EcoRadio

Category: News

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.
 

  • Adelaide latest victim of global water shortages

     

    “Another dry year will deplete our reservoirs and the water in the Murray will become too saline to drink. We are talking about 1.3 million people, who are not far off becoming reliant on bottled water. We are talking a national emergency,” said South Australian MP David Winderlich.

    As early as next week, water from parts of the river may become too dangerous to drink, which would require the water authority to begin delivering supplies to hospitals, clinics, aged care facilities and local supermarkets in plastic bottles, said Winderlich.

    “There’s simply too many people pulling water out of the river,” said Roger Strother, Coorong council mayor. “We’ve been saying that one day it would catch up, and this summer is when it is going to happen. It could be next week.”

    Recent rains have topped up Adelaide’s dams, but only enough for one year, and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which oversees water use across the whole of south-east Australia, says water levels in reservoirs are much lower than expected. Today the authority said the whole basin was at 25% capacity.

    Australia’s worst drought in a century has lasted over 10 years in places, and many cities have had to restrict water use.

    Climate experts fear the continent faces a permanently drier future as the impact of global warming kicks in. South Australians have watched the waters stagnate as farmers, especially cotton and rice growers upstream, siphoned up to 83% of the water from the river system.

    The WHO says the acceptable level of salinity for safe drinking water is 800 EC (electrical conductivity) units but the salinity in parts of the Murray is now around 1,200 EC units. The water authority says it will begin shipping water when the salinity rises to 1,400 EC units.

    Adelaide is one of many cities around the world facing acute water shortages as populations grow, long-term droughts continue and ground water is not replenished. The Chinese water minister, Chen Lei, today told engineers at a water conference that two-thirds of Chinese cities now face serious shortages due to rapid industrialisation and climate change.

    “Compared to 1956-79, the average rainfall has dropped 6% in three major river basins,” Lei said. “Most parts in the north of China are now facing water shortages problems, especially because of the increasing influence of climate change and the faster speed of industrialisation and urbanisation.”

    By 2015, Lei said, water efficiency would have to be increased by 30%. “Water abstraction must be strictly controlled. We should have strict management of groundwater exploitation and consumption, put a limit on total use of groundwater, and ban or set quotas on groundwater exploitation. Nearly two out of three cities are facing water shortages, and the farmland affected by drought reaches nearly 15m sq km a year.”

    According to a new UN environment programme report, perennial drought conditions are developing in south-eastern Australia and south-western North America. “Projections suggest that persistent water scarcity will increase in a number of regions in coming years, including southern and northern Africa, the Mediterranean, much of the Middle East, a broad band in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent,” the report said.

    “There is growing concern that thresholds or tipping points may now be reached in a matter of years or a few decades, including dramatic changes to the Indian subcontinent’s monsoon rains, the Sahara and west Africa monsoons, and climate systems affecting the Amazon rainforest,” it said.

    Hopes in some countries that an El Niño weather event would bring rain to parched areas of the US this week declined as the US government climate prediction centre said temperatures in the equatorial Pacific had stopped climbing. During strong El Niños, abnormally warm waters in that region pump heat and moisture into the atmosphere, which leads to intense storms.

     

     

    Cities around the world under water stress

    BEIJING: Most of Beijing’s water comes from the Miyun reservoir, but a decade of drought and huge population increase has left extreme shortages. Water diversion projects are helping, but this is depleting resources from other regions. The city must spend $3.5bn (£2.2bn) in the next five years to cope with a population expected to rise to 17 million.

     

     

    NAIROBI: The city has imposed water rationing, following an acute drought that has affected all Kenya’s water catchment areas. River and reservoirs are at historically low levels. Flower farms and export-oriented agriculture are also reducing supplies available to people.

    MEXICO CITY: 2009 has been the driest year recorded in the city of 19 million people. Water is rationed and many areas have no piped water for days at a time. The government has imposed fines of up to $1,200 for hosing down cars and sidewalks or watering lawns during daytime hours. Signs warn that the city could run out of water next spring unless residents switch to low-flow showers and toilets, and plug leaks.

