Tag Archives: infrastructure

“So Little Time Between Hope and Death”

by Myrna Posted on December 2, 2014

This fall, Kashmir saw its worst floods in more than half a century. My family and I barely survived them. A Kashmiri Muslim man carries an electric transformer through floodwaters. Dar Yasin/AP When Kashmir’s uprising was at its peak in the late 1990s, I used to walk along the banks of the Jhelum River after school. Amid the fighting between India, which controls the part of Kashmir where I grew up, and armed groups battling for independence or union with Pakistan, the river was calm in a way that the rest of the region wasn’t. I moved away from my home in Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, six years ago, but every time I come back, I try to walk on the bridge over the river, to watch the water flow with the same serenity that it had when I was a child. The same river submerged my family’s house this fall in Kashmir’s worst flooding in more than half a century, which ultimately killed more than 400 people on both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the region’s disputed border. But that river wasn’t the Jhelum of my childhood. It wasn’t the Jhelum I loved. When the river started to breach banks and burst levees on September 6, I was at my parents’ house in Srinagar, visiting my sister, who had just given birth to a daughter. By then, it had been raining for days. But that evening was almost completely ordinary. We heard the occasional sounds of cars rushing past. Loudspeakers in the nearby mosque broadcast periodic announcements that residents should move to higher floors of their houses in case of flooding, as well as requests for young men to help reinforce the river’s embankment with sandbags. Read the rest at The Atlantic. This article: “So Little Time Between Hope and Death”

Source article: 

“So Little Time Between Hope and Death”

Posted in alo, Casio, GE, ONA, OXO, The Atlantic, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “So Little Time Between Hope and Death”

Valuing the essential element: Water

by Myrna Posted on November 24, 2014

Assessing the role of watershed conservation in major global cities. The Nature Conservancy has created a website to highlight water quality threats and solutions for more than 500 cities. Read this article: Valuing the essential element: Water

Original source – 

Valuing the essential element: Water

Posted in Casio, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, organic, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Valuing the essential element: Water

29 Coal Miners Died in a 2010 Explosion. Congress Still Hasn’t Fixed the Problem.

by CathrynTorgerso Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last week, a federal grand jury indicted former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship for allegedly conspiring to violate mine safety standards in the run-up to the 2010 explosion that killed 29 workers at the Upper Big Branch Mine. The four-count indictment describes a culture of negligence under Blankenship’s watch, in which essential safety measures were ignored as the company sought to squeeze every last cent out of the ground. Blankenship, who left Massey in 2010, pleaded not guilty Thursday.

But the indictment also came as a sobering reminder: In the four years since the disaster, little has been done to make the mining industry safer. Legislation designed to rein in the worst offenders and give regulators teeth was beaten back by big business. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars in safety fines have gone uncollected.

“We’ve taken some actions after the various accidents that have taken place, but unfortunately, Congress can apparently only legislate in this area after someone dies,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who sponsored mine-safety legislation in the wake of the Upper Big Branch explosion.

“I’ve been there after the accidents, I’ve been standing with many of these politicians—they all pledge they’re gonna do something for the families, that they care about the miners. And then everybody goes back to business as usual.”

Continue Reading »

Taken from: 

29 Coal Miners Died in a 2010 Explosion. Congress Still Hasn’t Fixed the Problem.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 29 Coal Miners Died in a 2010 Explosion. Congress Still Hasn’t Fixed the Problem.

Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

by RobertoMontanez Posted on November 7, 2014

green4us

It’s been a bit player, but solar power is about to shine. Izu navi/Flickr Last week, an energy analyst at Deutsche Bank came to a startling conclusion: By 2016, solar power will be as cheap or cheaper than electricity from the conventional grid in every state except three. That’s without any changes to existing policy. In other words, we’re only a few years away from the point where, in most of the United States, there will be no economic reason not to go solar. If you care about slowing climate change or just moving toward cleaner energy, that is a huge deal. And solar energy is already going gangbusters. In the past decade, the amount of solar power produced in the United States has leaped 139,000 percent. A number of factors are behind the boom: Cheaper panels and a raft of local and state incentives, plus a federal tax credit that shaves 30 percent off the cost of upgrading. Still, solar is a bit player, providing less than half of 1 percent of the energy produced in the United States. But its potential is massive—it could power the entire country 100 times over. So what’s the holdup? A few obstacles: pushback from old-energy diehards, competition with other efficient energy sources, and the challenges of power storage and transmission. But with solar in the Southwest already at “grid parity”—meaning it costs the same or less as electricity from conventional sources—Wall Street is starting to see solar as a sound bet. As a recent Citigroup investment report put it, “Our viewpoint is that solar is here to stay.” Some numbers that tell the story: Sources Solar growth: Solar Energy Industries Association New solar installations: SEIA Sunlight: Sandia National Lab, Energy Information Agency/National Renewable Energy Laboratory Electricity generating capacity: SEIA Carbon savings, electricity demand: SEIA, EIA/NREL Installed PV capacity: International Energy Agency Solar jobs: The Solar Foundation, Bureau of Labor Statistics Solar panels on a typical house: NREL Panel cost, VC funding: Greenpeace; Mercom Capital Group (2013 & 2014) Image credits: Shutterstock (Earth, USA); Maurizio Fusillo/Noun Project (solar panel); Okan Benn/Noun Project (car); Q. Li/Noun Project (chart); Sergey Krivoy/Noun Project (coal trolley); Marcio Duarte/Noun Project (worker); Alex Berkowitz/Noun Project (cash)

More – 

Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

Related Posts

The Key to Cheap Renewable Energy? Robots
Three Reasons Why Germany Is Kicking Our Arsch on Solar
Here Comes the Son: Barry Goldwater Jr. Fights for Solar Power in Arizona
China’s Feud With West on Solar Leads to Tax
7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

Share this:






This article is from – 

Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

Posted in alo, ALPHA, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, growing marijuana, horticulture, Monterey, ONA, oven, OXO, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

How 3,500 Voters in North Dakota Could Put the Brakes on America’s Biggest Fracking Boom

by AdellNewman Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

The run-up to tomorrow’s midterm elections has seen an unprecedented spending surge from environmental groups. Climate and energy issues—from fracking in Colorado to coal mining in Kentucky—have taken center stage. But a far less prominent political fight in North Dakota is poised to have an outsized impact on America’s biggest oil boom.

The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, on the shores of Lake Sakakawea in the northwest part of the state, is home to roughly half of the 14,000 members of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. The community sits atop roughly one-third of an immense treasure-trove: The Bakken Shale, the oil formation that is home to North Dakota’s ongoing fracking boom. Tomorrow, MHA Nation members will head to the polls to elect a new chairman—the tribal administration’s chief executive. Out of about 8,000 eligible voters, 3,500 are expected to turn up tomorrow, according to a spokesperson for the Tribal Election Board.

Both men vying for the position say they plan to crack down on the oil rush that has brought their nation a complex mix of wealth, environmental degradation, and corruption allegations. Normally, a chairmanship election on a Native American reservation would draw little interest outside the reservation’s borders. But with so much oil development at stake, Fort Berthold is a different story.

Here’s a sense of the scale of Fort Berthold’s petroleum power, from the Bismarck Tribuneâ&#128;&#139;:

The reservation has 25 rigs drilling, 1,300 oil wells and produces 333,000 barrels of oil per day. About $25 million in oil tax revenue flows to the tribal treasury each month and the tribes’ annual budget has swelled from a modest $20 million annually to $520 million.

That heap of cash is administered by a tribal council, which is headed by the tribes’ current chairman, Tex Hall. A former oil-field services company executive, Hall was elected in 2010, just as the oil rush was getting underway. Fewer than half of the tribes’ members own mineral rights they can lease to drilling companies, according to Sebastian Braun, head of the Indian Studies department at the University of North Dakota. Since many residents don’t benefit directly from the fracking boom, they depend on the tribal administration to spend the money wisely and to help the residents cope with rising housing and grocery costs and the other ancillary impacts of oil development.

