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The Sydney Morning Herald, 28/1/2006, p. 3

Source: Erisk – www.erisk.net

It says an unprecedented outbreak of co-operation between countries,
applied through six specific financial tools, would slice through the
Gordian knot of problems that have bedevilled the world for most of the
last century.

If its recommendations are accepted – and the authors acknowledge
this could take years or even decades – it could finally force
countries to face up to the fact that their public finance and growth
figures conceal the vast damage their economies do to the environment.

At the heart of the proposal, unveiled at a gathering of world
business leaders at the Swiss ski resort of Davos, is a push to get
countries to account for the cost of failed policies, and use the money
saved “up front” to avert crises before they hit. Top of the list is a
challenge to the United States to join an international pollution
permit trading system which, the UN claims, could deliver $3.64trn of
global wealth.

Inge Kaul, a special adviser at the UNDP, said: “The way we run our
economies today is vastly expensive and inefficient because we don’t
manage risk well and we don’t prevent crises.” She downplayed concerns
over up-front costs and interest payments for the new-fangled financial
devices. “The gains in terms of development would outweigh those costs.
Money is wasted because we dribble aid, and the costs of not solving
the problems are much, much higher than what we would have to pay for
getting the financial markets to lend the money.”

The UNDP is determined to ensure globalisation, which has generated
vast wealth for multinational companies, benefits the poorest in
society.

It urges politicians to embrace some groundbreaking schemes put in
place in the past 12 months to tackle global warning, poverty and
disease, based on working with the global markets to share out the risk.

These include a pilot international finance facility (IFF) to “front
load” $4bn of cash for vaccines by borrowing money against pledges of
future government aid.

The scheme, which is backed by the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden
and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was born out of a proposal
by Gordon Brown for a larger scheme to double the total aid budget to
$100bn a year.

In an endorsement of the report, Mr Brown said: “This shows how we
can equip people and countries for a new global economy that combined
greater prosperity and fairness both within and across nations.”

The UNDP says rich countries should build on this and go further. It proposes six schemes to harness the power of the markets:

* Reducing greenhouse gas emissions through pollution permit trading; net gain $3.64trn.

* Cutting poor countries’ borrowing costs by securing the debts
against the income from stable parts of their economies; net gain
$2.90trn.

* Reducing government debt costs by linking payments to the country’s economic output; net gain $600bn.

* An enlarged version of the vaccine scheme; net gain (including benefits of lower mortality) $47bn.

* Using the vast flow of money from migrants back to their home country to guarantee; net gain $31bn.

* Aid agencies underwriting loans to market investors to lower interest rates; net gain $22bn.

Professor Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank and
a staunch critic of the way globalisation harms the poor, said:
“Globalisation has meant the closer integration of countries, and that
in turn has meant a greater need for collective action.

“One of the most important areas of failure is the environment.
Without government intervention, firms and households have no incentive
to limit their pollution.” He said a global public finance system would
force countries to acknowledge the external damage their policies had,
“the most important being global climate change”.

Solving the environmental crisis tops the UN’s $7trn wish-list. It
calls for an international market to trade pollution permits that would
encourage rich countries to cut pollution and hit their targets under
the Kyoto protocol.

But – and the UN admits it is a big “but” – the US would have to
sign up to Kyoto and carbon trading to achieve the $3.64trn that it
believes the system would deliver over time.

“We are dealing with a global problem as pollution can only be dealt
with internationally,” Ms Kaul said. Richard Sandor, the head of the
Chicago Climate Exchange, added: “Many encouraging signs are emerging.
When the business case is clear, private entrepreneurs step forward.”

But, the proposal is unlikely to get support from some green groups
who believe that action to curb consumption, rather than market
incentives, are the way to reduce carbon emissions.

Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation, said it left
unanswered questions over how these markets would be managed and how
the benefits and costs would be distributed. “We have nothing against
markets so it would be missing the point to get into a pro- or
anti-market stance. The point is how you distribute the benefits.”

 

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The Independent Online Edition

The most interesting area of application of mechanical waves is geophysical.