    GAZA: Water fit for human use will run out in the Gaza strip within 10 years, the Gaza Coastal Municipal Water Utility and UN agencies said this month. Tap water is already salty, and only 5-10% of groundwater is drinkable. Gaza’s population is expected to increase to 3 million by 2025.

    KATHMANDU: Erratic rainfall and drier winters have left Nepal’s capital very short of water. The water company can provide only 160m litres a day but the demand is well over 200m litres. Many households are drilling their own boreholes to extract groundwater with electric pumps, but the water table is sinking approximately 2.5 metres a year and this is not sustainable in the medium term.

  • Dust storms spread deadly diseases worldwide

     

    The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia’s interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

    It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

    As diplomats prepare to meet in Bangkok tomorrow for the next round of climate talks, meteorologists predict that more major dust storms can be expected, carrying minute particles of beneficial soil and nutrients as well as potentially harmful bacteria, viruses and fungal spores.

    “The numbers of major dust storms go up and down over the years,” said Andrew Goudie, geography professor at Oxford University. “In Australia and China they tailed off from the 1970s then spiked in the 1990s and at the start of this decade. At the moment they are clearly on an upward trajectory.”

    Laurence Barrie is chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system. He said: “I think the droughts [and dust storms] in Australia are a harbinger. Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution. The minute particles act like urban smog or acid rain. They can penetrate deep into the human body.”

    Saharan storms are thought to be responsible for spreading lethal meningitis spores throughout semi-arid central Africa, where up to 250,000 people, particularly children, contract the disease each year and 25,000 die. “There is evidence that the dust can mobilise meningitis in the bloodstream,” said Barrie.

    Higher temperatures and more intense storms are also linked to “valley fever”, a disease contracted from a fungus in the soil of the central valley of California. The American Academy of Microbiology estimates that about 200,000 Americans go down with valley fever each year, 200 of whom die. The number of cases in Arizona and California almost quadrupled in the decade to 2006.

    Scientists who had thought diseases were mostly transmitted by people or animals now see dust clouds as possible transmitters of influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth, and increasingly responsible for respiratory diseases. A rise in the number of cases of asthma in children on Caribbean islands has been linked to an increase in the dust blown across the Atlantic from Africa. The asthma rate in Barbados is 17 times greater than it was in 1973, when a major African drought began, according to one major study. Researchers have also documented more hospital admissions when the dust storms are at their worst.

    “We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust implications on health,” said William Sprigg, a climate expert at Arizona University.

    The scale and range of some recent dust storms has surprised scientists. Japanese academics reported in July that a giant dust storm in China’s Taklimakan desert in 2007 picked up nearly 800,000 tonnes of dust which winds carried twice around the world.

    Dust from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts is often present over the western United States in the spring and can lead to disastrous air quality in Korean, Japanese and Russian cities. It frequently contributes to the smogs over Los Angeles. Britain and northern Europe are not immune from dust storms. Dust blown from the Sahara is commonly found in Spain, Italy and Greece and the WMO says that storms deposit Saharan dust north of the Alps about once a month. Last year Britain’s Meteorological Office reported it in south Wales.

    Some scientists sought to attribute the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak to a giant storm in north Africa that carried dust and possibly spores of the animal disease as far as northern Britain only a week before the first reported cases.

    The scale and spread of the dust storms has also surprised researchers. Satellite photographs have shown some of the clouds coming out of Africa to be as big as the whole land mass of the US, with a major storm able to whip more than a million tonnes of soil into the atmosphere. Sydney was covered by an estimated 5,000 tonnes of dust last week, but the WMO says Beijing was enveloped by more than 300,000 tonnes in one storm in 2006.

    “The 2-3 billion tonnes of fine soil particles that leave Africa each year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and biological productivity,” said Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute research group in Washington DC. “Those big storms take millions of tonnes of soil, which takes centuries to replace.”

    Brown and Chinese scientists say the increased number of major dust storms in China is directly linked to deforestation and the massive increase in numbers of sheep and goats since the 1980s, when restrictions on herders were removed. “Goats will strip vegetation,” said Brown. “They ate everything and dust storms are now routine. If climate change leads to a reduction in rainfall, then the two trends reinforce themselves.” China is planting tens of millions of trees to act as a barrier to the advancing desert.

