NewsTrust - Sci/Tech - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Fighting climate change with nuclear energy

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - Nuclear power is currently the only carbon-free energy source that can provide base load electricity, Stepp writes, a characteristic crucial to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change. Next-generation nuclear energy offers even more productive strategies for reducing carbon emissions. ...

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What lies behind the power price increases in Australia?

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By John Quiggin - Jun. 18 (Comment) - To explain the latest 20% rise of electricity cost in Queensland, look no further than the free market reforms kickstarted in the 1990s.

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The Rationale for Wind Power Won't Fly

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Jay Lehr - Jun. 18 (Opinion) - Physical limitations will keep this energy source a niche provider of U.S. electricity needs.

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Wheels Blog: University of Michigan Students Ready Solar Car for Australian Race

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By RONALD AHRENS - Jun. 18 (Opinion) - Wheels Blog: University of Michigan Students Ready Solar Car for Australian Race

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The E.P.A. Backs Off on Factory Farms

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By THE EDITORIAL BOARD - Jun. 15 (Editorial) - The Environmental Protection Agency is obliged under the Clean Water Act to monitor America’s waterways and shield them from the toxic runoff from factory farms. But the growth of that industry, and its courtroom tenacity, has far outstripped the E.P.A.’

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China Sets New Rules Aimed at Curbing Air Pollution

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Keith Bradsher - Jun. 15 (Comment) - China Sets New Rules Aimed at Curbing Air Pollution

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As Obama moves forward on climate, he faces a tough political task

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Juliet Eilperin - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - A pair of fundraisers just 90 minutes apart in the San Francisco Bay Area last week laid bare the competing forces of politics and policy that President Obama is grappling with as he prepares to unveil a slate of major initiatives on global warming in late June or in July. ...

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Egypt frets, fumes over Ethiopia’s Nile plan

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Griff Witte - Jun. 13 - GIZA, EGYPT — Since long before the Pyramids towered above the rich soil of this riverside town, Egyptians have given thanks to the muddy waters of the Nile. “Plants, animals, humans,” said Ibrahim Abdel Aziz, a 45-year-old farmer, “we all come from this river.” ...

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Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Thomas Drake - Jun. 12 (Comment) - So we refused to be part of the NSA's dark blanket. That is why whistleblowers pay the price for being the backstop of democracy What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. Like me, he became discomforted by what he was exposed to and what he saw: the industrial-scale systematic surveillance that is scooping up vast amounts of information not only around the world but in the United States, in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution. The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind , in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA's lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said: "The White House has approved the program; it's all legal. NSA is the executive agent." It was made clear to me that the original ...

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From Trafalgar to Taksim, the politics of the square puts the wind up power | Simon Jenkins

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Simon Jenkins - Jun. 12 (Comment) - Forget Field Marshal Twitter. What scares rulers like Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are the street's wild squadrons Why does power hate a city square? A square fields no army, commands no votes, has nowhere to go. It is just a space. Yet it is space that invites occupation, an occupation hostile to power. Hence Turkey's president felt obliged yesterday to "recapture" Taksim Square in Istanbul. It had become an alternative seat of legitimacy, a place of defiance, an ugly gesture at his majesty. It took tanks, guns, gas and bulldozers, but cleared it had to be. Squares are civic holy places. Their geometry echoes to the ghosts of past uprisings, and holds promise of more to come. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had only to gaze on the turmoil of Cairo's Tahrir and recall Beijing's Tiananmen , Tehran's Azadi , Kiev's Independence and Athens's Syntagma . The very names must have called chaos to the colours and struck fear in the heart of power. A square in a capital city is a congress of the wild, a ...

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Out of India's Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Sarika Bansal - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - Opinionator | Fixes: Out of India's Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity

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Climate change threatens California's stock of native fish

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:50:57 -0700

Public Radio International - By Living on Earth - Jun. 12 - As summer begins along many U.S. rivers, you'll find anglers patiently contemplating their rods in the flowing water. But researchers say when it comes to California, in the future they may be out of luck if they are looking to hook an indigenous fish. A new study from the University of California at Davis finds that many of California’s unique fish species could go extinct if global warming continues at current rates. Peter Moyle, one of the lead authors on the study, says freshwater fish are especially vulnerable because they have nowhere to escape fluctuations in climate. "When you’re in a stream, you can only go upstream so far before you run into a waterfall or something, so if the conditions in that stream change, you’re pretty much stuck," he said. Moyle says throughout California and the west, streams are predicted to warm by four to six degrees in the summer, with stream volumes becoming more variable. That adds up to very difficult conditions for fish over the next 50 to 100 years. Moyle, who has done periodic surveys of California's fish dating back to the 1970s, used his experience to assess native fish on 20 different measures of their long-term vulnerability to climate change. "When we scored 121 native fishes and 43 non-native fishes, 82 percent of the native fishes are going to suffer heavily from climate change and many of them to the point where they’ll go extinct," he said. For many of these species, the decline has already started for other reasons — development, pollution, etc. — and climate change will just accelerate the decline. The fish that are most vulnerable, Moyle said, require cold water to survive and thrive, many of which are household names: Chinook salmon, Coho salmon and Steelhead trout, as well as species like Delta Smelt and Eulachon. "Many of these rivers are simply going to get too warm for them," Moyle said. Ironically, climate change won't mean the end of fish in California streams — it'll actually be a boon to non-native species introduced to California's rivers over time. "We’ve been essentially changing things in California ever since the Gold Rush and generally creating warmer water habitats anyway," he said. "So you’re bring in your catfish, your bass, your carp — species that thrive in warm water environments." Ironically, as they thrive more and more, they will put even more strain on native species, hastening their demise. And while this is undoubtedly bad for the fish, it's also economically harmful. In the case of certain species of salmon and trout, they're popular on dinner tables — and raised by farmers. If the fish go away, the streams will suddenly become less nutrient-rich as fish are no longer living and dying in the streams' headwaters. " I did a study once relating what salmon nutrients do to a steam surrounded by vineyards," Moyle said. "And we found that not only did local wildlife benefit from salmon, we even got photographs of deer coming to munch on salmon carcasses, what we found was that the vineyards alongside the stream actually incorporated marine nutrients into the leaves of the grapes." But all is not lost. Moyle said the biggest thing to be done is to upgrade the dams in the state, to allow them to release the cold water that is stored in the lower levels of reservoirs behind the dams. "When they do that, you’re releasing the cold water that native fishes like salmon really like. So you have to conserve that cold water and use it specifically for fish as long as you can during the summer months," he said.

