BRAD JOHNSON, - Thiink Progress
Stephan: This is one of those issues whose explanation will become clearer as we experience more and more such events. We still have weeks to go and, then, there is the hurricane season. Then there is next year, and the year after. Climate change is not just about warming.
Throughout human history, the climate system has been a source of life and death, the sun and rain capable of feeding our crops and bringing us comfort, or unleashing terrible devastation in wind, fire, drought, storm, and flood. Each tragedy that occurs – such as the terrible outbreak of tornadoes and flooding storms this week in the South – reminds us of that awesome power, which is beyond our control and at the limits of our comprehension. We have also learned that humanity is meddling with that power, primarily through the burning of coal and oil that increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and oceans. Scientists have been warning our leaders for decades that this interference with the climate system is dangerous, and have worked tirelessly to explain how these threats are now coming to pass.
However, the Republican Party is now dominated by ideologues who deny the threat of polluting our climate, even when faced with direct evidence of what the climate system can do to the people they are sworn to protect.
Conservatives attack any discussion of climate policy within the context of the killer tornadoes as ‘grotesque,
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Stephan: If this is how much progress is being made with the funding now allocated, imagine where we would be if we had put the trilllion and a half we squandered on endless war into alternative energy development. The Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld neocon policies set in motion an entire sequence of disasters with which we are still living.
Thanks to Damiem Broderick, PhD.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 29, 2011 – With the creation of a 3-D nanocone-based solar cell platform, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jun Xu has boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by nearly 80 percent.
The technology substantially overcomes the problem of poor transport of charges generated by solar photons. These charges - negative electrons and positive holes - typically become trapped by defects in bulk materials and their interfaces and degrade performance.
‘To solve the entrapment problems that reduce solar cell efficiency, we created a nanocone-based solar cell, invented methods to synthesize these cells and demonstrated improved charge collection efficiency,
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ROBERT WEISSMAN, - Public Citizen/Truthout
Stephan: THe only thing that is going to stop this trend is citizen action.
It’s a modest notion.
Companies that bid for government contracts should disclose their campaign spending, in order to diminish the likelihood that contracts are a payoff for political expenditures.
The Obama administration has indicated that it plans to impose such a rule, through an executive order. Ideally, the rule would prohibit contractors and lobbyists from campaign spending, but a disclosure standard is a very positive if modest step.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the trade association for big business, however, takes a somewhat different view.
‘We will fight it through all available means,
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BENJAMIN BIDDER, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: This is what happens when nuclear power goes bad. Imagine this in a neighborhood near you. How would you feel? Well, let me add this. There are aging pools of nuclear waste near every one of the 104 operating reactors in the U.S. Year by year they just get older. And when those reactors have closed down, we will pass on from generation to generation to generation the cost of keeping the detritus safe. The true cost of nuclear is absurd.
Work on the new sarcophagus meant to contain Chernobyl’s reactor 4 is a decade behind schedule. But significant problems will remain even once it is complete. For one, it is only meant to last for 100 years. For another, no one knows what to do with the vast quantities of radioactive waste left behind.
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Old Ganya is one of the last of her kind: the people of Chernobyl. The 78-year-old wraps a white scarf around her head and tames her unruly eyebrows with a comb. Then she steps out of her wooden hut and walks across the courtyard with small steps. The syrupy tree sap trickling from the large maple tree behind her house gives her ‘the strength of the bear and the agility of the rabbit,’ she says. ‘I’m not afraid of the radiation.’
The Ukrainian farmer returned to the restricted zone only a year after the massive explosion at Chernobyl. She refused to simply forget her native village of Kupowate. ‘I prayed for Jesus to walk in front of me, so that the guards wouldn’t catch me,’ says Ganya. More than 1,000 others like Ganya also returned home illegally.
Now the ‘Zone of Alienation,’ as the restricted area around Chernobyl […]
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Stephan: This is an excellent analysis of the U.S. transportation system, a view from outside of the U.S., and it is very sad. When I was growing up American railroads were the envy of the world. For generations before that they had played a central role in knitting the states into a nation. When President Eisenhower began the interstate system it was reported in every country. The American telephone system was beyond compare. But we stopped caring. Don't you think it is important to ask how we got from that to where were are today? Was this a good decision? What would American transportation look like if the system was designed to produce a healthful and convenient environment, and the task was how to make a profit from that? Do you have any doubt that many people would figure out how to do it, and get very rich in the process. But society has to say what it wants, not take what it can get.
On Friday afternoons, residents of Washington, DC, often find a clear route out of the city as elusive as a deal to cut the deficit. Ribbons of red rear-lights stretch off into the distance along the highways that radiate from the city’s centre. Occasionally, adventurous southbound travellers experiment with Amtrak, America’s national rail company. The distance from Washington to Raleigh, North Carolina (a metropolitan area about the size of Brussels) is roughly the same as from London’s St Pancras Station to the Gare du Nord in Paris. But this is no Eurostar journey.
Trains creep out of Washington’s Union Station and pause at intervals, inexplicably, as they travel through the northern Virginia suburbs. In the summer, high temperatures threaten to kink the steel tracks, forcing trains to slow down even more. Riders may find themselves inching along behind a lumbering freight train for miles at a time, until the route reaches a side track on which the Amtrak train can pass. The trip takes six hours, well over twice as long as the London-Paris journey, if there are no delays. And there often are.
America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart. American cities have suffered a rash […]
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