    However, research increasingly suggests that the dust could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients. Iron-rich dust blown from Australia and from the Gobi and Sahara deserts is largely deposited in oceans, where it has been observed to feed phytoplankton, the microscopic marine plants that are the first link in the oceanic food chain and absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, the upper layers of the rainforest in Brazil are thought to derive much of their nutrient supply from dust transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara.

    Just as scientists struggle to understand how dust is affecting climate, evidence is growing that another airborne pollutant, soot, is potentially disastrous. Minute particles of carbon produced by diesel engines, forest fires and the inefficient burning of wood in stoves is being carried just like dust to the remotest regions of the world.

    A study by the United Nations Environment Programme has just concluded that the pollutant has played a major part in shrinking the Himalayan glaciers and has helped to disrupt the south Asian monsoon.

    “Soot accounts from 10% to more than 45% of the contribution to global warming,” said Achim Steiner, director of the UN’s environment programme. “It is linked to accelerated losses of glaciers in Asia because soot deposits darken ice, making it more vulnerable to melting.”

  • Saving our rail lines

    The Greens strongly support a big increase in funding for cycleway and
    pedestrian infrastructure. There is no need to close rail lines and sell off
    associated land to do it.

    This is our campaign page
    http://leerhiannon.org.au/Campaigns/stop-rail-sell-off-1

    Facebook page by rail activists from northern NSW
    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=150753837663

    Parliament is not sitting for the next weeks so we will be campaigning
    across the state on this issue.

    If you could forward this email to your contact lists it would be
    appreciated.

    Please urge your friends and colleagues to lobby these MPs with the message:
    Save NSW rail, don’t vote for the Transport Administration Amendment (Rail
    Trails) Bill 2009.

    David Campbell – Minister for Transport – david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au
    Tony Kelly – Minister for Lands – sharon.armstrong@lands.nsw.gov.au Gladys
    Berejiklian – shadow minister for transport –
    gladys.berejiklian@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Roy Smith – Shooters MP – roy.smith@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Robert Brown – Shooters MP – robert.brown@parliament.nsw.gov.au  
    Fred Nile – Christian Democrat MP – fred.nile@parliament.nsw.gov.au Gordon
    Moyes – Independent MP – gordon.moyes@parliament.nsw.gov.au

    Regards
    Lee

    ————————————————–
    Lee Rhiannon, MLC
    The Greens
    Parliament of New South Wales
    Macquarie St
    Sydney 2000
    Tel: +61-2-9230 3551 Fax: +61-2-9230 3550 Email
    lee.rhiannon@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Web http://www.lee.greens.org.au/

  • The Thaw at the Roof of the World

     

    Because the Tibetan Plateau and its environs shelter the largest perennial ice mass on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctica, it has come to be known as “the Third Pole.” Its snowfields and glaciers feed almost every major river system of Asia during hot, dry seasons when the monsoons cease, and their melt waters supply rivers from the Indus in the west to the Yellow in the east, with the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Rivers in between. (The glaciers on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain contribute much of their water to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.)

    From a distance, Baishui Glacier No. 1 looks as immovable as the defiant mountain above. In reality, it is a fluid field of ice and rock in constant downward motion. Scientists speak about the reactive behavior of these glaciers as if they were almost human. The Tibetan and Naxi peoples who inhabit this region treat them, and their mountain hosts, as embodiments of deities and spirits.

    Now, a growing number of glaciers are losing their equilibrium, or their capacity to build up enough snow and ice at high altitudes to compensate for the rate of melting at lower ones. After surveying the Himalayas for many years, the respected Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong recently warned that, given present trends, almost two-thirds of the plateau’s glaciers could well disappear within the next 40 years. With the planet having just experienced the 10 hottest years on record, the average annual melting rate of mountain glaciers seems to have doubled after the turn of the millennium from the two decades before.

    Moreover, temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising much faster than the global average. A good portion of the area’s existing ice fields has been lost over the past four decades, and the rate of retreat has increased in recent years.

