Add your news
You can add news from your networks or groups through the website by becoming an author. Simply register as a member of the Generator, and then email Giovanni asking to become an author. He will then work with you to integrate your content into the site as effectively as possible.
Listen to the Generator News online
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.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
March 9, 2010 Solar Industry To Hit US $77B in 2015 Boston, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com] As the books close on what was a turbulent 2009 for the solar industry, Lux Research said that the solar market will soon see the lopsided supply and demand that characterized much of the last year return to equilibrium. According Continue Reading →
Married to the Lehman mob
In the book, Dick Fuld is revealed to be a cheif executive less interested in Lehman Brothers’ daily business than dress codes at the company’s strictly attended parties and fund-raising events. Source: AFP
WHEN an explosive 2200-page legal report on the collapse of Lehman Brothers landed with a thud in New York last week exposing the grand deception the firm used for years to mask its perilous financial situation, many were left wondering how so many of its senior executives could have been so bloody stupid.
What made them think that they were so special that the normal rules of the market, of the law and of common sense did not apply to them?
The answers to these questions can be found in The Devil’s Casino, a forthcoming expose on Lehman by Vicky Ward, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.
A British journalist who moved to New York in 1997, she lives in a smart town house in Greenwich Village. The idea for the book, her first, came to her after she had written a profile of Jean-Marie Messier, former chief of the French media company Vivendi, for which she approached many Vivendi insiders.
“Nobody would talk to me because they were all so terrified,” she says, “but the moment he fell from power, everybody wanted to talk.” Ward knew it would not be hard to find Lehman insiders, some of whom were acquaintances, to talk, but she had little idea that she would finally write a book that focused more on the saga of the firm’s behind-the-scenes life than the drama of its ending. The book lifts the lid on the extraordinary culture of a firm where an almost messianic belief in unity – motto: “one firm” – turned its New York offices into a sealed capsule that shut itself off from the rest of the world like a cult.
March 15, 2010
THE nation’s two leading scientific agencies will release a report today showing Australia has warmed up significantly over the past 50 years. It is a response to recent attacks on the science underpinning climate change.
The ”State of the Climate” snapshot, drawn together by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, shows the mean temperature has increased 0.7 degrees since 1960.
The snapshot also finds average daily maximum temperatures have increased every decade for the past 50 years.
The report states temperature observations, among other indicators, ”clearly demonstrate climate change is real”.
Nearly 500 species of plants and animals have disappeared in England in the past 200 years, according to the first comprehensive audit of native wildlife.
The disappearances, which have been largely attributed to human activities, include four species that did not exist anywhere else. The great auk, a flightless seabird similar to a penguin, Ivell’s sea anemone, Mitten’s beardless-moss and York groundsel, a weed, have all become extinct since 1800.
“These species were lost on our watch. In the late 1980s the last Ivell’s anemone died out in a lagoon near Chichester,” said Dr Tom Tew, chief scientist for Natural England.
The York groundsel was discovered in 1979 by Richard Abbott, a biologist from St Andrews University, offering the first glimpse of “evolution in action” in Britain. However, the fragile existence of the species had come to an end by 2000, partly because of the use of weedkiller by York City Council.
Oil cartel fears losing control over supply as Iraqi output hits 20-year high
OPEC fears that its grip on the global supply of oil is being threatened by the rising output of Iraq’s oilfields and the prospect of billions of dollars of multinational investment in the world’s leading untapped oil resource.
Iraqi oil exports in February were at their highest in 20 years, at an average of 2.08 million barrels per day, and the country plans to lift that to 2.15mbpd for the rest of the year.
According to the International Energy Agency, oil output from the country’s ageing infrastructure rose by 115,000bpd to 2.54m – the biggest single contributor last month to world oil-supply growth.
Moreover, Iraq is starting to worry OPEC, whose members meet on Wednesday in Vienna to review production quotas.
Fewer homes will now be insulated Australia-wide because the government has to pay to fix the bungled home insulation program, Treasurer Wayne Swan says.
The $2.45 billion program was axed following the deaths of four installers and nearly 90 house fires.
It’s to be replaced with a new and better-regulated scheme from June.
But Mr Swan has admitted the money needed to fix the axed program will come from the new scheme’s budget.
