burfman
burfman's JournalIndia, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green
Source: NY Times
MUMBAI, India — Just a few years ago, the world watched nervously as India went on a building spree of coal-fired power plants, more than doubling its capacity and claiming that more were needed. Coal output, officials said, would almost triple, to 1.5 billion tons, by 2020.
India’s plans were cited by American critics of the Paris climate accord as proof of the futility of advanced nations trying to limit their carbon output. But now, even as President Trump pulls the United States out of the pact, India has undergone an astonishing turnaround, driven in great part by a steep fall in the cost of solar power.
Experts now say that India not only has no need of any new coal-fired plants for at least a decade, given that existing plants are running below 60 percent of capacity, but that after that it could rely on renewable sources for all its additional power needs.
Rather than building coal-fired plants, it is now canceling many in the early planning stages. And this month, the government lowered its annual production target for coal to 600 million tons from 660 million.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/asia/india-coal-green-energy-climate.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
So it may not matter too much what we do politically or don't do as far as greening the planet's energy production.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, it's going to happen anyways, we can speed it up or slow it down a bit, not stop it.
So here's to the future with clean power.
burfman...................
The Unfreeing of American Workers
Source: NY Times
American conservatives love to talk about freedom. Milton Friedman’s famous pro-capitalist book and TV series were titled “Free to Choose.” And the hard-liners in the House pushing for a complete dismantling of Obamacare call themselves the Freedom Caucus.
Well, why not? After all, America is an open society, in which everyone is free to make his or her own choices about where to work and how to live.
Everyone, that is, except the 30 million workers now covered by noncompete agreements, who may find themselves all but unemployable if they quit their current jobs; the 52 million Americans with pre-existing conditions who will be effectively unable to buy individual health insurance, and hence stuck with their current employers, if the Freedom Caucus gets its way; and the millions of Americans burdened down by heavy student and other debt.
The reality is that Americans, especially American workers, don’t feel all that free. The Gallup World Survey asks residents of many countries whether they feel that they have “freedom to make life choices”; the U.S. doesn’t come out looking too good, especially compared with the high freedom grades of European nations with strong social safety nets.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/american-workers-noncompete-agreements.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
Krugman makes some good points....
It boggles my mind that anywhere the majority of people in this country would buy into having their life restricted with these apparently mostly spurious non-complete agreements and going back to having pre-existing health insurance restrictions.
What is going on with our country?
burfman.............
SpaceX Launches US Spy Satellite on Secret Mission, Nails Rocket Landing
Source: space.com
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX Falcon rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday (May 1) to boost a classified spy satellite into orbit for the U.S. military, then turned around and touched down at a nearby landing pad.
It was the 34th mission for SpaceX, but its first flight for the Department of Defense, a customer long-pursued by company founder Elon Musk. The privately owned SpaceX once sued the Air Force over its exclusive launch services contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.
Monday's 7:15 a.m. EDT (1115 GMT) liftoff of a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) officially broke ULA's 10-year monopoly on launching U.S. military and national security satellites. [In Photos: SpaceX's First US Military Satellite Launch]
Read more: http://www.space.com/36666-spacex-launches-first-spy-satellite-nails-landing.html
All sorts of things going on here.
A private for profit USA company started by an immigrant is creating leading edge rocketry.....
moving the state of the art toward cheaper, recyclable spacecraft......
burfman.......
Trump cartoon that made me laugh.......
"It's not an April fools' prank, it's preemptive damage control."
from the New Yorker Magazine
burfman................
Unsealed Documents Raise Questions on Monsanto Weed Killer
Source: NY Times
The reputation of Roundup, whose active ingredient is the worlds most widely used weed killer, took a hit on Tuesday when a federal court unsealed documents raising questions about its safety and the research practices of its manufacturer, the chemical giant Monsanto.
Roundup and similar products are used around the world on everything from row crops to home gardens. It is Monsantos flagship product, and industry-funded research has long found it to be relatively safe. A case in federal court in San Francisco has challenged that conclusion, building on the findings of an international panel that claimed Roundups main ingredient might cause cancer.
The court documents included Monsantos internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundups main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
The documents also revealed that there was some disagreement within the E.P.A. over its own safety assessment.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html?_r=0
Gee, if this is the EPA before the coming budget cuts......