    The slow-motion demise of Baishui Glacier No. 1 will have far-reaching consequences. In the short run, there will, of course, be an abundance of water. But in the long run there will be deficits. These will have national security consequences as countries compete for ever scarcer water resources supplied by transnational rivers with as many as two billion users.

    It was not so long ago that the Tibetan Plateau was seen as a region of little consequence, save to those few Western adventurers drawn to remote regions that the early 20th-century Swedish explorer Sven Hedin once called the “white spaces” on the map. Today, these white spaces play a crucial role in Asia’s ecology.

    Sadly, it may be too late to change the destiny of Baishui Glacier No. 1. But President Hu, by promising this week to try to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product and to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, signaled his willingness to act. China can’t solve this problem alone, and President Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing in November presents an opportunity to forge a bilateral alliance on climate change. After all, the ice fields in the majestic arc of peaks that runs from China to Afghanistan are melting in large part because of greenhouse gases emitted thousands of miles away.

    Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on United States-China Relations, is the author of “Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La From the Himalayas to Hollywood.”

  • Climate groups dimayed at G20

    The final summit statement ageed by the leaders, however, was fairly vague.

    “We will spare no effort to reach agreement in Copenhagen through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations,” it said, without going into specifics of how the funding gap might be met.

    Hopes that the world’s leading powers would get behind measures to help poorer countries fight climate change were raised in July in L’Aquila, Italy, when G8 leaders sent their finance ministers to seek sources of cash.

    On Friday, however, the broader G20 group promised simply to “intensify our efforts” and sent the ministers back to do some more research.

    “We welcome the work of the finance ministers and direct them to report back at their next meeting with a range of possible options for climate change financing,” the final statement said.

    “This was not a breakthrough on the climate issue … but over lunch we had a very open discussion that we need to take responsibility as leaders,” said Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who chairs the European Union.

    Reinfeldt promised the leaders would seek to meet again within two weeks to take another stab at resolving the issue, but pressure groups were outraged, singling out Obama and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel for scorn.

    “This is a crisis of leadership. The rich-country G20 leaders – especially Merkel and Obama – set themselves a deadline for a climate finance proposal, and then slept right through it,” said Ben Wikler of Avaaz.

    “Until the US, EU and Japanese leaders wake up and put together a serious climate finance plan, there will be a 150 billion dollar pothole on the road to Copenhagen,” he told reporters in Pittsburgh for the summit.

    Max Lawson, senior policy adviser for the aid agency Oxfam, said: “With 72 days to Copenhagen rich countries have once again refused to put up the funds needed to deliver the deal in Copenhagen.”

    The G20 did endorse an Obama-inspired plan to reduce government subsidies on fossil fuels, a move welcomed but dismissed as not enough by campaigners, but no one was pretending the leaders made progress towards a Copenhagen deal.

    Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the summit only took up global warming in broad terms and that he simply didn’t know whether there would be a new deal to be signed in Denmark to replace the Kyoto protocol.

    “I’m not an astrologer,” Singh told a news conference dismissively.

    “There is a broad, vague agreement that any agreement in which developing countries are also required to take any national action will have to be accompanied by credible action on the part of developed countries,” he said.

    “But other than expressing a pious wish with regard to the success of the framework convention meeting in Copenhagen, the Group of 20 I think did not go into the mechanics of these things.”

    The Kyoto Protocol required rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions but the requirements expire at the end of 2012, and experts say emerging powers such as India and China must take part if a new plan is to succeed.

    AFP

  • STOP CAPITALISM DEFINING HUMAN NATURE

     

    When what were regarded in a more primitive age as negative attributes are magically re-formed so they shine as virtues, it is easy to persuade ourselves that these represent human nature. It gives us permission, as it were, to be intemperate, self-indulgent and greedy. The morality of economic growth and expansion has invaded the psyche, the inner sites where people struggle with how to be a good person; and now reigns as the ultimate revelation of what it means to be human.

    The success of industrial society depends on this grim account of “reality”. “You can’t change human nature” is the first article in the credo of capitalism; a mildly sorrowful recognition that human beings are “essentially” selfish, irremediably “fallen” in fact: and this exhibits continuity in what might, at first sight, seem a radical break with Christian teaching.