Instead, Braun said, “people felt the money was spent in ways they didn’t understand”—for example, on a helicopter to ferry VIPs to the reservation and a cruise ship for Lake Sakakawea—while the main town has only one stoplight for the increasingly heavy stream of truck traffic. And a report this August commissioned by the tribal council made various allegations about Hall’s financial dealings with oil and gas companies. In September, Hall denied those allegations and, in a statement reported by the Bismarck Tribune, dismissed the report as a “smear campaign.” Hall did not respond to Climate Desk’s request for comment.

The video above shows oil production at work on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Via Lunker Federal 2-33-4H from Georgianne Nienaber on Vimeo.

Continue Reading »

Read More:  

How 3,500 Voters in North Dakota Could Put the Brakes on America’s Biggest Fracking Boom

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How 3,500 Voters in North Dakota Could Put the Brakes on America’s Biggest Fracking Boom

These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

by RRIAbraham Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform exploded in June 2010, killing 11 workers and sending roughly five million barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, much of the media coverage featured sludge-covered seabirds, empty shrimp baskets, and other environmental impacts. But for Doug Brown, the catastrophe was even more immediate. He was the rig’s chief engineer, standing in the control room when a deafening blast sent him flying and turned his workplace into a fiery, oil-soaked hell.

In The Great Invisible, a documentary about the blowout and its aftermath that premieres today in Los Angeles and New York, Brown breaks into tears as he recalls the “incoherent screamings of pain” of his coworkers: “I saw men completely lose control.”

This virtually untold side of the Deepwater Horizon story emerges from a melange of archival footage (including home videos shot onboard the rig) and original interviews with rig workers and family members of men who died in the disaster. They speak of pride at working on one of the world’s most advanced drilling rigs, terror at the explosion, and the post-traumatic stress and guilt that still haunt them.

Above all, they tell of their betrayal by Transocean, the rig’s owner, and BP, its operator—companies to which they gave their best years, and which they now blame for systematically walking back basic precautions in the months preceding the explosion. The film is equally critical of the federal government, which has resumed selling offshore drilling leases while offering no new rig-safety regulations.

The Great Invisible also paints a vivid portrait of life in the bayou fishing communities where filmmaker Margaret Brown (no relation to Doug) grew up—communities still reeling four years after the spill. I spoke with Brown about producing a film that is as much an exploration of America’s love-hate relationship with the oil industry as it is a critique of a few miscreant companies—and about how she encouraged her emotionally scarred central characters to speak out for the first time.

Climate Desk: You grew up in southern Alabama. How did your own background affect your filmmaking approach?

Margaret Brown: That’s pretty much why I made the film. My dad was sending me pictures of his house with the orange oil booms they put out during the spill. It was weird to see your home surrounded by the booms. It was really emotional. And then I started talking to people in the area, and everyone was super depressed. It’s not like a hurricane where people know how to respond. In a hurricane, there’s a drill if you grow up down there. With this, nobody knew what to do. There was a lot of uncertainty and depression. And that was what I responded to.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown

When we first went down there, there were so many cameras on the beach for like two or three months. And then it went away. I was curious about what would happen when all the other cameras left—when that image went off the news of the plume of oil leaking. The minute that was gone, all the reporters were gone. I stayed four years. I was curious what it would be like to make a film about something everyone knows about. How do you make that novel and fresh?

The film changed. It started with me wanting me to make something about where I grew up, and turned into something about the larger question of how Americans relate to petroleum. I wanted to see if I could make something personal, but also where people can watch it and understand a little more about what happens when we fill up our car. Hopefully people would have the same kind of thought process that I did, learning about how deeply entrenched the government is, how it makes so much money off offshore leases—which is probably a big answer to why things aren’t changing.

CD: Which of your initial assumptions were challenged or changed as you made the film?

MB: I think just the scope of what we talk about when we talk about oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. And after watching all the grandstanding in Congress, I really did think something might change in terms of safety regulations. Maybe that’s naïve. But this is the first major oil spill where something hasn’t changed. It made me a little more cynical.

But I think it’s a timely moment. People are realizing climate change is real in a way they didn’t 10 years ago. I think the film is part of the conversation, but it’s not the answer. I think people see it in a really simple way, like it’s either “Boycott BP!” or “Drill baby drill!” There’s no real understanding of the huge expanse in between, and that’s frustrating to me. We are all connected to what BP is giving us.

