The Green Thread

[wjfox]

Solar panels to span the Thames at new Blackfriars Station

Friday 27 May 2011
London SE1 website team

The new Blackfriars Station will generate up to 50 per cent of its own energy needs on-site thanks to the largest single use of solar photovoltaic cells in the UK.

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/5317

[wjfox]

http://www.fastcompany.com/1755510/g...rom-starvation

Gel-Suspended Mushrooms Could Save Us From Starvation

BY Ariel Schwartz
Thu May 26, 2011

If we run out of phosphate fertilizer, it will mean bad things for our future eating. But giving our crops a fungus can help us stretch our supply.





The human race has a food problem. Readily available phosphate fertilizer--a mainstay of intensive agriculture--won't be around for long. That's because supplies of mined phosphate could peak by 2033, at which point the material will become both expensive and hard to find. The ripple effects of a phosphate shortage could be catastrophic. But part of the solution to our phosphate woes may come from an unexpected place: gel-suspended mushrooms.

The news comes from the University of Lausanne, where researchers have been looking at why a kind of fungus that lives symbiotically with plant roots (mycorrhizal fungi) causes plants to grow larger. The mushrooms are expert at acquiring phosphates from the soil. So the university researchers are experimenting with producing massive quantities of the fungus, suspending it in a gel for easy transportation, and then attaching the gel to needy crops in tropical areas, where plants have extra difficulty gathering phosphate from the soil.

And it works remarkably well. During testing on potato crops in Colombia, the researchers discovered that plants using the gel can produce the same yield of crops with half the amount of added fertilizer.

This is a promising sign: A lot of what you eat might be fungi-fertilized soon. But this won't solve the phosphate problem altogether. For that, we'll need an arsenal of potential fixes, including recycling human urine (a phosphate-rich substance) and homemade bone meal. Entrepreneurs, now is the time to make these solutions both viable and appetizing.

[wjfox]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datab...ion-beautiful#

[wjfox]

Saudi Arabia plans 16 nuclear reactors by 2030

02 June 2011

Saudi Arabia plans to construct 16 nuclear power reactors over the next 20 years at a cost of more than 300 billion riyals ($80 billion), according to Abdul Ghani bin Melaibari, coordinator of scientific collaboration at King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy. Speaking during the Gulf Environment Forum in Jeddah, he said, "After ten years we will have the first two reactors. After that, every year we will establish two, until we have 16 of them by 2030." Melaibari said that the reactors would generate about 20% of Saudi Arabia's electricity demand. He also noted that arrangements were being made to offer the project for international bidding. "We will consider expertise that we can benefit from," he said.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/IT...0-0206115.html

[alonzo-ny]

Good.

[wjfox]

The planet's fucked, it's our fault, and it's getting worse.

Have a nice day!


---


http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/0...ss-extinction/





Carbon release to atmosphere 10 times faster now than 56 million years ago, the PETM, a time of 10°F warming and mass extinction

By Joe Romm on Jun 6, 2011 at 8:48 pm

The rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere today is nearly 10 times as fast as during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55.9 million years ago, the best analog we have for current global warming, according to an international team of geologists. Rate matters and this current rapid change may not allow sufficient time for the biological environment to adjust.

“We looked at the PETM because it is thought to be the best ancient analog for future climate change caused by fossil fuel burning,” said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences, Penn State.

“Rather than the 20,000 years of the PETM which is long enough for ecological systems to adapt, carbon is now being released into the atmosphere at a rate 10 times faster,” said Kump. “It is possible that this is faster than ecosystems can adapt.”

That’s the Penn State news release for a major new study in Nature Geoscience, “Slow release of fossil carbon during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum” (subs. req’d).

Again, this bad news isn’t big news to Climate Progress readers. A year ago I wrote about a different Nature Geoscience study, which found our oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And the UK’s Royal Society published a 2010 paper that noted, “Palaeotemperature proxy data from across the PETM indicate a coincident increase in global surface temperatures of approximately 5-6°C,” which is to say 9° – 11°F.

In short, whatever we do, we don’t want to duplicate the conditions of the PETM. Unfortunately, the new study finds human are actually pushing the climate system 10 times harder than it was pushed during the PETM by natural forcings.

[wjfox]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/op...dman.html?_r=2




The Earth Is Full

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 7, 2011

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

[SokoX]

Originally Posted by wjfox

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/op...dman.html?_r=2




The Earth Is Full

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

For Gods sake, this man isn't connected to the Net.

