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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 22nd, 2010 DENVER AND THE WEST AURORA — Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that the United States is in danger of falling irreversibly behind other countries in the race to develop clean-energy technologies and must act quickly to avoid that fate. In a speech at the Colorado Energy Jobs Summit on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Chu ticked off a series of areas where he said the country has fallen behind other nations: vehicle fuel efficiency, electricity transmission efficiency, battery technology and nuclear power. China, he said, is investing more than $100 billion a year in new energy technologies, far outpacing the U.S. Failure to match other countries’ efforts in clean-energy development could mean the U.S. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, was the highest-profile speaker at the jobs summit — an event organized by Colorado U.S. Sen. Mark Udall that featured panel discussions involving U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. Bill Ritter. Udall said he wanted the summit to bring together energy and environmental experts for discussions on energy independence, economic revival and “the next bold policy step we need to take.” “We need to be laying the groundwork today so that Colorado will lead the world in the clean-energy revolution,” Udall said. Along with wind and solar power, some of the discussions also focused on a revived nuclear power program. The Obama administration has recently taken steps to encourage new investment in nuclear power, and Udall said increasing the country’s use of nuclear power dovetails with his goal of capping carbon emissions to slow climate change. Udall said he would support a nuclear power plant in Colorado if it had local support and could be built and operated safely. But much of the summit focused on the growing international competition the country faces in developing new energy technologies. Chu, while noting the competition, said he was confident the U.S. could return to the forefront, saying, “America has the greatest innovation machine in the world. . . . We have an opportunity before us, an incredible opportunity, to lead the world in a new industrial revolution.” “We have to convince all of America that this is a nonpartisan issue,” Chu said. “This is our economic future.” John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold at denverpost.com ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 30th, 2009
Climate Change Adaptation: It’s about Water! Water is central to the world’s development challenges. Whether it is food security, poverty reduction, economic growth, human health—water is the nexus. Climate change is the spoiler. No matter how successful mitigation efforts might be, people will experience the impacts of climate change through water. The Global Water Partnership is participating in ‘Water Day’ at the climate change negotiations in Barcelona. GWP Executive Secretary Dr Ania Grobicki will be the lead speaker on water and transboundary issues on Tuesday, November 3. The venue is the Fira Congress Hotel, opposite the conference centre. The opening session starts at 9 am and lunch will be provided. Recently, the GWP’s Technical Committee released its 14th Background Paper: “Water Management, Water Security and Climate Change Adaptation.” It argues that investments in water are investments in adaptation. The paper can be downloaded on www.gwpforum.org or ordered free at gwp@gwpforum.org. Climate Change: How can we Adapt? – a one-pager about GWP’s key messages on this subject – is available here: http://www.gwpforum.org/gwp/library/GWP_Briefingnote_climatechange.pdf. GWP has been accepted as an Inter-Governmental Organisation with Observer Status at COP 15 in Copenhagen in December and has submitted an article to the delegate publication. But more information on that will follow later. More resources about climate change and water and more information on GWP’s involvement in the global dialogue on climate change is available on this page: http://www.gwpforum.org/servlet/PSP?iNodeID=205&itemId=442.
——————————————————–Steven DowneyHead of CommunicationsGlobal Water Partnership (GWP)Drottninggatan 33SE-111 51 Stockholm, SWEDENPhone: +46 8 522 126 52Fax: + 46 8 522 126 31E-mail: steven.downey@gwpforum.orgWebsite: www.gwpforum.org ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 9th, 2009 SOMETHING CALLED WORLD ENERGY JUSTICE. WE WONDER WHAT IT MEANS BUT WE SUGGEST PEOPLE TO GO AND FIND OUT!
from:
The Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES) is pleased to announce the 2009 Energy Justice Conference, which will take place in Boulder, Colorado, from 23 – 24 October, 2009. Please refer to the announcement below for more information (or visit the conference website at www.worldenergyjustice.org).
