Thousands of government officials, industry lobbyists, environmental campaigners and observers are arriving on the Indonesian island of Bali for two weeks of talks starting Monday that are aimed at breathing new life into the troubled 15-year-old global climate treaty.

A heightened sense of urgency surrounds the meeting in light of a report issued last month by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which detailed the potentially devastating effects of global warming in the panel’s strongest language yet.

But few participants expect this round of talks to produce significant breakthroughs. At most, they say, it will result in new commitments to negotiate to update the original treaty by the end of 2009.

“The bulk of attention will be on the future,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization administering the treaty. “My hope is that we can formally launch negotiations and form an agenda for those negotiations that will lead to a long-term policy response to climate change.”

The original treaty, signed by almost all nations in 1992, set voluntary goals for curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, which mostly come from burning fossil fuels and forests, and which have been linked by scientists to global warming. But few of those goals have been met.

Five years later, the Kyoto Protocol, a much-praised 1997 addendum to the original pact, set mandatory limits on emissions, but only for the three dozen industrialized countries that ratified it, and only through 2012. Since it took effect in 2005, emissions have continued to rise in many of those countries.

“We would be in big trouble if we can’t reach an agreement to move forward by the end of the conference,” Mr. de Boer said. “The science is clear. We now need a political answer.”

By far, the biggest obstacle to forging a new accord by 2009 is the United States, analysts say. Senior Bush administration officials say the administration will not agree to a new treaty with binding limits on emissions.

Instead, President Bush recently proposed that the world’s biggest countries work toward a common, long-term goal set decades in the future, without specific targets or limits, and more immediate goals set by individual nations using whatever means they choose.

In his latest statement on climate change last Wednesday, Mr. Bush said, “Our guiding principle is clear: we must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”

Paula Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, said in a recent interview that any new agreement should involve all the world’s major economies. “We feel very strongly about having a global framework here,” she said. “In order to have a global framework there has to be an effort here to determine how one can engage all the players. In order to do that there has to be some flexibility in this.”

The United States will soon stand alone among industrialized nations in its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, with the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, having said in no uncertain terms that his country would now ratify it.

“The Bush administration is the only government in the world that is opposed to mandatory emissions reductions being included in a new treaty,” said Philip Clapp, the deputy managing director of the Pew Environment Group, based in Washington. “The question is, will they block others from moving forward.”

While most developing countries — including China, which is poised to overtake the United States as the largest source of greenhouse gases — have agreed to negotiate treaties that require richer nations to reduce emissions, they remain opposed to taking on such mandatory limits themselves.

By contrast, adherents to the Kyoto pact, led by the European Union, are eager to extend and even broaden current emission restrictions. One reason is that Kyoto nations are already buying and selling credits — already worth several billion dollars a year — for cutting greenhouse gas emissions under the so-called cap-and-trade system. Such trade could collapse if the restrictions are not extended.

“Negotiations in Bali cannot afford to fail,” said Adam Nathan, director of communications for the Carbon Markets Association, an international industry trade association. “It is vitally important that ministers meeting in Bali do not let the date for a new global agreement slip beyond 2009, as this will send a weak signal to the carbon markets.”

The growing call for financial aid to help the developing countries most threatened by the negative effects of a warming climate — like harsher droughts, floods and disrupted water supplies and agriculture — is expected to be a central issue at the Bali talks.

The recent United Nations Human Development Report pointedly criticized the world’s industrialized powers for not living up to existing commitments under the original Framework Convention. So far, only $26 million has made it through financial pipelines ostensibly intended to funnel billions of dollars for climate-adaptation assistance, the report said.

The United States also plans to press for commitments by rich countries to spend more to refine and deploy nonpolluting energy technologies, including systems for capturing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants, and for all countries to change trade and tariff policies to speed the diffusion of such technologies to places where they are needed most, like China.

For ordinary residents here in Indonesia, a political solution cannot come soon enough. The WWF, the global conservation organization formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, says Indonesia is highly vulnerable to climate change. Drought, floods, landslides and rising sea levels are part of daily life here.

“To Indonesians, these problems are becoming commonplace,” said Farah Sofa, national director of Walhi, Indonesia’s leading environmental watchdog group. “It’s really bad. Governments should be our protectors. They have to find a way forward.”

Perched atop a tree branch overhanging the Athabasca River, a bald eagle serves as the last sentry before a jarring change of scenery.

Alberta’s longest river, which runs from the Columbia Icefield to the remote boreal forest north of Fort McMurray, makes a sharp left-hand turn and flows gently under a bridge.

Suddenly, in the midst of thick evergreens and rocky shores, stand two torch-topped towers, blinking lights and a maze of metal pipes marking the home of Canada’s oldest oilsands operation.

It’s here that a fraction of the river’s water will be scooped up by Suncor Energy, ending a journey that began around 1,000 kilometres upstream in the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.

And it is here, and at other oilsands projects near the river’s shores, that the Athabasca’s future health will likely be determined.

For four decades, the Athabasca has been a lifeline for oilsands companies, providing water crucial to the processes that produce black gold from tarry sands.

But the shores are getting increasingly crowded.

Several oilsands developments are poised to launch in the coming years — about $100 billion of investment clamouring to join Canada’s great oilsands rush.

All need vast amounts of water.

Petroleum producers already use as much of the province’s

water as every resident, business and industry in Calgary and Edmonton combined. And they have rights to triple that amount.

“The scale of development needs the world’s attention,” said Don van Hout, who led a canoe expedition this summer from the Athabasca’s headwaters to its final destination in Lake Athabasca.

“It needs the world’s help.”

Once considered in abundance in the northern half of the province, water — a key ingredient in oil and gas extraction — is becoming a precious resource.

Some believe the water issue could eventually force Alberta to make a stark choice: water or oil.

“Water is clearly a limitation to development and a serious environmental concern,” former Alberta Environment deputy minister Doug Radke wrote in a landmark report for the province last December.

Former premier Peter Lougheed has also weighed in, saying that without significant changes, “the issue of the water supply will become even more intense” if uncontrolled oilsands development swamps the Athabasca region.