[wjfox]

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/0...shington-post/


Romney alienates conservatives by embracing climate science,
Washington Post alienates readers by ignoring science entirely

By Joe Romm
Jun 9, 2011 at 7:27 pm

Another day, another head-exploding he-said/she-said climate piece in the Washington Post, “Romney draws early fire from conservatives over views on climate change.”

Last week, the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination said, he accepted the basic findings of climate science. As the WashPost puts it — carefully avoiding any scientific judgment of its own — “the former Massachusetts governor stuck to the position he has held for many years — that he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern.”

That wouldn’t be political news in 99% of the countries in the world, but here in the United States, them’s fightin’ words for the dominant flat-earth wing of the GOP (see National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”).

But the reason you are going to have to put on your head vises is that the WashPost wrote an entire story about how the climate science deniers have gone after Romney – without ever bothering to explain to their readers that Romney is actually right and the deniers are wrong.

Here is what the Washington Post printed from the hard-core conservative deniers:

“Bye-bye, nomination,” Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney’s climate remark. “Another one down. We’re in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it.”

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. “Governor Romney’s regulatory record as governor contains some flaws,” the report said, “including a significant one — his support of ‘global warming’ policies.”

And Conservatives4Palin.com, a blog run by some of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s more active supporters, posted an item charging that Romney is “simpatico” with President Obama after he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

Does the WashPost point out that, say, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and national academies and scientific journals side with Romney and that, say, the overwhelming majority of birthers side with Limbaugh?

No. This is just a political story to them. Romney has a “position” and others in the party have a different position. Romney happens to believe the earth is spherical. Others believe it is flat. Have at it!

But wait, there’s more:

Romney, in his full answer to the question about climate change, maintained his position while offering enough nuance to extend an open hand to those who disagree.

“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer,” he said. “I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that. I don’t know how much our contribution is to that, because I know that there have been periods of greater heat and warmth in the past, but I believe we contribute to that.”

Romney added that “it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.” He also said he does not support a cap-and-trade policy, saying it would put American companies at a competitive disadvantage in the world. “We don’t call it ‘America warming,’ ” he said. “We call it ‘global warming.’ ”

But it was his line that “humans contribute” that sparked the conservative backlash.

Romney has long known that the health-care legislation he signed in Massachusetts — like Obama’s federal health-care overhaul, it includes an individual mandate — could be his Achilles’ heel in pursuit of the Republican nomination.

On health care, this Onion piece is a must-read: “Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People.” Perhaps they should write a new piece, “Mitt Romney Haunted By His Fairly Accurate Understanding of Climate Science.” But I digress.

Now, some conservatives say, he should add climate change to that list.

“If [voters] get past Romneycare, then this will be a ‘do not pass go’-type issue,” said Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and a leading global warming skeptic. “This could just be the last straw.”

So the new litmus test for conservatives is any acceptance of the notion that humans contribute to global warming. Why, precisely, do conservatives think they are called ” greenhouse gases”? Because they don’t trap heat?

Again, does the WashPost include a single sentence explaining the overwhelming abundance of evidence that humans contribute to global warming (See “Eight great figures summarizing the evidence for a “human fingerprint” on recent climate change“).

Of course not. That information might detract from the entertainment value of the piece, which until about 7 pm the Post was touting on its front page for all of the comments it generated, urging readers to join in the debate:



There’s nothing wrong with encouraging reader comments, Lord knows, but informing your readers used to being important mission of newspapers, too, once upon a time.

But not for the WashPost. Even towards the end of the article, where they could easily have tucked in a little science, they decide to go with some polling:

In the 2008 presidential campaign, climate change was not a major issue. Although Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican nominee, said he believed the science behind global warming, he did little to highlight his earlier bipartisan work in the Senate on climate change.

Public opinion is politicized on the issue. A March Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Republicans think the effects of global warming are already being felt and 36 percent believe the rise in the Earth’s temperatures is caused by humans, while 67 percent say the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news.

The same survey found the opposite trend on the other side of the political fence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats polled said the effects of global warming have begun, and 71 percent said humans are causing the rising temperatures, while 22 percent think the situation is exaggerated. Among independents, there was a fairly even split on those questions.

[Pause to clean up gray matter.]

I wonder why public opinion is politicized on the issue. Oh, wait. I know. Could it be because major newspapers have stopped explaining the science to their readers?

