Follow @GreenNewsReport…
(Or use “Click here to listen…” link below.)
(Or use “Click here to listen…” link below.)IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: How many scientists does it take to change a light bulb? Three, according to the Nobel Prize Committee; EPA regulations cut cancer risk from air pollution 65% in CA; L.A. builds an all-electric highway; PLUS: Good news for breathers: Supreme Court upholds (George W. Bush’s) EPA ozone regulations … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)…
| Link: | |
| Embed: |
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Miami Beach races to control flooding from King Tide; Oceans warming much faster than previously thought; Fracking: methane releases jump on public lands; US farmers sue Syngenta over GMO corn rejected by China; Canada launches world’s first carbon capture plant; Why 12-ft traffic lanes are disastrous … PLUS: Buzzfeed asks, “What If We Cared About The Environment Like We Care About Sports?” … and much, MUCH more! …
STORIES DISCUSSED ON TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…
- VIDEO: Science Vs. “Reality” – United Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts spars with Chris Hayes (All In With Chris Hayes)
- Nobel Prize for Physics Goes to LED Inventors:
- LED there be light: 3 share Nobel for blue diode (AP) [emphasis added]:
By inventing a new kind of light-emitting diode, or LED, they overcame a crucial roadblock for creating white light far more efficiently than incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Now LEDs are pervasive and experts say their use will only grow….Their work, done in the early 1990s, led to a fundamental transformation of technology for illumination, the committee said.
- VIDEO: Physics Nobel prize goes to scientists who perfected LED light (CNN)
- VIDEO: Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 (Nobel Prize Youtube Channel):
- Victory for Breathers: SCOTUS Upholds Bush EPA Ozone Regulations:
- EPA Ozone-Pollution Standard Left Intact by High Court (Bloomberg):
The U.S. Supreme Court left intact ozone-pollution standards crafted under former President George W. Bush, rejecting an appeal by a business group that said the rules were too stringent. The rebuff leaves intact a federal appeals court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency had adequate scientific evidence to tighten the standards for ozone, an oxidant that is the principal component of smog.
- U.S. top court rejects challenge to ozone regulations (Reuters)
- U.S. Supreme Court denies industry challenge to ground-level ozone health standard (Environmental Defense Fund)
- Tide Turning Against Global Coal Industry: New Report (DeSmog Blog):
Coal, the fossil fuel that largely sparked the industrial revolution, may be facing the beginning of the end – at least in terms of generating electricity.
- EPA Regs Save Lives: Cancer Risk from Air Pollution Drops 65% In California:
- Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Study in the South Coast Air Basin [PDF] (South Coast Air Quality Management District):
- Cancer risk from air pollution drops in Southern California (LA Times):
Southern Californians’ cancer risk from air pollution has dropped 65% since 2005 but is still too high in many areas, regional air quality regulators said in a report released Thursday.They attribute much of the improvement to tough state and local regulations, incentive programs and cleaner fuels that have slashed diesel emissions from trucks, ships and other vehicles on freeways and in freight corridors and ports.
- Mapping Los Angeles’s Better But Still Terrible Air Quality (CurbedLA):
Don’t breathe too deeply yet….Ninety percent of the contaminants we breathe in the LA basin (a section of SoCal that includes Riverside, Orange, LA, and San Bernardino Counties) come from emissions from trucks, ships, trains, and planes…- Port of L.A. fire spews toxic fumes, prompting air-quality concerns (LA Times)
- EPA Rules Spur Innovation: L.A. Builds Electric Highway:
- Los Angeles Is Building an e-Highway (Atlantic Cities’ City Lab) [emphasis added]:
“We think there’s a disproportional impact on the areas that run along these major corridors,” says Miyasoto. “We do believe it’s an environmental justice issue, and technologies like these which give us zero emission miles in areas where you need it are necessary to ensure not only that the economic engine of our region, the ports, can continue to do business and grow but that the communities aren’t adversely impacted.”
- VIDEO: $13.5-million eHighway system aimed at reducing air pollution at SoCal ports (ABC7 Los Angeles)
‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…
- VIDEO: If We Cared About The Environment Like We Care About Sports (Buzzfeed):
- The Ocean’s Surface Layer Has Been Warming Much Faster Than Previously Thought (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
Surface layers of the ocean have been warming significantly faster than previous estimates had projected, according to a new study. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that the upper 700 meters (about 2,296 feet) of the ocean have been warming 24 to 55 percent faster since 1970 than previously thought.
