Canada: Formally pulls out of Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change

Canada formally pulls out of Kyoto Protocol on climate change - The Washington Post: "“To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire farming and agriculture sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada,” Kent said. Harper’s Conservative government is reluctant to hurt Canada’s booming oil sands sector, which is the country’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases and a reason it has reneged on its Kyoto commitments. Canada has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, more than 170 billion barrels. Daily production of 1.5 million barrels from the oil sands is expected to increase to 3.7 million in 2025. Only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have more reserves. But critics say the enormous amount of energy and water needed in the extraction process increases greenhouse gas emissions."

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Tip: Make Decisions when Mind is Balance because Emotions influence decision-making process

"Prof Aditya Murthy from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Prof Vinod Venkatraman from Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia spoke on issues related to perceptual decision making systems and cognitive control during decision making. According to Dr Vinod, complex economic decisions, whether investing money for retirement or purchasing some new electronic gadget, often involve uncertainty about the likely consequences of our choices. He demonstrated, through his studies, that certain areas of the brain contribute to the strategic control in complex decision making, exploring which can also help in understanding interaction in social contexts."

'via Blog this'‘Emotions influence decision-making process’ - The Times of India:

Australia: Turning Algae from CO2 into Fuel. CO2 is not released into atmosphere, but it's going into a renewable source

"A lot of countries worldwide are facing taxation on the carbon dioxide pollution they emit, and many companies are looking to alternative companies like Algae Energy to help do something about it. "If a company is facing millions of dollars of taxation, they will think of an alternative not to face excess taxation," he said. The algae system is known as a closed loop system. A 40-foot shipping container module can be sent anywhere in the world, equipped with power and plumbing. Once algae is grown and harvested, it can be used to create oil. Another product is biomass, which can be used in burning, as in coal, and feedstock in cattle. "Even the byproducts of the unit is a sustainable solution," McConchie said. The company has been growing as fast as its algae. The company went public January 2011 in the Australian Stock Market and has recently been added to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In the New York Stock Exchange, they are traded under Foreign Depositories.
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'via Blog this'Turning algae from carbon dioxide into fuel: Algae is nothing more than a plant. You need water, nutrients and carbon dioxide, and that's basically what Algae Energy uses to grow its system. Headquartered in Perth, Australia, in April the company opened a research and development and analysis facility in Cumming, 2460 Industrial Park Boulevard. Tray McConchie, business manager for Algae Energy, said technology, laboratory testing and fabrication of the company's modules are done in Cumming.

China & India: Will devise a new Global System for curbing emissions of greenhouse gases and make it operational by 2020

Free Markets, Carbon Tax Best Way to Fight Climate Change: View - Businessweek: "The best instrument for coordinating climate-change efforts is the price of carbon. The impact of any carbon-abatement plan -- emission quotas, cap and trade, carbon taxes -- can be measured by its effect on this price. The aim should be to equalize worldwide a gradually rising price of carbon. As a matter of practical politics, this flexibility is essential. It would allow governments to more easily tailor their climate-change policies to political and economic circumstances, altering them on the run if need be. The price of carbon would provide an international gauge of their abatement efforts, so that peer pressure could be brought to bear. For most countries, the simplest and clearest way to hit the price target would be with an outright carbon tax. The economic benefits are well known: By letting markets work, a tax achieves a given amount of emissions abatement at the lowest cost. The world needs to cap its greenhouse gas emissions, but there’s no obligation to do this in the most expensive, painful or disruptive way."

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Tip: Stop the Stigma Habit & Help Everyone Achieved Balanced Mental Health

Stigma removes minorities from various avenues of competition. "It is associated with unemployment, low earnings, lack of housing, diminished self-esteem, weak social support, new disorders or repeat episodes of existing problems, etc. Stigma can be instrumental or institutional causing resource limitations and unsupportive policies. To the perpetrators, stigma plays functions of reducing prevalence of “undesirable” behaviours and thus providing a means of social control, enhancing personal or group self-esteem and alleviating discomfort and anxiety on the part of the “normal”. Stop stigma today."

