BBC Science & Technology — The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun. The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy. The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.

To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it. Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a “seismic event”. “It would mark the transition for laser fusion from ‘physics’ to ‘engineering reality’,” he said.

The California-based NIF is the largest experimental science facility in the US and contains the world’s most powerful laser. It has taken 12 years to build.

“This is a major milestone,” said Dr Ed Moses, director of the facility. “We are well on our way to achieving what we set out to do - controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain for the first time ever in a laboratory setting.”

Experiments will begin in June 2009, with the first significant results expected between 2010 and 2012.

Fusion is looked on as the Holy Grail of energy sources because of its potential to supply almost limitless clean energy. But the challenge of creating a practical fusion reactor has eluded scientists for decades. Now, however, they believe they are nearing their goal.

“We are now very close to the culmination of 50 years’ effort,” explained Professor Dunne. (03/31/09)
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BBC Medical Science — A cheap five-in-one pill can guard against heart attacks and stroke, research suggests. The concept of a polypill for everyone over 55 to cut heart disease by up to 80% was mooted over five years ago, but slow progress has been made since.

Now a trial in India shows such a pill has the desired effects and is safe and well-tolerated by those who take it. Although The Lancet study is proof of concept, experts still question the ethics of a pill for lifestyle issues. The polypill used in the latest study combines five active pharmacological ingredients widely available separately - aspirin, a statin to lower cholesterol and three blood pressure-lowering drugs - as well as folic acid. Trials on 2,053 healthy individuals free of cardiovascular disease, but with a risk factor such as high blood pressure or a long-term smoker, showed combining the drugs into one tablet delivered a similar effect to each drug separately.

Reductions were seen in both blood pressure and cholesterol without any major side effects. The researchers believe that the combined action of all the components in their “Polycap” capsule made by Cadila Pharmaceuticals, could potentially halve strokes and heart attacks in average, middle-aged people. On a global scale, this would save tens of millions of lives.

The study, led by Dr Salim Yusuf, from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, took in people at 50 centres across India. A spokeswoman for the British Heart Foundation said: “The results suggest that the polypill has the potential to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease. (03/31/09)
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Brian Liloia writes: In the small town of La Plata, Missouri, something of a revolution is beginning. A brand new intentional community has recently formed, and its aims and message are radical, inspiring,
and daring: the Possibility Alliance is a completely car-free,
petroleum-free, and electricity-free community striving to raise a new
level of awareness regarding sustainable, cooperative, and
compassionate living.

Currently composed of a small handful of members, the Possibility
Alliance is totally off-the-grid and uses candlelight and wood stoves
for heating and cooking, and it owns no vehicles. Instead, members use
bicycles as their main mode of transport. (See above for an example!)
Another of the group’s goals is to depend entirely on 100% local food,
so that whatever is not grown by the community is obtained within a 200
mile radius. The Possibility Alliance hosts students, visitors, and
guests and provides educational workshops free of charge on topics such
as permaculture, bicycle maintenance, gardening, etc. Although the
group might use the term “radical simplicity” to describe the lifestyle
they have taken on, they see it as more of a return to what makes sense
for humans living harmoniously with the earth.

Last week, I spoke at length with
friend and communitarian Ethan Hughes, who is heavily invested in
the  Possibility Alliance project.

Ethan explains: “We’re so happy with what’s happening now. All of us [living there],
in our heart level, our big goal is total societal transformation. Our
vision is that the Possibility Alliance would have something like a
land-based center in every bioregion of the US to see how can we live
in this bioregion with a total local diet, no petro input, and as an
educational center, and also as a service center. So each bioregion
would have a team of Superheroes going out to serve in emergencies,
riots, hurricanes [etc.], and for free, which is a big part of the
Superheroes and the Possibility Alliance, is that we’re based on the gift economy.
We don’t require fees for what we do. We have probably moved over
$100,000 in eight years. People give to us and we gift projects. The
Possibility Alliance’s land was totally paid for in a year and a half
through people’s donations. They say, wow, it’s so amazing that you’re
having groups come, you’re teaching permaculture, you’re doing all this
for free. It’s amazing how when people have a choice to give, they give
a lot more than what you would even charge them.

“But really, our goal is not societal transformation as we think it
should be, but the belief that if everyone followed their heart,
society would be transformed. So how do we support and give people the
courage to live what’s in their heart? I know everyone sits on a secret
dream, and there’s a whole spectrum. By helping people to live to their
full vision, mainstream society will break the fabrics of consumption,
people will feel whole again, and we believe that what will emerge is a
healthier society.” (03/31/09)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: Mr. Obama heads to Europe now where official hostility is rising against the Anglo-American method of pounding monetary sand down the rat-holes of “non-performing” debt, bankrupt enterprise, and bubble-levitated bonds. Our poised and charming Prez may escape personal obloquy from the quaint old-world street folk, but most of the other G-20 policy playerz take a dim view of the shell-and-pea games being played by the custodians of the world’s reserve currency, including front-end-loader bank bail-outs, the shuffling of worthless securities under TARPS and TARFS, the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the now-notorious hijacking of public “liquidity” injections by third parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice of everybody else’s greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.

