CITIES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species)has decided to NOT bring many marine species under its protection. The Japanese Embassy hosted a dinner before the day of the vote and served Blue Fin Tuna, one of the species being voted on.
The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network has put out a new book, Threatend Plants of New Zealand, and it claims that 184 plants in New Zealand are on the brink of extinction.
A new way to farm fish is developed to use less water, the CS Monitor reports.
Scientific American is all about water awareness this month. Check out their site and see how water intensive your lifestyle is.
A new process is developed to take more oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands for less of an environmental impact. This is very significant. This is either making what was already going to happen not so bad, or it will legitimize something that should be stopped.
At a convention in California a group of scientists called for climate intervention research. They are discussing the ethics of geoengineering the climate to reverse global warming.
The White House will host a Conservation Summit to bring together conflicting interests to discuss land management. A focus will be placed on participatory management, where localities have more responsibility in land management and the feds release their grip on all decision making. This has been building in the academic land management field for some time.
29 US Governors are pushing the White House to support renewable energy more. Governors are trying to meet ambitious pollution reduction targets, create jobs in their states, and upgrade and connect the energy grid. Governors want more cash subsidies and less tax breaks for renewable energy. Cash is more immediate and clear for the market to understand than tax breaks.
The UN announced that it will enlist the international consortium of national academies of science, the InterAcademy Council, to review the IPCC due to recent controversies. The basic conclusions of the IPCC are not in question, the UN just wants to address any legitimate skepticism of the IPCC, its practices and its findings.
Showing posts with label alberta tar sands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alberta tar sands. Show all posts
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Change for the better, Politicizing for the worse
With the US government taking climate change as a serious threat politicians and lobbyists now step in to ruin a good intention. The deffinition of "renewable" is now being lobbied. Lobbyists for energy companies that ruin our environment are trying to get federal money for doing what they have always been doing like burning spent coal or capturing methane and re-using it or for burning food waste. The point of subsidizing renewable energy is to help wind and solar and wave to gain a footing in the energy market. Certainly we want companies to do things like capture their waste and re-use it but a federal subsidy is not needed to encourage this. We will see how watered down this vital effort gets.
The world business summit on climate change will occur next weekend and companies like shell are using the rhetoric of change while changing little. Shell's big plan is to just wait for carbon capture technology to develop in the next 10-20years and then use it when it is cheap enough for them to want to use it. Climate Change has a time line and waiting that long to reduce emissions is ineffective in mitigating Climate Change. This summit should be amusing as businesses come together to explain why we should do something about Climate Change while they do very little.
Steven Chu is the US Energy Secretary and he is making some contentious decisions. First, Chu is favoring the building of new coal fired power plants. This is unacceptable because every coal plant built today will burn coal until at least 2050. The understanding of environmentalists was that Chu would not allow another to be built under his watch, Chu is not gung-ho about coal plants, but is giving the nod to build more. Chu is also trying to get some reactors going that turn spent nuclear waste into a form that has a drastically smaller radioactive half-life. By doing this Chu would be making the spent nuclear fuel storage facility planned for mountains in Nevada unneeded. Finally, Chu is reducing the government funding of the hydrogen car, many are mad about this but hydrogen is a nowhere technology that was loved by GM and Bush because they could talk about it all day without the risk of having to make a single hydrogen car because there are too many obstacles for this technology. Also, to get fuel for these cars is so energy intensive it makes the car not the environmental thing that people want it to be.
Restructuring our infrastructure to be more "environmental" creates a lot of jobs!
Pollution damages our bodies we all know, but a study that is highlighted by National Geographic explains some of the newest research on the subject.
Canada is pulling oil out of a thing called the Alberta Tar Sands. It is drastically more energy intensive to get oil from sand fields then from tar deposits. The Alberta Tar Sands have 350 years of extraction left but it is expensive to extract and very costly to the environment as these sands lay below a forest and multiple meters of soil. In the Pacific NW of the US 10% of all oil comes from these sands, this topic is very important and you should research it more.
The world business summit on climate change will occur next weekend and companies like shell are using the rhetoric of change while changing little. Shell's big plan is to just wait for carbon capture technology to develop in the next 10-20years and then use it when it is cheap enough for them to want to use it. Climate Change has a time line and waiting that long to reduce emissions is ineffective in mitigating Climate Change. This summit should be amusing as businesses come together to explain why we should do something about Climate Change while they do very little.
Steven Chu is the US Energy Secretary and he is making some contentious decisions. First, Chu is favoring the building of new coal fired power plants. This is unacceptable because every coal plant built today will burn coal until at least 2050. The understanding of environmentalists was that Chu would not allow another to be built under his watch, Chu is not gung-ho about coal plants, but is giving the nod to build more. Chu is also trying to get some reactors going that turn spent nuclear waste into a form that has a drastically smaller radioactive half-life. By doing this Chu would be making the spent nuclear fuel storage facility planned for mountains in Nevada unneeded. Finally, Chu is reducing the government funding of the hydrogen car, many are mad about this but hydrogen is a nowhere technology that was loved by GM and Bush because they could talk about it all day without the risk of having to make a single hydrogen car because there are too many obstacles for this technology. Also, to get fuel for these cars is so energy intensive it makes the car not the environmental thing that people want it to be.
Restructuring our infrastructure to be more "environmental" creates a lot of jobs!
Pollution damages our bodies we all know, but a study that is highlighted by National Geographic explains some of the newest research on the subject.
Canada is pulling oil out of a thing called the Alberta Tar Sands. It is drastically more energy intensive to get oil from sand fields then from tar deposits. The Alberta Tar Sands have 350 years of extraction left but it is expensive to extract and very costly to the environment as these sands lay below a forest and multiple meters of soil. In the Pacific NW of the US 10% of all oil comes from these sands, this topic is very important and you should research it more.
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