US Secretary of State told a group of journalists when the United States invaded Iraq, “this will be a war that will not end in your lifetimes.” The vision of the project for the New American Century which backed George W Bush’s bid for presidency, is that the United States will control the world economy, by controlling the world’s oil supplies. The backing of independence movements in Georgia and Chechnya has deprived Russia of the gateway to Middle Eastern oil, and prevented it building a planned pipeline to China. Combined with manouvers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel, it is clear that this plan is being put into effect. The news stories in this category track the progress of this project and the impact it is having on the world economy and hence, your daily life.
Pakistan-born Glasgow-based sociologist, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, writing in the UAE journal The National on 5 April 2013, provides some answers – see True costs of Iraq War Whitewashed by fuzzy maths, republished the same day by the UK Stop the War Coalition under the headline No more fuzzy maths: how many died in the Bush-Blair war on Continue Reading →
Australia’s biggest rooftop solar panel at UQ By Siobhan Barry Updated 2 hours 41 minutes ago One-and-a-half football fields worth of solar grids will be installed on the roofs of three buildings. Map: St Lucia 4067 The University of Queensland’s Saint Lucia campus in Brisbane will be home to the country’s largest rooftop solar panel. Continue Reading →
The European market for biomass-fired power and heating is more developed than that of the United States, mainly due to stringent European regulatory requirements and broad public support for renewable initiatives. Denmark, for example, enacted legislation as early as 1993 requiring increased use of biomass in energy supply. At present, the 27 nations of the European Union (EU) have agreed to raise the share of renewables in the energy mix to 21 percent for electricity and 20 percent for heat by 2020. In 2005, two-thirds of all EU renewable energy came from biomass, which is expected to retain a significant share of EU renewables going forward.
As a result of these regulatory requirements, growing public awareness and the Kyoto protocol, the market for biomass in Europe is strong and growing. According to the European Biomass Association, the EU will increase its biomass consumption from 13 million tons annually today to 100 million tons by 2020. In fact, most large North American biomass pellet plants were built specifically to export to the European biomass market.
Europe is several years ahead of the U.S. in biomass development. However, state-level renewable portfolio standards are now mandating that U.S. utilities begin the process of embracing biomass. It is possible that within several years, the U.S. biomass landscape may more closely resemble that of Europe.
If I were a senior executive at an investor-owned utility (IOU), I would be more than a little nervous about the spread of Renewables, and grid-tied distributed energy generation sources in general. What would happen to the integrity of my operations if these proliferated in dense clusters in my service areas, and over which I exercised limited control? Can I co-opt them or are they competition? AMI, SmartGrid, and “cap and trade” regulations are innovation enough, I might think, do we have to accommodate distributed generation too?
From Common Dreams
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Mullumbimby, Tuesday The Toaster Tester gang was apprehended yesterday with an appliance appropriated from Power and Air Tools. Owner of the kidnapped and abused kitchen-ware, Jane Thomson, told The Generator that the high quality Dualit toaster had been sent for repairs, but when the repair shop changed hands she lost track of the item. “It Continue Reading →