Category: Earth Intelligence

Paul Krugman: Saving The Planet ‘Might Be Free’

Economist and columnist for The New York Times Paul Krugman says he’s been reading “two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change” that prove saving the planet could be “cheaper and easier than almost anyone imagines.”

Here’s a sampling of the evidence that suggests to him that the “economics of climate protection look even better now than they did a few years ago”:

On one side, there has been dramatic progress in renewable energy technology, with the costs of solar power, in particular, plunging, down by half just since 2010. Renewables have their limitations — basically, the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow — but if you think that an economy getting a lot of its power from wind farms and solar panels is a hippie fantasy, you’re the one out of touch with reality.

On the other side, it turns out that putting a price on carbon would have large “co-benefits” — positive effects over and above the reduction in climate risks — and that these benefits would come fairly quickly. The most important of these co-benefits, according to the I.M.F. paper, would involve public health: burning coal causes many respiratory ailments, which drive up medical costs and reduce productivity.

Of course, the wrench in the machine of Krugman’s last point is the utter lack of evidence that leaders in government and business run their cost-benefit analyses with entire societies in mind. Rather, they limit their concerns to their locales, social classes and enterprises—and sometimes, as in cases of control fraud, to themselves alone.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Paul Krugman on Saving the Planet “For Free” PLUS New Book List”

Here is some important and fascinating new quantum research.

Weekender: Quantum Biology? Scientists Discover Amazing Quantum Processes At Work In Nature
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The “interconnectedness of all things” is a notion embraced by the spiritual community and, more recently, by science in the field of quantum mechanics.

This area of research is still regarded as largely theoretical by the scientific community, however, unlike the “nuts and bolts” science that focuses on improving our medical and technological knowledge with solid, peer-reviewed studies.

Yet a recent finding made by UCSF scientists seems to a have distinctly quantum flavor to it: in a discovery that directly contradicts the standard biological model of animal cell communication, researchers discovered that typical cells in animals have the ability to transmit and receive biological signals by making physical contact with each other, even at long distance. The mechanism appears to be similar to the way neurons communicate with other cells, and contrasts the standard understanding that non-neuronal cells “basically spit out signaling proteins into extracellular fluid and hope they find the right target,” explained senior investigator Thomas B. Kornberg, PhD, a professor of biochemistry with the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute.

In the study, the results of which was published earlier this year in the journal Science, living tissue from fruit flies was used to demonstrate that cells send out long, thin tubes of cytoplasm called cytonemes, which Kornberg said “can extend across the length of 50 or 100 cells” before touching the cells they are targeting. The point of contact between a cytoneme and its target cell acts as a communications bridge between the two cells.

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