The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. ‘If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,’ Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones — ultimately resulting in a thriving industry. The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet. UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was ‘drawing down to the very capital’ on which it relies. However, ‘our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others […]
A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent. A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts. White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families’ assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000. A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984. ‘We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it’s escalated to $95,000,’ said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. ‘That’s primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans’ wealth essentially flatlined.’ The survey does not include housing equity, because […]
Republicans for the second time blocked legislation that would increase oil companies’ liability for oil spill damages, setting off criticism from Democrats seeking to make BP pay for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Tuesday blocked a bill Democrats have put forward to raise the liability cap from $75 million to $10 billion. He said on the Senate floor he agrees the cap should be raised, but the Senate should ‘wait and see where the cap should be.’ ‘If you have it too high you are going to be singling out BP and the other four largest majors and the nationalized companies, such as China and Venezuela, and shutting out the independent producers,’ he said. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) blocked the legislation last week. President Obama released a statement saying he is disappointed by the Republicans’ objections. ‘This maneuver threatens to leave taxpayers, rather than the oil companies, on the hook for future disasters like the BP oil spill,’ he said. ‘I urge the Senate Republicans to stop playing special interest politics and join in a bipartisan effort to protect taxpayers and demand accountability from the oil […]
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence. In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why. Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly […]
Exposure to pesticides used on common kid-friendly foods – including frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries and celery – appears to boost the chances that children will be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, new research shows. Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found. Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison. ‘I think it’s fairly significant. A doubling is a strong effect, said Maryse F. Bouchard, a researcher at the University of Montreal in Quebec and lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard: ‘I would say buy organic as much as possible, she said. ‘I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible. Diet is a major source of pesticide exposure in children, according to the National Academy of Sciences, and much […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
