The following pages and posts are tagged with
| Title | Type | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Liquid Air Battery | Post | The UK is starting construction near Manchester of the world’s largest battery. Spare green energy will be used to compress air into liquid for storage. Releasing the liquid back into gas willpower a turbine to put the green energy onto grid. The plant will be operational in 2022 and will... |
| Solar Geoengineering | Post | Gernot Wagner has a scary op-ed in Business Week with this conclusion: Solar geoengineering is potentially so powerful that one actor might be able to lower temperatures for the globe. It’s only a matter of time before pressure will increase to do just that, regardless of how fast the... |
| A Call to DeCommodify Capitalism | Post | Three scholars: Isabelle Ferreras, Dominique Méda, and Julie Battilana on May 16, 2020 launched a petition in Le Monde for #democratizingwork. The text Work: Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate was published in 41 publications, in 36 countries around the world, in 27 languages. The text is open for signing at the... |
| Ozone Layer Destruction Once More | Post | A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation. The Guardian May... |
| Agriculture threatens Birds | Post | “The State of the World’s Birds”, a five-year compendium of population data from the best-studied group of animals on the planet, reveals a biodiversity crisis driven by the expansion and intensification of agriculture. In all, 74% of 1,469 globally threatened birds are affected primarily by farming. Logging, invasive species and... |
| Enzyme eating Plastic | Post | An international research team headed by Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, has - by accident - created a mutant enzyme that breaks down PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat... |
| Bird Collapse in France | Post | The bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last 15 years. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds. The Frech countryside is in the process of becoming a veritable desert. The common white throat, the ortolan bunting, the... |
| Collapse of the Polar Vortex? | Post | The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in... |
| Ocean Dead Zones increasing | Post | Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the... |
| Ocean Plastics Tax | Post | The UK Treasury is starting considereing taxes / charges on single-use plastics such as takeaway cartoons and packaging. The introduction just over two years ago of a 5p charge on single-use plastic bags led to an 85% reduction in their use inside six months. An estimated 12m tonnes of plastic... |
| Urban Snakes | Post | When the latest distress call came into Phinyo Pukphinyo’s fire station in Bangkok, it was not about a burning home or office building. Instead, the caller needed urgent help with a far more common problem facing the capital: snakes. A 2-meter-long (10-foot-long) python was dangling from the caller’s garage roof,... |
| Why Latin American Nations Fail | Post | Matias Vernengo and Esteban Pérez Caldenty discusses the limitations of the mainstream New Institutionalist school of development economics. While traditionally the study of institutional economics focused on a very broad range of interests and made contributions in several different areas, including the structure of power relations, the beliefs systems, and... |
| Explaining Capitalism | Post | Yanis Varoufakis book Talking to my Daughter About the Economy is out in English translation and presented in an interview with The Guardian. The book is an rare attempt to explain to a youth how Capitalism emerged and works. Simple explanation of complex issues is an art. Look... |
| Forest Degradation | Post | Measuring the detoriation of the environment is not easy. The surveilance of tropical forests has mainly been based on interpretation of satelite imageniary. This basically estimate the extent of the tree canopy - an area measure, assuming that what is below is unchanged. A new study shows that this... |
| Homage to Catalonia | Post | These are particular days here in Spain. Catalonia is fighting for (a referendum on) independence. The date is set to October 1st, 2017. The Spanish Government in Madrid is fighting back - trying by all means to crush the (preparations for the) referendum. Guardia Civil enters the offices of the... |
| Microplastic Contamination | Post | The scale of global microplastic contamination is only starting to become clear. There are two principal concerns: very small plastic particles and the chemicals or pathogens that microplastics can harbour. In the nanometre range they can penetrate a cell which means they can penetrate organs. Microplastics can attract bacteria found... |
| Hurricane Harvey | Post | This week main news is the flooding of Housten by Hurricane Harvey. Michael E. Mann discusses the links to climate change here. The factors involved are: Sea level rise - coastal subsidence, mainly due to oil drilling, have increased to ca. 15 cm over the last few... |
| Photographing Dogs | Post | ‘Dogging’ -living with dogs - is one of my favourite activities. One result is a tremendous archive of photos of the dear friends. However, not all photos and videos will qualify for a photo exhibition. But there are a few of exceptions - I have added one of them -... |
| New Site Started | Post | A few days ago I forked Tom Johnson’s ‘Jekyll Documentation Theme’ on GitHub. I was looking for a web publishing toolset to integrate various web publishing activities. Jumping around in the file structure gave some insight of how the theme worked. As from today the Tom’s content is removed and... |