As Suncor Energy itself cautioned in a sustainability report this year: “As an industry, we have gone from an era when water was abundant to one of potentially significant constraint.”

The issue is quickly coming to a head.

Across Alberta, as the population grows and industrialization expands, the struggle for water is becoming a major concern: who has it, who doesn’t, and do we have enough supply for the

future?

Scientists and environmentalists have blasted the Alberta government for what they see as a laissez-faire approach to water management, while the province contends it has paved the way for strict new rules capping industry water use.

The energy sector has taken it upon itself to curb water use as the provincial economy shifts into overdrive.

Alberta’s largest industry — oil and gas — maintains it uses water efficiently, recycling as much as possible and drawing little resource out of the river overall.

“We know there’s an expectation that we minimize our water use,” says David Pryce of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the industry’s main lobby group.

“I think we’re doing a good job of it.”

The future holds the promise of new technology that could eliminate some of the sector’s water needs.

But it also holds the possibility of conflict among government, water experts and the industry itself over how the resource is used — and who gets to use it.

In time, the Athabasca could become the most prominent test case of what happens when Alberta’s rampant industrial development collides head-on with diminishing water

supplies.

“People recognize there are limitations,” says Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner.

“If we do it wrong today, the impact that we have on the future could be quite dramatic.”

On the Athabasca River, it doesn’t take long for van Hout or a flotilla of 16 canoes to come across the first signs they’re in oil country upon leaving Fort McMurray.

Black stains cover the rocks lining the river’s shore.

Over the centuries, oil has leached out of the ground and onto the rocks, leaving small rainbow-coloured pools on the river’s surface.

Those stains first revealed the secret of what lay beneath northern Alberta’s craggy soil.

Natives had long used the gooey substance to patch holes in their birch canoes.

When Peter Pond, an explorer employed by the North West Co. to expand its fur-trading reach, ended up in the area around 1778, he recorded memorable spots on his maps where “tar” oozed from Lake Athabasca’s banks.

The Canadian government got word of the black “gum” around 100 years later.

A botanist doing geological survey work in 1875 wrote in his journal of the “enormous quantities” of “oil scum” coating the river.

But it wasn’t until the last century, and the invention of the internal combustion engine, that the black substance was seen as useful on a grand scale.

Now, that grandeur is measured in the millions and billions: millions of barrels of bitumen bringing in billions of dollars.

The rush is on.

In a world fuelled by petroleum, Canada is second only to Saudi Arabia when it comes to proven oil reserves.

Close to 180 billion barrels worth lie beneath the country’s surface, the vast majority in

Alberta.

Oilsands production now sits around 1.3 million barrels a day, but that’s expected to reach three million barrels by 2015.

It takes water to get oil — anywhere from a fifth of a barrel to five barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced, depending on the type of crude and where it’s extracted.

If the sector hits those 2015 production targets, it’s expected to need more than half a trillion litres of water a year — essentially double what companies use today.

Water is key to extracting crude, particularly in the oilsands, where bitumen is either mined or steamed out.

Mining projects mix water with oilsand to make a slurry in the separation process, among other uses. In-situ projects inject steam underground to soften bitumen and pump it to the surface.

Today, petroleum producers annually use enough water from the Athabasca River basin alone to fill 70,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Van Hout, a conservationist who grew up in the Wood Buffalo region, knows all this.

He hoped a two-month canoe trip on the Athabasca’s waters this summer might help other Albertans see his point.

“In order to change people’s opinions in this province, you have to do something on a grand scale,” he said.

“This is a grand scale.”

As the frigid river flows away from Fort McMurray’s shopping malls and fast-food outlets and into the northern wilderness, there are few hints of what’s fuelling Alberta’s latest boom.

Dense rows of evergreens straddle the shores and muffle the sounds coming from the adjacent highway, where — day and night — a parade of buses shuttles workers to and from the sprawling oilsands complexes.

Above the Athabasca, clouds roll in and out, sparking a brief thunderstorm.

Then, around a river bend, two faraway flames burn like beacons atop distant columns, a signal of where some of the river’s water ends up.

Alberta started seeing its own flickering signs of water troubles in the north a few years ago as more companies began announcing new projects.

The province had already seen water shortages in the south, prompting selective bans on water withdrawals in 2002. That led to a full moratorium on any new withdrawals south of the Red Deer River basin last year.

Stricter limits in the north have taken longer to arrive.

This year, the province introduced a weekly cap — tied to the Athabasca River’s flow — on how much water the oilsands companies can remove. It marked the first time tough limits linked with the river’s strength were established.

Critics contend the province didn’t do enough in years gone by — and that even the new steps aren’t adequate.

“We’ve managed our water like complete idiots,” says Bill Donahue, a freshwater science expert who’s studied northern rivers with renowned University of Alberta ecologist David Schindler.

“It’s been hands-off and it’s

‘Alberta is open for business,’ and it’s auto-pilot.”

At stake, Donahue believes, is the integrity of the northern rivers. The waterways could eventually dry up due to increased demand combined with shrinking glaciers that feed the rivers.

Even before that would happen, the rivers and the life they maintain — plants, animals, fish, landscapes — would collapse because the river levels would drop, Donahue contends. That would cause a ripple effect beyond the rivers’ banks.

The province has not only rubber-stamped development without caution, but failed to explain what’s at stake, he charges.

“I have no problem with

Albertans deciding: ‘We are willing to develop this and we are willing to sacrifice the river,’ ” Donahue says.

“I have no problem with making informed decisions. But we’re not making informed decisions.”

Government experts insist they’re on top of water policy, especially when it comes to the Athabasca.

The new rules, which the province says will be bolstered within the next few years, put withdrawals on a sliding scale that declines as the river’s flow drops.

Overall withdrawals average out to around three per cent of the river’s annual flow. Combined with monitoring and other measures, it adds up to a “very protective” strategy that still gives oilsands companies enough water to develop their resource, government officials say.

“We’re not turning the water tap off,” says Preston McEachern, the government’s lead author for the river’s new rules.

“We don’t think that’s necessary. We just made very little water available.”

Still, it’s been a bumpy road to add new regulations.