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New York City Faces Increasing Risk From Climate Change, New Data Show

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Jenny Anderson - Jun. 11 (Comment) - New York City Faces Increasing Risk From Climate Change, New Data Show

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What to Make of a Warming Plateau

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Justin Gillis - Jun. 11 (Comment) - By Degrees: What to Make of a Climate-Change Plateau

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Silver linings in the IEA report on 2012 fossil fuel carbon emissions

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dana Nuccitelli - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - Carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels, but the 2012 rise was relatively small, and there are positive signs As Fiona Harvey reported for The Guardian, the International Energy Agency (IEA) 2012 World Energy Outlook Report found that annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose 1.4 percent in 2012 to 31.6 billion tonnes (gigatonnes [Gt]).

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Climate change – what next after the 2C boundary?

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - The modification of the 2C climate target will put an end to the vision of a "science-based" climate policy This Friday, another frustrating round of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ends in Bonn/Germany. It is highly doubtful that the international community will be able to agree on a treaty that would commit all industrialised countries and emerging economies to binding emissions reduction targets by the end of 2015.

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Australians are waking up to why coal matters

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Oliver Milman - Jun. 10 () - Bill McKibben says there is increasing momentum behind the anti-fossil fuel movement, whatever the outcome of the election.

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Eight ways to solve world hunger

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Alex Renton - Jun. 09 (Opinion) - Millions of people are starving, despite the world producing more than enough to feed everyone. What can we do about it? PREVENT LAND GRABBING An ugly side of current scares over future food supply is wealthy, land-poor states, like those in the Gulf and South Korea, acquiring tracts of undeveloped countries to use as allotments. It is a campaigning cause of the multi-charity IF campaign against hunger. Ethiopia, Sudan, Madagascar and Cambodia have been targeted and a total area the size of Spain may already have been acquired. Problem: Hard to police. Difficult to distinguish between genuine investment in Africa and the expropriation of land from the poor who need it to grow their food. Chances: 3/10 BLOCK THE SPECULATORS Huge sums of investment fund money have flooded into the commodities markets since the financial crisis, looking for returns no longer available in equities. Automated trading systems that exploit tiny flaws in the market and encourage volatility make it ...

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Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Jun. 09 (Opinion) -

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How Not to Be Alone

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - A COUPLE of weeks ago, I saw a stranger crying in public. I was in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, waiting to meet a friend for breakfast. I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early and was sitting on the bench outside...

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Climate change is happening but we can meet the challenge

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Sarah van Gelder - Jun. 08 (Comment) - As carbon emissions rise inexorably, it's easy to feel powerless as catastrophe looms. But activism is a chance to take control "The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just hit 400ppm," I told Alex, my 23-year-old son, as we were catching up on news. "So that's it, huh?" he asked.

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In global climate change fight, what can we learn from Kyoto?

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - Nations across the world continue to grapple with how to address climate change, and there have been some tough lessons learned since the Kyoto Protocol, first adopted in 1997.

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Fracturing in California

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - Democrats revolt against a ban on oil and gas 'fracking.'

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Tropical Storm Andrea about to make landfall in Florida

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

USA Today - By Doyle Rice - Jun. 06 () -

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Climate change: let's bury the CO2 problem

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Myles Allen - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - We can't stop fossil fuels being burned: but we can easily act now to capture and store carbon with CCS technology How often have you read that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve the problem of climate change – shortly followed by frustration and disappointment? People might expect me, as a climate scientist, to be disappointed by the failure of the attempt by the MP Tim Yeo to set an ambitious decarbonisation target in Tuesday's debate on the energy bill. But I'm not. Not because I don't think it is possible, or even desirable: get climate policy right, and I believe we will have largely decarbonised the UK power sector by 2030. And the UK, having led the world into this era of venting fossil carbon into the atmosphere, clearly has a duty to lead the world out of it. But ambitious targets backed by micromanagement of energy supply and demand are leading nowhere. What other country is going to attend a seminar on the UK energy bill and think, "Great idea, let's do that"? ...

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