Yet even as the European program begins to harvest biofuels in greater volume, homegrown production is still far short of what is needed to reach the 10 percent goal: Europe‟s farmers produced an estimated 2.9 billion liters, or 768 million gallons, of biofuel in 2004, far shy of the 3.4 billion gallons generated in the United States in the period. In 2005, biofuel accounted for around 1 percent of Europe‟s fuel, according to European statistics,with almost all of that in Germany and Sweden. The biofuel share in Italy was 0.51 percent, and in Britain, 0.18 percent.
That could pose a threat to European markets as foreign producers like Brazil or developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia try to ship their biofuels to markets where demand, subsidies and tax breaks are the greatest.
Ms. Fischer Boel recently acknowledged that Europe would have to import at least a third of what it would need to reach its 10 percent biofuels target. Politicians fear that could hamper development of a local industry, while perversely generating tons of new emissions as “green” fuel is shipped thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic, instead of coming from the farm next door.
Such imports could make biofuel far less green in other ways as well — for example if Southeast Asian rainforest is destroyed for cropland.
Brazil, a country with a perfect climate for sugar cane and vast amounts of land, started with subsidies years ago to encourage the farming of sugarcane for biofuels, partly to take up “excess capacity” in its flagging agricultural sector.
The auto industry jumped in, too. In 2003, Brazilian automakers started producing flex-fuel cars that could run on biofuels, including locally produced ethanol. Today, 70 percent of new cars in the country are flex-fuel models, and Brazil is one of the largest growers of cane for ethanol.
Analysts are unsure if the Brazilian achievement can be replicated in Europe — or anywhere else. Sugar takes far less energy to convert to biofuel than almost any product.
Yet after a series of alarming reports on climate change, the political urgency to move faster is clearly growing.
With an armload of incentives, the Italian government hopes that 70,000 hectares, or 173,000 acres, of land will be planted with biofuel crops in 2007, and 240,000 hectares in 2010, up from zero in 2006.
Mr. Pini, the farmer, has converted about 25 percent of his land, or 18 hectares, including his “set aside” land, to Europe‟s fastest-growing biofuel crop, rapeseed. He still has 50 hectares in grain and 7 in olives.
He has discovered other advantages as well. In Italy‟s finicky food culture, food crops have to look good and be high quality to sell— a drought or undue heat can mean an off year. Crops for fuel, in contrast, can be ugly or stunted.
“You need fewer seeds and it‟s much easier to grow,” he said.
2008年11月人事部三级笔译英译汉试题
1.LONGYEARBYEN, Norway With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and
2.This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault‟s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.
3.As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.
4.Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.
5.The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct.
A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.
6.For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production.
7.“We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,” said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. “Everyone was saying, why didn‟t anyone prepare for a hurricane before? We knew it was going to happen.
8.“Well, we are losing biodiversity every day — it‟s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It‟s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.”
9.This week the urgency of the problem was underscored as wheat prices rose to record highs and wheat stores dropped to the lowest level in 35 years. A series of droughts and new diseases cut wheat production in many parts of the world. “The erosion of plants‟ genetic resources is really going fast,” said Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the division of crop biotechnology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has preserved half
10.The United Nations International Treaty Plant Genetic ratified in 2004, created a formal global network for banking and sharing seeds, as well as for studying their genetic traits. Last year, its database received thousands of new seeds.
11.A system of plant banks could be crucial in responding to climate crises since it could identify genetic material and plant strains better able to cope with a changed environment.
12.Here at the Global Vault, hundreds of gray boxes containing seeds from places ranging from Syria to Mexico were moved this week into a freezing vault to be placed in suspended animation. They harbor a vast range of qualities, like the ability to withstand drier, warmer climate.
