Janis Mackey Frayer, - NBC News
Stephan: I have been following the Chinese automotive industry, and have done several stories on it in SR, because I think its development represents an important trend; this is the latest. My view is that the American car industry like so many other aspects of our economy is arthritic; rather than adapt to the future special interests fight to maintain their markets even though those products and designs are increasingly out of date and out of synch with the trends. You can see this process easily in Elon Musk's Tesla 3 sales in which in 36 hours he sold more electric cars -- 300,000 of them -- than the traditional American auto companies collectively have sold in the last five years.
Now we are going to see Chinese cars, electric and petroleum powered, come on the market at much lower prices yet with quality as good or better than Detroit. Where once we were nimble and innovative now we are conservative and defensive.
A Lifan Panda and a Mini Cooper. The electric Lifan Panda (also called the 330 EV) starts at $15,400 but the original Mini impersonator, the gas-powered Lifan 320, is priced at $7,150. The Mini Cooper starts at $20,700 in China.
Credit: Janis Mackey Frayer | Jae C. Hong / AP
BEIJING — Consumers ambling through China’s largest auto show might be forgiven for occasional flashes of déjà vu.
Most of the display stages in the exhibition halls look the same. The young women staffing them are dressed in matching outfits. And many of the designs from Chinese carmakers bear an uncanny resemblance to vehicles made by foreign companies.
Some of the Chinese firms’ vehicles appear to pay homage to others made by the likes of BMW, Ford, and Audi.
One of […]
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Thursday, April 28th, 2016
Evan Lehmann, - Scientific American/Climatewire
Stephan: This is weird, but good news for all of that. Republican leaders may not believe in climate change but actual Republican voters, probably because they are seeing it impact their own lives, are changing their views radically. This report will give you a good sense of what is happening.
Credit: Darren Staples/Reuters
The number of conservative voters who believe in climate change has almost doubled in the past two years, according to a new poll that attributes the rise in part to a lessening hostility toward the issue by Republican leaders.
Forty-seven percent of conservatives now say the climate is changing, a leap of 19 points since the midterm elections of 2014, according to the survey released yesterday by Yale and George Mason universities. The poll did not ask respondents whether climate change is caused by people.
The jump accounts for the single biggest change among all voting groups, and it could symbolize a softening among conservatives on an issue that has sharply divided the political parties, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
A number of things might […]
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Thursday, April 28th, 2016
Leslie Brody, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: I just hate stories like this. The Republican "No child left behind," Core Curriculum, and privatization movement, collectively has taken a public school system that was once the envy of the developed world and turned it into a cross between a warehousing operation and a prison.
Our children are our future. So what would you say was America's future?
Only 37% of American 12th-graders were academically prepared for college math and reading in 2015, a slight dip from two years earlier, according to test scores released Wednesday. (emphasis added)
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” said that share was down from an estimated 39% in math and 38% in reading in 2013.
Educators and policy makers have long lamented that many seniors get diplomas even though they aren’t ready for college, careers or the military. Those who go to college often burn through financial aid or build debt while taking remedial classes that don’t earn credits toward a degree.
Bill Bushaw, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the test, said the board was pleased that high school graduation rates were rising, but disappointed in the lack of progress in boosting students’ skills and knowledge.
“These numbers aren’t going the way we want,” he said. “We just have to redouble our efforts to prepare our students to close opportunity gaps.”
At the time of the assessment, 42% of the test-takers said they had been accepted into a four-year college. The test is taken by a representative sample of seniors nationwide.
The biggest problems came […]
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Thursday, April 28th, 2016
Tom Philpott, Food and Agriculture Correspondent - Mother Jones
Stephan: The mono-culture agriculture model that has come to dominate the U.S. and much of the rest of the world, is based on toxins, and is completely unnatural. Nature never grows like that. And the combination of the chemicals, the genetics, and the pesticides/herbicides creates all kinds of problems, and poisonous solutions. Here is some new research on what we are doing to ourselves.
Credit: Highland osu.edu
For defense against the fungal pathogens that attack crops—think the blight that bedeviled Irish potato fields in the 19th century—farmers turn to fungicides. They’re widely sprayed on fruit, vegetable, and nut crops, and in the past decade they’ve become quite common in the corn and soybean fields. (See here and here for more.) But as the use of fungicides has ramped up in recent years, some scientists are starting to wonder: What are these chemicals doing to the ecosystems they touch, and to us?
A new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications adds to a disturbing body of evidence that fungicides might be doing more than just killing fungi. For the study, a team of University of North Carolina Neuroscience Center researchers led by Mark Zylka subjected mouse cortical neuron cultures—which are similar in cellular and molecular terms to the the human brain—to 294 chemicals “commonly found in the environment and on food.” The idea was to see whether any of them triggered changes that mimicked patterns found in […]
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Thursday, April 28th, 2016
Joshua S Hill, - CleanTechnica
Stephan: This is good news and an important data point on our exit out of the carbon age. The report described here I think repressents an emerging consensus; one that could stabilize the world and improve wellness.
When I was living in Egypt and the Israelis gave back the Sinai, I argued at the time, that Egypt, Palestine, and Israel should join to create in the desert solar installations that would make them collectively the Saudi Arabia of solar, and change the course of their history in very positive ways. Imagine, as just one scenario, if Israeli design and financial firms, had built the installations with Palestinian managers, and Egyptian workers. They would have been in an active mutually beneficial regional partnership, instead of what did happen, and where we are today. Similarly, this could and it could change both Europe and Africa in positive ways.
More about the report
can be found here, and the report
is available for download here (PDF).
A megalithic ‘Supergrid’ connecting Northern Africa with Europe could help both regions reach near-100% renewable energy share.
This is the primary conclusion from a new report published by Fraunhofer ISE, which was worked on by five separate Fraunhofer institutes, each using their individual expertise to examine the idea of a Supergrid which would connect the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region with Europe. The report, which developed several Supergrid scenarios, evaluating their potential as well as the necessary technologies and policies, found that decarbonization of the electricity systems in the EU and MENA by focusing on renewable energies “is possible and economically practicable.”
If this near-100% expansion of renewable energy in North Africa were to benefit Europe, however, a transition to “a meshed superimposed HVDC grid with bipolar VSC technology which allows the transmission of fluctuating power from renewable power plants over long distances” would be necessary.
“The results of the study show that decarbonizing the electricity supply in Europe and North Africa is feasible in a cost-effective manner,” said Professor Dr. Werner Platzer, project leader and division director at Fraunhofer […]
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