published by mother nature network | March 05, 2010
May
22
2010
22
2010
May
11
2010
11
2010
THE BIG SHORT – HOW WALL STREET DESTROYED MAIN STREET
Post by JimQ | TheBurningPlatform.com in Economy | Posted on 10th May 2010
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18,2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars. The truth is that the CEO’s of all the Wall Street banks encouraged a casino culture of greed and gambling. The generation of fees became the sole driving incentive for every firm. It started with collateralizing subprime mortgages into packages of mortgage backed securities. Then they created Credit Default Swaps as insurance on these mortgages. When they ran out of chumps to put into houses, they created side bets with Credit Default Obligations that didn’t require an actual homeowner.
Read on: http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/05/10/the-big-short-how-wall-street-destroyed-main-street/
May
11
2010
11
2010
You’d Never Know He’s a Sun King
By TODD WOODY | The New York Times | May 7, 2010
David Gelbaum has quietly poured nearly $1 billion into environmental companies and causes. He advocates nature preserves and solar energy. (Image: Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times)
AMID the $6 million homes perched on a beachfront cliff in this conservative Southern California enclave, the seven-year-old Honda Civic hybrid with the Obama bumper sticker is the giveaway.
It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.
Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.
Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09green.html
Apr
26
2010
26
2010
What Climate Change Means for Wine Industry
By Mark Hertsgaard | Wired Science | April 26, 2010 | 6:28 pm
John Williams has been making wine in California’s Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted.
“You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale, not the vineyard scale.”
Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot vines. The heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic and — most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers — there is no irrigation.
Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”
Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what might happen to premium wines.
But there is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops — and all industries — will confront as global warming intensifies.
In vino veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The truth now is that Earth’s climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing for.
Apr
26
2010
26
2010
Gene helps worm regrow missing head
Posted by Lindsay Brooke-Nottingham | FUTURITY | Friday, April 23, 2010 16:12
Planarian worms have an amazing ability to regenerate body parts following amputation. These remarkable creatures contain adult stem cells that are constantly dividing and can become all of the missing cell types. They also have the right set of genes working to make this happen exactly as it should so that when they re-grow body parts they end up in the right place and have the correct size, shape, and orientation. (Credit: Daniel Felix/U. Nottingham)
The finding is another step forward in efforts to explore how humans might one day regenerate damaged organs and tissue.
The research led by biologist Aziz Aboobaker at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. shows for the first time that a gene called ‘Smed-prep’ is essential for correctly regenerating a head and brain in planarian worms. The study is published in the open access journal PLoS Genetics.
Read on: http://futurity.org/health-medicine/gene-helps-worm-regrow-missing-head/
Apr
24
2010
24
2010
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
TED2006 | Filmed February 2006 | Posted June 2006
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Apr
22
2010
22
2010
The Key to Fixing Global Warming? China
By Daniel Roth | Wired May 2010 | April 19, 2010 | 12:00 pm
Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)
It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.
He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.
Apr
21
2010
21
2010
Those Bricks Barrick Gold Dropped on Publishers
The huge mining corporation’s legal actions against two small book presses — what do they say about our democracy?
By Philip Resnick | TheTyee.ca | April 21, 2010
The gold goliath demanded to see manuscript before printing.
How could one look such a gift horse in the mouth, or quarrel with Peter Munk’s professed beliefs? According to him, “Canada has a unique opportunity to step into the shoes that America has vacated, and I think that requires an elite group of highly educated, globalized Canadians who can be the spokespersons of every aspect of globalization. I don’t mean just trade, or democracy, or multiculturalism. . . but all the things Canada stands for, from health care down to the fundamental rejection of any kind of corruption.”
Perhaps the portrait is a little too perfect. How many readers of The Tyee or Canadians outside Quebec are aware that the same Barrick Corp., on whose board sit such eminences as Brian Mulroney, has been engaged in using SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation — against two small presses, one in Quebec, one based in Vancouver, that have published or announced an intention to publish books that this august corporation finds offensive to its image? It took a March 25 op-ed article in Le Devoir, the independent Montreal daily (not beholden to the powerful media interests that control so many of Canada’s leading newspapers) to alert me to the situation.
Apr
19
2010
19
2010
Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff. An Interview with Tavis Smiley
Annie Leonard
Annie Leonard has spent nearly 20 years and visited more than 40 countries working on environmental health and justice issues. She currently directs The Story of Stuff Project, which includes an animated Web-film about the life-cycle of material goods—used as a teaching tool in schools and meetings across the globe—and a published book version of the film. The Seattle, WA native was coordinator of the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption and co-created the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.
Read on: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201004/20100408_leonard.html?vid=1463757472#video
Apr
10
2010
10
2010
A Weak Constitution?
POSTED BY ROGER VALDEZ | Sightline Daily – SPECIAL SERIES: GAME CHANGERS #07 | April 05, 2010
Solving big problems might mean giving up some cherished myths.
(Image of US Constitution from the National Archives of the United States)
Now that the health care proposal has been approved by Congress and signed into law, some people are feeling pretty happy I suppose. Much of the angst and anger about the procedures impeding reform—reconciliation, procedural delays, etc—has receded. But the basic problems that stirred everyone up in the first place haven’t disappeared. As Alan has suggested in the Game Changers Series, the problems might be structural rather than political. The fundamental flaw in our system is not the absence of a big political majority. Democrats have that right now. Instead, the problem is the underlying document—our written constitution—that frames the debate and our deep, almost pathological, attachment to the halo of myths surrounding it. Changing the structure of our system—our constitution—is difficult and only made more so because of our flawed understanding of our own history, especially the origins of our founding document.
Read on: http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2010/04/05/a-weak-consitution