挪威朗伊尔城——随着植物物种正在以骇人听闻的速度灭绝，科学家和各国政府正在创建全球网络性的植物库来储存种子和苗芽。人类可以利用这些珍贵的种芽资源确保充足的食物供应，以应对气候变化。 本周，作为这种不懈努力的旗舰机构，“全球种子地库”接收了首批数百万种的种子。该地库建于北极的一座白雪皑皑的大山之中，其目标是储存和保护世界各地收藏的各类种子样本。
截至周四，成千上万个堆放整齐且贴有标签的灰色种盒在上釉的洞穴式结构中安家落户，如尼日利亚的豌豆、墨西哥的玉米。这些盒子就如已经备份了的电脑硬盘，以防世界上的植物物种会因自然灾害和人为破坏而消失。
通往种子地库的入口隧道，位于永冻带下约500英尺处，其设计旨在防御爆炸和地震。自动化数字监控系统用于控制温度并提供类似导弹发射井或福特诺克斯军事基地的安全保障。任何人都不单独拥有进入种子库的全部密码。
目前，世界上很多人士致力于收集种子及其种子基因的信息并使之系统化，全球种子地库是这种全球性努力的的一个缩影。气候变化专家称，这些信息要比金子还要贵重。在比利时的鲁汶，科学家正在搜集世界上的香蕉样本并将香蕉芽保存在液体氮中，以防其灭绝。法国也正在进行类似的努力，保护咖啡物种。很多植物，大多数是来自热带地区的植物，无法通过种子繁殖，不能产生可供储存的种子。
多年来，很多庞杂的种子库网络一直以随意的方式收集种子和苗芽。例如，墨西哥的实验室收藏玉米种，尼日利亚的实验室收藏木薯种。现在，正对这些分散的努力进行亟需的整合和系统化操作。之所以可以这样做，部分原因是储存植物基因技术的更新，部分原因是气候变化的警钟继续长鸣及其对世界粮食产量的影响。
卡里·福勒是一家负责管理种子库的非营利性组织全球作物多样性托管会的总裁，他说：“我们是在„9·11‟事件之后、尤其是卡特里娜飓风之后，开始有这个构想的。” 他还说：“每个人都在问：为什么事先不作好迎接飓风的准备呢?我们明明知道会发生飓风的。”
他指出：“喏，我们每天都在损失生物多样性——一点一滴地在损失。这种损失没有止步的迹象，我们必须为此做点什么。”
本周，由于小麦价格上升到最高纪录水平和小麦储存量下滑到35年来最低水平，更加突出了这个问题的紧迫性。由于一连串的干旱及新的疾病，世界很多地方的小麦产量下降。罗尼·斯文奈恩博士现任比利时鲁汶天主教大学作物生物技术部主任，他保存了世界上1200种香蕉种的一半以上。斯文奈恩博士说：“植物基因资源正在受到快速侵蚀。”他还指出：“我们正处于关键时刻，如果不迅速采取行动，我们将失去很多我们需要的植物物种。”
已于2004年获得批准的联合国国际植物基因资源条约创建了一个正式的全球网络，旨在对种子进行储存和共享并对其遗传特征进行研究。去年，有成千上万的新种子在其数据库安家落户。
由于植物库系统能够识别出那些对环境变化适应能力较强的基因物质和植物种类，因而这种系统能在应本周，
2009年5月24日三级笔译真题(英译中)
Last Friday an advisory panel to the European Environment Agency issued an extraordinary scientific opinion: The European Union should suspend its goal of having 10 percent of transportation fuel made from biofuel by 2020.
The European Union's biofuel targets were increased and extended from 5.75 percent by 2010 to 10 percent by 2020 just last year. Still, Europe's well-meaning rush to biofuels, the scientists concluded, had produced a slew of harmful ripple effects - from deforestation in Southeast Asia to higher prices for grains.
In a recommendation released last weekend, the 20-member panel, made up of some of Europe's most distinguished climate scientists, called the 10 percent target "overambitious" and an "experiment" whose "unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control."
"The idea was that we felt we needed to slow down, to analyze the issue carefully and then come back at the problem," Laszlo Somlyody, the panel's chairman and a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, said in a telephone interview.
He said that part of the problem was that when it set the targets, the European Union was trying desperately to solve the problem of rising transportation emissions "in isolation," without adequately studying the effects of other sectors like land use and food supply.
"The starting point was correct: I'm happy that the European Union took the lead in cutting greenhouse gasses and we need to control traffic emissions," Somlyody said. "But the basic problem is it thought of transport alone, without considering all these other effects. And we don't understand those very well yet."
The panel's advice is not binding and it is not clear whether the European Commission will follow the recommendation.
It has become increasingly clear that the global pursuit of biofuels - encouraged by a rash of targets and subsides in both Europe and the United States - has not produced the desired effect.
Investigations have shown, for example, rain forests and peat swamp are being cleared to make way for biofuel plantations, a process that produces more emissions than the biofuels can save. Equally concerning, land needed to produce food for people to eat is planted with more profitable biofuel crops, and water is diverted from the drinking supply.
In Europe and the United States, food prices for items like pizza and bread have increased significantly as grain stores shrink and wheat prices rise.
The price of wheat and rice are double those of a year ago, and corn is a third higher, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said this week.
"Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations," said Henri Josserand of the Food and Agriculture Organization
For example, the European Environment Agency advisory panel suggests that the best use of plant biomass is not for transport fuel but to heat homes and generate electricity.
To be useful for vehicles, plant matter must be distilled to a fuel and often transported long distances. To heat a home, it can often be used raw or with minimal processing, and moved just a short distance away 2009年11月15日三级笔译实物真题
英译汉
Plans are well under way for a year of celebrations to mark the upcoming bicentennial of one of Poland's favorite native sons-Frédéric, Chopin.
The prestigious International Chopin Competition for pianists will mark its 16th edition in October 2010. Held every five years, the competition draws scores of young musicians from all over the world. In addition, Warsaw's Chopin Museum, with world's largest collection of Chopin documents and other artifacts, will to dozens of sites in and the lived, ate, studied, performed, visited or even partied.
"Actually, Chopin doesn't need to be promoted, but we hope that Poland and Polish culture can be promoted through Chopin," said Monika Strugala, who is coordinating the Chopin 2010 program under the aegis of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, a body set up by the Sejm in 2001 to promote and protect Chopin's work and image. "We want to confirm to all that he is a very, very important Polish symbol," she said. Indeed, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Chopin's music flows through the Polish national consciousness like some sort of cultural lifeblood.
The son of a Polish mother and a French émigré father, Chopin was born in a manor house at Zelazowa Wola, about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, west of Warsaw, and moved to Warsaw as an infant.
