From the IEEE Spectrum website: By the year 2030, the 8 billion people on Earth will face an annual water shortfall of 2700 billion cubic liters, and the world will demand 45 percent more energy than it does now. We can't solve one problem without solving the other. Join thousands of IEEE members
online starting 3 June 2010 at 12 noon ET (5 p.m. UTC) in a massively multiplayer forecasting experiment dubbed E = H20. Whether
you have 5 hours or 5 minutes, you can help explore the future at the intersection of water and energy.
About This Experiment:
E = H20 is a collaboration between IEEE Spectrum magazine and the Institute for the Future's Signtific Lab, a microforecasting platform developed by the Institute for the Future to foster open discussion about the future of science and technology. Register
This important essay by Ray McGovern makes a compelling case for the recommendation he makes last two paragraphs which are repeated in italics below:
“As a former CIA analyst, I hope that Obama would have the presence of mind to order a fast-track special National Intelligence Estimate on the implications of the Iran-Brazil-Turkey agreement for U.S. national interests and those of the countries of the Middle East.
Obama needs an unvarnished assessment of the agreement’s possible benefits (and its potential negatives) as counterweight to the pro-Israel lobbying that will inevitably descend on the White House and State Department.”
The times may be a-changin’ — at least a bit — with the United States and Israel no longer able to dictate to the rest of the world how crises in the Middle East must be handled, though the new reality has been slow to dawn on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her neocon friends in Congress and the U.S. media.
They may think they are still in control, still the smart ones looking down at upstarts like the leaders of Turkey and Brazil who had the audacity to ignore U.S. warnings and press ahead with diplomacy to head off a possible new war, this one over Iran.
On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced success in persuading Iran to send roughly 50 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that would be put to peaceful medical uses.
My good friend Robert Bryce tries to inject a little truth into a green technology known as Carbon Capture. He is author of several energy-related books, including the the book shown below.
May 12, 2010
A Bad Bet on Carbon
By ROBERT BRYCE
On Wednesday John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.
Washington
Amazon Page
That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.
Planned and deployed drill sites and oil spill coverage
Drill rig
The Katrina Myth;
the Truth about a thoroughly unnatural disaster
Related:
Center for Public Integrity project on recent oil spill (May 11)
The Center for Public Integrity partnered with ABC News to reveal the serious lack of government and industry preparedness for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Exclusively-obtained government reports about a series of spill exercises — one as recently as March 25 — warned of a lack of tools to contain a spewing oil well in deep water and of bureaucratic confusion in declaring a “Spill of National Significance” that activates a full federal response. The Center's report was part of ABC's Nightline program on Tuesday, and was prominently featured on The Blotter, a blog written by ABC News' chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross.
As part of the oil spill drill story, the Center experimented with an online library on our website to share investigative materials with readers. We posted the U.S. Coast Guard's after-action reports on past oil spill training exercises using DocumentCloud — an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.
In my last blaster (here), I raised a question of whether the Israelis were trying to hijack the Green Lobby or whether they were ready for the rubber room. This was made in response to a report by Jonathan Cook that contended Israel was greenwashing war on terror. It turns out that I may have phrased this question in naive, simplistic terms, if my good friend Pierre Sprey (a justifiably well known weapons analyst, mathematician, and recording entrepreneur) is correct, Israel's motives for trying to hijack the Green Lobby can be viewed in a larger, longer range context. Below is his most interesting analysis of Israel's motives for greenwashing the war on terror: Chuck
I totally agree that the currently faddish alternate energy sources are ludicrously uneconomical and, for the most part, environmentally harmful. The only alternate source that could almost completely supplant oil and that actually makes economic and environmental sense, natural gas, is currently among the most unfashionable.
Nevertheless, there's an important larger perspective to Israel's dead serious push to raise huge amounts of capital (guess where?) to produce non-oil based energy from trendy green sources in large enough quantities to reduce worldwide oil demand significantly.
That perspective is simple: unbeknownst to most, the absolute highest priority objective of Israeli foreign policy, from 1949 to today, has been to break the Seven Sisters oil cartel's stranglehold on world oil production in order to collapse the world price of oil. From Israel's point of view, that's a perfectly rational strategic objective–and, almost certainly, the only Israeli objective I know of that would be a major benefit to the world.
The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not ordinary citizens). If and when the need arises, any bit of news that is damaging to the targeted state will be fed into the demonization process — and in the marvelous propaganda system of the West, the grossest distortions will be swallowed and regurgitated without much guilt or apology, even upon the exposure of exceptional gullibility and dishonesty. The dishonesty, gullibility, double standard, and hypocrisy are handled with an aplomb that Pravda and Izvestia could never muster in the Soviet era.
. . . . . . .
Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago
Phi Beta Iota: See the table at the Monthly Review Zine to truly appreciate the spectacular relevance of the total commentary by the lead author who with Noam Chomsky was a half-century ahead of the pack in understanding how Potemkin Democracy might be foisted on a deliberately disengaged public.
