This New Method of Farming Could Change Where Our Food Comes From

TIME

 

Correa vs. Amazon tribes: Oil demand threatens Ecuador's rainforest, tribes fight back [Videos]

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

America's engine of the future to get 'Made in China' label

mazautolv 

Fox News

Thanks to generous support from a foreign backer, there is renewed hope for an American attempt to revolutionize, modernize and sanitize the automobile engine.

The catch?  The finished product will be stamped “Made in China.”

EcoMotors, a startup engineering company based in Allen Park, Mich., plans to produce up to 150,000 of its opposed-piston, opposed-cylinder (OPOC) two-stroke engines annually in a factory funded by Zhongding Power. The facility will be located in China’s Anhui Province, west of Shanghai.

EcoMotors CEO Don Runkle told FoxNews.com that Zhongding has committed to building a plant for the engines with the hope of supplying generator companies and builders of medium-duty trucks.

“We have talked to a number of automobile manufacturers in the United States, as well as in China,” Runkle said.  He added that EcoMotors has “a letter of intent with Generac,” an American manufacturer of generators that currently buys engines from John Deere and Iveco.

Although Chinese-built generators and motorcycles are becoming more common in the United States, engines produced there have rarely seen duty in American automobiles. The first was when General Motors dropped a Chinese-made 3.4-liter V-6 into its 2005 Chevrolet Equinox and Pontiac Torrent crossovers.

In 2010, when Zhongding agreed to invest up to $18 million toward engineering costs for the OPOC engine, Runkle announced that “this initiative will create a range of high-skill R&D jobs here in southeast Michigan, further underscoring the region's critical role as the incubator of tomorrow’s high-efficiency powertrain solutions.”

The OPOC two-stroke engine is a markedly different concept than the four-stroke engines fitted to most modern automobiles. While two-strokes are generally lighter, have fewer moving parts and a higher power density than comparable four-strokes, they are often not as durable and burn a lot of oil, resulting in worse emissions. EcoMotors claims to have overcome these hurdles with its new technology.

The EcoMotors-designed power plant does without valves and cylinder heads, and places two pistons facing one another in each cylinder like boxers' gloves, with the pistons in turn connected to identical counterparts in an adjacent cylinder. The expansion stroke on one side creates a compression stroke in the other.

“Our innovation is an unusual engine architecture,” Runkle said.

The company says the motors can be configured to run on a variety of fuels, including gasoline and diesel, and will be cheaper to build while delivering between 20 and 50 percent better fuel economy than conventional internal combustion engines, depending on their application.

Production of the OPOC is set to begin in 2014.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/04/24/america-new-engine-future-to-be-made-in-china/#ixzz2RPLVRI4O

Our Environmental Catastrophe: Geoengineering and Weather Warfare

seeker401

The environmental movement has developed a single-minded obsession with the supposed effects of carbon dioxide on the global climate. Rather than CO2 gas, however, the technologies that are now being proposed to mitigate this supposed problem might be the real cause of our coming environmental calamity.

http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2013/02/our-environmental-catastrophe-geoengineering-and-weather-warfare

Catherine Malabou-Introduction to Biopolitics and Biopower

egsvideo

zenfloyd.blogspot.com

Catherine Malabou, philosopher and author, talking about biopolitics and biopower in Foucault, Agamben and Derrida. In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses the political deconstruction of sovereignty, the meaning of the symbolic in language and the difference between the biological and symbolic body in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gilles Deleuze focusing on life, death, dasein, phenomenology, spiritual body, subjective body, flesh, the reciprocation of gift and counter-gift, dialectical materialism, the system of debt, exchange value, linguistic economy, incest, the zero-level of value and the body without organs (BwO). Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2012. Catherine Malabou.

Catherine Malabou, Ph.D., born in 1959, was a student at the École normal supérieure (ENS) and Sorbonne University in France. She wrote her dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel under the direction of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, completing it in 1994. The thesis was published in 1996 under the title L'Avenir de Hegel, plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic). Catherine Malabou has taught at Nanterre University in Paris, the University of California at Berkeley, the New School for Social Research in New York City and currently is a full-time professor at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy of Kingston in the United Kingdom. She also teaches an intensive summer seminar at the European Graduate School (EGS).

Catherine Malabou is a specialist of contemporary French and German philosophy, with a focus on Hegel and Heidegger. She is most famous for her concept of ontological "plasticity." Her work also incorporates neuroscience and neuro-psychoanalysis. Malabou has published many works including Voyager avec Jacques Derrida - La Contre-allée (1999, English publication in 2004 entitled Counterpath), Que faire de notre cerveau? (2004, English publication in 2008 entitled What Should We Do with Our Brain?), La Plasticité au soir de l'écriture : Dialectique, destruction, deconstruction (2005, English publication in 2009 entitled Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction), Changer de différence (2009, English publication in 2011 entitled Changing differences). More recently, Catherine Malabou published a book in French with Judith Butler entitled Sois mon corps (2010). She also manages a philosophy book series for the French publisher Éditions Léo Scheer.