In 2005, a group of industry executives, advocacy organizations and government officials failed to meet a five-year deadline to draw up rules for pulling water out of the river, forcing Alberta Environment to step in.

Provincial promises of conservation targets and a status report on the industry’s efficiency have been delayed, the latter until as late as 2009-10.

McEachern acknowledges that even five years ago, the government wouldn’t have predicted the development frenzy now dotting northern Alberta.

The rush made rules slower in coming and, because they’re still novel, experimental.

How everything will affect the river is still an unknown, McEachern adds.

“We’re quite certain that the impacts are small enough to not be a problem,” he says. “But exactly what they are, if any, we can’t predict.”

After six hours of paddling, the expedition’s canoes slide up onto an arrowhead-shaped sandbar attached to a small island.

The camping spot for the night features what appears to be wolf tracks in the soft sand. As the sun sets, a beaver swims near the shore and pokes its head out of the water.

The rumbling of trucks and controlled explosions, meant to scare birds away, are harbingers of the sprawling oilsands plants that lie ahead.

There are warning signs on the horizon that water could be one of the key impediments to expanding the oilsands boom.

The National Energy Board, Canada’s energy watchdog, warned last year that stakeholders agree “the Athabasca River does not have sufficient flows to support the needs of all planned oilsands mining operations.”

The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board has also added its voice, saying earlier this year it was time for companies to find ways to slash their water demands.

And the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank based in Alberta, issued the starkest warning to date.

“In some areas,” said its 2006 report, “it will become necessary to determine which is more important: water or oil.”

Such warnings have seen water climb the industry’s list of priorities.

“The idea of water management has been evolving over the past decade,” says Pryce of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

“It sort of put us in a bit of a conflict because we’ve been encouraged to maximize recovery (of oil) and been encouraged to use water to do that.”

Now the attitude inside industry is different, says Kevin Stashin, vice-president of operations for oilsands producer Devon Canada.

“I think 20, 30, 40 years ago, when industrial activity wasn’t as high, when the population wasn’t what it was, water was plentiful,” says Stashin, who also serves as CAPP’s water expert.

“It’s like anything. If you get something that’s plentiful, then maybe you’re not as conscious about conserving as much.”

Aside from capping river use, Alberta’s main tool for controlling the faucet is through licensing water withdrawals.

The energy industry is licensed to use around 800 billion litres of water, 285 billion more than all of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, consumes.

Yet, companies only use around a third of what they have access to.

Critics say over-generous licensing years ago has opened the door for industry to take more than it needs, spurring expansion without caution.

“We did not realize that water could become a scarce resource,” says the Pembina Institute’s Mary Griffiths. “I suppose that reflects back to what I call a pioneer mentality, where we had lots of water, lots of land.”

Oilsands companies say the lower use shows they’re being efficient stewards of a precious natural resource.

Suncor Energy’s Sue Lowell says her company has always taken water consumption seriously.

Canada’s second-largest oilsands producer returned 14 billion litres of treated water back to the Athabasca River last year. It has cut its water use 40 per cent in the past five years, although the company boosted its intake for the first time last year during that span.

What has changed recently, Lowell says, is how crowded Suncor’s riverside neighbourhood has become since its predecessor began operating four decades ago.

“With the increased activity, there are more operators in the area and I think (water) has become more of a heightened concern for everybody.”

Such concern doesn’t stop at the Athabasca River.

The North Saskatchewan River finds itself poised to supply Alberta’s newest oil-related developments: heavy oil upgraders and refineries.

Northeast of Edmonton, in an area widely known as Upgrader Alley, petroleum producers are building massive plants to process bitumen extracted in the north.

And, just like the extraction process, upgrading and refining can’t happen without water.

Eight current and proposed upgrader projects have asked the government for access to around 102 billion litres of water every year, nine billion litres more than all of Edmonton.

Companies wanting that river’s water say recycling is a key part of their plans. Donahue, the water expert, counters that extra consumption could have irreparable consequences for what is already one of Alberta’s most heavily licensed rivers.

There are also challenges buried beneath the surface in northern Alberta.

The energy industry is the top consumer of groundwater, with rights to 105 billion litres overall — a third of the underground water marked for use.

Much of it is used for in-situ oilsands projects, where the bitumen is too deep to mine. And while Alberta’s actual supply of groundwater is unknown, as are all of the consequences of using it, companies are being careful, says Peter Koning of oil giant ConocoPhillips Canada.

“You don’t make billion-dollar investments without understanding the key aspects that your project relies on.”

As the canoes float quietly past Suncor’s oilsands plant, the paddlers are silent in the face of the sheer girth of the industrial complex before them.

White smoke billows from one stack, while a deep hum — like a massive churning furnace — overtakes sound from the natural environment.

None of this development would exist without what flows past it. The next few years will be crucial in determining how much water keeps flowing by.

The energy industry now sits in fourth place when it comes to water rights in Alberta, owning access to around 8.3 per cent of all water marked for use, less than agriculture, commercial business and municipalities.

A report commissioned by the province, released Friday, said the majority of increased water demand over the next three years is expected to come from the petroleum sector.

Some companies are moving on water conservation.

Devon Canada’s 35,000-barrels-a-day Jackfish project, for example, is Alberta’s first operation to only use brackish water — water unfit for humans but useable for industry after treatment.

Moving away from using freshwater is the norm now, as is water recycling.

In many cases, 90 per cent of the water withdrawn is recycled and re-used at least a dozen times.

But every sector has its obstacles.

One of oilsand mining’s most glaring issues is the tailings ponds, massive waste water collection sites that cover more than 50 square kilometres in the Athabasca region.

Companies have yet to come up with a way to clean dumped water of clay and chemicals. Instead, water gets stored in the ponds and can’t be recycled until the clay settles to the bottom, something one study estimated would take between three decades and 150 years.

Companies such as Suncor are looking into waterless tailings technology, but the Calgary-based firm says it likely won’t be ready until 2012 at the earliest.

If anything heads off a water supply crunch, though, it will be technology.

In-situ projects, for example, are experimenting with using solvents instead of water to force out hydrocarbons.

