Environment
Monday, March 27, 2006
Enviro-Economics cont.
4:11 PM
There's a very informative seminar*
[1 hr. 42 min.] available on GoogleVideo regarding the science and policy
related to climate change.
"[Dr.
Stephen Schneider and Thomas
C. Heller] have helped steer the international course of policy,
scientific verifications and the overall consensus on the existence of
climate change. They both have plenty to say about what the failures and
successes have been along the way, and what their predictions for the
future of climate change policy will be."
The March
24 issue of Science magazine also has a lot of articles focussed on
climate change. For a quick summary, see here
[\\Ars Technica\Nobel Intent]
*The seminar is a part of the TechTalks
at Google. A whole bunch
of these TechTalks are available at Google video.
- Chinmay
Friday, March 24, 2006
The latest thinking on economics and the natural environment
4:27 PM
In intriguing interview
with Lester
R. Brown in Wired Magazine. Definitely worth reading.
Interesting
snippets -
-
"Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the
economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the
market to tell the ecological truth." - Oystein Dahle
-
China justified a 1999 blanket ban on tree cutting in the upper
reaches of all river basins in economic terms - the flood-control
services provided by those forests were three times as valuable to
society as the timber in those trees.
-
It is no longer true that the US consumes 25% of global resources.
China has now overtaken the US in this regard. Which raises the
question - what happens if China catches up to the US in consumption
per person? The Western economic model -- fossil-fuel-based,
automobile-centered, throwaway economy -- is not going to work for
China, or India, or for the other three billion people in developing
countries.
Brown's book - Plan
B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
should prove an interesting read fon anyone concerned about these matters. Another
book on a similar subject, but with a more retrospective approach is Collapse
: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [I haven't read this one
either.. yet] Meanwhile, here
are some soundbites from IBM's Global
Innovation Outlook 2.0. ["For GIO 2.0, 248 thought leaders from nearly
three dozen countries and regions, representing 178 organizations,
gathered on four continents for 15 “deep dive” sessions to discuss three
focus areas and the emerging trends, challenges and opportunities that
affect business and society - The future of the enterprise, Energy and the
environment and Transportation and mobility"] Whether all this
thinking and talking is going to have a meaningful impact on the survival
of our civilization is still up for grabs. In my opinion, we have very
likely passed a point of no return in terms of ecological change, and
there will be some pretty dramatic and destructive changes to the global
order before the end of this century.
- Chinmay
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Guns Germs and Steel
12:25 PM
Keep an eye out for Guns
Germs and Steel coming to PBS (sneak
peek) on July 11, 18 and 25 as a TV
series. I suspect the series website will have more interactive stuff
soon, and once it has aired, probably a webcast of the series too. I
haven't read the book yet, but it has won a Pulitzer, among other praise;
so definitely worth putting on the reading list.
Also see: an
interview with the author here.
- Chinmay
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Global Warming
6:39 PM
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Epigenetic Adaptation - Fascinating!
8:59 PM
A NYTimes article
elaborates on a paper
in Medical Hypotheses- The sweet thing about Type 1 diabetes: A
cryoprotective evolutionary adaptation.
In simple words, Type I
diabetes* was a adaptive response to rapid temperature drop in Northern
Europe, and the change wasn't in the genetic information, but in
expression!
*In Type I diabetes, the immune system attacks insuling
producing cells, thus decreasing insulin, and increasing blood glucose
levels. Increased blood glucose means that the freezing point of the
tissues is lowered. TI diabetes is very common among descendants of
Northern Europeans, and is very rare among descendants of populations who
never had to face the minor ice age.
- Chinmay
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Growth at what cost?
2:07 PM
Just acouple of days back I was thinking about the need for unlimited
economic growth - in the context of a world with limited resources - that
human (western?) civilizations feel ; and what would happen if we all
decide to bump down 'growth' on the priority list for a few years and pay
attention to shoring up the rear.
(On a related note, I remember
reading somewhere that the ideal inflation rate is not zero, but around 2%
- if inflation dips much below that, it can trigger deflation and
recession).
In any case, since I'm not that smart in Global
economics (nor did I have too much time to think about it :), I didn't
figure out the answer to the original question. Serendipitously though, I
came across an interview
with Jared Diamond*
in which he raises some very thought provoking (although not entirely
novel) points about the issue.
*Faculty at UCLA, and the author
of 'Collapse
: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed'; 'Guns,
Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies' and 'The
Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal'
- Chinmay
Friday, April 01, 2005
Planet under pressure
12:07 AM
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Distributed Computing
1:44 PM
More and more computing intensive research projects are utilizing the 'Volunteer your CPU cycles' approach of SETI@Home [which I've never ran, I don't think it's a significant quest as of now...]
