The Dying Arctic: Could Be Ice Free By 2008 (Thats This Year By The Way)
This goes well with this.
More here.
Roundtable On Sustainable Palm Oil: Snake Oil!
Ever get the feeling you’ve been had? It’s an iconic quote from a punk legend, but as with all great sayings, it can be applied in many different places. This is one example: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry talking shop if ever there was one and, like the ineffectual light-green environmental groups who “fight” for changes to government policy and send out gleeful press releases whenever a corporation promises to behave itself, the RSPO are actually making things far worse than if the public were left to their own devices. Sustainable palm oil is simply snake oil in a clever diguise: it doesn’t exist and it never will do.
Here’s how it works.
1) As a group of big businesses whose primary interest is to ensure the expansion of the lucrative palm oil industry – retailers, traders, processors, growers, investors; that sort of thing — set up a shell organisation that claims it is going to make the industry “sustainable”.
2) Call in some gullible (yes, I said “gullible”) NGOs and environmentalists and say that they can have a seat on this august, influential body if they allow business to continue as before — but they will be allowed to suggest changes to the industry providing it doesn’t affect the business model.
3) Repeatedly announce to the world, through member companies such as Sainsburys and Unilever, that agreements are being reached and work is moving on swiftly to make plantations sustainable, but that we have to give them time because this is a tough job, and there are so many products that contain this oil it is just “impossible” to do this any other way.
4) Do almost nothing for years while counting the massive profit that has been made from cheap oil being grown on recently deforested land using cheap labour.
5) After a few years say that the there are so many plantations that no more deforestation has to take place. Meanwhile the South East Asian rainforest has ceased to exist, carbon levels through wood and peat burning have boosted the greenhouse effect, and people have still not realised they have been well and truly greenwashed.
[Read the rest at The Unsuitablog]
Backyard Permaculture
Governor Patrick Trying To Make Massachusetts Into Green Energy Hub
Deval Patrick (my governor), making his second appearance at MIT this month, told an enthusiastic crowd at Kresge Auditorium on Tuesday–the 39th anniversary of the first Earth Day–that clean energy has the potential to bring about an economic bonanza for the commonwealth at the same time that it improves the planet’s well-being.
“If we get this right, the whole world will be our customer,” Patrick said of his plans to make Massachusetts a hotbed of both innovation and implementation in solar, wind and other clean energy alternatives.
Patrick said state regulations must be updated to give renewable energy projects a fair shake. At present, he said, there are “built-in biases” that favor fossil fuel. For example, a provision that allows the state to override local objections and permit the construction of new power plants only applies to large plants, and thus almost exclusively affects fossil-fuel plants. “Ironically,” he said, “the only [renewable] plant large enough to be affected by this law is the most controversial–Cape Wind, which I enthusiastically support.”
Despite strong opposition to that offshore wind project from most of Massachusetts’ political leaders, Patrick said that if it does get built as the nation’s first major offshore wind installation, it would be a powerful symbol of a new direction in energy policy.
A new energy reform bill now being hammered out in a state legislature conference committee, Patrick said, “will revolutionize energy policy in this state.” One of the reforms he wants to see incorporated in the bill is a restructuring of electric utility regulation to promote energy efficiency–”the cleanest energy of all,” he said.
Currently, rate structures “reward our utilities for selling as much as they can,” but that must be changed in order to reap the enormous benefits of efficiency. Changing that policy will be “good news for consumers, and good news for renewable energy,” he said.
In addition, to promote the development of solar energy, Massachusetts has forged “the first alliance of utilities and solar manufacturers in the whole country,” Patrick said. One sign of that alliance is the recent announcement of Evergreen Solar–a manufacturer of solar panels that was a spin-off of MIT research–to triple its manufacturing capacity in the state, creating 1,000 jobs. In addition, state rebates will pay up to 60 percent of homeowners’ costs for installing photovoltaic panels.
“Thanks to places like MIT, with its Energy Initiative, Massachusetts is becoming a center of solar research,” he said. Noting an overall U.S. trend away from manufacturing jobs and toward information-based work, he said that “Clean energy is one knowledge-based technology that produces jobs across the spectrum”–everything from construction trade work to manufacturing, managerial, academic and research positions.
Patrick said that while some might find it odd to spend Earth Day talking about the building of a new industry, it really isn’t. “I hope everyone will help us build, right here in Massachusetts, a clean energy industry that saves the world,” he said, to a resounding standing ovation.
Arctic Melting Faster Than Even The Doomsday Scenarios
In yet another series of crappy news coming from the poles of this planet global warming is having a greater and faster impact on the Arctic than previously thought, according to a new study by the global conservation organization WWF (pdf).
The new report, called Arctic Climate Impact Science – An Update Since ACIA, represents the most wide-ranging reviews of arctic climate impact science since the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) was published in 2005.
The new study found that change was occurring in all arctic systems, impacting on the atmosphere and oceans, sea ice and ice sheets, snow and permafrost, as well as species and populations, food webs, ecosystems and human societies. In essence fucking up everything.
Melting of arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet was found to be severely accelerated, now even prompting the expert scientists to discuss whether both may be close to their “tipping point” (the point where, because of climate change, natural systems may experience sudden, rapid and possibly irreversible change).
“The magnitude of the physical and ecological changes in the Arctic creates an unprecedented challenge for governments, the corporate sector, community leaders and conservationists to create the conditions under which arctic natural systems have the best chance to adapt,” said Dr Martin Sommerkorn, one of the report’s authors and Senior Climate Change Adviser at WWF International’s Arctic Program. “The debate can no longer focus only on creating protected areas and allowing arctic ecosystems to find their balance. At the same time, we need to simultaneously reduce the vulnerability of social and environmental systems of the Arctic by reducing threats from human activity and building ecosystem resilience — the ability of ecosystems to remain stable when under a lot of pressure.”
According to last year’s reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if the entire Greenland Ice Sheet were to melt, sea levels would rise 7.3 metres, making its status a global concern. While it is currently impossible to accurately predict how much of the ice sheet will be melting, and over which time, the new report shows there has been a far greater loss of ice mass in the past few years, much more than had been predicted by scientific models.
Likewise, the loss of summer arctic sea ice has increased dramatically, with record lows reached in 2005 and — way more dramatic — in 2007. In September 2007, the sea ice shrank to 39 per cent below its 1979-2000 mean, the lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979 and also the lowest for the entire 20th century based on monitoring from ships and aircraft.
“When you look in detail at the science behind the recent arctic changes it becomes painfully clear how our understanding of climate impacts lags behind the changes that we are already seeing in the Arctic,” said Sommerkorn. “This is extremely dangerous, as some of these arctic changes have the potential to substantially warm the Earth beyond what models currently forecast. That is because climate models don’t currently adequately incorporate important underlying drivers of the arctic changes we are already observing, such as the interaction between sea ice thickness and water temperature.”
The Arctic is not only one of the places on Earth most vulnerable to climate change, but also a place where vulnerability is of urgent global relevance. WWF calls for a two-pronged strategy to minimize the impacts of climate change. “We need to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases to levels that will avoid the continued warming of the Arctic and the anticipated resulting disruption of the global climate system,” said Sommerkorn.
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