However, a 2004 report by the Alberta Chamber of Resources said no major breakthroughs or alternatives to water-based bitumen extraction would emerge by 2030. By that time, Alberta’s oilsands output is predicted to more than triple.

Alberta’s environment minister vows to fill the gap.

Renner says the province will set strict rules and it will be up to companies to cope.

He is signalling that some long-standing practices could be set aside, including licensing that has given petroleum producers access to enough water for a city five times Calgary’s size.

“Water licences are a creature of the government,” he says.

“We’re not going to take unilateral action (to alter licences) without due consideration. The fact of the matter is that licences that were issued many, many years ago may have to be modified over time to reflect today’s reality.”

Perhaps the most contentious idea involves charging for water.

The Canada West Foundation, among others, has said the province’s current system “treats water as essentially free,” although there are now instances of water rights changing hands for cash in Alberta.

Adding a price tag, the thinking goes, would drive innovation needed to save water.

Gerald Doucet, a Canadian who’s secretary general of the World Energy Council, a 94-country organization that provides analysis and projections for all types of energy, says charging for water needs to be done.

“We need to know its value and we need to make sure the costs of water are taken into account,” he said during a recent stop in Calgary.

The industry isn’t quite so ready to accept pricing, arguing it already pays for every litre it uses by finding, treating and injecting it.

“Water is not without a cost,” says Stashin.

“Water is not free. If you can find something cheaper to use, you’re going to use it.”

Renner prefers to consider water pricing as a last resort. Better measures will come, he vows, and soon.

“All I can say is that I hope you watch very closely.”

It’s not long before the river arrives at the gravelly shores of the Fort McKay First Nation.

The area, home to about 550 people, has made economic hay out of being the oilsands’ next-door neighbour.

The band has established an array of oil-related businesses. Residents have reliable jobs and live in a growing subdivision that’s still being built.

A three-storey band headquarters, built two years ago, gleams with polished wood and tile. Inside the immaculate office of Chief Jim Boucher sits a golden pumpjack music box, a gift from Husky Energy CEO John Lau.

Much has changed on the land since the oilsands business arrived.

Boucher has also noticed changes on the river, lower flows that have dried up waterways once 10 metres deep.

He wants more stringent standards for the Athabasca, contending the current system allows withdrawals during critical winter periods that could have brutal consequences.

“If you cut off any flow into the river system during wintertime, it’s like cutting off oxygen to your brain,” he says.

“If we don’t take care of it — and we have only one shot to maintain the river — then the river system will die.”

The multibillion-dollar sector believes it has the answers.

The industry figured out how to extract petroleum trapped several kilometres below the ground. Energy executives argue they can figure out how to lower water use without being hit by drastic government intervention. It won’t come down to water or oil, they insist.

“I believe that it’s not a question of one or the other, that with proper management of our supply, we can have both,” says Devon’s Stashin, who also sits on the Alberta Water Council. “Are we there today? No. Will we get there? Yes.”

Renner agrees, saying it’s a gross exaggeration to portray the choice as one non-renewable resource versus another.

“The question comes down to how do we develop a very valuable resource in the context of limited access to other resources, such as water.”

But Donahue, the freshwater expert, says water and oil won’t mix without strict standards in place.

Acting now — and acting firmly — offers the only remedy, he believes.

“Our demands for water are increasing at a time when the supply for water is decreasing,” Donahue says.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the consequences when the demand for water outstrips the supply. What you have is an unsustainable economic situation.”

One water champion shares some of Donahue’s concerns.

Former premier Peter Lougheed says Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach must tread carefully, given that his government is partially hamstrung by rampant approvals of past years.

“The Stelmach government is caught now with the approval of many projects and licences and permits that they have to honour and respect, so they have to deal with it,” he says.

“When you sit back and think about it, oil is a depleting resource.

“You could even consider a world where technological developments reduce the need for oil.

“But I don’t see anything that’s going to change with respect to water.”

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 30 — Claiming it now has the largest green fleet in the nation, the city of San Francisco this week completed a yearlong project to convert its entire array of diesel vehicles — from ambulances to street sweepers — to biodiesel, a clean-burning and renewable fuel that holds promise for helping to reduce greenhouse gases.

Using virgin soy oil bought from producers in the Midwest, officials said that as of Friday, all of the city’s 1,500 diesel vehicles were powered with the environmentally friendlier fuel, intended to sharply reduce toxic diesel exhaust linked to a higher risk of asthma and premature death.

“Just like secondhand smoke, diesel is one of the worst things we can breathe,” said the city’s clean vehicle manager, Vandana Bali of the Department of the Environment.

The announcement came without fanfare from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office late Thursday, even as Congressional lawmakers dickered over the particulars of an energy bill that would give automakers incentives to produce cars that burn biofuels.

Ms. Bali said the city’s diesel vehicles now all used a fuel known as B20, a mix of 20 percent soy-based biofuel and 80 percent petroleum diesel fuel, which reduces toxic emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and other pollutants that lead to global warming.

A spokesman for the mayor, Nathan Ballard, said the goal was to cut such emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

In November, Mr. Newsom announced a new project called SFGreasecycle, a program to collect fats and cooking oils from restaurants, at no charge.

“We are collecting grease,” Mr. Ballard said. “Waste fats and oils are a major source of backup in our sewage system. But we’re taking the grease that would have gone down the drain and turning it into biodiesel.”

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Roger Ruan of the University of Minnesota says algae is a far more efficient fuel crop than corn.

The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan’s laboratory at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research.

Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Dr. Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source.

Some algae is as much as 50 percent oil that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is cutting the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.

“If you can get algae oils down below $2 a gallon, then you’ll be where you need to be,” said Jennifer Holmgren, director of the renewable fuels unit of UOP, an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International. “And there’s a lot of people who think you can.”

Researchers are trying to figure out how to grow enough of the right strains of algae and how to extract the oil most efficiently. Over the past two years they have received more money from governments, the Pentagon, big oil companies, utilities and venture capital firms.

The federal government halted its main algae research program nearly a decade ago, but technology has advanced and oil prices have climbed since then, and an Energy Department laboratory announced in late October that it was partnering with Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, in the hunt for better strains of algae.

