The Natural Resources Defense Council and 26 other U.S. and Canadian environmental groups sent a letter to the Senate and House urging preservation of Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). Section 526 prohibits the Federal purchase of dirty fuels (such as liquid coal, tar sands and oil shale) whose lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions are higher than conventional fuels.
The letter urges Members to oppose amendments to the 2008 National Defense Authorization Bill that would repeal Section 526.
In the Guardian an article by Alex Renton on why we’re running out of fish. Timely as the West coast faces a salmon ban. Article here.
Is anyone not aware that wild fish are in deep trouble? That three-quarters of commercially caught species are over-exploited or exploited to their maximum? Do they not know that industrial fishing is so inefficient that a third of the catch, some 32 million tonnes a year, is thrown away?For every ocean prawn you eat, fish weighing 10-20 times as much have been thrown overboard.
So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish? ‘Quite simply,’ Roberts says, ‘agreements and deals brokered by politicians will never be satisfactory. They always look for the short-term fix.’ He and his team at York University did a survey of the last 20 years of EU ministerial decisions on fish catches and found that, on average, they set quotas for fishing fleets 15 to 30 per cent higher than those recommended as safe by scientists. What that figure doesn’t tell you is that often, for less threatened species like mackerel or whiting, they have set quotas 100 per cent higher than the science recommended. So, in their efforts to pacify the industry, they are bringing populations that could be sustainably fished into the risk zone,’ he said.
According to Greenpeace, Chinese fishing fleets are among the most rapacious when it comes to hoovering up the stocks of small nations in the Pacific and Atlantic. But in no Asian country is the notion of sustainable fishing much developed among consumers - and it is from consumers that any demand for change must come. Because, as Roberts and all the green lobby groups note, the structures and organisations set up by politicians and industry to control fisheries, or even preserve the most endangered species, have entirely failed.
What can you do? Demand sustainable seafood where you eat and where you shop. The following links can help:
From the WSJ, some interesting numbers on Biofuels.
To create just one gallon of fuel, ethanol slurps up 1,700 gallons of water, according to Cornell’s David Pimentel, and 51 cents of tax credits. And it still can’t compete against oil without a protective 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imports and a federal mandate that forces it into our gas tanks. The record 30 million acres the U.S. will devote to ethanol production this year will consume almost a third of America’s corn crop while yielding fuel amounting to less than 3% of petroleum consumption.
In December the Congressional Research Service warned that even devoting every last ear of American-grown corn to ethanol would not create enough “renewable fuel” to meet federal mandates. According to a 2007 OECD report, fossil-fuel production is up to 10,000 times as efficient as biofuel, measured by energy produced per unit of land.
Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A February report in the journal Science found that “corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.” Princeton’s Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Iowa State, of all places, found that markets for biofuel encourage farmers to level forests and convert wilderness into cropland. This is to replace the land diverted from food to fuel.
A bit disingenuous though because it does not address the myriad tax incentives and subsidies that oil receives. Nevertheless, biofuels have some big problems and the mandate should be repealed in favor of more R&D money.
I’ve been very busy and having to neglect the site, but I’m back now. And just in time for Pangea Day. What is Pangea Day?
Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.
The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.
The program will also include a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers. Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova are among those taking part.
Sunrgi expects to be producing solar energy at $0.05 / kWh (equivalent to coal) within the next 12-15 months. How do they do it? By using glass to concentrate the solar power 1600 times and focus it on a tiny square of the most efficient photovoltaic material on the planet.
Photovoltaic material is expensive, but glass is cheap, so Sunrgi’s method effectively brings down the price of solar to be as cheap as coal. An added benefit is that there is no need for an expensive system to track the movement of the sun.
