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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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Manuel calls for calm, while Vavi warns of looming crisis in South Africa. “Don’t panic,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel urged yesterday as food riots spread around the world. While global financial leaders have declared an international food emergency, South African labour federation, Cosatu, planned country-wide protests against price collusion and rampant inflation in the country’s Continue Reading →
Dr James Hansen. Photograph: AP Photos/The Daily Iowan/Melanie Patterson
One of the world’s leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 – the most stringent in the world – should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the arXiv.org website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth’s history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.
Halima Shaban and Fred Ouma, New Vision (Kampala)
EVERY morning, Mama Benah, a mother of six and a resident of Ntebetebe village in Bweyogerere, makes sure her children’s lunch box has juice. But with no tap water in a radius of three kilometres, she has to collect water from a nearby spring.
But with 90% of the springs in the central region declared contaminated and with one out of every six people having no access to safe water, it is important that for Mama Benah’s children to remain healthy, she has to boil the water every time to prepare the juice and to protect them from water borne diseases.
With the introduction of Life Straw, a family product used to purify water, all Mama Berna’s woos will be history.
Hundreds of residents and visitors to Australia’s most Easterly point, Cape Byron, attended the Australian premiere of Sharkwater on Saturday March 3rd. The crowd was addressed by the Generator’s Giovanni Ebono, underwater filmmaker David Hannan and Australian Seabird Rescue’s Rochelle Ferris.
The crowd lingered after the film for questions and answers and expressed an overwhelming desire to take immediate action. The passion of the audience was to ban long line fishing in Australian waters as well as the sale of all sharkfin products.
The Generator will air the issue over coming weeks to guage the best course of action. Many campaigns toward this end already exist.
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — The U.S. government insists it’s deeply engaged in talks started this week on the world’s next climate pact, but other negotiators are already looking ahead to the next administration — and wondering what to expect.
Nations have less than two years to piece together a deal that scientists say is needed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases and stop the planet’s temperatures from rising so high they trigger an environmental disaster.
The high-stakes negotiations that began Monday in Thailand, however, are complicated by the coming presidential election in the United States.
Crucial details — such as how much Washington is willing to cut its emissions — can’t be fully discussed until a new president takes office next year, slowing action on a final deal, some negotiators say. And it’s far from certain what a new administration’s negotiating stance will be.
The International Monetary Fund said in a report released today that sharply reducing the world’s carbon emissions will cost relatively little economically if a carbon-pricing scheme is adopted soon that includes all the major-emitting countries. The report didn’t endorse one specific pricing mechanism, but said that either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system could Continue Reading →