And I really wonder why conservatives think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news — when media coverage has collapsed and centrist (center-right?) papers like the Post devote massive front-page articles to the climate debate that simply parrot back to their readers what the right-wing deniers believe.

I repeat the question I asked back in May: What kind of media analysis could possibly conclude the Washington Post covered climate well (in 2009)?

[wjfox]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ton-ocean-acid




Explosion in jellyfish numbers may lead to ecological disaster, warn scientists

A dramatic global increase in jellyfish swarms could damage the marine food chain

Tracy McVeigh
The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

Global warming has long been blamed for the huge rise in the world's jellyfish population. But new research suggests that they, in turn, may be worsening the problem by producing more carbon than the oceans can cope with.

Research led by Rob Condon of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in the US focuses on the effect that the increasing numbers of jellyfish are having on marine bateria, which play an important role by recycling nutrients created by decaying organisms back into the food web. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that while bacteria are capable of absorbing the constituent carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other chemicals given off by most fish when they die, they cannot do the same with jellyfish. The invertebrates, populating the seas in ever-increasing numbers, break down into biomass with especially high levels of carbon, which the bacteria cannot absorb well. Instead of using it to grow, the bacteria breathe it out as carbon dioxide. This means more of the gas is released into the atmosphere.

Dr Carol Turley, a scientist at Plymouth University's Marine Laboratory, said the research highlighted the growing problem of ocean acidification, the so-called "evil twin" of global warming. "Oceans have been taking up 25% of the carbon dioxide that man has produced over the last 200 years, so it's been acting as a buffer for climate change. When you add more carbon dioxide to sea water it becomes more acidic. And already that is happening at a rate that hasn't occurred in 600 million years."

The acidification of the oceans is already predicted to have such a corrosive effect that unprotected shellfish will dissolve by the middle of the century."

Condon's research also found that the spike in jellyfish numbers is also turning the marine food cycle on its head. The creatures devour huge quantities of plankton, thus depriving small fish of the food they need. "This restricts the transfer of energy up the food chain because jellyfish are not readily consumed by other predators," said Condon.

The increase in the jellyfish population has been attributed to factors including climate change, over-fishing and the runoff of agricultural fertilisers. The rise in sea temperature and the elimination of predators such as sharks and tuna has made conditions ideal, and "blooms" – when populations explode in great swarms, sparking regular panics on beaches around the world– are being reported in ever-increasing size and frequency. Last year scientists at the University of British Columbia found that global warming was causing 2,000 different jellyfish species to appear earlier each year and expanding their number.

The proliferation of jellyfish has caused problems for seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa. The blooms are also perilous to swimmers; the effects of a jellyfish sting range across the species from painless to tingling to agony and death.

[Octoman]

Climate change should be excluded from curriculum, says adviser

Head of government review says school syllabus needs to 'get back to the science in science'

Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk,



http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/...rnment-adviser

Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said.

Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schools to decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives.

In an interview with the Guardian, Oates called for the national curriculum "to get back to the science in science". "We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don't date," he said. "We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist."

His stance marks a turning point in the development of the national curriculum. Oates' intention is to substantially reduce the national curriculum. Under the previous government, the curriculum expanded to nearly 500 pages. His remarks also show he wants to reverse a shift in emphasis, made under the Labour government, under which teachers were encouraged to place great importance on scientific "issues" and not just scientific knowledge.

Climate change has featured in the national curriculum since 1995. In 2007, the topics "cultural understanding of science" and "applications and implications of science" were added to the curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds.

But Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, warned that Oates' ideas might not be in pupils' best interests and could make science less interesting for children.

"An emphasis on climate change in the curriculum connects the core scientific concepts to topical issues," he said. "Certain politicians feel that they don't like the concept of climate change. I hope this isn't a sign of a political agenda being exercised."

He said leaving climate change out of the national curriculum might encourage a teacher who was a climate change sceptic to abandon teaching the subject to their pupils. "This would not be in the best interests of pupils. It would be like a creationist teacher not teaching about evolution. Climate change is about science. If you remove the context of scientific concepts, you make it less interesting to children."

Annette Smith, chief executive of the Association for Science Education, said she agreed with Oates that the curriculum was too crowded. "However, what I wouldn't want to lose from the national curriculum is the idea that science is developing all the time and that it impinges on our lives," she said.