84% de las playas cubanas afectadas por la erosion

www.americaeconomia.com/

telemundo51.com

La Habana. El 84% de las 413 playas cubanas sometidas a una investigación científica enfrenta "algún indicio de erosión" a causa del cambio climático, informaron este viernes especialistas del Instituto Nacional de Oceanología.

La investigación está dirigida a diseñar pronósticos para evaluar "la probable respuesta de los distintos perfiles de costas arenosas existentes en el país a la subida del nivel medio del mar", explicó el jefe del Departamento de Procesos Costeros de la institución, José Luis Juanes.

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Según el estudio, este proceso de erosión "responde en buena medida al aumento del nivel medio del mar y a las inadecuadas acciones practicadas por el hombre durante muchos años".

Entre esas acciones figuran la extracción de arena para fines diversos, la construcción de diferentes tipos de obras encima de las dunas y la incorrecta ubicación de espigones de entrada de canales y dársenas.

El experto aseveró que 35 playas de la isla caribeña están incluidas en una red de monitoreo nacional para detectar "las variaciones morfológicas y otras transformaciones que puedan ocurrir en esos ecosistemas, debido al efecto del cambio climático".

Cuba desarrolla un macroproyecto que hace pronósticos y busca medidas ante las penetraciones del mar y la erosión que estas puedan causar en las zonas de la costa del país para el período 2050-2100.

El pasado 25 de octubre, el huracán "Sandy" azotó el oriente cubano, donde transformó la costa y convirtió una playa en un litoral rocoso.

Does Cuba Promote Deforestation?

Havana times

Isbel Diaz Torres

The percentage of the land where tree planting has taken place in thousands of hectares.

HAVANA TIMES — After reading a brief article in the national press, I became suspicious about Cuban policy regarding forestry. What some Cuban journalists have managed to achieve is making it seem like it’s possible to promote reforestation and deforestation at the same time.

The article in question (published in Spanish in the Granma newspaper on November 20), announced the reforestation of more than 11,000 acres in the western province of Pinar del Rio, immediately noting that this area is “twice the size of those areas where timber is being cut down for industrial purposes.”

This might seem reasonable in the eyes of a less informed reader, since the principle of planting more than what is cut down seems to make sense.

However, if we analyze the current situation on the island by referencing the report “Forestry in Cuba: 2007-2011,” issued by the Office of Agricultural Statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics and Information (ONEI), things begin to look different.

That document states that “the total number of saplings of timber and fruit trees planted during the period 2007 to 2011 (…) experienced an average annual rate of decline of 4.30 percent.”

In 2011 this document reveals a significant decrease in forested areas compared to the preceding four years, so there must have been a sweeping change in strategy in 2012 for that negative trend to have been reversed.

As for those seedlings, the area planted in the period analyzed underwent an annual rate of decline 5.65 percent, with decline also experienced in 2011 – the year of lowest index in this activity.

Illegal logging.

The headline in Granma proudly announces the number of 11,000 acres planted in Pinar de Rio, but if we look at the ONEI report, it’s clear that they need to reforest much more than this, given that in 2011 (the worst year in the five-year period) more than 12,000 acres were planted in that province. It’s visible that the actual figure falls short of this.

When we discuss Pinar del Rio, we’re not talking about just any province, but the most reforested one on the island and the one that contributes most of the country’s lumber, according to that same Granma article. So what’s happening in the rest of the provinces?

The same applies to “reconstruction work” (improving the biodiversity and economic value of natural forests by adding more valuable species), where there was observed an annual downward trend of 3.70 percent.

Similar behavior was shown over that same period by other indicators, such as “maintenance work” and the “planting of green belts,” which demonstrated average annual decreases of 2.80 percent and 0.85 percent respectively.

Did the journalist and the optimistic official interviewed take this information into account? Apparently not, but as we continue reading that Granma article we come to understand what all of this involves: publicized commitments, numbers games and quotas.

“Pedro Ramirez Lara, head of the State Forestry Service (SEF), said that this number will allow Pinar del Rio Province to reach 2015 with a rate of forestation above 44.02 percent. Achieving that provincial objective would allow the country to reach its national goal of 29.3 percent forestation and thus fulfill its commitment made at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, says the article in Granma.

I know that many people put a lot of effort into reforestation; however, it seems that despite this, the country is continuing to experience a declining rate of reforestation, yet by 2015 it is made to appear that the nation will achieve the percentage agreed upon.

This is a strange reforestation policy, and what’s stranger still is that if we know that these trees are destined to future felling, though I imagine that in 2013 and 2014 they can hold back the chainsaws a little and still achieve respectable statistics for international forums.

As you can see, what remains visible in Cuba is the lack of the slightest bit of investigative journalism, which would at least be able to diversify its sources and compare information.

Man made Ecological disaster: Lessons from the Dust Bowl w/ Ken Burns

PBS

Bill Gates Pours Millions Into Geoengineering

Infowars.com/ Paul Joseph Watson

Microsoft founder Bill Gates continues to pour millions of dollars into high-risk geoengineering projects that purport to offer a solution to global warming yet have been savaged by environmentalists as potentially posing a greater threat than climate change itself.