Natural
waves, whose sources are crustal movements, tides or deep disturbances,
give the only information on the interior of the earth, and are
interesting on their own. Artificial waves, from explosions intentional
and unintentional, or mechanical pounding, are used to explore the
upper layers of the crust, scientifically, or for structural traps for
petroleum. In this case the medium is not isotropic or homogeneous, but
horizontally stratified, which introduces further complication.  

The
existence of structured and organized mechanical waves is the signature
of a living earth that manifests all signs of life.   It is easy
to find the wave equations for the main types of bulk plane waves in an
isotropic medium, since we can use principal axes. That really defines
the earth’s heartbeat.  

This brings into question serious
questions about extraterrestrial life structures. They may not be
biological and organic in nature after all. They can be in the form
mechanical wave structures in the crust of a planet or star or even a
black hole.   According to some scientists every heavenly bodies
in this cosmos are alive and are guided by Zero Point Energy
structures.

The life is centered around ZPEs and the outer
shell can take any form.   Even a neutron star or a black hole is
alive, says some scientists. All ZPEs are connected by the central
mechanism of integrated consciousness the underlying basis of higher
dimensional existence in the Hyperspace. Sourced from – India Daily Technology Team

Bio-fuel

Mr Wannacott said Japanese manufacturers had led
the way on hybrid electric and petrol cars but all major manufacturers
were developing hydrogen and bio-fuel engines.

He urged the government to provide incentives and build
infrastructure to encourage the take-up of hydrogen, which he said was
about 15 to 20 years away.

But Professor Blythe, who is one of the key contributors
to the government future transport strategy, claimed it was the
manufacturers who were dragging their feet.

“We have had a lot of meetings with car companies, who
promote their green credentials – but they say we are not going to do
much for the next 20 to 30 years because our customers don’t want to
pay more.

“Japanese car manufacturers seem to be much more progressive than some of the European or American ones,” he said.

Perpetual motion

He was speaking at the launch of a report on the long-term shape of UK transport policy.

The report includes four alternative scenarios of what
life might be like in 50 years time to help industry and government
plan future transport infrastructure.

The scenarios are:

• Perpetual motion – Demand for travel remains
  strong thanks to continued globalisation and growth. Cars have got
  faster but more green, air travel still popular but expensive.
  

• Urban colonies – Environment top priority
  for government. Car use expensive and restricted. Public transport
  widely used but rural areas lose out.
  

• Tribal trading – Energy crisis has caused
  mass unemployment. Long distance travel a luxury few can afford. World
  has shrunk to local communities for most people.
  

• Good intentions – Tough government measures
  restrict carbon emissions. Traffic volumes have fallen but the market
  has failed to provide new energy sources.

Asked which of the scenarios would appeal to car
manufacturers, Professor Blythe said: “I suspect they would not favour
any of them.”

Road pricing

He said the way people used their cars would have to change over time to make it a more “efficient” form of transport.

Road pricing schemes, electronic networks to help people
plan journeys better or even replacing private car ownership with
public cars-on-demand schemes could all play a part, he added.

Mr Wannacott said the car industry backed “smarter use of cars and commercial vehicles”, which would free roads from congestion.

But he added: “I can never see a time when our love affair with the car wanes.

“There will always be an element of glamour: you are
safe, you are free to go where you choose, you are not restricted to
doing things the way somebody else wants you to do them. It is about
personal freedom.”

Source – BBC News  

The report, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, collates
evidence presented by scientists at a conference hosted by the UK
Meteorological Office in February 2005.

The conference set two principal objectives: to ask what
level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is too much, and what the
options are for avoiding such a level.

In the report’s foreword, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
writes that “it is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases…
is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.”

Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett said the report’s conclusions would be a shock to many people.

“The thing that is perhaps not so familiar to members of
the public… is this notion that we could come to a tipping point
where change could be irreversible,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today
programme.

“We’re not talking about it happening over five minutes,
of course, maybe over a thousand years, but it’s the irreversibility
that I think brings it home to people.”

Vulnerable ecosystems

The report sets out the effects of various levels of temperature increase.

 

To continue reading this report –

Source BBC News 

The Daily Telegraph, 26/1/2006, p. 34

Source: Erisk – www.erisk.net