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Tuesday, June 10, 2003
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New York Times: Environment -- There's an odd calm along this part of the Yangtze, no jubilation and no weeping, as the tawny waters lap several feet higher each day and a 350-mile stretch of this mightiest of rivers is finally transformed into a long narrow lake. After decades of bitter debate, years of heavy construction and the uprooting so far of 700,000 people, the Three Gorges Dam has closed its gates.  On June 15, the reservoir will be filled to its interim level of 135 meters, or 443 feet above sea level. The next day, the first commercial ships will pass through the locks, heralding the eventual passage of ocean vessels hundreds of miles upstream to Chongqing, a booming metropolis in central China. In August, two initial turbines from what will be the world's most colossal array of generators are to start spinning electricity — a down payment on the promised riches from a $25 billion megaproject with gains and perils that may be forever disputed. "For the country as a whole, this project might be worthwhile," said Yang Hongwen, who runs an ailing small business in Fengjie, a city some 150 miles upstream of the dam. "But from the perspective of the ordinary people around here, it was a mistake," he said, surveying what had been the lower half of a lively town of 100,000 and now resembles ground zero of an atomic blast, flattened for service as the lake bed and teems with people slaving to scavenge every ounce of steel. Many of those resettled up to now — another 430,000 or more people must be moved from the area before the project is completed in 2009 — are already hurting for good land or jobs. For some longtime residents like Mr. Yang, nostalgia runs deep for the lost ancient city and the nearby scenic gorges that will soon be a little less deep and majestic. (06/10/03) | |
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E. O. Wilson writes: Lately I've been circling back to the large issue of consilience, the notion that there is a unity of the sciences through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences. To that end, in addition to doing systematic, basic biodiversity research I'm conducting a reexamination of the basic theory and contents of sociobiology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans. In sociobiology, the social insects—ants, bees, wasps, termites—are so especially congenial to analysis, experiments, and theory that we can find paradigms of this kind of explanation that range from the genome, through the organism, through the colony, and through the ecosystems in which colonies live. By enriching the databases of each of those biological levels of organization, and developing middle level theory in concert with that data accumulation as we go along, we can get a much clearer and quicker picture through the social insect of how social behavior evolved in the higher vertebrates. We can define how this works by considering ant, termite, wasp, and bee colonies as superorganisms. A superorganism is an aggregation of highly organized individuals into colonies. In the case of the social insects we have a set of criteria that we use called eusociality, which has three criteria. First, there are two major castes—a queen, or sometimes a king, which constitutes a reproductive caste, and workers that don't reproduce as much if at all. Second, you have generations of grown, mature adults living with other grown mature individuals in the same community. And finally, you have mature adults that take care of the young. Those three elements are the primary criteria of what makes an advanced insect colony. (06/10/03) | |
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Richard Heinberg writes: When Mike Bowlin, Chairman of ARCO, said in 1999 that "We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil," he was voicing a truth that many others in the petroleum industry knew but dared not utter. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that global oil production is nearing its historic peak. Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever. When oil production peaks, those assumptions will come crashing down. (06/10/03) | |
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The Atlantic Monthly -- A dependence that's so strong it's almost like a narcotic. You don't question the pusher." It may sound like the language of drug addiction, but in fact Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in the Middle East, is describing American dependence on Saudi Arabia and its oil. In "The Fall of the House of Saud" (May Atlantic), Baer details the United States's absolute reliance on oil from a country that is deeply, dangerously unstable. The history of U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia goes back nearly to that nation's birth. In 1933, a year after the kingdom was declared, the first American oil concession was granted. Over time, U.S. interest in Saudi oil evolved into a company called Aramco, which controlled all of the oil in Saudi Arabia—25 percent of the world's total. Aramco was a private company held by four large U.S. oil companies, with immense influence on the U.S. government. (It is now wholly owned by the Saudi government.) Moreover, the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia extends beyond this private interest—as early as 