What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent.  You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptciesÖ or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value.  But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up.  That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.

By this I mean our methods for getting food, for moving about the landscape, for deploying capital, for trading and manufacturing, for schooling, doctoring, and running public services all destabilize and, to some degree or other, fail to deliver their contribution to normal daily life.  Banking (capital deployment) is already mortally wounded.  It remains to be seen how this will affect the food supply half a year ahead in the harvest system.  Capital is as big an “input” for our method of farming as diesel fuel or fertilizers made from methane gas.  The failure of banking will combine with city and state insolvency to crush public transit, law enforcement, fire protection, and whatever flimsy local safety nets exist to keep the ultra-poor and helpless from die-off.  The lowering of living standards by 20 to 50 percent essentially eliminates all but the must critical commerce, meaning that most of the stores in the malls and strip malls lose their customers and shed employees, while the mall and strip mall owners lose their rents, and the bankers lose performing commercial real estate loans. As all this occurs, tax revenues go way down, schools can’t pay their employees or buy diesel fuel for their yellow bus fleets. More people lose the ability to carry health insurance.  Hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Health care descends to Third World levels.  Meanwhile, pensions are destroyed, the elderly live on dog food and ketchup. (03/30/09)
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Ellen Brown writes: Nervous pundits are predicting the end of American life as we know it, after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke announced on March 18 that he would be dropping yet another trillion dollars in helicopter money – up to $300 billion to buy long-term government bonds and an additional $750 billion to buy private debt, with the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to be opened up for the sake of consumers and small businesses. The dollar immediately experienced its worst drop in 25 years, amid worries that the Fed’s intervention would spur hyperinflation. Typical of the concerned commentators expressing these sentiments was Mark Larson, who wrote in “Money and Markets” on March 20:

Tim Wood wrote in “Financial Sense” on March 21:

Commentators on the Financial Sense Newshour suggested that the Fed’s move toward “quantitative easing” would be looked back upon as the watershed event in the beginning of the end of the United States dollar. As explained in Wikipedia:

The Federal Reserve has the capacity to create money on its books and lend it to whomever it will. This credit may be extended to the public to replace the loans that banks have been unwilling or unable to make; but there is also a danger that we may just see more money being funneled to those same Wall Street banks that got us into this crisis in the first place. The Fed remains a privately-owned “bankers’ bank,” and it has not asked Congress’s permission before engaging in its new policy of massive “quantitative easing.” (03/30/09)
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BBC Environmental Science — Nasa scientist James Hansen, speaking ahead of a protest in Coventry against energy firm E.ON’s plans for a plant at Kingsnorth, Kent, said: “What has become clear from the science is that the climate system is much closer to dangerous consequences than we had realised even a few years ago.”

He said that reserves of readily available oil and gas, which people would continue to use, were already enough to push the planet into the “dangerous zone” of emissions.

“The only way we can prevent disaster for our children and grandchildren is to cut off the biggest source, coal,” he added.

A spokesman for E.ON said: “We are talking about one coal-fired power station that will hopefully be built in the UK in a 30-year period.

“In China and India they are building the equivalent of Kingsnorth every two weeks.”

He added: “However we recognise that we have to de-carbonise. Earlier in the week we called upon the government to fund carbon capture storage from day one in some form.

“Once one power station has managed carbon capture the technology can be exported. It’s not just a problem in Kent it’s a problem facing the world.” (03/30/09)
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Richard Heinberg writes: A process for designing the energy system to meet society’s future
needs must start by recognizing the practical limits and potentials of
the available energy sources. Since primary energy sources
will be the most crucial ones for meeting those needs, it is important
to identify those first, with the understanding that secondary sources
will also play their roles, along with energy carriers (forms of energy
that make energy from primary sources more readily useful—as
electricity makes the energy from coal useful in millions of homes).

We can define a future primary energy source as one that meets, at a minimum, these make-or-break standards discussed above:

• It must be capable of providing a substantial amount of energy—perhaps a quarter of all the energy currently used nationally;
• It must have a net energy yield of 10:1 or more;
• It cannot have unacceptable environmental impacts; and
• It must be renewable.

The most cursory examination of our current energy mix yields the
alarming realization that about 85 percent of our current energy is
derived from three primary sources—oil, natural gas, and coal—that are
non-renewable, whose price is likely to trend higher (and perhaps very
steeply higher) in the years ahead, whose EROEI is declining, and whose
environmental impacts are unacceptable. While these sources
historically have had very high economic value, we cannot rely on them
in the future; indeed, the longer the transition to alternative energy
sources is delayed, the more difficult that transition will be unless
alternatives can be identified that have superior economic and
environmental characteristics.

Assuming therefore that oil, natural gas, and coal will have rapidly
diminishing roles in our future energy mix, this leaves fourteen
alternative energy sources with varying economic profiles and varying
environmental impacts. Since even the more robust of these are
currently only relatively minor contributors to our current energy mix,
this means our energy future will look very different from our energy
present. The only way to find out what it might look like is to
continue our process of elimination.