The spill happened, and then nothing happened. I hope the film can address why nothing happened, and I think a lot of that is Congress. But also that, the minute it got off the news, people stopped thinking about. It seemed like, “Okay, they capped it. It’s gone.” But actually, there are no new safety regulations. It’s not gone.

Doug Brown was chief engineer on the Deepwater Horizon when the rig exploded in 2010. Courtesy Margaret Brown

CD: How did you get the workers and their families to open up?

MB: That was the hardest part, actually, those interviews. Rig hand Stephen Stone and Doug Brown were absolutely the hardest people to get to agree to be in the film. I think that was mainly because of the PTSD they’d suffered from the accident, and they and their wives weren’t sure if being in the film would be better or worse for them. I think they’re still not sure. We still talk about it. But I think mainly the consensus has been that it’s been cathartic and positive to share their story. Those stories of how their lives have changed, and how they haven’t gotten paid, and what happens when you witness this—the guilt and the troubling feelings, the suicidal feelings. It’s some of the scariest stuff there is. They were super brave to be in the movie, because in that industry I think people sort of follow the leader, and those guys decided to speak out and be whistle blowers.

Doug had tried to kill himself, and it was really hard to get them to open up. I spent hours with his, Meccah, on the phone talking, and crying sometimes, because I think they thought at first that I was a spy from Transocean. They had such a level of mistrust and being messed around with by those companies that they didn’t believe that I was an independent filmmaker. So I went from being a spy to someone you would talk to. They felt that Doug had been so loyal to that company, and was so proud of his job. To go from that to feeling like—I mean, Doug struggles with a lot of guilt for something that he had little to no control over. And it’s interesting to me who feels guilt in this film—and who should feel guilty.

The workers are proud of what they’re doing. There’s a sense of bringing oil to the American people and providing energy. If you just look at it from the left, and how bad BP is, you’re going to miss a lot of what’s really going on.

Follow this link:  

These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

The Midwest’s Vast Farms Are Losing a Ton of Money This Year

by ErwinHanson Posted on October 22, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Think you have it tough at work? Consider the plight of the Midwest’s corn and soybean farmers. They churn out the basic raw materials of our food system: the stuff that gets turned into animal feed, sweetener, cooking fat, and even a substantial amount of our car fuel. What do they get for their trouble? According to a stunning analysis (PDF) by Iowa State ag economist Chad Hart, crop prices have fallen so low (a bumper crop has driven down corn prices to their lowest level since 2006), and input costs (think seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) have gotten so high, that they’re losing $225 per acre of corn and $100 per acre of soybeans. So if you’re an Iowa farmer with a 2,000-acre farm, and you planted it half and half in these two dominant crops, you stand to lose $325,000 on this year’s harvest.

Over on Big Picture Agriculture—the excellent blog that alerted me to Hart’s assessment—Kay McDonald wonders: “Is organic corn the way to go next year?” She points out organic corn receives a large premium in the market, and key input costs—seeds, fertilizers, and insecticides—are much lower, making the economics better.

Another possibility is one I’ve been banging on about for years: why not take some of the Midwest’s vast stock of farmland—say, 10 percent?—and devote it to vegetable and fruit production? And take another slice of it and bring it back to perennial grass for pasture-based beef and pork production? Both vegetables and pastured meat deliver much more income pre acre than commodity corn and soybeans, once the systems are up and running and the infrastructure in place. And considering how much of our produce comes from drought-stricken California, that would likely be a wise move from a food security standpoint.

Alas, none of this is likely to happen, at least not anytime soon. That’s because crop subsidies, enshrined by the farm bill signed in February, will likely wipe out much of the huge gap between farmers’ costs and what the market gives them. According to Bloomberg, taxpayers are set to pay “billions of dollars more to subsidize farmers than anticipated just months ago,” before crop prices plunged.

I don’t begrudge federal support for farming. As I argued in a post last year, large-scale commodity farming is a vicious business—farmers are caught in a vice between a small handful of buyers (Archers Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge) that are always looking to drive crop prices down, and a small handful of input suppliers (Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, etc) always looking to push the price of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides up. It’s no wonder, as Iowa State’s Hart has shown, that the “long run profitability” of such farming is “zero.”

