Now Even National Security Is Trumped By Economic Greed
You’ll have to take my word for it that the notes to this article have been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks, waiting for a topical moment in which to post it: I didn’t have to wait long — this afternoon (or morning, depending on where you are), Barack Obama proposed an idea quite alien to the military-industrial machine’s normal aspirations. Rather than wage endless war, allowing the defense (attack) industry, plus their counterparts in oil and construction, to cream off the vast profits created by “strategic global realignment”, he suggested that $1.5bn a year should be set aside for Pakistan for non-military purposes, such as sanitation, schools and infrastructure (ok, there might be a bit of money in it for Bechtel, but c’est la vie).
This idea will, of course, be heatedly debated in Congress: how can the USA spare such a vast amount of money helping another country’s people when there are such financial difficulties at home? Quite. After all, a one trillion dollar baleout doesn’t come cheap; there are banks, insurance companies and investment houses to save from the vaguaries of the global market. So what if a billion and a half dollars could be enough to prevent local insurgency, saving the lives of soldiers who — regardless of your position on foreign affairs — have a bloody awful job doing what they are told in such a deadly area? The hierarchy is becoming clear: to see how it stacks up, here’s what I say in Time’s Up!
It seems so obvious, especially after reading to this point, that in order to thrive as a species, humanity is dependent on a fully functioning, healthy and diverse global ecology. When you turn on the television news, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, the state of the global ecology is shown clearly as improving or deteriorating in quality overall, with x number of species having evolved or become extinct, and certain trophic levels becoming more or less dominant. Or rather, this is what we should be seeing and hearing: instead, we learn about the state of the global economy, whether the markets are rising or falling; how many jobs have been gained or lost; which companies are taking over others, and which sectors of the economy are thriving or failing. The economy is king; the ecology is a footnote.
Listening to the radio today, there was more “bad news” with the latest figures from the UK Office of National Statistics showing that the British economy had fallen by 1.6% in the last quarter. If you read The Earth Blog, you will know by now that there is a neat correlation between economic activity and the release of climate changing gases, so this would suggest that there will be a reduction in emissions during the same period — in fact, according to recent figures, there has been a significant drop in UK road traffic, largely from the reduction in freight and commuter driving.
Bad news, isn’t it? A fall in greenhouse gas emissions. Might give us a bit more time to save humanity, but still bad news, because it’s the economy that counts: more than our future on the planet, more than the safety of ordinary people in Pakistan, more even than the lives of American soldiers — considered a scourge by many people in battle torn nations, and quite clearly considered just cannon-fodder in the eyes of the great and good who still regard a growing economy as the only game in town.
There is, indeed, a war to fight: the enemy is greed.
New Heavy Future Chapter Out!
I had thought it dead, but it seems that the author of Heavy Future is still going! Hurray for my feed reader popping this out today.
Green eyes opened a large metal door that led into the ground and motioned us to move downward. A ladder was embedded into the wall. My final glimpse of New York was of the remaining buildings trying in vain to hold back an unending wall of swirling black. Each building touched by the void was embraced and folded into the behemoth, more ammunition for Ophelia’s destruction.
Etched into my brain was the sound of iron and steel and glass howling in agony as it was rent and thrown about by the raw face of nature’s fury. Nothing will make it go away. Nothing can remove the feeling of sheer terror as the very ground beneath you starts to pull up into the sky. If not even the solid earth below is safe from such a thing, what hope do we small fleshy things have?
Awesome.
If you have no idea what I am talking about I suggest you check it out from the first chapter, it’s good stuff. But be prepared for disappointment the author seems to update very irregularly….grrrrr.
Breaking News: EPA Orders Time Out On All New Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Permits
This week’s post is from Bruce Nilles, Director, and Mary Anne Hitt, Deputy Director, of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.
The Obama Administration just made a major announcement – they have directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to not issue any new mining permits until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a chance to take a hard look at well over 100 pending permits to bury streams with mining waste, an essential part of the mountaintop removal coal mining process.
Beginning with EPA’s recommendation today to deny a permit to bury a stream in West Virginia, this review, using the best available science, will likely halt the flood of permits that was unleashed by the 4th Circuit court decision last month.
That federal court of appeals decision left it up to the Army Corps of Engineers – and several companies had already utilized their permits to start blasting away. These dozens of permits would have obliterated huge swaths of Appalachia—all to continue our dependence on outdated and dirty energy.
Today’s announcement is huge progress after eight long years of lawlessness in Appalachia. It signals a departure from the policies of the Bush Administration and reflects President Obama’s commitment to science and justice in government. In a statement announcing the decision about the West Virginia permits, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said,
Already close to 2,000 miles of irreplaceable streams have been contaminated or destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining, and communities throughout the Appalachian region suffer daily from contaminated drinking water, increased flooding, and a decimated landscape.