If we regard large contributions of climate-changing greenhouse gas
emissions as a non-negotiable veto on future energy sources, that
effectively removes tar sands and oil shale from the discussion.
Efforts to capture and sequester carbon from these substances during
processing would further reduce their already-low EROEI and raise their
already-high production costs, so there is no path that is both
economically realistic and environmentally responsible whereby these
energy sources could be scaled up to become primary ones. That leaves
twelve other candidates.

Biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) must be excluded because of their low
EROEI, and also by limits to land and water required for their
production. (Remember: we are not suggesting that any energy source
cannot play some
future role; we are merely looking first for primary sources—ones that
have the potential to take over the role of conventional fossil fuels.)

That leaves ten possibilities: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar PV,
concentrating solar thermal, passive solar, biomass, geothermal, wave,
and tidal. (03/29/09)
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BBC Earth Science — Earthwatch says it is vital for leaders attending a key UN summit in December to find a way to halt deforestation. Deforestation accounts for about 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities, UN data shows.

The environmental charity will outline its concerns during a public lecture in central London on Thursday evening. “This year is the crunch time for forests and climate change,” Earthwatch’s head of climate change research Dan Bebber told BBC News. “We are hoping for big things from the Copenhagen climate summit at the end of 2009,” he added, referring to a much anticipated UN gathering. “Unless we tackle the question of forests as a mitigation method for climate change, then we will really have lost the battle to keep greenhouse gas concentrations below levels that many people would consider to be dangerous.”

Despite the measures introduced by the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on climate change, global emissions of CO2 have continued to rise as a result of increasing energy consumption and the loss of forest cover.

The reason why deforestation accounts for about 20% of CO2 emissions from human activities is primarily a result of old growth tropical forests being felled or burned in order to convert the fertile land into farmland. The issue is one of the key topics on the agenda at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, which will consider how the global climate strategy will look when Kyoto expires in 2012.

“This year is going to be critical and we feel we need to raise public awareness about this issue as much as possible,” Dr Bebber said. “There have been some very strong pressures to use forests in an unsustainable way, particularly in the tropics. You could probably make a thousand times more money by converting tropical forests to agricultural land to grow, for example, soya beans than you could managing it in a sustainable way. It is this imbalance that needs to be addressed at a global level.” (03/27/09)
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BBC Technology — A British engineer from Hampshire has broken the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. Richard Jenkins reached 126.1mph (202.9km/h) in his Greenbird car on the dry plains of Ivanpah Lake in Nevada. Mr Jenkins told the BBC that it had taken him 10 years of “hard work” to break the record and that, on the day, “things couldn’t have been better”.

American Bob Schumacher set the previous record of 116 mph in 1999, driving his Iron Duck vehicle.

“It’s great, it’s one of those things that you spend so long trying to do and when it actually happens, it’s almost too easy,” Mr Jenkins told the BBC. The Greenbird is a carbon fibre composite vehicle that uses wind (and nothing else) for power. The only metalwork used is for the wing bearings and the wheel unit. The designers describe it as a “very high performance sailboat” but one that uses a solid wing, rather than a sail, to generate movement.

Mr Jenkins, from Lymington, spent 10 years designing the vehicle, with Greenbird the fifth vehicle he has built to try to break the record.

Due to the shape of the craft, especially at such high speeds, the wings also provide lift; a useful trait for an aircraft, but very hazardous for a car. To compensate for this, the designers have added small wings to “stick” the car to the ground, in the same way Formula 1 cars do. “Greenbird weighs 600kg when it’s standing still,” said Mr Jenkins. “But at speed, the effect of the wings make her weigh just over a tonne.”

Richard Jenkins spent much of his childhood sailing on the South Coast of England and from the age of 10 was designing what he calls “radical contraptions”. (03/27/09)
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 Severn Cullis-Suzuki speaking in 1992 at the United Nation Earth Summit: Hello,
I’m Severn Suzuki, speaking for ECO, the Environmental Children’s
Organization. We are a group of four twelve and thirteen year-olds from
Canada trying to make a difference. Ö

We raised all the money ourselves to come 6,000 miles to tell you
adults
 you must change your ways. Coming here today I have no hidden
agenda. I’m fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points in the stock market.

I am here to speak for all future generations yet to come. I am
here to
 speak on behalf of the starving children around the world
whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals
dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the
ozone. I 
am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what
chemicals are in 
it. I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my hometown,
with my dad, until just
 a few years ago we found the fish full of
cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every
day — vanishing forever.

In
my life, I have dreamed of seeing the great herds of wild animals,
jungles, and rain forests full of birds and butterflies, but now I
wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.


Did you worry about these things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes, and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions.

I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to

realize, neither do you!

You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don’t
know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream. You don’t know how
to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back the
forests that once grew where there is now a
desert.


If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here you may be delegates of your governments, business people,
organizers, reporters, or politicians. But really you are mothers and
fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. And all of you are
somebody’s child.

I’m only a child, yet I know we are all a part of a family, five
billion
 strong — in fact, 30 million species strong. And borders and
governments will never change that. I’m only a child, yet I know we are
all in this together and should act as one single world toward one
single goal.
 (03/26/09)

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