    If the first article of capitalism has been the unalterability of human nature, its second has been a relentless remaking, domination and plunder of the rest of the natural world. Nature itself has been infinitely pliable, to be used and shaped to any purpose “humanity” proposes. Whole continents have been subjugated, forests felled, watercourses diverted, the earth gutted, seas fished to extinction; only human nature, remains triumphant, invincible.

    The weight of the dazzling iconography of production and consumption, together with these vices-become-virtues leaves no room for other, eclipsed visions of the better world that this one might have been, but can no longer be, since these have been colonised by one of the many possible versions of prosperity or well-being. If the western view of the world has prevailed over all others, this is not so much a sign of its providential truth as of its physical power.

    If this story of human purposes contains some truth, that truth conceals an even greater falsehood. It is undeniable that human beings have always longed for more, have yearned for possessions that will serve as a bulwark against existential desolation, as an illusion against eternity – the tombs of history are strewn with precious objects to accompany the deceased even into the afterlife. But, no one has ever before seriously believed that bliss is to be attained in this brief life, even those who have professed total faith in the pursuit of happiness.

    Religion has always taught the necessity for restraint, limits and the impossibility of transcendence in this world. The ideology of limitless growth turns this on its head: it injects an otherworldly cosmology into an ostensibly secular context. Instead of promising happiness in the hereafter, it offers a happy eternity in the here-and-now. These doctrines are far more impossible of fulfilment than the dogmas of any religious faith; for while it cannot be proved that there is no afterlife, it is obvious that perpetual happiness in a life limited by insecurity, pain and loss is a vain endeavour. This is why much of the resistance to capitalist ideology comes from the religious; since priests, imams and intermediaries with the other world are well aware that it is their territory that is being trampled.

    The conviction that the natural world is ours for the taking, but that human nature remains closed to change, has led directly to multiple global crises – climate change, growing inequality, and, less noted, but perhaps even more significant, a pervasive, doomed and morbid desire for the unattainable. It has now been recognised that disturbance of the biosphere, an addiction to progress, the accumulated effects of human action, have led directly to global warming; but there has been – understandably – far greater reluctance to recognise the role of an unalterable human nature in the achievement of this melancholy state.

    This equation cannot be selectively modified, since it is, in its way, a holistic view of the world. Any resolution of the threats posed by globalisation requires a reversal of the ideology: the very opposite is needed of the cynical, taken-for-granted fatalism about the nature of humanity, for this has led to immobilism and sense of powerlessness in engaging effectively with the present crisis.

    The most urgent work is to address this fiction of human nature, which is viewed as the only fixed point in the constant churning of feverish change and growth. Human nature is not as it has been painted by the self-justifying prophets of economic ideology. It is one thing to compel people to behave in a particular way and then to approve the outcome of such conduct as in accord with human nature. If there is no public space for other attributes of humanity, this bleak view will inevitably crowd out our capacity for generosity, selflessness, sacrifice and kindness. We know these things exist: only they are barred, proscribed guests from the sombre economic banquet, except for the crumbs of philanthropy of leftovers. Ruthless, self-centred, individualistic – if these characteristics are rewarded, who will not cultivate them, leaving human virtues to be practised furtively, in the secrecy of a private life where they have been incarcerated as spoilers of the economic game?

    “We must change nature, but we can’t change human nature” has been the cry of the most serious conservationists of all, those who would conserve intact the dominant unjust paradigm. Even for the modest aim of 10:10 to work effectively in Britain, other human possibilities will have to be aroused from the common grave of unsettling ideas; among them, a reawakening of the resourcefulness, creativity and flexibility of people, which alone can mitigate our baleful effects upon the planet.

    Perhaps there are, for the rich, other ways of being prosperous, and for the poor, other pathways out of poverty than those we know. But they remain blocked by the immoveable conviction that the disciplines of the market economy – that alliance of destructiveness of nature and the inviolability of our human nature – are still the only route to the realisation of our deepest dreams and avoidance of our worst nightmares.

    It has now been generally acknowledged that the plunder of nature must cease; but without confronting the source of those predations, our chances of survival are becoming smaller by the day. Some radical questions arise, not the least of which is why it has become so difficult to distinguish between the nature of industrialism and the industrialising of our own nature?