signed – Kevin Doran
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 27th, 2009 Uranium Contamination Haunts Navajo Country Dan Frosch, The New York Times, July 27, 2009. “There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Stephen B. Etsitty said. The Slowman home, the same one-level cinderblock structure his family had lived in for nearly a half-century, was contaminated with potentially dangerous levels of uranium from the days of the cold war, when hundreds of uranium mines dotted the vast tribal land known as the Navajo Nation. The scientist advised Mr. Slowman, his wife and their two sons to move out until their home could be rebuilt. The legacy wrought from decades of uranium mining is long and painful here on the expansive reservation. Over the years, Navajo miners extracted some four million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons. Now, those homes are being demolished and rebuilt under a new government program that seeks to identify what are very likely dozens of uranium-contaminated structures still standing on Navajo land and to temporarily relocate people living in them until the homes can be torn down and rebuilt. After a Congressional hearing in 2007, a cross-section of federal agencies committed to addressing the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining on the reservation. As part of that commitment, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Navajo Nation began working together to assess uranium levels in 500 structures through a five-year plan set to end in 2012. Using old lists of potentially contaminated structures, federal and Navajo scientists have fanned out to rural reaches of the 27,000 square mile reservation — which includes swaths of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — to measure levels of radium, a decay product of uranium that can cause lung cancer. Of 113 structures assessed so far, 27 contained radiation levels that were above normal. “In these situations, you have contamination in somebody’s yard or in their house,” said Harry Allen, the E.P.A.’s section chief for emergency response in San Francisco who is helping lead the government’s efforts. “To us, that is somewhat urgent.” Many structures that showed high levels of radiation were vacant; some families had already moved out after hearing stories of contamination in their homes. But eight homes still had people living in them, and the E.P.A. and Navajo officials have worked to convince residents that it would be unsafe to stay. “People had been told they were living in contaminated structures, but nobody ever did anything about it,” said Will Duncan, an environmental scientist who has been the E.P.A.’s main representative on the reservation. “They would tell us, ‘We don’t believe you are going to follow through.’ ” But with a budget of nearly $8 million, the E.P.A. has demolished all 27 contaminated structures and has begun building ones to replace those that had been occupied. Typically, the agency pays a Navajo contracting company to construct a log cabin or a traditional hogan in the structure’s stead, depending on the wishes of the occupants. Mr. Allen said the cost, including temporarily relocating residents, ran approximately $260,000 per dwelling and took about eight months. The agency also offers $50,000 to those who choose not to have an old home rebuilt. Lillie Lane, a public information officer with the Navajo Nation E.P.A. who has acted as a liaison between the federal government and tribal members, said the program held practical and symbolic importance given the history of uranium mining here. Ms. Lane described the difficulty of watching families, particularly elders, leaving homes they had lived in for years. She told of coming upon two old miners who died before their contaminated homes could be rebuilt. “In Navajo, a home is considered sacred,” she said. “But if the foundation or the rocks are not safe, we have to do this work.” Some families, Ms. Lane said, complained that their children were suffering from health problems and had wondered if radiation were to blame. The E.P.A. has started sifting through records and interviewing family members to figure out whether mining companies that once operated on the reservation are liable for any damages, Mr. Allen said. On a recent summer day, Fred and Clara Slowman proudly surveyed their new home, a one-level log cabin that sits in the quiet shadows of Black Rock Point, miles away from the bustle of Farmington, N.M., where the family has been living in a hotel. Mr. Slowman said he suspected that waste materials from a nearby abandoned mine seeped into his house. The family plans on having a traditional Navajo medicine man bless their dwelling before they move in. “In our traditional way, a house is like your mom,” he said. “It’s where you eat, sleep, where you’re taken care of. And when you come back from the city, you come back to your mom. It makes you feel real good.” ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 3rd, 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival We watched on C-Span the Aspen Institute discussion and we deffer our reporting to David Brooks’ professionalism. Brooks defined himself as one of the last still active liberal Republicans. Others on that panel were two Wertheimers – Linda Wertheimer and Fred Wertheimer – both very centrist speakers. Fred Wertheimer is founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that works to ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. Wertheimer has spent more than 35 years working on money and politics issues and has been described by The New York Times as “the country’s leading proponent of campaign finance reform.” He is a national leader and spokesman on campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reform, and government accountability. Wertheimer previously served as president of Common Cause; as a Fellow at the Shorenstein Press, Politics, and Public Policy Center at Harvard University; as J. Skelly Wright Fellow and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School; and as a political analyst and consultant for CBS News, ABC News, and ABC’s “Nightline.”
Linda Wertheimer is a senior national correspondent for National Public Radio. Before her current post, she spent 13 years as a host of NPR’s flagship news magazine, “All Things Considered.” She has worked at NPR for more than three decades and has held various positions, including congressional and national political correspondent. In 1976, she became the first woman to anchor network coverage both of a presidential-nomination convention and of an election night. She has received numerous journalism awards, including those from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Women in Radio/TV, and the American Legion. Wertheimer has also received the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. She is the author of Listening to America: Twenty-five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica. In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent. This savings diversion allowed the Chinese to plow huge amounts of capital into the U.S. and dollar-denominated assets. Cheap Chinese labor kept American inflation low. Chinese efforts to keep the renminbi from appreciating against the dollar kept our currency strong and allowed us to borrow at low interest rates. During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last. The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption. Chinese nationalism is also on the rise. The Internet has made young Chinese more nationalistic. The Chinese are acquiring resources all around the world and with them, willy-nilly, an overseas empire that threatens U.S. interests. The Chinese are building their Navy, a historic precursor to expanded ambitions and global conflict. Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships. Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there. Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world. Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation. I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America’s debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 26th, 2008 Friday, December 19, 2008
Click the highlighted headlines for links to these stories.
Advocates for Action on Global Warming Chosen as Obama’s Top Science Advisers. By Juliet Eilperin and Joel L. Achenbach, WashPost, December 19, 2008. “President-elect Barack Obama as head of the NOAA, which will be announced tomorrow, dismayed Obama Announces Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture. By Barack Obama, Change.gov, December 17, 2008, video and text. “I will bring to the Department of the Interior an abiding commitment to “To lead a Department of Agriculture Organic Consumers Launch Campaign to Block Vilsack’s Confirmation. Press Release, Organic Consumers Association, December 19, 2008. “Wednesday’s announcement that former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, has Salazar at Interior: For Greens, Not a Dream Choice. By Bryan Walsh, Time, December 19, 2008. “Environmentalists have so far been ecstatic over President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet picks, with some even calling it the green dream team... Salazar voted in favor of President George W. Bush’s Interior Secretary ### |




