But Oates, who is director of research at Cambridge Assessment, one of the biggest exam boards in Europe, said the topics that engaged children in science "changed dramatically" from year to year. "The national curriculum shouldn't ever try to keep up with those, otherwise it would keep changing." Teachers knew best which current affairs topics related to science would interest their pupils, he said. "A lot should not be in the national curriculum at all. A lot of damage was done to the curriculum last time it was reviewed," he said.

"If you live in a town where there is a lot of manufacturing, then teachers can use that as a context to discuss the social effects of science; other groups of pupils might be more interested in how the pharmaceutical industry produces drugs. It's really important that children think through the social application of science, but the precise topics... do not have to be specified by the state."

Oates also called for algebra to be taught to pupils at an earlier age. "Algebra has crept later and later over the last few decades. We should start 'pre-algebra' with young children – aged eight, for example," he said. He said that by the age of 11, children could be solving simple algebraic equations.

He said this would bring England into line with some nations in Asia. "Algebra is so important because it is the foundation of so much of maths. In other nations, children operate with equations and algebraic expressions."

He said some maths was taught only to older children, because teachers in primary school did not have the confidence to teach it themselves.

The curriculum review, which started in January, will look at 12 subjects, including maths, English, science, and art and design. It will consider which subjects should be compulsory and at what age.

At the launch of the review, Michael Gove, the education secretary, said the national curriculum was "too long ... patronising towards teachers and stifled innovation".

"Its pages are littered with irrelevant material – mainly high-sounding aims, such as the requirement to 'challenge injustice', which are wonderful in politicians' speeches, but contribute nothing to helping students deepen their stock of knowledge."

Climate change in the current curriculum

What the national curriculum says children should learn about climate change and caring for the environment in science lessons:

Age 5-11:Pupils should be taught to care for the environment as part of a topic on life processes and living things.

Age 11-14: Pupils should be taught how human activity and natural processes can lead to changes in the environment and about ways in which living things and the environment need to be protected. Teachers are encouraged to examine issues such as the finite resources available to us, waste reduction, recycling, renewable energy and environmental pollution.

Pupils demonstrate exceptional performance if they can "describe and explain the importance of a wide range of applications and implications of science in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, such as addressing problems arising from global climate change".

Age 14-16: Pupils should learn that the surface and the atmosphere of the earth have changed since the earth's origin, and are changing at present. They should also study how the effects of human activity on the environment can be assessed, using living and non-living indicators. Under "applications and implications of science", pupils should be taught to "consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made, including those that raise ethical issues, and about the social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions".

Climate change also comes up in the geography curriculum and may be tackled in religious education too.

[wjfox]

[chuck_nbc]

Can someone edit the subject?


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_879542.html




On Friday, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu announced a "game changing" development in solar energy. A company called 1366 Technologies, headquartered in Lexington, Mass., has developed a silicon solar wafer that would cut the cost of solar cell manufacturing by an estimated 50 percent.

The wafer technology was developed with the support of a pilot innovation investment program housed under the Department of Energy, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E). According to director Arun Majumdar, "ARPA-E is looking for high risk ideas that, if successful, can be high impact. Those that don't exist today."

Unlike traditional wafers--which are sliced from a large block, resulting in considerable losses of material (up to 50 percent)--these new wafers are individually cast to specific measurements, a more efficient model of production.

In 2009, ARPA-E made an initial $4 million dollar investment in 1366 Technologies, and on Friday, announced it would make an additional $150 million dollar loan guarantee to take the company's research and development to the next level.

If projections regarding cost savings are accurate, solar may be on its way to becoming competitive with traditional fossil-fuels -- though some in the industry remain concerned about barriers still in place.

"There are two main areas of concern: price and value," said Brian Keane, president of Smart Power, a green energy marketing group. Keane explained that the primary "value" of solar "is that it's good for the environment. But quite frankly, no American actually thinks that's good value."

Keane says that U.S. consumers need to be convinced that solar is a viable proposition. "The perception is that solar is an idea from the 1970s that just didn’t work. They think it’s not strong enough to power their lives, compared with oil, coal and nuclear power."

[hypnotoad24]

Some developments from NI. NI set a target of 40% of energy from renewables by 2020 last year- presently, due to high fuel poverty levels in NI, this is under review, though planners in NI are still planning for the 40% target: http://www.globalgateway.com/article...energy-target/

This excellent report highlights the difficulties in integrating renewable energy sources into a small island system: http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/fa...nofrenewables/

(as a note- early last July, there was a day when over 50% of NI's energy came from renewable sources)

Another development in NI is the proposed Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) facility- this plant will have the ability to take excess wind generation, and store it as compresed air, and release it as and when needed when wind output is low. Information here: http://www.gaelectric.ie/news-detail.asp?nid=52&id=5

Other schemes being looked at include flywheel energy storage schemes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage and battery storage schemes.