But today’s decisive and timely action by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets the stage to protect Appalachian communities and end destructive mining. This sends a clear signal that it is time to move beyond coal and toward clean energy solutions that will create good, green jobs here in Appalachia and across America.
This decision also comes on the heels of two recent major pushes to end mountaintop removal coal mining. First, we teamed up with Ashley Judd and Kentuckians For The Commonwealth to bring attention to the travesty of this type of mining.
Then last week more than 150 clean energy activists from Appalachia and around the U.S. came to Washington, DC, to meet with their Congressional representatives and various agency officials to call for an end to mountaintop removal coal mining and the passage of the Clean Water Protection Act.
We applaud EPA Administrator Jackson’s and President Obama’s continued commitment to science and environmental justice. We thank the community activists who have fought long and hard to protect our mountains and to ensure a sustainable future for Appalachia. Today’s announcement underscores that grassroots organizing and fighting for justice can and will prevail when we all work together.
4th Annual Tufts Energy Conference
| March 28, 2009 | ||
| 9:00 am | to | 5:00 pm |
4th Annual Tufts Energy Conference
“Global Green Infrastructure: Powering the 21st Centuryâ€
Date: March 28th, 2009
Time: 9am – 5pm
Location:
Sophia Gordon Hall
Tufts University
15 Talbot Avenue
Medford, MA 02155
Description:
9:00-09:30
Open Registration
09:30 – 09:45
Welcome and Introduction by Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership (with introduction from Peter O’Regan, Conference Co-Chair)
10:00 – 11:30
Panel 1: Innovation and Diffusion of New Infrastructure Technologies
Theme: This panel is an examination of efforts to both finance and develop technologies that allow us to use power more efficiently and sustainably. It brings together the science and technology of infrastructure development and explores the future of new technological innovation and diffusion.
Confirmed:
• Jon Karlen, Flybridge Capital
• Rob Pratt, EnergyClimate Solutions
• Philip Guidice, Commissioner Mass Department of Energy Resources
• James Bickford, Draper Labs
• Richard Larson, MIT
11:30-11:45
Coffee Break
11:45-12:15
Opening Keynote: Peter Droege, World Council for Renewable Energy
12:15 – 1:30
Panel 2: Revitalizing National Infrastructure
Theme: This panel will explore the future of U.S. Infrastructure policy. What role will the U.S. Federal government, state governments, utilities, and other actors play in the future of U.S. Infrastructure policy? How can we alter our grid to encourage more sustainable power use? Is distributed generation a better means to greener power supply and usage than grid-based infrastructure?
Confirmed:
• Watson Collins, NE Utilities
• Suzanne Watson, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
• Alan Nogee, Union of Concerned Scientists
• Penny Conner, NSTAR
• Professor Bill Moomaw, Tufts (moderator)
1:30-3:00
Networking lunch with keynote Gregg Dixon
3:00-4:00
Panel 3: Powering the Developing World
Organizer: Charles and Luo
Theme: This panel will examine developing world energy infrastructure. It seeks to see how growing nations will get their power in the future, especially as many countries see rapid population growth and subsequent energy demand growth. What are the best routes for meeting this need in a sustainable manner? Can distributed generation technologies carry the load? What other technologies and policies are needed? To what extent will developed nations contribute to the process?
Confirmed:
• Richard Hanson, Soluz Inc.
• Sam White, Promethean Power
• Professor David Dapice, Tufts (moderator)
4:15-4:45
Mindy Lubber, CERES
4:45-5:00
Closing remarks, Alex Clough, Conference Co-Chair
Co-sponsored by the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership and the Tufts Climate Solutions Coalition
Via the very cool AIDG
Ocean Iron Fertilization In Southern Ocean Fails To Capture Significant Carbon
Turns out that solving our global warming problems will not be as easy as spreading a bunch of iron dust into the ocean and letting nature run wild. So first the idea of Iron Fertilization. Most ecosystems have a limiting factor, a rare nutrient or substance that limits how fast everything can grown. In the desert it is water, in more wet places it is things like nitrogen and phosphorus. In the ocean one of the limiting factors is Iron. The idea was that if we spread iron dust on the ocean surface, hungry little algae would go nuts for this sudden burst of nutrient, in the process they would suck up lots of co2 (plants suck up co2 when the grow) then they would sink to the ocean floor, in the process removing large amounts of co2 from the atmosphere and safely storing it on the ocean floor. Or at least thats what we hoped would have happened.
A Indo-German team of scientists from the National Institute of Oceaonography and the Alfred Wegener Institute has returned from its expedition on research vessel Polarstern. The cooperative project Lohafex has yielded new insights on how ocean ecosystems function. But it has dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and thus mitigate global warming.