But as it’s structured now, the subsidy system keeps farmers chugging along on the corn-soy treadmill. Meanwhile, transitioning to organic ag and diversifying crops to include vegetables and pastured meat would also require much more hands-on labor and a new set of skills for Midwestern farmers, who have been operating in a corn-soy-chemical system for decades. It would also require the rebuilding of infrastructure—small-scale slaughterhouses, canneries, cold storage, etc.—that were dismantled as corn and soy came to dominance. Supporting such a transition, and not propping up an unhealthy food system suffused with cheap corn and soy, seems like a good use of the billions of federal dollars that are about to be spent.

Link to original: 

The Midwest’s Vast Farms Are Losing a Ton of Money This Year

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dr. Bronners, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Midwest’s Vast Farms Are Losing a Ton of Money This Year

Pentagon: We Could Soon Be Fighting Climate Wars

by StantonMcClean Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

In one of its strongest statements yet on the need to prepare for climate change, the Defense Department today released a report that says global warming “poses immediate risks to US national security” and will exacerbate national security-related threats ranging “from infectious disease to terrorism.”

The report, embedded below, builds on climate readiness planning at the Pentagon that stretches back to the George W. Bush administration. But today’s report is the first to frame climate change as a serious near-term challenge for strategic military operations; previous reports have tended to focus on long-term threats to bases and other infrastructure.

The report “is quite an evolution of the DoD’s thinking on understanding and addressing climate threats,” said Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security. “The Department is not looking out into the future, it’s looking at what’s happening now.”

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1312288-dod-report-on-climate-change-readiness-october.js”,
width: 630,
height: 700,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1312288-dod-report-on-climate-change-readiness-october”
);

DoD Report on Climate Change Readiness–October 2014 (PDF)

DoD Report on Climate Change Readiness–October 2014 (Text)

Continue Reading »

Continue reading here – 

Pentagon: We Could Soon Be Fighting Climate Wars

Posted in Anchor, Dolphin, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pentagon: We Could Soon Be Fighting Climate Wars

While You Procrastinate on Facebook, More Than Half the World Still Doesn’t Have Internet Access

by WaylonODowd Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

If you’re an American office worker who sleeps next to a smartphone and deals with an average of 120 work emails a day, life without the internet may seem like a quaint memory. But you’re actually in the minority: According to a new report, more than 60 percent of the world’s population hasn’t accessed the internet in the past 12 months. And those without access are disproportionately rural, low income, elderly, illiterate, and female.

Since 2004, 1.8 billion people have joined the online community, bringing total internet users to 2.7 billion. Even as new users continue to join the online ranks, however, the rate at which they join is slowing. The McKinsey & Company report projects that less than 1 million additional users will be added by 2017, leaving up to 4.2 billion people—more than half the forecasted world population—on the other side of the digital divide.

The share of the global population with access (defined as having used the internet in the preceding 12 months) grew sharply from 2004 to 2009, but less so from 2009 through 2011, and even less growth is projected from 2013 to 2017:

The specific trends that drove people online over the past decade (such as urbanization, cheaper smartphones, and the internet’s increased utility) likely won’t be enough to push the remaining population online, thanks to barriers like low incomes and lack of infrastructure.

“Those who do not or simply cannot go online increasingly suffer from constrained prospects for economic attainment, class mobility, education, and other areas related to quality of life,” the report notes. “The voices, ideas, and contributions of the offline population can’t be heard and often can’t be made until they’re connected.”

Those left offline miss out on opportunities to connect socially, access information on everything from health to the weather, and take advantage of online government services. The internet allows communities to participate in political movements like the Arab Spring and mobilize aid following natural disasters. Online access also increases government transparency, helps shoppers save time and money, lowers the barriers of entry for businesses, and of course, provides entertainment.

Beyond individuals, whole countries are left behind: An earlier McKinsey report found that from 2006 to 2011, the internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth in nations with stable populations and slowing economic growth. And global connectivity can lead to improvements in technology, education, democracy, and tourism.

The disadvantages of being left behind in a digital world fall disproportionately on certain communities: A full 74 percent of today’s offline population resides in just 20 countries. Even within these nations, those who lack internet access often fit similar profiles.