“It’s not backyard inventors at this point at all,” said George Douglas, a spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the Energy Department. “It’s folks with experience to move it forward.”

A New Zealand company demonstrated a Range Rover powered by an algae biodiesel blend last year, but experts say algae will not be commercially viable for many years. Dr. Ruan said demonstration plants could be built within a few years.

Converting algae oil into biodiesel uses the same process that turns vegetable oils into biodiesel. But the cost of producing algae oil is hard to pin down because nobody is running the process start to finish other than in a laboratory, Mr. Douglas said.

If the price of production can be reduced, the advantages of algae include the fact that it grows much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Dr. Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.

An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It would not require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use sea water and could consume pollutants from sewage and power plants.

The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is financing research into producing jet fuel from plants, including algae. The agency is already working with the Honeywell subsidiary, General Electric and the University of North Dakota. In November, it requested additional research proposals.

By Jennifer S. Holland
Photograph by David Liittschwager, Maps by National Geographic maps
If carbon dioxide continues to rise unchecked, computer models show that acidification will deplete carbonate ions in much of the ocean by 2100, turning the waters corrosive for many shell-building animals.

Tiny creatures near the base of the marine food chain lead perilous lives at best. Now they face a man-made threat. No, not global warming this time, though the root cause is the same. As the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) rises, it is not only heating the globe but also dissolving in ocean waters, turning them more acidic. For shell-building animals that can mean a corrosive, even deadly environment.

Oceans are a natural sink for CO2, already soaking up more than a quarter of what’s released into the atmosphere. Today we’re pumping out massive quantities—a surge that began more than a century ago as factories, power plants, and cars began devouring fossil fuels. By now the oceans are taking in 25 million tons a day of excess CO2, and it is starting to show. Already scientists have measured a rise in acidity of some 30 percent in surface waters, and they predict a 100 to 150 percent increase by the end of the century.

No ill effects have been documented so far in the open ocean, but the threat is clear. Absorbed by seawater, CO2 reacts to form carbonic acid, which turns the normally alkaline water more acidic. In the process, fewer carbonate ions are left floating around—and many marine organisms, including mollusks and corals, rely on carbonate from seawater to build their shells and other hard parts. Eventually, vital species will no longer be able to build or maintain their shells and skeletons.

Users of the mineral aragonite—a very soluble type of calcium carbonate—are especially vulnerable. They include tiny pteropod snails, which help feed commercially vital fish like salmon. Computer models predict that polar waters will turn hostile for pteropods within 50 years (cold water holds the most CO2, so it is already less shell-friendly). By 2100, habitat for many shelled species could shrink drastically, with impacts up the food chain. And as the acidification reaches the tropics, “it’s a doomsday scenario for coral reefs,” says Carnegie Institution oceanographer Ken Caldeira. If current trends continue, he predicts, reefs will one day survive only in walled-off, acid-controlled refuges.

Massive outbursts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have acidified the oceans in the geologic past, but equilibrium returned as the oceans stored away excess CO2 in minerals on the seafloor. This time nature may be slow to heal. “Our emissions are huge compared with natural fluxes,” Caldeira says. “If you could stop emissions and wait 10,000 years, natural processes would probably take care of most of it.” These days we’re simply dishing it out faster than the oceans can mop it up.

Small is beautiful,” declared economist E. F. Schumacher. Wise perspective for a planet where most organisms are built on a minor scale. A dipperful of seawater can reveal a hodgepodge of tiny free-swimmers and nebulous drifters that fog the water column. Many are microscopic. Others would be visible except they’re virtually transparent. Gelatinous shape-shifters lazily ride the currents. Familiar forms in miniature—wide-eyed fish larvae, baby squid and octopuses—dart freely. Their lives are precarious. Some wear shells or exude toxins against predators; others are active only after dark. But untold numbers succumb to hungry mouths—each other’s or those of bigger foes like grown-up fish and whales that vacuum up biomass.

To see the show, photographer David Liittschwager joined scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration off the island of Hawaii. Inhabitants must specialize to survive in these open, nutrient-poor waters—making for rich diversity. Liittschwager sampled with a bucket and fine-mesh net; at night, he lowered lights as lures. What squirmed toward the glow? “A genuine riot of life,” he says. The scientists kept some animals on board to confirm identities; the rest they returned to the sea.

Condenser lenses cast focused beams to outline see-through specimens; side lighting rendered a baby flounder iridescent, and a backlight exposed its developing bones and organs. Tinkering with light, Liittschwager captured the nearly invisible.

Vast reaches of the planet have been locked for millennia in stunning permafrost formations. But perhaps not permanently.

EARTH’S LUNAR SATELITE, the moon, is an alien and remote though still compelling landscape known to us all. We imagine it from our front lawns and our apartment windows as a place of absence. No wind, nor any blade of grass for a breeze to stir. No people. No cascading brook or animal track. But unearthly beautiful all the same. On a clear night, with a pair of ten-power binoculars, the craters and highlands, the depressions and seas, appear so vividly etched, the pattern of their shadow and light so captivating, that the geography can induce a sensation of joy. The beauty of such a moment is hard to explain. It’s as if beauty were not actually in the thing itself—the basalt plain, the crater—but lay instead with the viewer’s capacity to appreciate that object. When a portion of the moon resolves itself sharply through the binoculars’ prisms, when it comes alive to a viewer’s eyes, he or she can experience a kind of euphoria, which the moon alone cannot explain. It is, for some, the thrill of being fully alive.

The world is beautiful, in many unfathomable ways. In our hurrying, though, we frequently miss what is beautiful around us, in the same way that we forget from time to time what we want our lives to mean. Just to stay afloat in the modern world, many of us reluctantly choose detachment from the constant stimulus. We even turn away from beauty, as if it were another thing we had had too much of.

