Busy day for the Prez. He’s in the running for most inappropriate Peace prize since Kissinger. The Presidential diary entries read something like this:
followed by
Somebody once remarked that fighting for peace was like copulating for virginity.
The state of California has teamed up with Google.com to create a Google Earth picture website that will synthesize existing California climate change scenarios and climate impact research and… encourage its use in a way that is beneficial for local decision-makers.
The Climate Change Risk and Adaptation Options in the CalAdapt Prototype Project allow you to download a “flyover tour” in Google Earth using what’s called a KMZ file. Viewing it as a KMZ file (a Keyhole Markup Language, Zipped file) within the Google Earth application will allow you to customize your view of the flyover. Google Earth 5 must be installed on your computer.
It is an an exploratory project to develop a Google Earth-based platform to engage the public on climate change impacts and adaptation in California.
Philadelphia, PA — There have been many recent breakthroughs in membrane technology.
Researchers at the University of Texas and Virginia Tech University have been working on desalination technology. The research team has discovered a way to use a chlorine-tolerant membrane that would significantly reduce the cost of desalination making fresh water more readily available for drought stricken areas. With sea levels expected to rise, there will also be more communities that face salt water intrusion.
On the energy front, several companies are claiming breakthroughs in membrane polymers for fuel cells. Electrolyser membranes take H2O and separates the hydrogen from the oxygen. In a fuel cell, the membrane separates hydrogen protons from electrons which produces electrical current. If the technology proves true, hydrogen power from water could become an economic reality.
And of the future ?
Fears, aye, those we have, yet Hopes also.
For it has come to this, perhaps the last throw in a losing game. Carbon released in the last one hundred and fifty years of industrialization has raised the temperature by a degree Fahrenheit, and will, in spite of our best possible efforts, raise it by another degree in the next few decades. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries, no matter what we do, as quickly as a foot every generation.
This the future that the West leaves to the unborn of the East and the South; indeed to their own as well ? A watery death for billions in the lowlands by the ocean ? A short, emaciated life for the rest, as monoculture crops, created by the best science of the West, shrivel and die in climes outside their design? Why then should the East or the South curb their carbon emissions if they are doomed in any case ? Why not reach and grasp and use fossil fuels exactly as the West has done, in hope that their peoples have perhaps some small chance of survival as the world warms ? For if we are all to hang from a rope spun from the carbon history of the West, why, let us all hang together. The West has had its centuries in the sun, and before the noose snaps tight, why begrudge the wretched of the world some little hydrocarbon happiness ?
China’s middle class will soon outweigh the rest, and the children of India await in the wings, for demography will not be denied. Their present charge is to their destitute masses, and they weigh to a nicety death today from fossil fuel taxes against death tomorrow from souring oceans and withered soils. Their scientists, astute as any, know full well what the future holds and account to the last gram the cumulative carbon released thus far by the West.
And more: They see their strength daily wax, as the West wanes; they pay for your banks and your houses, your cars and your gasoline, your bombs and your armies, your wars and your genocides, your corporations and your politicians. More, they know exactly now how the game is played. Death and Suffering are no strangers to them, familiar terrors known and understood.
Will they not ensure the West pays and pays again for the past? Can we really imagine that they will sacrifice their children’s future so that yours may live as you did, in profligate gluttony ? Will they not make your children bear this burden at least in equal measure, share bitter fruit of rising tides and failing crops ?
Both our hopes and our fears may be belied. For our hope is that the West might cease polluting the world with carbon and our fear is that the East and South will not.
I have little hope that the great and the powerful of the West will change; they have not done so in the past, and their present actions spell doom. But the East and the South hold the future in their hands. They may yet turn away from that black gold, and reach instead for the sun and the wind, and the heart of the atom. Indeed, they do already; their efforts are fumbling and slow, but they are a beginning. If we are to have any chance at all of saving some of the future, these efforts must prevail.
And perhaps not the least, in turning away from fossil fuels, they may show the West that in the end, the poor of the earth can forgive and save their overlords, indeed perhaps it is only the poor that might do so. For those in power have much to lose in abandoning their ways of life, and the poor have naught to lose and a world to gain. In the end, it may be that the hearts of the small and powerless are larger than those of their tyrants.
And perhaps, in our own hearts, we know that already.
Kill most everybody, pay off the rest. Worked for a few centuries. Here’s a couple bucks, we cool now, right ?
…is sauce for the gander. Rip off everybody, including your audience and your clients. Who cares if you own the regulators. Nice job if you can get it.
Because if you do, we’ll turn you in. It was said about Bill Gates that he was a monocle and a white cat away from being in a James Bond movie. Welcome to the club, Eric.
Destroy Your Company! Crash the Economy! Get Paid Millions!
They’re laughing at us peasants, all the way to the bank…er, sorry, they already own the banks.
Why are these scum not in jail ? Can’t be because of campaign contributions, can it ? Naa…
These parasites own the Congressmen, the Senators, the White House and the rest. The average voter gets to vote for a couple Representatives, a Senator; but these robber barons get to vote for ALL of them.
You know why they make so many laws ? Because Congressmen and Senators get paid to write them, get paid to put in loopholes, get paid to put in exemptions, get paid to amend them.
So long USA. Nice knowin’ ya.
Read it and weep.
Robbing the Bank
Or that’s what Bernanke claims, but for his valiant efforts.
So, let’s see: the man who abetted Greenspan’s loose policies, who didn’t see the biggest bubble since the Depression, who vacillated between saving one Wall Street giant as opposed to another, now says he sees beginnings of recovery due to his actions. Sure. Could have been worse. Goldman Sachs might have lost money.
To quote Oscar Wilde: The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.
Media consolidation continues. These are the people who cheerled the tech bubble, the jingoistic rush to wars, and the real estate Ponzi scheme, replaced reasoned analysis with the soundbite, inflamed the basest passions of their audience rather than encouraging calm debate. Don’t bother changing the channel, they own all the channels. Or, as they used to say, ‘Kill your TV.’ It turns your brain to mush.
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