I’m liking this song today “because of reasons” (and using the new Spotify feature on Tumblr).
(Source: Spotify)
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Amid a torrent of downers, from dysfunctional debt-ceiling talks to the News of the World phone hacking scandal, it would easy to overlook some of the better news this week. That’s why we’re here to remind you.
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This bit of good news came through from my parents, who participate in sea turtle protection activities where they live.
CEDAR KEY, Fla. — The first rehabilitated turtles oiled by BP’s massive leak were released back into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, with scientists saying that animals taken in by rescuers — including birds — appear more resilient than first feared.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the oil crisis for the government, helped release the 22 oiled sea turtles about a mile off the coast of Cedar Key, Fla., an area unaffected by the spilled crude. They were the first oiled turtles found in the Gulf and rehabilitated.
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Today’s good green news. It’s doubly-good because not only does the carbon stay in the ground, but the carbon dioxide-consuming rainforest stays intact. How about that leadership from a country in the Global South? And let’s not forget the flora and fauna that would be saved.
Ecuador’s $3.6bn scheme to save its rainforest from exploitation could point the way to sparing other threatened landscapes
Sunday, 8 August 2010
EPA
The Tiputini river on the border of Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, which is threatened by oil drilling. Ecuador’s UN-backed plan to leave the oil in the ground would mitigate global warming
The world’s first genuinely green energy deal is about to be sealed. In a plan which could be a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet from exploitation, a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath.
While the world’s industrialised countries are building complex carbon markets to enable them to carry on polluting, Ecuador has come up with a much simpler idea for mitigating climate change: leave the oil underground. It is promising to lock up as much as a fifth of its oil reserves indefinitely, providing rich nations pay out at least half the market value of the oil – some $3.6bn – as compensation.
The trail-blazing proposal was first floated in 2007, but it took a step towards reality last week when the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with the Ecuadorean government to be the independent administrator for the project’s trust fund. The accord makes Ecuador the only country in the world offering to leave lucrative oil reserves untapped in an attempt to slow climate change.
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Good news, everyone! (Tip ‘o’ the hat to a FB friend.)
ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2010) — A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source.
A small PETE device made with cesium-coated gallium nitride glows while being tested inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The tests proved that the process simultaneously converted light and heat energy into electrical current. (Credit: Courtesy of Nick Melosh)
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“The Structure Whisperer” is my course blog, which draws in feeds from a variety of sociology blogs at Contexts.org, including this one, from the “Colorline” blog.
I know many of my recent posts have focused on the “bad news” — examples of tensions and hostilities when it comes to racial/ethnic and immigration news. However, there are certainly examples of the…
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