Certainly, the integration of renewable energy in NI has presented significant challenges, the utmost being that customers enjoy, now and into the future, present levels of energy security. Although NI is but a mere pimple in European terms, it is well worth noting that NI is at the forefront of renewables technologies, both in terms of integration with the existing electricity network, and management of high levels of renewables.

Also, as an aside, this document is worth reading: https://www.entsoe.eu/system-development/tyndp-2010/
It describes all the major projects being implemented across Europe to secure a target of 20% of energy from renewables from every country by the year 2020.

Certainly, this is an exciting time to be involved in the energy sector in NI. The amount, and variety, of new technologies being proposed for the country is unprecedented in its history, and hopefully there will be many developments to report on in this thread! Such as this one:http://www.marineturbines.com/3/news...thern_ireland/

[wjfox]

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/0...conomy-stupid/





Bill Clinton on Green Jobs: “It’s Still the Economy Stupid”

Jun 23, 2011 at 9:02 am
by Raj Salhotra

While President Obama gets hammered by Republicans for his economic policies and criticized by environmental groups for not doing enough to address climate change, former President Clinton weighed in recently on the intersection of both topics: Green jobs.

Clinton wrote an article for Newsweek in which he laid out 14 steps to put Americans back to work. Six of these steps were in some way related to clean energy. Whether it was through loan guarantees, energy efficiency building retrofits, or just painting roofs white to save electricity in the summer, President Clinton, says he believes in the potential of green energy to create jobs.

When I was president, the economy benefited because information technology penetrated every aspect of American life. More than one quarter of our job growth and one third of our income growth came from that. Now the obvious candidate for that role today is changing the way we produce and use energy.

Two specific proposals stick out as providing tremendous opportunities for job creation and economic growth:

Firstly, President Clinton points to the retrofit of the Empire State Building which will reduce electricity usage by “38 percent [and] will enable the costs of the retrofits to be recovered through lower utility bills in less than five years.” The project also “created hundreds of jobs and cut greenhouse-gas emissions substantially.”

Building retrofits have huge job-creating potential; a recent report suggests “retrofitting 40% of the US building stock will create over 600,000 jobs by 2020.” This estimate is very similar to that of President Clinton (retrofitting the entire building stock will create 1,000,000 jobs). Even in the residential sector, retrofits can create “between 600,000 and 1,000,000 jobs by 2025.”

Secondly, Clinton notes that loan guarantees can be a powerful tool to create jobs as they “allow banks to lend money to a business after the federal government guarantees a percentage of the loan amount.” The federal government usually maintains a leverage ratio of 10:1. Approximately 10% of the loan value is kept in a special debt service reserve fund to be tapped only if the company defaults on its loan.

The DOE currently offers a loan-guarantee program to support clean energy projects. Thus far, the DOE has guaranteed 29 projects which have created or saved over 62,000 jobs across 21 states. Yet, because the program’s funding will end in September 2011, many other potentially groundbreaking projects have been placed on hold.

In his FY 2012 budget proposal, President Obama requested $200 million for the loan guarantee program, yet the House Appropriations Committee recently passed its FY 2012 Energy and Water budget with only $160 million appropriated for the program. Based on the number of job-creating clean energy projects placed on hold, it is imperative that the President and Congress appropriate more funds for the DOE loan guarantee program.

Both loan guarantees and commercial and residential building retrofits are policies that, at virtually no cost to the ratepayer or taxpayer, will create jobs, boost the economy, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

— Raj Salhotra

[Stephen Lacey: Clinton's ideas are very consistent with Obama's goals. While energy efficiency and renewable energy programs are proving effective at creating tens of thousands of jobs, it takes a long time to build up a substantial base of permanent jobs in this industry. We're talking about overturning a very large number of buildings and energy facilities — many of the green jobs will be created over a period of many years, not overnight. Today, the big issue is whether or not Congress will extend various tax credits to give investors certainty so they can continue supporting the projects that create these jobs.]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Glenn Beck: Empowering Individuals Through Sustainable Development is a “Socialist Crusade”

By Tripp Brockway

In another paranoid tirade last Friday, Fox News Commentator Glenn Beck announced, yet again, his belief that “socialists” are attempting to take over the world – this time through the concept of “sustainable development.”