Last year I used to run grid.org's cancer research program, but this year I've switched to ClimatePrediction's whole earth climate simulations [they recently published [pdf] in Nature!]. There's also Foldin@Home which explores the protein folding problems - partly to understand protein mis-folding diseases like
bovine spongiform encephalopathy [mad cow disease to us mortals], cystic fibrosis, and Alzheimer's, among many others.
Now there is a newcomer [yet to be launched] - Einstein@Home! It plans to "search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors" whatever that means! ;) - here's an introductory article on news@nature.com.
Take your pick! [tell me if you know some more, I'll add them to my list - look in the left hand column...]
Interestingly, Google has started helping out [having considerable experience in running DC] by offering a DC Client bundled with their Toolbar. Right now you can run Folding@Home via the toolbar, but they're saying that there will be more.
- Chinmay
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
We now know...
1:32 PM
.. that protons flying at just 1 part in 1022 slower than light - and consequently having the same kinetic energy as golf balls in flight [nature.com] [which have 30 orders of magnitude more rest mass!!!] originate when magnetic fields in colliding galactic clusters become warped and set up humungous particle accelerators.
... that the tiny fluctuations in the distribution of matter that nucleated the first galaxies are still observable [nature.com] in the current distribution of galaxies, and that just 18% of the universe is made of particles that we know - the rest is dark matter.
... that due to Global Dimming [bbc] - one of the unnoticed cooling effects of particulate air pollution [the average temperature in the northern hemisphere actually went down a little in the 70's] we might have underestimated the heating effects of green house gases. If that is so, global warming predictions will have to be revised. RealClimate discusses this in detail.
... that Nuclear energy is safe and renewable [newkerala]. We owe this last revelation to George Bush [of course!]. Also see the SierraClub RAW article.
What a fantastic week for science!
- Chinmay
Monday, January 03, 2005
RealClimate
2:24 PM
This is good... I've now added another blog that does the talking for me. Check out RealClimate.org. Now I only need to add some blogs that talks about India, Photography, Geekstuff etc, and I won't have to blog much at all!
Delegation. It's the smart thing to do :-)
update:Here's more -
The Panda's Thumb on evolution/creationism.
India Uncut
- Chinmay
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Eco Friendly Architecture
7:57 PM
A very interesting website. I'll definitely think about this when building my home...
Triggered by this.
Also see[nature.com] - "The devastating earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean on 26 December was so powerful that it has accelerated the Earth's rotation, geophysicists have declared. They estimate that the shockwave shortened the period of our planet's rotation by some three microseconds.
The change was caused by a shift of mass towards the planet's centre, as the Indian Ocean's heavy tectonic plate lurched underneath Indonesia's one, say researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This caused the globe to rotate faster, in the same way that a spinning figure-skater accelerates by tucking in her arms."
Fascinating!
- Chinmay
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
It's a small world
11:01 AM
Bush is back [with all the implications and more], the ice caps are melting fast, Rupee and the Indian stock market have surged [my mock portfolio is up 10.4% in little over a month, but my real Rupee worth is down!]
I guess I won't be buying any beach-front properties anytime soon.
- Chinmay
Monday, September 27, 2004
A limerick
11:12 AM
There was once a thing called environment;
thoughtfulness was its primary requirement.
Then we discoverd Oil
and put an end to toil.
But also created a lot of disheartenment.
- Chinmay
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Changing All the Rules
6:28 PM
A very detailed [and long!] article in the NYTimes Magazine [free. reg. req.] on "How the Bush administration quietly — and radically — transformed the nation's clean-air policy" For the worse, of course...
An Excerpt:
Quote
...the [Bush] administration's real problem with the new-source review program wasn't that it didn't work. The problem was that it was about to work all too well -- in the way, finally, that it was designed to when it was passed by Congress more than 25 years ago.
[Energy companies] faced potential fines of tens of millions of dollars. Cost estimates for fitting power plants with new scrubbers and, in some cases, reconfiguring entire plants to run on cleaner-burning natural gas were estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, the companies were not about to be put out of business by complying with E.P.A. regulations. In 1999, the Southern Company reported profits of $1.3 billion.
Thomas R. Kuhn, a Yale classmate of President Bush's and president of the Edison Electric Institute... sent energy-industry executives a confidential memo, on May 27, 1999, later made public in the course of a lawsuit, advising them to bundle their contributions to the Bush campaign under a tracking number to ''ensure that our industry is credited'' for its generosity.
