LOS ANGELES — In his first speech on global warming since winning the election, President-elect Barack Obama promised Tuesday to set stringent limits on greenhouse gases, saying the need is too urgent for delay. Many observers had expected Obama to avoid tackling such a complex, contentious issue early in his administration. But in videotaped comments to the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, he called for immediate action. ‘Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,’ Obama said. ‘Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high, the consequences too serious.’ He repeated his campaign promise to create a system that limits carbon dioxide emissions and forces companies to pay for the right to emit the gas. Using the money collected from that system, Obama plans to invest $15 billion each year in alternative energy. That investment – in solar, wind and nuclear power, as well as advanced coal technology – will create jobs at a time of economic turmoil, he said. ‘It will … help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by […]
Editor’s note: This is Part II of a two-part series. Part 1 of our discussion of wind power and wildlife, reported the number of bird deaths from well-sited, modern-design turbine designs was found to be relatively low, especially compared with impact deaths from other power sources, like buildings, power lines, vehicles and domestic cats. But does that mean we can locate high-wind coastal land – or offshore areas – and erect wind turbines and related energy-distribution facilities without considering their impact on land use and wildlife? No, it doesn’t. What does it mean then? What we don’t know We don’t know as much as we should about wind power with our coastal ecology. National Academy of Sciences’ 2007 report on wind-power’s environmental effects summarized current knowledge about the effects on wildlife and suggested how to resolve unknowns. Unfortunately, studies already done focused on the mid-Atlantic region, which has different ecologies, geography and wildlife from ours. The Wildlife Society 2007 report on wind, wildlife and habitat focused on ways to plan sites and evaluate post-construction effects of wind farms. They found lots of problems including the following: Studies to plan sites involved only one season’s data about […]
WASHINGTON — Primary care doctors in the United States feel overworked and nearly half plan to either cut back on how many patients they see or quit medicine entirely, according to a survey released on Tuesday. And 60 percent of 12,000 general practice physicians found they would not recommend medicine as a career. ‘The whole thing has spun out of control. I plan to retire early even though I still love seeing patients. The process has just become too burdensome,’ the Physicians’ Foundation, which conducted the survey, quoted one of the doctors as saying. The survey adds to building evidence that not enough internal medicine or family practice doctors are trained or practicing in the United States, although there are plenty of specialist physicians. Health care reform is near the top of the list of priorities for both Congress and president-elect Barack Obama, and doctor’s groups are lobbying for action to reduce their workload and hold the line on payments for treating Medicare, Medicaid and other patients with federal or state health insurance. The Physicians’ Foundation, founded in 2003 as part of a settlement in an anti-racketeering lawsuit among physicians, medical societies, and insurer Aetna, […]
Mother-of-two becomes first transplant patient to receive an organ grown to order in a laboratory A 30-year-old Spanish woman has made medical history by becoming the first patient to receive a whole organ transplant grown using her own cells. Experts said the development opened a new era in surgery in which the repair of worn-out body parts would be carried out with personally customised replacements. Claudia Castillo, who lives in Barcelona, underwent the operation to replace her windpipe after tuberculosis had left her with a collapsed lung and unable to breathe. The bioengineered organ was transplanted into her chest last June at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona. Four months later she was able to climb two flights of stairs, go dancing and look after her children – activities that had been impossible before the surgery. Ms Castillo has also crossed a second medical frontier by becoming the first person to receive a whole organ transplant without the need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs. Doctors overcame the problem of rejection by taking her own stem cells to grow the replacement organ, using a donor trachea (lower windpipe) to provide the mechanical framework. Blood tests have shown […]
DURHAM, N.C. — During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proposed an economic plan that would create 5 million jobs in environmental industries. These so-called ‘green collar’ jobs do, in fact, present the next frontier for U.S. manufacturing, says a new report from Duke University. Highlighting the direct linkages between low-carbon technologies and U.S. jobs, Duke researchers say U.S. manufacturing is poised to grow in a low-carbon economy. Their report, ‘Manufacturing Climate Solutions,’ provides a detailed look at the manufacturing jobs that already exist and would be created when the U.S. takes action to limit global-warming pollution. A copy of the study is available at http://www.cggc.duke.edu/environment/climatesolutions/. ‘Until now, there was no tangible evidence of what the jobs are, how they are created and what it means for U.S. workers. We are providing that here,’ said Gary Gereffi, a Duke professor of sociology and lead author of the report. ‘We don’t guess where the jobs are; we name them. Our report uses value chains to show that clean technology jobs are also real economy jobs.’ Led by Gereffi, researchers at Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC) assess five carbon-reducing technologies with potential for future green job creation: […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