- Miami Beach in race to control flood ahead of annual King Tide (Reuters) [emphasis added]:
The event, caused by the alignment of the sun, moon and Earth, provides a taste of the potential impact of a longer-term two-foot sea level rise predicted for south Florida by 2060, according to the United States Geological Survey… To combat such widespread flooding, the city has set aside $300 million to 400 million to install up to 50 pumps in the coming years in what some say is a vain effort to protect an estimated $23 billion of real estate.
- Fracking on Public Lands: “Methane Emissions Soar in Drilling Boom” (Houston Chronicle):
Methane emissions from oil and gas wells on federal lands and waters jumped 135 percent from 2008 to 2013, an analysis shows, driven by a drilling boom in New Mexico and North Dakota that has outpaced the building of pipelines and processing centers.
- U.S. Farmers Latest To Sue Syngenta Over GMO Corn Rejected By China (Reuters):
Farmers from the biggest U.S. corn-growing states have sued Syngenta AG over sales of genetically modified corn seed not approved by China, joining global exporters in pursuing damages from the Swiss-based company.
- Can this coal plant stop climate change? (CS Monitor):
A Canadian utility opened the doors on the world’s first commercial-scale coal plant to capture and store its carbon emissions. If the project and others like it are successful, carbon capture and storage technology could play a major role in fighting climate change.
- Like Sea Level, Times Environmental Coverage on the Rise (NY Times):
[A] year ago, the signs weren’t particularly good for coverage of the environment in The New York Times….I’m glad to report, things are looking up again. Since the survival of the planet ranks pretty high on my list of what matters, it seems worth noting here exactly what’s happening and why.
- Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now (The Atlantic) [emphasis added]:
When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don’t fit.
- FRACKING: ‘Moment of Truth’ on Emissions (NY Tiems):
If the administration takes the right course, methane emissions could likely be reduced by 40 percent or 50 percent over the next five years – enough to make natural gas a genuinely cleaner alternative to coal and a critical component in reducing greenhouse gasses. But if it doesn’t – if the government decides to back away from regulation, or allow industry to reduce emissions voluntarily – then the promise of natural gas as a cleaner fuel could well go unrealized.
- VIDEO: August 2014: Greenland is the New Black (Climate Crocks, Dark Snow Project):
Newest observations show the lowest reflectivity on record for Greenland’s Upper elevations.
- More Bad News For Coal: Mountaintop Removal Nixed By Court (CleanTechnia):
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday won another major legal victory in the long saga of one of the largest mountaintop removal mining permits in West Virginia history.
- 4 Scenarios Show What Climate Change Will Do To The Earth, From Pretty Bad To Disaster (Fast CoExist):
But exactly how bad is still an open question, and a lot depends not only on how we react, but how quickly. The rate at which humans cut down on greenhouse gas emissions–if we do choose to cut them–will have a large bearing on how the world turns out by 2100, the forecasts reveal.
FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page
- Skeptical Science: Database with FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Myths
- How to Solve Global Warming: It’s the Energy Supply (Scientific American):
Restraining global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius will require changing how the world produces and uses energy to power its cities and factories, heats and cools buildings, as well as moves people and goods in airplanes, trains, cars, ships and trucks, according to the IPCC. Changes are required not just in technology, but also in people’s behavior.- Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)
- NASA Video: Warming over the last 130 years, and into the next 100 years:
- Filed in Categories: CoalEPAExtreme weatherGreen NewsOil
7 Comments on “‘Green News Report’ – October 7, 2014”
Comments are closed.
- Cancer risk from air pollution drops in Southern California (LA Times):
A paper published about three days ago is based on accurate new measurments of the southern hemisphere oceans:
(The Phrase is Back: “Worse Than Previously Thought”).
Potentially a much more important paper than the one noted @1:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014/10/08/e-cat-report-leaked/
This blog consistently promotes the idea that man made global warming will lead to an apocalypse.