"Taking a lesson from Reagan's experience with Gorsuch and Watt, Bush officials realized that it would be self-defeating to appoint to public positions people with outspoken views on the environment, so they found noncombative figures instead.... they adopted a two-track strategy. Publicly, the president asked Congress to pass major environmental legislation like the Clear Skies Initiative and a sweeping energy bill, which he knew would face considerable opposition. Privately, the president's political appointees at the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Office of Management and Budget would carry out those same policies less visibly, through closed-door legal settlements and obscure rule changes.... These second-tier appointees knew exactly which rules and regulations to change because they had been trying to change them, on behalf of their industries, for years."
"President Bush went on CNN and blamed environmentalists for the [California electric energy] crisis. ''If there's any environmental regulation that's preventing California from having 100 percent max output at their plants -- as I understand there may be -- then we need to relax those regulations,'' he said. California utility officials denied that environmental rules had anything to do with the crisis. But their protests didn't matter. The president had forged the link."
President Bush's final National Energy Policy (N.E.P.) was published on May 16, 2001. [laying] the administration's vision of the environmental future of the United States. The policy's defining notion was simple: environmental regulations have constrained America's domestic energy supply. In broad strokes, the N.E.P. laid out the next three years of the Bush administration's energy and environmental agenda: roll back wilderness and wildlife protections to open up more public land to oil and gas development; establish fast-track hydropower permits; expand offshore oil and gas drilling; and replace tough Clean Air Act rules, including new-source review, with an industry-friendly market-based pollution trading system.
...when President Bush announced Clear Skies, the E.P.A. was already on track to require deeper reductions in air pollution than his cap-and-trade proposal would produce. So the air would actually be dirtier under Clear Skies than if the president allowed the E.P.A. to enforce the existing law. Clear Skies allowed 50 percent more sulfur dioxide, nearly 40 percent more nitrogen oxides and three times as much mercury as the Clean Air Act -- rigorously enforced -- called for.... ''We can do better under current law than what they're putting on the table,'' Eric Schaeffer told George Stephanopoulos [ABC's ''This Week'']. Schaeffer, the E.P.A.'s head of civil enforcement from 1997 to 2002, had worked on the new-source review lawsuits since their inception. He left the E.P.A. in early 2002, tired, as he said in his letter of resignation, of ''fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.''
Sylvia Lowrance, the E.P.A.'s deputy assistant administrator for enforcement.. a 24-year veteran of the agency, had officials in her office study years of data, looking at figures that came from actual power plants, and on June 3, 2002, she wrote a memo to Holmstead indicating that her office thought 0.75 percent was a reasonable figure.In other words, if the total value of a generating unit was $1 billion, a power company should be able to legitimately spend up to $7.5 million a year on routine repair and maintenance without being required to install new pollution controls. Marianne Horinko, acting E.P.A. administrator...said, utilities would be allowed to spend up to 20 percent of a generating unit's replacement cost, per year, without tripping the N.S.R. threshold. In other words, a company that operated a coal-fired power plant could do just about anything it wanted to a $1 billion generating unit as long as the company didn't spend more than $200 million a year on the unit. To E.P.A. officials who had worked on N.S.R. enforcement, who had pored over documents and knew what it cost to repair a generator, the new threshold was absurd. ''What I don't understand is why they were so greedy,'' said Eric Schaeffer, the former E.P.A. official. ''Five percent would have been too high, but 20? I don't think the industry expected that in its wildest dreams.''
The framework of new-source review would remain, but the new rules set thresholds so high that pollution-control requirements would almost never come into effect. ''It's a moron test for power companies,'' said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group. ''It's such a huge loophole that only a moron would trip over it and become subject to N.S.R. requirements.... the new rules would result in emissions increases of 7 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxides per year by 2020.
By the end of 2003, with new-source review all but dead, the White House began moving on to other projects. Mike Leavitt, the newly installed E.P.A. administrator, proposed two new regulations. The first suggested new standards for mercury emissions that would in the short term permit the release of as much as seven times as much mercury as current law allows. The second, known as the interstate air-quality rule, and was seen by many as the administrative enactment of Bush's Clear Skies Initiative.... Yet the new rule set higher national limits for emissions of dangerous chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides than Clear Skies, which in turn was considered by critics to be weaker than the existing Clean Air Act.
UnQuote
Just one of the reasons why I recently termed him a dispicable thug of the worst kind.
- Chinmay
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Give and Let Give
2:17 PM
Thursday, March 04, 2004
Hydrogen?
11:07 AM
The American Physical Society report, and the National Academy of Science report on the Hydrogen Economy Initiative*.
In Short -
- Major scientific breakthroughs are required for the Hydrogen Initiative to succeed.
- Basic science must have greater emphasis both in planning and in the research program.
- The Hydrogen Technical Advisory Committee should include members who are deeply familiar with the core basic science problems.
- “Bridge” technologies should be given greater attention.
