Posted: April 25th, 2007 | Author:admin | Filed under:Uncategorized | Comments Off
The Kyoto Protocol is doomed. The reason is simple. Someday the Europeans are going to come to their senses and realize that Kyoto promised something they can’t deliver and Russia is making out like the bandits they are.
To reduce carbon dioxide emissions the Europeans are using more natural gas. Where are they getting a lot of it? Russia. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you want to give Vladamir Putin the power to halt the supply of natural gas to your country, like he did to the Ukraine in 2006.
Russia has for the first time submitted its greenhouse gas inventory to the UNFCCC. Compared to the national communication submitted in October, the 1990 emissions
A recent study from the Environmental Science and Technology journal raises some new concerns about ethanol-based E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) which can be used in automobiles. The study finds that if much of the country’s fuel supply would switch from gasoline to E85, the number of deaths from respiratory failure (due to ozone) in the United States would rise from 4,700 people a year to nearly 4,900 per year.
“It’s not green in terms of air pollution,” said study author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University environmental engineering professor and author of the study. “If you want to use ethanol, fine, but don’t do it based on health grounds. It’s no better than gasoline, apparently slightly worse.”
I’m not sure what to think of Prudhomme. He apparently wants cycling to be clean, but as far as I can tell, Basso was cleared by the appropriate authorities. Regardless, there is something really good that may come out of this–Levi Leipheimer may be the Discovery Team leader at the Tour de France. That bodes well for Leipheimer since the Discovery Channel team is probably the best cycling team right now and they may be able to power him to victory.
Posted: April 4th, 2007 | Author:admin | Filed under:Uncategorized | Comments Off
Sunday’s Washington Post top-of-the-fold story was about illegal and ecologically damaging logging in China, Burma, and Russia. Just before the jump, the Post had these two paragraph:
Mountains of logs, many of them harvested in excess of legal limits aimed at preserving forests, are streaming toward Chinese factories where workers churn out such products as furniture and floorboards. These wares are shipped from China to major retailers such as Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe’s and many others. They land in homes and offices in the United States and Europe, bought by shoppers with little inkling of the wood’s origins or the environmental costs of chopping it down.
“Western consumers are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries,” said an American environmental activist who frequently travels to Burma and goes by the pen name Zao Noam to preserve access to the authoritarian country. “Predominantly, the Burmese timber winds up as patio furniture for Americans. Without their demand, there wouldn’t be a timber trade.”
Without their demand, there wouldn’t be a timber trade? That may be true. It’s also true that one of the reasons there is so much logging in China, Burma, and Russia is because developed countries have stopped much of their logging because of environmentalists. One reply to Zao Noam is that, western environmentalists are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries. There wouldn’t be a demand for as much Burmese timber if western environmentalists didn’t shut down so much logging in the west. Without the environmentalists there would be a much smaller Burmese timber trade.