Offshore Wind Moves Into Energys Mainstream
Source: NY Times
LIVERPOOL, England — When engineers faced resistance from residents in Denmark over plans to build wind turbines on the Nordic country’s flat farmland, they found a better locale: the sea. The offshore wind farm, the world’s first, had just 11 turbines and could power about 3,000 homes.
That project now looks like a minnow compared with the whales that sprawl for miles across the seas of Northern Europe.
Off this venerable British port city, a Danish company, Dong Energy, is installing 32 turbines that stretch 600 feet high. Each turbine produces more power than that first facility.
All of those factors in concert have helped push costs down. Dong says its anticipated costs of electricity generation have halved. As recently as 2014, they were 156 euros, or $166, per megawatt-hour, a wholesale unit of electricity, on a British project. By last year, they had fallen to €78 per megawatt-hour on a series of wind farms off the Netherlands.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/business/energy-environment/renewables-offshore-wind-green-power-dong.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Looks like the air might get cleaner regardless of the politics.
Troops Who Cleaned Up Radioactive Islands Cant Get Medical Care
Source: NY Times
RICHLAND, Wash. — When Tim Snider arrived on Enewetak Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to clean up the fallout from dozens of nuclear tests on the ring of coral islands, Army officers immediately ordered him to put on a respirator and a bright yellow suit designed to guard against plutonium poisoning.
A military film crew snapped photos and shot movies of Mr. Snider, a 20-year-old Air Force radiation technician, in the crisp new safety gear. Then he was ordered to give all the gear back. He spent the rest of his four-month stint on the islands wearing only cutoff shorts and a floppy sun hat.
“I never saw one of those suits again,” Mr. Snider, now 58, said in an interview in his kitchen here as he thumbed a yellowing photo he still has from the 1979 shoot. “It was just propaganda.”
Today Mr. Snider has tumors on his ribs, spine and skull — which he thinks resulted from his work on the crew, in the largest nuclear cleanup ever undertaken by the United States military.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/us/troops-radioactive-islands-medical-care.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=nytmm_FadingSlideShow_item&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
I'm shocked by this going on during the late 1970's. You can't blame it on lack of scientific knowledge or keeping classified secrets from the Russians. It was just a lack of caring for the value of a human life.
burfman......................
Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year
Source: NY Times
Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.
The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.
The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.
In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html?hpw&rref=science&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
Time to switch to better stuff like solar and wind coupled with better lithium batteries.
Burfman.......
China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020
Source: NY Times
China intends to spend more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable power sources like solar and wind, the governments energy agency said on Thursday.
The agency said in a statement that China would create more than 13 million jobs in the renewable energy sector by 2020, curb the growth of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming and reduce the amount of soot that in recent days has blanketed Beijing and other Chinese cities in a noxious cloud of smog.
Even the headline-grabbing numbers on total investment and job creation may understate what is already happening on the ground in China. Greenpeace estimates that China installed an average of more than one wind turbine every hour of every day in 2015, and covered the equivalent of one soccer field every hour with solar panels.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/world/asia/china-renewable-energy-investment.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The revolution in wind and solar may happen regardless of what our country does.
China may have even more incentive than we do as evidenced by the smog that occurs in Beijing.
It would be great if we could be part of the solution too.
Burfman.....................
Mylan releases a half-price generic version of EpiPen
Source: Washington Post
Months after promised, Mylan has launched a half-price authorized generic of EpiPen, the lifesaving allergy injection that drew ire for its dramatic price increases.
A two-pack of the generic EpiPen will carry a list price of $300 and will reach pharmacies next week, the company announced Friday. In late August, Mylan said it would make the authorized generic, stating at the time that the drug would be available within “several weeks.”
Mylan chief executive Heather Bresch appeared before Congress in September to defend the price hikes of EpiPens. Since Mylan acquired the drug in 2007, the price has risen from less than $100 for a two-pack to more than $600. Sales of the drug have grown since then, from less than $200 million to nearly $1.7 billion last year, according to data from IMS Health.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/16/mylan-releases-a-half-priced-generic-version-of-epipen/?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.4d23469740e5
It's hard to argue when you have a gun pressed to your head......
In 2007 it was two for $100 and now the 'generic' is two for $300
yeah it's down from two for $600, but they still have managed to triple the price over what it was 10 years ago.
Even allowing for inflation they are still screwing the public.
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Member since: Thu Jan 16, 2014, 03:01 PMNumber of posts: 264