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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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Species Collapse:(3)
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carbon emissions  ~ oil issues  ~ health impacts  ~ global warming  ~ climate impacts  ~ ocean acidification  ~ contamination  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ massive die-off  ~ bad policy  ~ ocean warming  



ApocaDocuments (3) matching "bad policy" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "bad policy"]
Sat, Jul 31, 2010
from Technology Review:
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Dwarf Support for Renewables
A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance says altogether governments spent between $43 and $46 billion on renewable energy and biofuels last year, not including indirect support, such as subsidies to corn farmers that help ethanol production. Direct subsidies of fossil fuels came to $557 billion, the report says. This disparity raises the question--if the report is right and fossil fuels require so much backing, can they compete with renewables without government support? After all, some renewables--such as sugarcane based biofuels and some wind farms--can already compete with fossil fuels. Without the huge government subsidies for fossil fuels, wouldn't they be eclipsed by renewables? The answer, for now, is no. So far renewables just can't provide enough fuel and power to displace fossil fuels. ...


Quit subsidizing the most profitable industry on earth? But who knows what chaos might ensue?

ApocaDoc
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Sat, Jul 31, 2010
from IEEE Spectrum:
Technically Speaking: Hacking the Planet
My goal here, as usual, is to focus on the new language being generated by geoengineers and others in this burgeoning field, and there's plenty of it. The overall goal of solar radiation management (or SRM)--the various schemes to reflect sunlight back into space and thus reduce global warming--is global dimming, which is the gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface. One way to do this is to increase Earth's overall reflectivity, which is also called its albedo, so this form of planet hacking is known as albedo engineering. Examples of proposed projects include cloud brightening, increasing the reflectivity of marine clouds (also called cloud whitening); creating a stratoshield through stratosphere doping.... These two procedures are linked as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Strategies include adding nutrients to the ocean to increase the number of organisms that can capture carbon, known as ocean nourishment (when the nutrient is iron, this technique is also called iron fertilization); making artificial trees with plastic "leaves" that capture carbon; creating carbon sinks, reservoirs that store carbon; injecting carbon into underground geological structures (geosequestration) or into biological entities (biosequestration), particularly a form of charcoal called biochar; and pumping carbon into the deep ocean, where it dissolves (ocean dissolution). ...


Now that we have a special language for geoengineering, we're ready for groupthink!

ApocaDoc
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Mon, Jul 26, 2010
from Discover Magazine:
The Best Flavor of Geoengineering Stills Leaves a Bad Taste
In theory, geoengineering seems like the ideal remedy for our climate ills. Some white reflective roofs here, a little ocean fertilization there, a few simulated volcanic eruptions, and voila! you have a potential fix for one of the world's most intractable problems. But there's good reason to believe that many of these proposed schemes would prove much costlier to the planet over both the short- and long-term than more mainstream approaches to addressing climate change--and leave a number of critical problems, like ocean acidification, in the lurch.... The rapidly changing nature of climate models, from which most of these findings are drawn, also makes it inherently difficult to predict with any uncertainty what this scheme's exact outcome will be. What is certain, however, is that it would have a fair number of unintended consequences--almost all of which would be bad. According to a new paper in Nature Geoscience, stratospheric geoengineering, or "solar-radiation management," as the authors refer to it, would affect different parts of the world differentially (go figure), helping to cool down some countries while cooking others. ...


It doesn't just taste bad.

ApocaDoc
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