12 February 2015, Climate News Network: Rice serves up double measure of biofuel and fodder. An inexpensive process developed in Japan will allow farmers to produce their own tractor fuel and cattle feed in one simple step. Japanese scientists have found a potential answer to the biofuel dilemma that if you grow crops for energy, you have to sacrifice crops for food. They report that they can now ferment rice to deliver ethanol, while making silage for cattle feed –and that it can all be done on the farm without need for any expensive off-site processes. Mitsuo Horita, of the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues write in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels that they used a process of solid-state fermentation known to temperate zone farmers everywhere: grass or cereal is harvested, compressed, sealed, and fermented in the absence of oxygen. Read More here
Monthly Archives: February 2015
8 February 2015, climate 7 Capitalism, Pentagon Pollution,PENTAGON POLLUTION THE MILITARY ASSAULT ON GLOBAL CLIMATE The military assault on global climate. The U.S. military is the single greatest institutional contributor to the growing natural disasters intensified by global climate change. By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy … Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements … Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders. It’s a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report A Climate of War. In 1940, the US military consumed one percent of the country’s total energy usage; by the end of World War II, the military’s share rose to 29 percent.(1) Oil is indispensable for war. Correspondingly, militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster, bigger, more fuel-guzzling planes, tanks and naval vessels employed in more intensive air and ground wars. At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army’s armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.(2) The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving! A quarter of the world’s jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War (1941-1945) — an astounding 2.6 billion gallons.(3) Barry Sanders observes with a load of tragic irony that, while many of us assiduously reduce our carbon footprint through simpler living, eating locally, recycling and reusing, energy conservation, taking public transportation, installing solar panels, and so on, the single largest institutional polluter and contributor to global warming — the US military — is immune to climate change concerns. The military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body, thanks to US arm-twisting during the 1997 negotiations of the first international accord to limit global warming emissions, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Read More here
7 February 2015, COIN: Should migration be a way of adapting to climate change? As the world warms, our focus moves from how we can reduce emissions, to how we can adapt to life on a warmer planet. Our new briefing paper explores whether migration could become a key strategy for some people to cope with the impacts of climate change. The paper looks at this complex and controversial notion of migration as adaptation. The briefing, Migration as adaptation, exploring mobility as a coping strategy for climate change, explores the possibility of migrating as a way of coping with climate change impacts, but also examines some of the risks involved in such strategies….” Read More here