Gazing at these images, I think of our habits of detachment. More than any other region of the planet, the Arctic has responded in starkly visible ways to global climate change. It is here, if you will, that a canary is singing faintly in a mine shaft. To make pictures of these places—this is my presumption—I imagine the photographer had to have been thinking about us in some way, about how we are going to fare. The images are not merely beautiful, an exoticness to admire, but an invitation to reattach ourselves to the Earth, specifically to a place that has now grown oddly poignant.

Like the moon, these landscapes appear alien and remote, exquisite but vaguely threatening. We’re an integral part of them, however. The pingos and polygons, the rock circles and beaded streams, all are part of us in a way the lunar highlands and seas are not. Or, to be specific again, what’s happening on the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada this spring bears more on the fate of our families than whatever might be happening in the lunar valley of Taurus-Littrow during the same weeks.

I don’t know whether you have ever had the good fortune, even the desire, to fly close over the Earth’s coldscapes or to wander in Svalbard, Iceland, the Canadian Arctic, Siberia, or Alaska—some of the places where permafrost is slowly disintegrating, sea-ice cover thinning and shrinking, where glaciers are retreating. I had that unquenchable desire once, and when I look at these scenes, I feel a longing akin to the longing one sometimes feels for the landscapes of childhood, from that time before the world noticed you and you began to feel its weight in your life. I recall the exuberance with which I used to camp on vast expanses of wet tundra, despite the inconvenience of mosquitoes, the difficulty of finding a patch of high ground. Depending on where my companions and I were, tundra grizzly, caribou, or wolves might turn up. I had no aerial perspective, but the view from the ground was equally breathtaking—land rolling outward to all 360° of the horizon, sunlight flickering ceaselessly on a river and on tundra ponds, cotton grass seed heads swaying under the wind, gleaming swatches of red bearberry, punctuated by the green of moss campion and purple blossoms of saxifrage. Overhead, a flock of 7,000 old-squaws or 500 pintails going somewhere fast, and the feathers floating down. Or maybe no birds at all. Maybe the mandible of a fox, suddenly, right where I’d thrown down my ground cloth.

And then there was the next day, when we’d fish once more for char and climb that pingo on the horizon and paddle on and farther on, because it was so unbrokenly beautiful. It was untrammeled; it appeared never to have been occupied. There were no ruins, no fences, no flags, no roads. Nothing had been erected. It spoke to something primordial in us and abiding.

We would come on fresh tracks or scat and then glass the land all around. Where were they? The residency of animals was obvious here, but they were not visible. We paddled on, always trusting, in the days before GPS, we were not lost.
And all the time it was “we.” Not for safety alone, or the ordinary benefits of companionship, but to be able to share enthusiasm for a countryside that never had to resolve itself into words to be appreciated. Increasing the intensity of one’s private relationship to a place like this worked at the same time to increase the intensity of one’s human relationships. For us, the land, utter monotony to some, was so full of eternity it was scary. It hummed with endurance. It radiated completeness. And for a few weeks we were a part of it, the mysterious rock circles, the perfect repetition of polygons, the labyrinths of water bodies so continuously discontinuous they could not be discretely named. We could hardly find the definitive edge of anything.

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/permafrost/images/circles.jpg

I miss those days. I have since passed other days in remote quarters of the Earth—the Tanami Desert in Australia, the Queen Maud Mountains in Antarctica, the upper Boro River in Botswana—but I feel an affection for Arctic landscapes I feel for no other place outside my homescape in western Oregon. I have often wondered whether it was because the brutality of winter in those regions was never far from my thoughts when I was traveling in the brief bounty of sunlight and warm air called “the high-latitude boreal summer.” Could it have been the contrast between these two seasons that broke something open in me once, that allowed me to feel tenderness toward a part of the Earth I did not in any way possess?

OVER SEVERAL DECADES OF TRAVEL, I have often met people who were profoundly intimate with the places in which they lived. Usually they were hunters, hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, or pastoralists, people who had to know precisely where they were, physically, all the particulars of it, if they were going to keep their preferred way of life intact. In conversation, I found the fine points they were attuned to fascinating, but more so the pattern of their knowledge, their skill at arranging myriad details in a pattern that could be recognized, remembered, and put to use. It is exhilarating to encounter knowledge this intimate. Most of us in the modern world have nothing to compare with it, except a working knowledge of the infrastructure of our own highly technical civilization. To see and appreciate, to be immersed for a lifetime in patterns that are not of your own making, that is a different order of things.

My guess would be that someone someday will trace the roots of modern human loneliness to a loss of intimacy with place, to our many breaks with the physical Earth. We are not out there much anymore. Even when we are, we are often too quick to take things in. A member of the group who insists on lingering is “holding everyone else up.” I think about this kind of detachment from the physical world frequently, because human beings, generally, seem to long for a specific place, a certain geography that gives them a sense of well-being.

When I was traveling regularly in the Arctic, I routinely asked Yupik, Inupiat, and Inuit how they characterized people from the civilization of which I was a part. “Lonely” was a response I heard with discomfiting frequency. The cure for loneliness, I have come to understand, is not more socializing. It’s achieving and maintaining close friendships. The trust that characterizes that kind of friendship allows one to be vulnerable, to discuss problems that resist a solution, for example, without having to risk being judged or dismissed. I bring this up because the desire I experience most keenly, when I travel in landscapes like the ones made so evocative here, is for intimacy. I have learned that I will not experience the exhilaration intimacy brings unless I become vulnerable to the place, unless I come to a landscape without judgments, unless I trust that the place is indifferent to me. The practice I strive for when I travel is to meet the land as if it were a person. To encounter it as if it were as deep in its meaning as human personality. I wait for it to speak. And wait. And wait.

THE MOON IS BEAUTIFUL, but I do not live on the moon. The Earth everywhere, even in places where people never or seldom live, is thought to be beautiful, and throughout human history, people of very different persuasions have behaved as if the Earth everywhere were speaking to them. Until now. Now, many more people prefer to believe the Earth is mute, that it has no intrinsic worth. Its worth, they say, lies with its utility. Or with its conventional beauty, its scenery.
It’s with thoughts like these that a kind of detachment begins to take hold.

When I look at these photographs, I feel a twinge of misgiving. Disintegration of this frozen habitat is now occurring around the world. A silent warning. We can enter the images here though, even if we have never had the experience of being in the Arctic. The photographs say the Earth is profound and revealing, but in these opening years of the 21st century the nature of the Earth’s beauty is changing.

The photographs are asking, What do you think? Years from now, they ask, what will it mean to live in earthly beauty?

Relentless sprawl, invasive species and global warming are threatening an increasing number of bird species in the United States, pushing a quarter of them — including dozens in New York and New Jersey — toward extinction, according to a new study by the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy.

The study, called WatchList 2007, categorized 178 species in the United States as being threatened, an increase of about 10 percent from 2002, when Audubon’s last study was conducted. Of the 178 species on the list, about 45 spend at least part of the year in this region.

Among the most threatened is the rare Bicknell’s thrush, a native of the Catskill and Adirondack highlands whose winter habitat in the Caribbean is disappearing. Although less at risk, the wood thrush — whose distinctive song was once emblematic of the Northeast’s rugged woodlands — is on the list because a combination of acid rain and sprawl has damaged its habitat and caused its numbers to decline precipitously over the last four decades.

The Audubon list, which was released Wednesday, overlaps the federal government’s official endangered species list in some cases. But it also includes a number of bird species that are not recognized as endangered by the federal government but that biologists fear are in danger of becoming extinct.

“We’re concerned that there’s been almost a moratorium on the listing of endangered birds over the last seven years under this administration,” Greg Butcher, Audubon’s bird conservation director and a co-author of the new study, said in a telephone interview. Placing a threatened bird on the new watch list can bring it the kind of attention it needs to survive even if the federal government does not act, he said.

“When we pay attention to these birds and do the things we know need to be done, these birds recover,” Mr. Butcher said. “All these birds have a chance to rebound if we put the right actions in motion.”

Those actions include channeling new development to established areas, being vigilant about new invasive species that can devastate habitats and limiting carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to climate change.

The national watch list is divided into two categories: 59 species, including the whooping crane and the lesser prairie-chicken, are on the “red list” for species that are declining rapidly and facing major threats; 119 are on the “yellow list” for species that are declining or rare but are not yet endangered.

In New York, 10 birds — including the Henslow’s sparrow — are on the red list. The cerulean warbler, the short-eared owl and 35 other birds are on the yellow list. New Jersey’s list includes many of the same birds as New York’s. The count in Connecticut is similar, Mr. Butcher said.

The region’s coastal location raises issues of particular concern. Mr. Butcher said he was especially worried about beach birds like the piping plover, the least tern and the black skimmer, as well as birds whose habitat is the region’s disappearing salt marshes. They include the saltmarsh sharp-tailed sparrow and the clapper rail. And he noted that migratory shore birds, including the red knot and the semipalmated sandpiper, would face increasing difficulties in this region.

“As sea level rises, and the salt marshes disappear, these species don’t have anyplace to go,” Mr. Butcher said. “In New York and New Jersey, so many people live close to the coast that we do what we can to safeguard people but we don’t necessarily protect the natural habitat.”

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: November 30, 2007

The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.

A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.

The report said the country was brimming with “negative cost opportunities” — potential changes in the lighting, heating and cooling of buildings, for example, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels even as they save money. “These types of savings have been around for 20 years,” said Jack Stephenson, a director of the study. But he said they still face tremendous barriers.

Among them is that equipment is often paid for by a landlord or a builder and chosen for its low initial cost. The cost of electricity or other fuels to operate the equipment is borne by a tenant or home buyer. That means the landlord or builder has no incentive to spend more upfront for efficient equipment, even though doing so would save a lot of money in the long run.

Another problem, the report said, is that consumers often pay no attention to energy use in choosing gear. Computers, for instance, can be manufactured to use less power, but with most users oblivious to energy efficiency when they are shopping for a computer, manufacturers perceive no competitive edge in spending the extra money on efficiency.

“What the report calls out is the fact that the potential is so substantial for energy efficiency,” said Ken Ostrowski, a leader of the report team. “Not that we will do it, but the potential is just staggering here in the U.S. There is a lot of inertia, and a lot of barriers.”

The country can do the job with “tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies,” the study found, but doing the work “will require strong, coordinated, economywide action that begins in the near future.”

The report focused on describing the problem, rather than on advocating fixes. But it did mention some possible solutions. Rules for utilities could be rewritten so they make as much money in promoting conservation as in selling electricity, the study said.

The task might also require emissions limits and other government mandates, as well as incentives like tax breaks to promote efficient buildings, cars and appliances, the study said. The McKinsey report said “lifestyle changes” by Americans could play a role in improved efficiency, even though they were not a major factor in the potential gains the report cited.

“A broad public education program around wasteful energy consumption could be mounted,” the report said. Modeled on the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the 1960s, it could promote reduction in “carbon littering” by increasing people’s awareness of the problem.

In contrast to improved efficiency, measures like capturing carbon dioxide from coal power plants and storing it would be relatively costly, and they account for less than 10 percent of the potential to cut emissions, the study said. The potential contributions from new nuclear plants and renewable energy supplies from wind or solar sources are also relatively modest, the report said.

The study, released yesterday in Washington, was conducted by McKinsey & Company for DTE Energy (the parent company of Detroit Edison), Environmental Defense, Honeywell, National Grid, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Pacific Gas & Electric and Shell.

Its release comes a week before a United Nations climate conference is to convene in Bali, and as Congress approaches a vote on proposals to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.

Steadying himself on the heaving foredeck of an inspection ship recently, his face flecked by spray, Arne Floderus pronounced it a good day for his new offshore wind farm.

30-mile-an-hour wind was twirling the fingerlike blades of a turbine 380 feet above his head. Around him, a field of turbines rotated in a synchronized ballet that, when fully connected to an electrical grid, would generate enough power to light 60,000 nearby houses.

“We’ve created a new landmark,” said Mr. Floderus, the project manager of the $280 million wind park, one of the world’s largest, which was built by the Swedish power company Vattenfall.

The park, in a shallow sound between Sweden and Denmark, testifies to the remarkable rise of wind energy — no longer a quirky alternative favored by environmentalists in Denmark and Germany, but a mainstream power source used in 26 nations, including the United States.