- The Hydrogen Initiative should not displace research into promising energy efficiency and renewable energy areas.
The committees also conclude that hydrogen will become a viable technology in 30 to 50 years rather than in the 20 year time frame given by Bush. ---
*The Hydrogen Economy Initiative involves using H2 as fule in fuel cells to generate electricity, in all/most of the places that we use fossil fules now. Mainly cars, but possibly also mainstream power generation.
The problem is that all the technologies involved - hydrogen production, storage, and Fuel Cells -are rather inefficient right now, and plagued by basic scientific problems [as against problems of implimentation/initiative in say, malaria irradication...]
Bush is mainly pushing it as a carrot.. by showing the promis of a very clean future just around the corner, he's justifying pollution excesses being carried out in the present.
- Chinmay
Monday, March 01, 2004
In other news...
10:57 AM
| |
U.S.A. |
India |
| Percent of world's population |
5%
(~270 million)
|
16%
(~980 million)
|
| Use of world's non-renewable resources |
25% |
3% |
| Creation of world's trash and pollution |
25% |
3% |
Production / consumption of goods and services |
21% |
1% |
| Exports [Billions of USD] |
687
[# 1] |
44.5
[# 33] |
| Imports [Billions of USD] |
1165
[# 1] |
53.5
[# 25] |
Source [Indiana University] [Statistics from ~ 1998]
Source for trade statistics [Indian - 2001, USA - 2002 est. ]- CIA Factbook.
Total world trade in 2002 - 6.6 trillion USD. So [Ex+Im/World] is 28% for US and 1.5% for India. Not sure that's the right way to calculate it though.
- Chinmay
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Buncha Stuff...
5:04 PM
Extremely engaging Nature article on the search for our Last Universal Common Ancestor -
"...The ultimate goal is to arrive at a most defendable reconstruction in terms of a set of genes. This set will number about 600, Koonin estimates, based on what contemporary genomes tell us about the minimum number of genes needed by a self-sufficient organism. Once that set of genes is known, it might even be possible to create LUCA in a dish.
Building a microbe may seem outlandish, but just such a project is already under way. In 2002, human genome sequencer Craig Venter announced his plan to build an artificial cell with a minimal genome based on modern genes at his Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Maryland. And last year, a team led by Steven Benner of the University of Florida, Gainesville, used phylogenetic analysis to resurrect a protein from an ancient bacterium that lived around a billion years ago...."
A Pelamis wave farm to go on real world trial later this year. - " a square kilometre wave farm would power up to 20,000 homes" - part of the Scottish initiative to generate 40% of the country's required energy from renewable resources by 2020
Miracle on South Block - "...Whatever is done in the future in regard to India’s international relations, the years 1998-2004 will surely be judged as the six years which witnessed real change in India’s strategy and India’s relationships around the world."
In Passing: It's official: Brits don't know f***
- Chinmay
Monday, February 23, 2004
Pentagon's Weather Nightmare?
8:12 PM
"Over the last three years, the administration has made every effort, through both words and deeds, to ignore and undermine the science behind global warming. It has ridiculed study after study and testimonial after testimonial as insufficient, incomplete, inconclusive, biased, or worse. Now, however, the administration's in a bit of a pickle. How do you discredit the source when the source is YOU?
- RAW"
A report by the Pentagon quoted in The Guardian and Fortune Magazine as "Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in
wars and natural disasters... [and]... should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern"
and
"Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America."
- Chinmay
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Mercury...
12:33 PM
NYTimes link [registration required] - "More than one child in six born in the United States could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb, according to revised estimates released last week by Environmental Protection Agency scientists.... Mercury pollution has become a contentious environmental issue with the Bush administration's proposal to create a market-based trading-pollution system." [i.e. Power companies - mainly coal based electricity generation - can promise not to pollute in one area but skip cleanup measures in another.]
If you are concerned about the environmental policies of the Bush Government, subscribe to RAW: : the Uncooked Facts of the Bush Assault on the Environment.
Excerpt from this week's RAW -
Mercury + Hot Air = Silence- The apparent ebullience and jubilation with which EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt celebrated this effort seems to have vanished from the White House along with holiday spirit. In December, Mr. Leavitt bragged that the new standard was better than the stronger one recommended by the previous administration and that it was, in fact, "more aggressive." Well, maybe it was better if you define "better" as a standard that's more favorable to polluting power plants than to the American people, but clearly we disagaree with the Bush administration on this point. So why has the administration allowed the subject to grow cold, instead of continuing to remind us how grateful we should be? In fact, we think the administration has missed the boat on three really good opportunities to sing its own praises regarding this special gift to its polluting friends.
And so on in that vein...
- Chinmay
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