“Concern is now growing that the small but influential group of scientists, and their backers, may have a disproportionate effect on major decisions about geoengineering research and policy,” reports the London Guardian, quoting critics who allege that Gates’ funding has enabled geoengineering advocates to “dominate the deliberations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

In 2010, Gates was criticized for ploughing $300,000 dollars into a sea trial of cloud-whitening technology which involved spraying clouds with microscopic particles in an effort to make them reflect more sunlight, an experiment dubbed “dangerous” by environmental campaigners.

The report reveals that Gates has backed Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, to the tune of $4.6 million dollars to fund studies based around the premise of injecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere designed to reflect sunlight.

As we have previously documented, experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.

Exposure to sulphur has been linked to innumerable physical and neurological diseases, including reproductive failure, behavioral changes, damage to the immune system, as well as liver, heart and stomach disorders.

Even pro-geoengineering scientist Mark Watson, admits that injecting sulphur into the atmosphere could lead to “acid rain, ozone depletion or weather pattern disruption.”

Rutgers University meteorologist Alan Robock also, “created computer simulations indicating that sulfate clouds could potentially weaken the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing rain that irrigates the food crops of billions of people.”

China's shrinking lakes

A new report says that over the period from 1960-2005 Chinese lakes have shrunk in size and in number. The total area of Chinese lakes over that period shrank by 13 percent of their original size, an area just a bit smaller than Connecticut.

Sixty new lakes appeared, mainly in the high altitudes of Tibet. This new water might come from melting glaciers. But, 243 lakes with a size larger than one square kilometer (roughly half a square mile) vanished all together.

More

China's shrinking lakes

Oil and ice

Frida Bengtsson
On the evening of February 17th, the Icelandic containership Godafoss ran aground in the Hvaler national park in southern Norway and started leaking heavy oil. One of the biggest challenges of the cleanup operations has been to clean up oil from ice covered areas. This clearly illustrates that we can’t let the oil industry move into the Arctic.
I know that coastline well and I have been there with the Rainbow Warrior to document the unique cold-water coral reefs in the area. The same summer the Norwegian government decided to make the area a national park – the only one at sea. This national park is home to more than 6000 marine species - around 220of which are on the Norwegian national redlist of endangered and threatened species. Yesterday I visited the same area but on a coast guard ship struggling to get oil up from the ice.

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Oil and ice

Humans on Verge of 6th Great Mass Extinction

By Stephanie Pappas

Dreamstine

Will 75 percent of Earth's species go the way of the dodo?

Are humans causing a mass extinction on the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs?

The answer is yes, according to a new analysis — but we still have some time to stop it.

Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years. It's happened only five times before in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out.) At current rates of extinction, the study found, Earth will enter its sixth mass extinction within the next 300 to 2,000 years.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/02/humans-verge-6th-great-mass-extinction-experts-say/#ixzz1FTPYbXnj

How to recycle your iPad 1 after you buy an iPad 2

How to recycle your iPad 1 after you buy an iPad 2

Wikileaks: 5 environmental revelations

• 5 environmental revelations from WikiLeaks

China: Shake-up for 'chaotic' rare earth industry

CHINA has pledged to bring order to its "chaotic" rare earth industry by introducing strict mining rules and tightening environmental standards over the next five years.

Full story
Shake-up for 'chaotic' rare earth industry

Tortazo a ministra canadiense

La ministra canadiense de pesca, recibio un tortazo en pleno rostro por parte de una activista que esta en contra de la caceria de focas. El tema en si mismo es bien complejo pues de la caza de focas viven buena parte de los canadienses que viven en las regiones atlanticas y nordicas.

El asunto cobro particular relieve cuando personalidades como Brigitte Bardot y Paul McCartney entre otros, comenzaron a hacer campana publica en contra de esta industria.

Todos tienen el derecho de opinar, pero lo sui generis del caso, es que nadie se cuestiona de donde salen los solomillos ni los jamones serranos ni los sushis.

Alerta de tsunami

Alerta de tsunami en Haití, Cuba, Bahamas y República Dominicana

El rio mas contaminado del mundo

Se trata del río Citarum, ubicado al oeste de la isla de Java en Indonesia.

Irónicamente este río, en sus buenos tiempos, era utilizado para la pesca y la irrigación, pero debido a las fábricas que existen en el lugar, el río se convirtió en un inmenso basurero. Los aldeanos dejaron de pescar. Lo que ahora hacen es “rebuscar” entre la basura, algo que les podría servir para vender o negociar con alimentos.

Clarias en las calles de la Habana Vieja

El sitio The Real Cuba publica unas fotos tomadas mediante un celular el pasado 2 de noviembre de clarias en la calle Muralla de la Habana Vieja.

Lastimas que alguna no salga por las tasas sanitarias de Punto Cero y Punto Uno.

Africa se parte en dos

Laz Ciencias: Africa se parte en dos