Yet Sweden’s gleaming wind park is entering service at a time when wind energy is coming under sharper scrutiny, not just from hostile neighbors, who complain that the towers are a blot on the landscape, but from energy experts who question its reliability as a source of power.

For starters, the wind does not blow all the time. When it does, it does not necessarily do so during periods of high demand for electricity. That makes wind a shaky replacement for more dependable, if polluting, energy sources like oil, coal and natural gas. Moreover, to capture the best breezes, wind farms are often built far from where the demand for electricity is highest. The power they generate must then be carried over long distances on high-voltage lines, which in Germany and other countries are strained and prone to breakdowns.

In the United States, one of the areas most suited for wind turbines is the central part of the country, stretching from Texas through the northern Great Plains — far from the coastal population centers that need the most electricity.

In Denmark, which pioneered wind energy in Europe, construction of wind farms has stagnated in recent years. The Danes export much of their wind-generated electricity to Norway and Sweden because it comes in unpredictable surges that often outstrip demand.

In 2003, Ireland put a moratorium on connecting wind farms to its electricity grid because of the strains that power surges were putting on the network; it has since begun connecting them again.

In the United States, proposals to build large wind parks in the Atlantic off Long Island and off Cape Cod, Mass., have run into stiff opposition from local residents on aesthetic grounds.

As wind energy has matured as an industry, its image has changed — from a clean, even elegant, alternative to fossil fuels to a renewable energy source with advantages and drawbacks, like any other.

“The environmental benefits of wind are not as great as its champions claim,” said Euan C. Blauvelt, research director of ABS Energy Research, an independent market research firm in London. “You’ve still got to have backup sources of power, like coal-fired plants.”

Mr. Blauvelt publishes an annual report on wind energy in which he discusses its flaws. People in the industry would accuse him of propagating myths, he said. Now, the criticism is more tempered.

“One of the big problems with wind is that people tend to get hyped up about it, very emotional,” Mr. Blauvelt said. “The difference is that the arguments are becoming more rational.”

None of this is to say that wind power has peaked. On the contrary, Mr. Blauvelt figures the industry is adding capacity at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 26.3 percent. That is faster than hydroelectric power in its early days and twice the recent growth rate of nuclear energy.

The United States, which is considered a pioneer in wind, added more generating capacity in 2006 than any year on record. With 11,575 megawatts, the United States is the world’s third largest wind country, after Germany and Spain, and it is adding more capacity than any other.

Among new countries with significant wind capacity are Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands.

“What we’re seeing is a second wave of countries, which are starting to invest more heavily,” said Christian Kjaer, the chief executive of the European Wind Energy Association in Brussels.

He said wind energy would benefit from two parallel trends: rising oil prices and a global push to tax carbon-dioxide emissions. “It’s very good way of hedging against volatile oil prices and potentially volatile carbon costs,” Mr. Kjaer said.

In Germany, where 20,000 wind turbines generate 5 percent of the electricity, advocates say wind will be critical to meeting the government’s goal of generating at least 20 percent of all power from renewable methods by 2020. But the industry’s growth is slowing for a variety of reasons.

Germany is running out of places to put the turbines because of restrictions on the location and height of the devices. And rising raw material prices are making wind farms more expensive to build.

“Under the current circumstances, Germany’s climate protection targets are not achievable,” said Hermann Albers, the president of the German Wind Energy Association.

Open land is not a problem in the United States, but wind parks have faced resistance, particularly in scenic locales near the shore. A private developer, Cape Wind, wants to erect 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound, off Cape Cod. It has drawn protests from some well-connected locals, including the Kennedy family.

Cape Wind said it hoped to obtain all the necessary permits by next year, which would enable it to be up and running by 2011. “It’s been a long road,” said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for the developer.

For a socially conscious society like Sweden, wind turbines exert a fashionable appeal.

Today, they account for less than 1 percent of Sweden’s electricity generation. But the government wants to increase annual wind power production to 10 terawatt hours, or 10 trillion watt hours, by 2015 from less than 1 terawatt hour now (the park off Malmo will produce a third of a terawatt hour).

Vattenfall hopes to develop an even larger off-shore park in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Germany. In all, the government has identified 49 sites that are suitable for wind parks.

Sweden has historically invested little in wind projects because it has two reliable sources of energy, nuclear and hydro, which each supply roughly half its power. And because hydro is renewable, Sweden already does well on the environmental balance sheet.

But these energy sources have their vulnerabilities: hydro, to low water levels; nuclear, to technical breakdowns. The Swedish government has also pledged not to build any new nuclear power plants.

“One of the key energy priorities for Sweden is to establish a third leg of energy production,” said Anders Nyberg, political adviser in the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications.

Of course, Sweden does not need to build wind parks to get wind power. It could simply buy more surplus wind power from Denmark, which it uses, as does Norway, to pump underground water into elevated reservoirs. The water is later released during periods of peak electric demand to drive hydroelectric stations.

In this way, hydro acts as a form of storage for wind energy — addressing one of wind power’s biggest shortcomings. Sweden’s strength in hydro makes it a good candidate for greater development of wind power, according to analysts.

Sweden is subsidizing wind power through “green” certificates, which favor the use of renewable energy. The small extra cost is passed on to consumers.

While Swedes staunchly support wind energy, they are as susceptible to the not-in-my-backyard opposition as people elsewhere. For years, residents opposed the wind farm near Malmo, known as Lillgrund, particularly after the builders obtained permission to raise the height of the towers. But the campaign to block the project failed.

Still, Mr. Floderus said the process took far too long, and Vattenfall is urging the government to speed up the approvals next time.

As his inspection ship followed a zigzag course through a field of 48 turbines, Mr. Floderus pointed to Malmo’s two other landmarks, visible in the distance: Oresund Bridge, a 10-mile engineering marvel that connects Malmo with Copenhagen, and the Turning Torso, an eye-popping 54-story skyscraper designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

Soon, Mr. Floderus said, the whirling blades of the Lillgrund wind turbines would take their place alongside those landmarks as symbols of the modern age.