Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
JAMES TRAUB, Fellow of the Center on International Cooperation - Foreign Policy
Stephan: One of the worst of the toxic 'gifts' the Bush-Cheney neocons gave to America was the official policy of enhanced interrogation -- torture to those not enthrall to their ugly madness. Now with the Boston bomber calls for torture are once again being heard from Republican politicians. This is only possible because enough Americans have not spoken out to condemn torture.
Practically everyone from U.S. President Barack Obama to newspaper columnists has reacted to the bombing of the Boston Marathon by declaring that Americans will not abandon their daily habits, or their deepest values, in the face of another terrorist attack. Be it so. But a report on the torture of detainees in the United States and abroad, released the day after the Boston attack, painfully reminds us of what America’s leaders permitted themselves to do — and the American people permitted them to do — in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And there is little reason to be confident that it wouldn’t happen again.
The report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment concludes that ‘it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.’ We knew that, of course. But this 577-page report not only reminds us of every sickening thing the United States did in the name of protecting Americans from the threat of terrorist attack, but it comes under the unimpeachably bipartisan seal of co-chairs James R. Jones, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, and Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who later served in George W. Bush’s Department of […]
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MARK FISCHETTI, - Salon/Scientific American
Stephan: An important interview with Mark Jacobson, one of the most original thinkers in energy transition. It is well worth your time.
I consider what is being described here as extremely good news. Finally a discussion is emerging about what would really be involved in giving up carbon energy. And, it turns out, its not so scary to accomplish as one might think. You pull back the curtain, and it is the Wizard of Oz. All that is keeping us from making this transition is carbon energy's control of the American government.
Click through to see the important graphics.
Three times now, Mark Jacobson has gone out on the same limb. In 2009 he and co-author Mark Delucchi published a cover story in Scientific American that showed how the entire world could get all of its energy – fuel as well as electricity – from wind, water and solar sources by 2030. No coal or oil, no nuclear or natural gas. The tale sounded infeasible – except that Jacobson, from Stanford University, and Delucchi, from the University of California, Davis, calculated just how many hydroelectric dams, wave-energy systems, wind turbines, solar power plants and rooftop photovoltaic installations the world would need to run itself completely on renewable energy.
The article sparked a spirited debate on our web site, and it also sparked a larger debate between forward-looking energy planners and those who would rather preserve the status quo. The duo went on to publish a detailed study in the journal Energy Policy that also called out numbers for a U.S. strategy. Two weeks ago Jacobson and a larger team, including Delucchi, did it again.
This time Jacobson showed in much finer detail how New York state’s residential, transportation, industrial, and heating and cooling sectors could all be powered by wind, […]
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Stephan: In order to believe in profit above all one perforce has to abandon any concern for facts because, as our own history shows, the shift to unregulated profit above all produces notably inferior social outcomes. Only placing belief above facts allows one to continue to espouse such a philosophy.
These deniers are going to destroy society unless we stop them. The vote in 2014 may be the most important vote in the country's history. If the Theocratic Right continues to exercise such power in the Congress after the 2014 election we will be in very difficult straits.
A strong belief in a hands off approach to economics is tightly linked to the rejection of scientific facts such as climate change, according to research published in Psychological Science in late March.
‘The conspirator ideation that all of the world’s scientific academies have conspired together to create a hoax known as global warming has found traction in American mainstream politics,
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INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY CHRISTIAN TEEVS, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: This is the latest in the Climate Change Remediation Trend; it is not happy news. This is an excellent interview explaining what has just happened in Europe, and its effect on Climate Change.
It is because of acts such as this one that nothing truly meaningful will occur dealing with Climate Change before a difficult future is locked-in because of the momentum in the system. Scientists who spend their life studying climate are running around with their air on fire, you have read their stories and reports. Meanwhile politicians will not even agree climate change exists, or is human-mediated, or both. This is going to get down to the personal level for people in many parts of the world.
The next story is the antipode, and how the world could go.
Europe’s once celebrated cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions has languished. The economic crisis has caused the price of emissions licenses to plummet, and a recent remedy to the problem has been rejected by EU lawmakers. Climate policy expert Felix Matthes tells SPIEGEL ONLINE that an opportunity has been squandered.
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted down a proposal to make it more expensive for companies to burn fossil fuels, in what environmental advocates are calling a major setback in the fight against climate change.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, had proposed measures that would have increased the price per ton of emitted carbon dioxide that companies must pay under the bloc’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), which was set up in 2005. EU lawmakers narrowly rejected the bill 334 to 315, with 63 abstentions.
The ETS was initially lauded by environmental advocates as the world’s most ambitious effort to combat climate change. The number of certificates granting permission to emit carbon dioxide is capped, and companies can trade those certificates on the open market, in theory giving an economic incentive to invest in cleaner energy.
However the economy slump in Europe has caused the price of the emission certificates to drop dramatically, […]
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EDWIN CARTLIDGE, - physicsword.com
Stephan: Physics and consciousness become more intertwined with each passing month. This is the latest example of what I mean.
The research is to be published in Physical Review Letters.
Click through to see the very useful graphics.
ROME — Researchers in Saudi Arabia and the US say that two people equipped with suitable optical devices should in principle be able to exchange information without transferring even a single photon.
The work is based on an idea put forward by Israeli physicists Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman in 1993 known as interaction-free measurements. This involves using light to detect the presence of an object without actually bouncing any photons off it. Elitzur and Vaidman argued that the wave-particle duality of light dictates that an object obstructing one of two paths inside an interferometer can destroy the interference pattern in that device, even though no photons actually come into contact with it – a hypothesis subsequently confirmed experimentally. Another team of researchers used the principle last year to create a quantum-mechanically encoded key for the encryption and decryption of secret messages.
In the latest work, a team of scientists from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and Texas A&M University (TAMU) aimed to find out whether it was possible to use interaction-free measurements to communicate actual messages rather than simply keys. To do this they used the ‘quantum Zeno effect’, a phenomenon in which ‘a watched kettle never […]
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