On 17 March the scientists reached Punta Arenas, Chile, together with colleagues from five other countries. They carried out an ocean iron fertilization experiment in the south-western Atlantic for an arduous two and a half months in the notorious Roaring Forties (an area known for bad weather and rough seas).
The scientists fertilized a 300 square kilometre patch of ocean inside the core of an eddy (a clockwise rotating water column with an area of about 10,000 square kilometres) with six tonnes of dissolved iron. They followed the effects of the fertilization on the plankton continuously for 39 days. Additionally they investigated ocean chemistry, particularly concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Response of the plankton
As expected, iron addition stimulated growth of the planktonic algae (phytoplankton), which doubled their biomass within the first two weeks by taking up CO2 from the water. “However, the increasing grazing pressure of small crustacean zooplankton (copepods) prevented further growth of the phytoplankton bloom,†explains Dr Wajih Naqvi, co-chief scientist from the National Institute of Oceanography of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Those algal species, which regularly make blooms in coastal regions including the Antarctic, were most heavily grazed. As a result, only a modest amount of carbon sank out of the surface layer by the end of the experiment. Hence, the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean to compensate the deficit caused by the LOHAFEX bloom was minor compared to earlier ocean iron fertilization experiments.
The larger blooms stimulated by earlier experiments were due to a group of algae known as diatoms. These unicellular algae are protected against grazers by shells made of glass (silica) and are known to sink to great depths after blooming. Diatoms could not grow in the Lohafex experiment because previous, natural blooms had already extracted all the silicic acid (the raw material of diatom shells).
Iron sources for natural blooms are melting icebergs or terrestrial input from streams or via dust blown off Patagonia. Hence a major finding was that other algal groups, although stimulated by iron fertilization, are unable to make blooms equivalent to those of diatoms. Since the silicic acid content in the northern half of the Southern Ocean is low, iron fertilization in this vast region will not result in removal of significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Predators: Amphipods instead of krill
“To our surprise, the iron-fertilized patch attracted large numbers of zooplankton predators belonging to the crustacean group known as amphipodsâ€, explains Professor Dr Victor Smetacek, co-chief scientist from Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. These shrimp like crustaceans are between two and three centimetres long and feed indiscriminately on other zooplankton including copepods. The dominant species Themisto gaudichaudii plays an important role in the food web of the Southern Ocean. It is the main food of squid and fin whales in the south-western Atlantic.
A second fertilization of the patch after 3 weeks had no further effect on the phytoplankton indicating that the ecosystem was already saturated with iron. “The bacterial community both inside and outside the patch was very similar and their cell numbers remained unusually low throughoutâ€, said Dr Bernhard Fuchs of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Bremen). This implies that most of the nutrient recycling (including iron) was carried out by the zooplankton. This is a particularly surprising finding because the microbial food web based on bacteria is believed to be the base of all recycling planktonic ecosystems.
Concentrations of gases other than CO2 produced by the plankton either did not change or increased negligibly in the bloom. Some of these gases such as nitrous oxide and methane are potent greenhouse gases, others such as halogenated hydrocarbons contribute to stratospheric ozone depletion. By the end of the experiment, chlorophyll concentrations were in decline. By now the patch will have merged with its surroundings leaving behind no trace other than a swarm of well-fed amphipods.
Outlook
These preliminary findings will be supported by additional measurements that will be accomplished in the home labs. The data will be refined and interrelationships between the organisms quantified in the coming months. These will be intensely discussed and prepared for joint publication in scientific journals at workshops to be held by the end of the year.
The Lohafex participants are very happy with their results. Also they are crazy tough scientists. “It was a strenuous cruise, full of anxiety and hope as we chased our patch around the collapsing eddy,†says Smetacek. Strong winds were almost the rule, and on two occasions RV Polarstern had to leave the eddy to avoid strong storms that swept the region. On several occasions the expedition participants weathered short storms with wind speeds of over 120 kilometres per hour. “Nevertheless, despite the hard work under difficult circumstances, Lohafex has been an exciting experience laced with the spirit of adventure and haunted by uncertainty quite unlike other scientific cruises,†Naqvi and Smetacek summarize the experiences of the Indo-German cooperation. Spicy Indian curries were prepared at each meal by a Goan cook specially engaged for this cruise and contributed to the good atmosphere. The experiment thus provides an excellent example of international collaboration in interdisciplinary ocean sciences. “The officers and crew of Polarstern did a fantastic job in providing technical support under testing conditions without which the expedition could not have achieved its objectives,†the chief scientists added.
More hard data about the study here. (for you science dweebs like myself)
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