The report outlines four major barriers to internet access:

Incentives: Many people lack awareness of online capabilities: In 2011, 21 percent of those surveyed in Ethiopia’s capital did not know what the internet was. Even those who know of its existence might not find relevant local information or even material in their own language. The World Bank reports that 80 percent of all internet content is written in one of just 10 languages. There is also decreased incentive to use the internet in countries with limited online freedom or information security, like Iran or Nigeria.

Low incomes and affordability: Internet access is expensive in rural areas. In Ethiopia, a country with an annual per capita income of just $470, a smartphone retails for $377.

User capability: Many people throughout the world have never been educated on the internet and how to use it. Some are held back by the even more basic barrier of illiteracy.

Infrastructure: In parts of the world, there is simply no mobile internet coverage or network access. In fact, 24 percent of sub-Saharan Africans and 20 percent of Southeast Asians lack even basic electricity. The McKinsey report cites an initiative to extend broadband access to a shared community space in every village and city in Colombia over the next several years, but notes this type of project “requires substantial investment in infrastructure and is cost-prohibitive to build out in many developing markets.”

Although the United States scored high on incentives and user capability, a chunk of the population remains offline due to affordability and infrastructure. Only 77 percent of US adults with household incomes below $30,000 go online, and World Economic Forum ranked the US 35th in the world in regard to internet bandwidth. Of the 50 million offline Americans, 80 percent are low income, 54 percent are seniors, and a full 66 percent are female.

The authors report that over the past decade, growth in online population has been driven by mobile coverage expansion, urbanization, cheaper phones and data plans, a growing middle class, and the internet’s increasing utility. But they caution that the remaining offline population is unlikely to be swayed by these advantages, unless the four barriers above are addressed. “Without a significant change in technology, in income growth or in the economics of access, or in policies to spur internet adoption, the rate of growth of internet penetration will continue to slow.”

This article is from:  

While You Procrastinate on Facebook, More Than Half the World Still Doesn’t Have Internet Access

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on While You Procrastinate on Facebook, More Than Half the World Still Doesn’t Have Internet Access

Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

by Rosa54Nxuhep Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Few figures in the climate change debate are as polarizing as former Vice President Al Gore. His fans and his enemies are equally rabid, and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth is still probably the most-referenced document on climate change in history. In the last few years, Gore’s global warming work has mostly been channeled into a nonprofit he oversees called the Climate Reality Project, which organizes rallies and educational events.

This week, that group held its annual “24 Hours of Reality” marathon of live-streamed videos and appearances by Gore and other celebrities to raise funds for climate action. The event took place in New York City, which is gearing up for a series of meetings and protests in advance of the biggest climate summit of the last five years, to take place Tuesday at the United Nations. Gore took a break from the broadcast to chat with Climate Desk’s Inquiring Minds podcast, offering his views on everything from President Obama’s climate polices and the role of the tea party in US politics to his hopes for a strong international climate treaty.

Gore said that Obama hasn’t yet gone far enough in his efforts against climate change, but that he nonetheless admires “what the president has done.”

“In his first term I expressed some considerable concern about what I thought he was failing to do,” Gore said, adding that after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, “there was not the kind of energy and activity that I felt was appropriate.” But Gore credited Obama for shifting course dramatically in his second term, and for going around the “logjam” in Congress by instructing the EPA to issue “historic regulations” on carbon emissions from power plants.

Gore did criticize some of Obama’s policies, including the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which Gore described as the “prevailing code for ‘let’s keep burning fossil fuels.'”

“But it’s not fair to just take those things out of context without looking at the totality of his policies,” he added. “And the totality of what he’s doing now in his second term is really historic.”

Gore expressed skepticism about the fracking boom. He said he opposed the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel—something the Obama administration has supported—”until and unless they demonstrate the ability to stop the methane leaks at every stage of the process, particularly during fracking.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that some scientists argue can negate the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.) And he added that the increasing cost-effectiveness of solar and wind power was already posing a “threat to the viability of natural gas as a source of energy in the marketplace.”

You can hear Gore’s comments in full on this week’s episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, below, and see the highlights of his comments in our exclusive video above.

See original article – 

Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis