GM crop protesters go back to the battlefields

During the summer of 2003, more than 600 public meetings were held across the country on the order of the government. One was even held in the fictional town of Ambridge, setting for Radio 4′s rural soap The Archers, such was the desire to spark a “national debate”.

At each event, attendees were asked about their attitudes towards a technology that left very few people on the fence – genetically modified (GM) food. When Professor Malcolm Grant, the man chosen by the Labour government to lead the consultation, published the findings of the “GM Nation” report a few months later, the conclusions could not have been clearer: “The mood ranged from caution and doubt, through suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection.” Such views, added the report, “far outweighed any degree of support or enthusiasm for GM“. In fact, only 2% of those surveyed said they would be happy to eat GM food. It was about an emphatic a “No!” from the British public as it could muster. The food industry, especially the supermarkets, heard it loud and clear and abandoned the technology.

Game over for the climate

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

Is there a technological solution to global warming?

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Two years after Horizon: why we won’t stop drilling

It was two years ago today that the Deepwater Horizon—a top-of-the-line offshore drilling rig owned by BP and run by Transocean—experienced a sudden burst of gas from a three-mile long well its crew was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, 40 miles south of the Louisiana coast. The combustible methane rushed up the well and into the rig, igniting a massive explosion that would kill 11 workers, destroy the Deepwater Horizon—and trigger the biggest offshore oil spill the U.S. had ever seen.

Will Climate Change Shrink the Species?

If you think there are no new reasons to get freaked out by climate change, try this: There’s at least a theoretical possibility that a warmer and warmer world could lead to tinier and tinier humans. That’s the inevitable conclusion of a just-published study of Siferhippus sandae, the littlest horse that ever lived.

A confused nuclear cleanup

IITATE, Japan — As 500 workers in hazmat suits and respirator masks fanned out to decontaminate this village 20 miles from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, their confusion was apparent.

“Dig five centimeters or 10 centimeters deep here?” a site supervisor asked his colleagues, pointing to a patch of radioactive topsoil to be removed. He then gestured across the village square toward the community center. “Isn’t that going to be demolished? Shall we decontaminate it or not?”

India’s Solar Power Project

When the Indian government embarked on an ambitious solar power project two years ago, I wrote that its goals seemed farfetched. Since then, things have changed significantly, and as I note in Thursday’s paper, analysts say the project’s goal of having 20,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2020 seems well within reach.

The main reason for the change is the striking drop in the global price for solar panels and modules. Another interesting factor in the fall in prices is an auction process that India adopted to force solar power producers to compete with one another. In one recently concluded auction, for instance, the prices at which developers agreed to sell power to the government were nearly 30 percent lower than a year earlier. More than 100 companies bid in the auction, including many that have never built a solar power park before. It almost didn’t happen that way.

The race to ‘green’ bottles is long

Over their decades of competition, the battle between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo has taken on many colors — brown (cola), orange (juice), blue (sport drinks) and clear (water).

Now, they are fighting over green: The beverage rivals are racing to become the first to produce a plastic soda bottle made entirely from plants.

A gold rush of subsidies in search for clean energy

WASHINGTON — Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.

The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

World headed for irreversible climate change in 5 years, IEA warns

If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change. The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.