SolidarityEconomy.net

by Anton Caputo

Playing equal parts visionary, cheerleader and comedian, Al Gore brought his message of how to fight global warming to a capacity crowd of receptive architects Saturday in San Antonio.

The former vice president referred continually to a “new way of thinking” that is emerging in the country and offered hope in the battle to control the effects global warming will have on the planet.

“It’s in part a spiritual crisis,” Gore told the crowd in the Convention Center at the American Institute of Architects (more…)

by Daphne Wysham

As the Kyoto Protocol comes into force this month, a carbon rush is gaining steam in the financial industry. Investors predict that carbon could become one of the largest markets in the world, with a trading volume of $60 billion to $250 billion by 2008.

Supporters assert emissions trading allows the invisible hand of the market to do what the “command and control” approach to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions can not; that is, meet and even exceed expectations of emissions reductions.

Critics charge that carbon trading is a smokescreen: At best, it will represent a (more…)

[Note from SolidarityEconomy.net Editors: This article is significant because of its source. Timothy Garton Ash is no Leftist. He’s a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford (where Milton Friedman held forth until his recent death). He’s always been fiercely anti-communist.]

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires

by Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian

What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does (more…)

by Graham Bowley, Financial Times

Andy Hines is stuck in traffic. Predictable enough for Houston at rush hour, but frustrating none the less. The 44-year-old gesticulates with a wiry, tattooed arm at the lines of red tail- lights forecasting a slow drive ahead, but focuses most of his ire on something less immediately tangible: the future. Or rather, the role of futurology - his chosen profession - in the corporate world.

“I should have just gotten an MBA,” Hines says, explaining that futurists are seldom given credit for their ideas within the big organisations where (more…)

Stephen Hawking warns:

We must recognise
the catastrophic dangers
of climate change

By Steve Connor

Science Editor
The Independent (UK)
January 18, 2007

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.

Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.

He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which has decided to move the minute hand of its “Doomsday Clock” forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world. (more…)

Gary Braasch reports from the latest U.N. climate-change convention in Nairobi, Kenya. Braasch has been photographing and reporting on climate change since 1999. His forthcoming book, Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, will be published by the University of California Press next year.

The seasonal rains have returned to southern Kenya, greening the countryside once again. But in the north and east, near the Somalian border, refugee camps set up for those who lost everything in a deep drought earlier this year are suddenly being flooded out by this season’s unusually severe rains. Many see this rapid switch from drought to deluge as global warming in action — more searing droughts and stronger rainstorms in an intensifying cycle that affects the world’s very poorest.

Not far away, in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, officials and observers from around the world gathered for this year’s United Nations summit on climate change. Here, the severity and urgency of global warming should have seemed clearer to delegates than it did at last year’s frigid Montreal summit.

No continent is as vulnerable to climate disruption as Africa, and none harbors more poverty. That’s why it’s been a big deal to African nations that the 12th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was held for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa. Many African nations sent large delegations. African luminaries like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan shed light on the plight of Africans in the face of global climate change. Environmental groups presented papers on threats to the continent. (more…)

November 13, Science Daily

The shift toward a service-based economy won’t automatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases (GHS) in the air, a University of Minnesota researcher has found. His research contradicts assumptions about global warming often preferred by some economists and national policy experts.

Sangwon Suh, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota’s bioproducts and biosystems engineering department, uses a “life-cycle assessment” approach to quantify the environmental effect of products and services, taking into account all the materials and energy used to create a product or a service throughout its life-cycle.

(more…)

A low-profile industrial revolution based on corn and sunflower seeds is being born in Terni, a middle-sized Umbrian city, situated some 100 kilometers north of Rome. On Friday 13 October, in this once-prosperous steel and chemical industry cluster, the Italian company Novamont, pioneer in the sector of biodegradable products, inaugurated the “first green bio-refinery in the world, able to produce bio-polyesters based on vegetable oil.” European leader in bio-plastics based on starch thanks to its star product, Master-Bi, 35,000 tons of which already are turned out by the Terni site, the firm is raising its production capacity to 60,000 tons, or about 60% of the global market.

Compared to 40 million tons of petroleum-based plastics consumed in (more…)

A Green ‘High Road’
for Venture Capitalists

By Andrew K. Burger
EcommerceTimes.com

(Nov. 8, 2006) When it comes to alternative, renewable energy, European companies and countries have been leading the charge. “We see several trends concerning financial investments into solar energy,” said Edwin Koot, the founder and principal of Solar Plaza.

Making the Case for Enterprise Mobility: Wireless Management and Spend Control. Find out how AT&T was able to reduce spiraling enterprise mobility costs and boost the efficient use of assets.

Venture capital (VC) and private and public investments in alternative energy continue to grow at their highest rates since the OPEC crisis of the 1970s.

Around the world, the persistence of much higher fossil fuel prices, heightened power demands — particularly in the fast-developing economies of China and India — national employment trends, security concerns, and growing evidence of sharp climate changes are contributing to what amounts to a clean technology boom. (more…)

SAN DIEGO, California - Oregon’s spectacular coastline could become the United States’ center for wave energy development in coming years, with plans underway to install power buoys in locations with enough potential to meet the state’s future energy needs.

Electrical engineers at Oregon State University are developing electricity-generating buoys they believe will be a key component for clean, green wave power. Their objective is to convert the Pacific Ocean’s heavy rolling swell into a renewable energy resource., relying on buoys to harness the near constant rise and fall of waves to produce electricity.

“Waves generate energy through motion,” said Dr. Annette von Jouanne, an electrical engineering professor at Oregon State University (OSU).

(more…)

Solar power is a better investment than a dated technology that’s too expensive and dangerous.

Suddenly, nuclear power is in vogue. At the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced a far-reaching agreement to cooperate in the rapid expansion of nuclear energy worldwide and called on other countries to join them. It was the latest in a series of high-profile initiatives by the White House to promote nuclear power. Bush argues that the future energy security of the United States and the world will depend on increasing reliance on nuclear energy.

A technology that for years suffered ignominiously in scientific purgatory has been resurrected. Its virtues have been heralded by the likes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the famed scientist Sir (more…)

KHORI, India — Dilip Pantosh Patil uses an ox-drawn wooden plow to till the same land as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. But now he has a new neighbor: a shiny white wind turbine taller than a 20-story building, generating electricity at the edge of his bean field.

Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like India and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central India and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company.

(more…)

The science is clear, the technology is available. To meet the challenge of ‘the most serious threat to humanity since the invention of nuclear weapons,’ climate-change campaigners now need to win the political argument, says Tom Burke of E3G.

The public argument on climate change has been transformed by a series of recent interventions by scientists. First, James E Hansen, the global doyen of climate scientists, announced that the world has only ten years in which to take decisive action on the climate. ‘I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,’ he told the Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento, California.Second, John P Holdren, the incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in his inaugural address that the world is already experiencing dangerous climate change.

(more…)

SACRAMENTO, California - A leading U.S. climate researcher said on Wednesday the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert a weather catastrophe.

NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

‘I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,’ Hansen said at the Climate Change Research Conference in California’s state capital.

(more…)