If the technology described in the link is legitimate, which it seems to be, unless this is an incredibly elaborate scam, then this blog should be promoting awareness of this technology as well.
Every government in the world should fast track regulatory clearance so this can come to market as soon as possible.
This tech renders the debate on climate change largely moot, as it completely and utterly nullifies the economic arguments against tackling climate change without having to resort to academic studies to prove the point.
It also narrows down the solutions to a single technology that can eventually be distributed throughout the world in the residential, municipality, industrial, transportation and aviation, spaces.
Every little village with no power and no clean water can have it. Every nuclear power plant can be shut down for good (which is really what will cause a coming environmental apocalypse well before climate change will – since radiation truly does destroy most life irrevocably).
No new taxes, no carbon trading, no reason for any factory or power plant or shipping vessel to ever use a polluting source of energy again for all eternity. It also meets one of the fundamental preconditions necessary to colonize our immediate neighborhood in the solar system.
Further, it is not only a possible alternative to polluting energy sources, it is potentially WAY CHEAPER than any conventional source of energy could ever be, and doesn’t require 0% interest loans (as is required to make fracking profitable) or the destruction of the biosphere to extract the fuel necessary to run it.
The “denialists” will have to agree to implement this because it makes economic sense, and it will usher in a worldwide economic boom the likes of which we have never seen.
If the climate change activists get behind this tech, I think the world can largely eliminate polluting energy sources within ten to fifteen years. (Obviously other uses of petroleum will continue to persist).
If the anti-war activists get behind this, they have the best stupid slogan EVER – “Don’t drop bombs drop CATS bitchez!” But really, if every country had access to this tech, the strategic imperative to control oil and natural gas sources and to secure transportation lines for these resources pretty much disappears overnight.
It also makes it more feasible to deal with the consequences of runaway climate change, as communities affected can essentially relocate and have a stable, effectively limitless distributed supply of power.
The cancerous corruption fostered by the conventional energy conglomerates is nullified and everyone can hold hands and sing hippie songs together and just fucking enjoy life knowing there is a small chance that the future might be better than the present.
SH — Really? Cold fusion?
As always, if the experiment is broadly, independently replicated and confirmed in peer-reviewed literature, we will report on it.
You are mistaken in your statement, “This blog consistently promotes the idea that man made global warming will lead to an apocalypse.”
We report on the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific studies and academic analyses, including the projections and uncertainties within the credentialed scientific community of the different impacts global warming may have on the different geophysical systems on which human society relies. That’s not apocalyptic, it’s just science.
Great! Thank you very much.
Quick follow up. This is a decent summary to give everyone an idea of the general quality and implications of this latest test.
http://lenrftw.net/assessing_ecat_report.html#.VDXM4hZKPHo
Unfortunately, with all of the corruption fostered by energy and banking conglomerates, there is going to be A LOT of obfuscation and censorship if this tech is legit. There will be ridicule, charges of fraud and manipulation etc. This will make it difficult to get these findings peer reviewed. After all, this is an “impossible” invention. On the other hand, maybe a courageous journal will actually publish the recent report. We shall see.
The point is to go in with an open mind and get people thinking about the implications of this tech. The report I linked to above is pretty conclusive in its experimental results (but only speculates on the physics of what is happening). Unless all or some of the testers were hoodwinked or corrupt themselves, of course.
And if this is real, then perhaps the validation will happen in the marketplace, well before it happens by acceptance of the scientific establishment.
One last link:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/10/prweb12239416.htm
“Michael Nelson, Alternate Discipline Leader for SLS Propulsion at NASA’s Propulsion Research and Development Laboratory, notes,
‘I was impressed with the work that was done to insure the measurements claiming a 3.2 to 3.6 COP were accurate. Aside from the fact that this could not have been produced from any known chemical reaction, the most significant finding to me is the evidence of isotopic shifts in lithium and nickel. Understanding this could possibly be the beginning of a whole new era in both material transmutations and energy for the planet and for space exploration. This is an exciting time to live in and this is an exciting technology to witness come about.’â€
Shhhhh,
Don’t tell anybody.
Technology is the tool of the Oil-Qaeda tools.
Not because good technology is bad, but because bad technology is bad.
Thus, Civilization is on Suicide Watch … does that leave you out?.