Richard Harris - Did I Fill The World With Love

The question each one should ask as he face the sunset... "Did I fill the world with love?..."

AngloSexuality and Arabophobia of Non-Arab Muslims سفهاء السلطان

G20 Protests Heat Up: Video of police car fire in Toronto

Reports say black-clad demonstrators broke off from a crowd of peaceful protesters at the G20 summit in Toronto, torching a police cruiser in the financial district and smashing windows with baseball bats and hammers.


Around 10 thousand people took part in the protests against those summits - more than six hundred of them were arrested after rallies turned violent. The demonstators accuse the leaders of the world's largest economies of turning a blind eye to the problems of those who are in need. And many of the protestors say the local security crackdown was a violation of their rights.

'Zero Carbon Britain' or Dust Bowl Britain?

ISIS Report 28/06/10

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A project based on a fallacious assumption about biofuels. Patrick Noble

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) has just published what seems its
definitive Zero Carbon Britain Report [1].

The report is based on the following assumption: If biomass is burned, the
chemistry is more or less reversed, and the original energy and raw material
(C02 and water) are released. There is then no net gain or loss of CO2, which
is why biological fuels are considered to be “Carbon neutral”.

Unfortunately, this assumption is true only if no fossil fuel energy is expended
in growing the biomass, in producing the fertilizers, pesticides and other
chemical inputs, does not involve destroying natural carbon sinks and creating
huge carbon sources by cutting down forests and turning other natural ecosystems
into agricultural land, and so on; not to mention the displacement of indigenous
peoples and decimation of biodiversity (see [2, 3] Biofuels: Biodevastation,
Hunger & False Carbon Credits, SiS 33, ‘Land Rush’ as Threats to Food Security
Intensify, SiS 46; and many other ISIS articles dealing with the topic).

But someone must have said this at a Beautiful Person’s party, so now it is
generally accepted, and by most of my friends. More to the point, The Centre
for Alternative Land Use, the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural
Sciences, and even the IPCC assume it is true. (The Institute of Science in
Society is one notable exception (see its comprehensive reports [4. 5] Green
Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050 and Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable
*Fossil Fuel Free .)

Consequently, every chart, graph and conclusion of the CAT report is suspect.
CAT’s “sequestration sink” will actually empty a little more at each harvest,
creating annual losses of CO2 to the atmosphere. CAT’s “biological fields” are
emphatically not “carbon neutral”.

The terrifying thought is that the Welsh Assembly is adopting Zero Carbon
Britain as a blue print for Zero Carbon Wales. That has galvanised me to speak
out and sound a warning that we could well end up instead with a Dust Bowl
Britain.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, immediately after CAT’s first Zero
Carbon Britain report was released [6], and sent it to the authors, but got no
acknowledgement. Nothing has changed in principle, although the details have
become more sophisticated. I use the old report for analysis here, as it deals
more specifically with acreage, rotation and exposes the fallacy of CAT’s
underlying assumption more clearly.

The old report says that there are 18m hectares of agricultural land in Britain,
and proposes what many may agree to be necessary: a reduction of livestock
numbers, an increase in arable and intensive horticultural land and an increase
in woodland, at the expense of permanent pastures (6 m ha down to 1 m ha) and
rough grazing (6 m ha down to 2 m ha).

However, the report also suggests that 4m ha of short and longer rotation
woodland be burnt for energy and that a third of the arable rotation (Rape and
Miscanthus) should also be burnt. That means the output of 40.5 percent of the
agricultural land of Britain is to be combusted. There is no suggestion as to
what would replace the combusted nutrients and minerals lost to the land, though
it mentions that “organic methods” will increase carbon sequestration. Under the
CAT agricultural regime, British agricultural land will move inexorably towards
desert and life in the soils will be annually reduced, so less and less carbon
is sequestered.

Read the rest of this report at the ISIS website:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/zeroCarbonBritainOrDustBowlBritain.php

Or read other reports about energy generation
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/scienergy.php

Costner offers BP oil clean-up device - 2 Reports

Costner cleanup device gets high marks from BP

It was treated as an oddball twist in the otherwise wrenching saga of the BP oil spill when Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device he said could work wonders in containing the spill's damage. But as Henry Fountain explains in the New York Times, the gadget in question — an oil-separating centrifuge — marks a major breakthrough in spill cleanup technology. And BP, after trial runs with the device, is ordering 32 more of the Costner-endorsed centrifuges to aid the Gulf cleanup.

The "Waterworld" actor has invested some $20 million and spent the past 15 years in developing the centrifuges. He helped found a manufacturing company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, to advance his brother's research in spill cleanup technology. In testimony before Congress this month, Costner walked through the device's operation—explaining how it spins oil-contaminated water at a rapid speed, so as to separate out the oil and capture it in a containment tank:

The device can purportedly take in thousands of gallons of oil-tainted water and remove up to 99% of the oil from it. On Thursday, BP posted to its YouTube page a video of the news conference featuring Costner and BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles announcing the news. You can watch the video here:

"Doug Suttles was the first guy to step up in the oil industry," Costner said at the presser, "and I'm really happy to say when he ordered 32 machines, it's a signal to the world, to the industry, where we need to be."

Suttles said the additional machines will be used to build four new deep-water systems: on two barges and two 280-foot supply boats.

"We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find, and actually what it's done — it's quite robust," Suttles said. "This is real technology with real science behind it, and it's passed all of those tests." He added that Costner's device has proved effective at processing 128,000 barrels of water a day, which "can make a real difference to our spill response efforts."

In his congressional testimony, Costner recounted his struggle to effectively market the centrifuge. He explained that although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government.

[Before 'Waterworld': See Kevin Costner in the '90s]

It's true, as Fountain notes in the Times, that innovation on spill technology has been hobbled in part by the reach of federal regulation — though Fountain also notes that oil companies have elected to devote comparatively little money for researching cleanup devices in the intensely competitive industry.

Costner said that after the device was patented in 1993, he sought to overcome oil-company jitters by offering to allow U.S. oil concerns to use it on a trial basis. He'd extended the same offer to the Japanese government in 1997, he said, but got no takers there either.

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.

Interesting News from an Experimenter