'via Blog this'Stop stigma in mental health:

Solar Experiment:"We need 0.05% of the land to capture adequate sunlight (the entire Earth) in 4.5 hours (1.25 hours) to satisfy our needs for a year"

"Catching energy from the Sun is pretty simple. Sit in the sun on a cool day and benefit from its warmth. Situate your house so that south-facing windows can swallow sunlight and offset (or obviate) conventional sources of heat. Use thermal collectors for domestic hot water and/or interior heating. Stick a PV panel outside and it will generate electricity provided it is not placed face-down. Concentrate sunlight to heat a fluid and/or create steam for electricity production in a heat engine (possibly combined with thermal storage). Lots of options, when the sun shines."

'via Blog this'Solar vs. Wind - Who Wins? at Oil Price:

Of the 1370 W/m² incident on the upper atmosphere from the Sun, 30% is reflected straight away without pausing long enough to say hello. About 20% is absorbed in the atmosphere and clouds, and 50% gets absorbed at ground level. Note that 7% of the energy budget goes into conduction and rising air (separate phenomena; the latter relating to wind). Virtually no heat is able to conduct through the thick atmosphere, so really this figure is all about convection, or moving air. For comparison, the energy consumption (conversion) rate of the human race is about 13 TW (13 trillion Watts), which works out to an average of about 2,000 W per person on the globe (Americans are 10 kW). We can also divide by the area of the globe to get a power density of 0.025 W per square meter, or 0.09 W/m² if we just count land area.

If 50% of the incoming solar radiation makes its way to the ground, then we have about 700 W/m² for the average terrestrial square meter facing the Sun. But the Sun puts this onto the projected ?R² area of the Earth (the disk of the Earth as seen from the Sun), while the actual 3-D globe has an area of 4?R². So we must divide by four to get the flux per unit area of actual terra firma, yielding 170 W/m². We can think of this factor of four as being made up of a factor of two for day and night, plus a factor of two because the Sun is not overhead all the time, resulting in a loss of intensity per square meter at the ground. A panel tilted to the site latitude can compensate for some of the slanted-sun-angle loss (for high latitudes, the ground always suffers from this geometric dilution, even at “high” noon), so that the ½ factor becomes 2/?, or 0.64, representing a global 30% boost over horizontal panels. In this scheme, we get 220 W/m² for our latitude-tilted panel (nearly independent of latitude, weather notwithstanding). The tilted panels will require more land to avoid self-shadowing, so that the amount of land area needed is stuck with the pre-adjusted value of 170 W/m².

Note how much bigger the solar potential is than our demand of 0.09 W/m² of land area. This implies that we need only 0.05% of the land to capture adequate sunlight, or that enough sunlight strikes land (the entire Earth) in 4.5 hours (1.25 hours) to satisfy our needs for a year. That’s a powerful resource!

But once we factor in efficiency—say 10% for simplicity and conservatism—we need ten times the land area computed above. Still, it’s a pittance. I have used the following graphic before to illustrate how much land would be occupied by solar photovoltaics (PV) at 8% efficiency to produce 18 TW of electrical output (note that about half of the 13 TW consumption today is lost in heat engines, so 18 TW of electricity more than satisfies our current demand)

Durban Climate Change Conference: More than 120 Countries now Support a Timetable towards a Legally Binding Agreement

"The world is within reach of a new deal to stop global warming", said Chris Huhne, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary. That obviously puts a substantial amount of pressure on countries that are not signed up to our vision and a number of them are beginning to back it and you saw that today with the US coming up and saying it’s in favour of a road map,” he said. “A comprehensive global agreement is not beyond our reach,” he said. “We can achieve when we display flexibility and the will to compromise. If we continue to choose co-operation over conflict, we can show that all nations are indeed united by a common ambition: to protect our planet and our people from the dangers of climate change.” The EU want a deal in place by 2015 but sources close to the talks say the date could be pushed back and emissions are unlikely to start coming down before 2020. Joseph Alcamo, the UN Environment programme chief scientist, pointed out that emissions need to peak within the decade or the world will be “locked in” to dangerous global warming."

'via Blog this'Durban Climate Change conference: world close to deal on global warming - Telegraph: