via Monbiot.com » An Eruption of Reality.

 

From Change.org

The Clean Energy Economy Is Already Booming

Without much attention from policymakers, or funding from the public trough, a low-carbon economy has already taken off in the United States.  The jobs being created nationwide in clean energy are helping to bolster the nation’s environmental sustainability and cut greenhouse gas emissions — and expanding at a faster rate than the U.S. economy overall.

Research by The Pew Charitable Trusts, published in a new report titled “The Clean Energy Economy,” found that:

• Between 1998 and 2007, jobs in clean energy grew at a faster rate than overall jobs.
• By 2007, more than 68,200 businesses across all 50 states and the District of Columbia accounted for about 770,000 jobs.
• Jobs in clean energy, both white-collar and blue-collar, grew at a rate of 9.1 percent, while total jobs grew at a rate of 3.7 percent.
• Clean tech has not been immune to the economic meltdown, but it’s proving to be an especially resilient sector: Although venture capital investment in clean tech dropped by 48 percent in the first three months of 2009 (compared to the same period in 2008), investment across the board was down 61 percent during the same period.
• Employment in clean energy covers a broad swath of blue-collar and white-collar jobs, including plumbers, machinists, scientists, engineers, bankers and marketing consultants.  Annual incomes ranging from around $21,000 to $111,000.

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The Business Logic of Sustainability

If an oil-intensive company can do it, anyone can do it…

 

The tragedy of climate commons

 

Airbus hopes these attention-grabbing efforts will jump-start competition and collaboration for continued development of alternative fuels. “Testing today will support future second generation bio-fuels,” said the company’s press release. “Fuel and energy are key challenges aviation is facing and for which technology and international research collaboration open up new horizons,” said Airbus President and CEO Tom Enders. Enders cited “cross industry and cross border collaboration” as the key to an “eco-efficient enterprise.”

At a time when the aviation industry is already under great pressure over the impact of aircraft emissions, Airbus’ record-making flight will no doubt spark an alternative-fuel fire.

 

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Meanwhile, the same phenomena is happening in Asia, where some 2 billion people may soon not have enough water.

 

Suddenly, the bees farmers and growers rely on are vanishing. Researchers are scrambling to find out why.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

What’s Happening to the Bees?

 

Humans, who like to think of themselves as intelligent, are in fact quite possibly the most stupid specie on Planet Earth, destroying the very biosphere that sustains it, through pollution and decimation of the biosphere. As David Suzuki so eloquently demonstrated in The Sacred Balance: A Visual Celebration of Our Place in Nature, everything in nature is connected together in a finely balanced system, and every time we destroy part of it, there are untold consequences all the way up and down the biological food chain. One displaced or destroyed specie can affect dozens of others. We ourselves are part of this web, and every time we damage it, we are hurting ourselves. Such is the legacy of our selfish profit-driven society. The damage was limited until 150 years ago when we developed the technologies that now enable us to destroy the planet. When will it stop? Once we realize it is too late? We are rapidly approaching that point, and yet we continue to pillage as if there was no tomorrow, and our population is exploding, compounding the problem.

I have not brought children into this world, but if I had, I would be extremely worried for their future. What kind of planet will they have to live on? What are you doing about it?

 

Because of this inherent lack of efficiency in producing biofuels, the only way they can be profitably produced is through heavy government subsidies to farmers and energy companies. The danger of these subsidies is that they encourage farmers to displace food crops and this drives-up the price of food; an alarming fact considering that millions of people already don’t have enough to eat on this planet, and it will only get worse. An even bigger danger is that this sudden interest in biofuels is pushing many countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil, to slash-and burn valuable rainforest and replace them with oil palms or sugar cane. This slashing and burning of the carbon-rich rain forests and peat is releasing 10 times as much CO2 as the fuels produced will save. This is also destroying precious rain forests, destroying wildlife habitat, and causing severe disruption to the whole ecosystem. I have seen first-hand in southern Costa Rica the effects of destroying rain forests to plant oil palms as well as the effects of replacing man-power intensive banana crops with low-labour oil palms, putting thousands of people out of work in the process.

And now western governments are signing treaties with third-world countries, encouraging them to continue the destruction of their most precious resource (the rain forests) in exchange for biofuels production. So once again, western governments are exploiting third-world countries, and transporting first-world problems to the third world. George Monbiot has just published an article entitled A Lethal Solution that discusses these very dangers and denounces the governments hiding behind these so called “green fuels”.

 

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled “The Future of Geothermal Energy” (PDF, 14.1 MB). Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

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