Group items tagged

So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,

At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]

Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.

A robust transmission system is the cornerstone for large-scale integration of wind power in the United States. Therefore, perhaps the greatest barrier to achieving this goal is building new transmission to connect the large amounts of location-constrained wind resources to the load centers. Another goal-limiting factor is the lack of appropriate market rules across the various interconnections in the US. Furthermore any reversal of policy decisions made at Federal and State levels (e.g. Renewable Portfolio Standards) in support of renewable energy could send the wrong signal to the industry causing uncertainty in the markets, potentially stalling the investments in new wind plants. The reality is that there are five election cycles between now and 2030 so it is important that wind energy related policies are sustained during this period.   Other potential barriers to achieving this 20-by-2030 goal include: a surge in the global demand for wind energy which could limit the supply of turbines in the US; another financial crisis during the next two decades which affects the credit and investment markets; and lastly the lack of skilled work force to operate power systems with high penetration of variable generation.

Taking the holistic view, one can understand how some of the most basic conditions of life are threatened by a basic contradiction. Civilization, the quintessential expression of Enlightenment values that relies on ever-expanding energy, threatens to reduce humanity to barbarism if not extinction through exactly such energy production.

or every farmer or rancher who has leased his land for drilling, there are many homeowners living nearby who get nothing but the shitty end of the stick: pollution, noise and a loss of property value.

What gives the film its power is the attention paid to people like Stevens who organized petition drives and showed up at town council meetings to voice their opposition to fracking. They look like Tea Party activists or Walmart shoppers, mostly white and plain as a barn door, but they know that they do not want drilling in their townships and are willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent it. For all of the left’s dismay about its lack of power, the film’s closing credits reveal that there are 312 local anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania made up of exactly such people who will likely be our allies as the environmental crisis deepens.

India’s energy sector emissions are dominated by emissions from electricity production, industrial and construction activities, and transportation (See figure). And while electricity production will drive significant carbon emissions reduction, the “harder-to-abate” transportation and industry sectors will hold the key to India’s net-zero goal, and more so the 1 billion tons reduction by 2030 goal.

Ecologically sustainable energy technologies comprise renewable energy supply together with improved efficiency of energy conversion and use. Together they can mitigate the climate crisis, greatly reduce pollution of air, water and land, create more jobs than are lost in the fossil fuel industries they replace, and contribute to energy independence and social equity. The best technical energy supply strategy is transitioning fossil fuelled electricity to renewables, electrifying most heating and transportation, and producing fuels by using renewable electricity to make hydrogen and ammonia. This technological transition is necessary and urgent, but unlikely to be sufficiently rapid to avoid irreversible climate change. Substantial demand reductions are needed by rich countries, beyond the technological measures of energy efficiency. This would entail an end to growth in energy production, materials extraction, land clearing and population, that is, the creation of a steady-state economy within Earth’s biocapacity.

President Jimmy Carter signed a bill calling for 10,000 megawatts of OTEC capacity to be up and running by 1999. Then oil prices stabilized, administrations changed, and other than a few demonstration projects, nothing happened.

“When people actually have to build stuff that’s got to survive in the ocean and be insured, costs double. Insurance premiums triple,” he said. “And all of a sudden, what looked good when you announced it, you can’t actually get finance to build.”

Binger added that many small island nations still haven’t recovered from the debt they incurred during the oil crisis that began in 1979.