Friday, April 10, 2009
stic.man "My S.W.A.G. Is Up" feat. Young Noble
stic.man of Dead Prez, upcoming solo debut album Manhood
WP: Crimes That Deserve Punishment - Eugene Robinson
It's no longer possible to mince words, or pretend we didn't know. The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced" interrogation methods, used on "high-value" terrorism suspects, plainly constituted torture. The time for euphemisms is over, and the time for accountability has arrived.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/09/AR2009040903523.html
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Center for Global Development: Desert Power: The Economics of Solar Thermal Electricity for Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East - Working Paper
Really good paper by CGDev:
A climate crisis is inevitable unless developing countries limit carbon emissions from the power sector in the near future. This will happen only if the costs of low-carbon power production become competitive with fossil fuel power.
In this CGD working paper, Kevin Ummel and senior fellow David Wheeler focus on a leading candidate for investment: solar thermal or concentrating solar power (CSP), a commercially available technology that uses direct sunlight and mirrors to boil water and drive conventional steam turbines. Solar thermal power production in North Africa and the Middle East could provide enough power to Europe to meet the needs of 35 million people by 2020.
Ummel and Wheeler compute the subsidies needed to bring CSP to financial parity with fossil-fuel alternatives. They conclude that large-scale deployment of CSP is attainable with subsidy levels that are modest, given the planetary stakes. By the end of the program, unsubsidized CSP projects are likely to be competitive with coal- and gas-based power production in Europe.
The question is not whether CSP is feasible but whether programs using CSP technology will be operational in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. For such programs to spur the clean energy revolution, efforts to arrange financing should begin right away, with site acquisition and construction to follow within a year.
New Blog
Still learning the ropes, and have a lot of backlog of things posted on facebook. Standby for a lot more.
Huffington Post: Johann Hari - You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
"Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
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