Thursday, March 29th, 2012
AMINA KHAN, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Yet another of our ancestor species seems to have been discovered, and the human story presents another chapter in our wonderful saga through the millennia.
Yet huge numbers of Americans don't believe a word of it. I had lunch with a friend the other day who had just returned from Orlando, Florida. He described his visit to a new Creationist theme park where he saw a display of happy little modern humans playing with baby dinosaurs. It is so pathetically ignorant should one laugh or weep?
Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly discovered fossil suggests.
Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have unearthed a rare, 3.4-million-year-old partial foot that resembles those belonging to Ardipithecus ramidus, a species thought to have roamed East Africa a million years before Lucy and other members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis.
The findings, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature, provide the first good evidence that another bipedal human relative was still climbing trees at the same time that Lucy and her kind had their feet planted on the ground.
Foot bones are seldom found intact because they’re usually too delicate to survive in harsh environments, said Bruce Latimer, a paleoanthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who worked on the study. This makes the new fossil, made up of eight bones from the front part of a right foot, a valuable find - particularly since it has several toes intact, allowing scientists to get a better sense of how the foot operated as a whole.
Lucy’s foot shares many fundamental qualities with those of modern humans. Our big toes are large and parallel with the other four, […]
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Thursday, March 29th, 2012
MOLLY JAHN, Contributor - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephan: The mono-culture chemical and petroleum intensive industrial agriculture and animal husbandry that has arisen over the last century cannot continue. It is destroying the Earth's normal cycles and systems. The propaganda from agri-industry claims this is the only way to feed the world. That is not the truth, and this is increasingly recognized, as is the urgency to change.
MADISON – An independent commission of scientific leaders from 13 countries today released a detailed set of recommendations to policymakers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change.
In their report, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change proposes specific policy responses to the global challenge of feeding a world confronted by climate change, population growth, poverty, food price spikes and degraded ecosystems. The report highlights specific opportunities under the mandates of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Group of 20 (G20) nations.
‘Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world and these problems are poised to accelerate,
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Thursday, March 29th, 2012
REBECCA LEBER, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is how transparent our slavery to the petroleum is. It's a great system if you are on the ownership side. It's just like the drug business. You have a large global population addicted to your drug. They'll put up with anything as long as you can keep them hooked.
Exxon Mobil, the most profitable of the big five oil companies, made $41.1 billion in profits last year. Although Exxon made 35 percent more profits since 2010, its estimated effective tax rate actually dropped. Citizens for Tax Justice reported Exxon paid only 17.6 percent taxes in 2010, lower than the average American, and a Reuters analysis using the same criteria estimates that Exxon will pay only 13 percent in effective taxes for 2011. Exxon paid zero taxes to the federal government in 2009.
Reuters compares the 45 percent tax rate Exxon claims it pays to the effective rate estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice - a rate that’s even lower than Mitt Romney’s tax rate. Chevron, which made $26.9 billion profit in 2011, paid 19 percent:
Citizens for Tax Justice considers U.S. profits and U.S. taxes paid only. By that measure, Exxon Mobil paid 13 percent of its U.S. income in taxes after deductions and benefits in 2011, according to a Reuters calculation of securities filings.
It is a far cry from the 35 percent top corporate tax rate.
Still, the three-year average for telecom companies is 8 percent; for information technology […]
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Thursday, March 29th, 2012
KATE SHEPPARD, - Mother Jones
Stephan: In the war against women that the Right is waging, part of it is driven by a desire to take women out of the the workforce, particularly at the professional level. I think a certain kind of conservative man for both ideological and theological reasons finds the power of women, and their wealth very threatening.
Not only is birth control helping women not get preggers, it’s also making women richer. Widespread availability of oral contraception-a.k.a. ‘The Pill’-has played a major role in closing the gender wage gap since the 1980s, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
During the 1980s, the gap in median annual wages between women and men closed rapidly; women working full-time earned 60 percent of what their male counterparts earned in 1979, but earned 69 percent of men’s wages by 1989. There were a number of good reasons that gap narrowed so quickly-the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s, the increase in the number of women getting college degrees, and the protections afforded women by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a series of legal decisions. But the researchers found that use of ‘The Pill’ accounted for 10 percent of the narrowing of the wage gap in the 1980s:
Its diffusion to younger, unmarried women improved their ability to time births, altered their expectations about future childbearing, and reduced the cost of altering career investments to reflect their changed expectations. The timing of its diffusion during the 1960s and 1970s also fits […]
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Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
GILES PARKINSON, - REneweconomy
Stephan: As time has gone on it has become ever more clear to me that non-petroleum energy sources are not only cleaner, they are truly going to be much cheaper. On that basis if national wellness were our country's first priority then we would be spending billions to make the transition. But the path out of old energy has been troubled and problematic. Why? The answer of course is that those corporations whose profits are based on old energy are doing everything they can to stop the decentralization which is implicit in the alternatives. Mostly the attack point is the regulations that allow people, towns or communities to sell to the grid. He is what is going on in Europe and Australia, where solar is a much bigger factor than it is in the U.S. Click through to look at the very useful charts; they are worth some close attention.
Here is a pair of graphs that demonstrate most vividly the merit order effect and the impact that solar is having on electricity prices in Germany; and why utilities there and elsewhere are desperate to try to reign in the growth of solar PV in Europe. It may also explain why Australian generators are fighting so hard against the extension of feed-in tariffs in this country.
The first graph illustrates what a typical day on the electricity market in Germany looked like in March four years ago; the second illustrates what is happening now, with 25GW of solar PV installed across the country. Essentially, it means that solar PV is not just licking the cream off the profits of the fossil fuel generators – as happens in Australia with a more modest rollout of PV – it is in fact eating their entire cake.
Both graphs were published last week on the website Renewables International, and were sourced from EPEX, the European power price exchange. The first graph, from 2008, shows peaking power prices rising to around €60/MWh and staying there for most of the day, with some visible peaks around noon and the early evening – the size of which would […]
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