His prime target was the United Nations’ Agenda 21. Agenda 21 is a document that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that made sustainable development a goal of the United Nations member countries. Beck purports that Agenda 21 and sustainable development are part of a “socialist created, redistribution of wealth, globalist scheme disguised very poorly as environmental crusades.”

Here’s only a piece of a very long, exhausting rant:





So what is sustainable development in reality? Is it “just a really nice way of saying centralized control over all of human life on planet earth,” as Beck claims? Of course not.

It’s the exact opposite of centralized control. It’s a framework for thinking about how to empower individuals and communities to help them realize their economic potential. Because experience shows that economic growth creates increased awareness about environmental issues.

Sustainable development is actually a simple combination of environmental sustainability and local economic development, as the term itself suggests. According to Agenda 21:

Integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future.”

International cooperation in this area should be designed to complement and support – not to diminish or subsume – sound domestic economic policies, in both developed and developing countries, if global progress towards sustainable development is to be achieved.”

The very nature of sustainable development demands that it take place on the local level. The overall goal is global environmentally-intelligent economic growth, but the implementation of this goal relies on effective understanding and incorporation of the local economic and environmental context.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/0...sade%E2%80%9D/

[wjfox]

Some good news. The Serengeti motorway (possibly the most insane road plan in history) has been scrapped:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13904464



(see earlier post here)

[wjfox]

Originally Posted by wjfox

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ton-ocean-acid




Explosion in jellyfish numbers may lead to ecological disaster, warn scientists

A dramatic global increase in jellyfish swarms could damage the marine food chain

Tracy McVeigh
The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

Global warming has long been blamed for the huge rise in the world's jellyfish population. But new research suggests that they, in turn, may be worsening the problem by producing more carbon than the oceans can cope with.

Research led by Rob Condon of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in the US focuses on the effect that the increasing numbers of jellyfish are having on marine bateria, which play an important role by recycling nutrients created by decaying organisms back into the food web. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that while bacteria are capable of absorbing the constituent carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other chemicals given off by most fish when they die, they cannot do the same with jellyfish. The invertebrates, populating the seas in ever-increasing numbers, break down into biomass with especially high levels of carbon, which the bacteria cannot absorb well. Instead of using it to grow, the bacteria breathe it out as carbon dioxide. This means more of the gas is released into the atmosphere.

Dr Carol Turley, a scientist at Plymouth University's Marine Laboratory, said the research highlighted the growing problem of ocean acidification, the so-called "evil twin" of global warming. "Oceans have been taking up 25% of the carbon dioxide that man has produced over the last 200 years, so it's been acting as a buffer for climate change. When you add more carbon dioxide to sea water it becomes more acidic. And already that is happening at a rate that hasn't occurred in 600 million years."

The acidification of the oceans is already predicted to have such a corrosive effect that unprotected shellfish will dissolve by the middle of the century."

Condon's research also found that the spike in jellyfish numbers is also turning the marine food cycle on its head. The creatures devour huge quantities of plankton, thus depriving small fish of the food they need. "This restricts the transfer of energy up the food chain because jellyfish are not readily consumed by other predators," said Condon.

The increase in the jellyfish population has been attributed to factors including climate change, over-fishing and the runoff of agricultural fertilisers. The rise in sea temperature and the elimination of predators such as sharks and tuna has made conditions ideal, and "blooms" – when populations explode in great swarms, sparking regular panics on beaches around the world– are being reported in ever-increasing size and frequency. Last year scientists at the University of British Columbia found that global warming was causing 2,000 different jellyfish species to appear earlier each year and expanding their number.

The proliferation of jellyfish has caused problems for seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa. The blooms are also perilous to swimmers; the effects of a jellyfish sting range across the species from painless to tingling to agony and death.

Jellyfish force Torness nuclear reactor shutdown

Both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station have been shut down after huge numbers of jellyfish were found in the sea water entering the plant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotlan...-fife-13971005

[PresidentBjork]

there was a really good feature on opportunities and challenges posed by the future development of biofuels in last week's nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...l/474S02a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...l/474S06a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...l/474S09a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S012a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S015a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S017a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S018a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S020a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S022a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../474S025a.html

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/201...7352-531a.html