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt asserted that protecting the kingdom, and its oil, was of vital economic importance to the United States as a whole. The precedent of maintaining a friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia, for both public and private reasons, has remained unchanged in the intervening years. The United States' policies on Saudi Arabia, Baer argues, are built upon the delusion that Saudi Arabia is stable—that both the country and the flow of its most precious commodity can continue on indefinitely. Sustaining that delusion is the immense amount of money (estimated at $19.3 billion in 2000) exchanged between the two partners: the U.S. buys oil and sells weapons, Saudi Arabia buys weapons and sells oil. Oil and the defense contracts underpinning its protection bind these two countries together in such a way that when Saudi Arabia falls—a fate Baer feels is absolutely certain—the U.S. falls too. Perhaps not all the way down, but, if we don't curtail our dependence, he argues, a failure in Saudi Arabia could have catastrophic consequences for the United States. (06/10/03)
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Science News -- Whether it's the whisper of a lover or the shouts of rapper Eminem, the hearing process works the same. Sound waves bend lashlike projections on cells within the inner ear, and these so-called hair cells respond by sending electrical impulses to the brain.  Conventional wisdom holds that once damaged, hair cells in people and other mammals don't regenerate. But by using a virus to deliver a gene into the inner ear, scientists have now coaxed the ears of adult guinea pigs to sprout new hair cells. "It's the first time anyone has shown new hair cells can be grown in a mature mammalian ear," says Yehoash Raphael of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the study. Even though the study didn't determine whether the new hair cells detect sound or properly connect with the brain, other investigators hail the work and suggest it will one day lead to treatments for many types of hearing loss, including the kind commonly suffered by elderly people. "It's another major step toward hair cell regeneration in the human ear," says Wei-Qiang Gao of Genentech in South San Francisco, Calif. (06/10/03) | |
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Richard Heinberg writes: With the dawn of the 21st century the world has entered a new stage of geopolitical struggle. The first half of the 20th century can be understood as one long war between Britain (and shifting allies) and Germany (and shifting allies) for European supremacy. The second half of the century was dominated by a Cold War between the US, which emerged as the world’s foremost industrial-military power following World War II, and the Soviet Union and its bloc of protectorates. The US wars in Afghanistan (in 2001–2002) and Iraq (which, counting economic sanctions and periodic bombings, has continued from 1990 to the present) have ushered in the latest stage, which promises to be the final geopolitical struggle of the industrial period – a struggle for the control of Eurasia and its energy resources. (06/10/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- "The results of our study are shocking," said Gabriel Thompson, an author of the report, who is on the staff at the Community Council. "Our findings also have significance for residents of other Brooklyn neighborhoods, many of which have similar housing stock." According to the report, to be released today, more than a third of the buildings tested were found to have at least one apartment with a hazardous amount of lead, and 32 percent of the individual apartments tested had dangerous lead levels ranging from 5 to 100 times the federal threshold. Working mainly within a 12-block area, testers including 10 students from the Benjamin Banneker Academy in Clinton Hill took several dust wipe samples from each apartment in April and May to determine lead levels. Although New York banned the production of lead-based paint decades ago, it is common in many old homes and can become a threat when apartments are poorly maintained or are renovated. An epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pamela Meyer, would not evaluate the findings, although she said she was not surprised by them. High rates of lead, both in the city and nationwide, tend to be most common in housing built before 1950 in low-income, urban minority neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant. In a study of pre-1950 housing in Chicago last year, Dr. Meyer said, about a third of the children had elevated blood lead levels. (06/10/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- While struggling with one of the worst droughts in history, planners from across the West gathered here Friday to hear Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton announce a grand new initiative called Water 2025. Most of the people in the audience could already guess four of its elements, and she did not disappoint them. "Anyone who has ever heard me speak," Ms. Norton said with a calm smile, "knows that I talk about the four C's: communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation." To Ms. Norton, the four C's are the basis of what she and President Bush call the new environmentalism, which emphasizes cooperation at the local level rather than federal edicts. In the case of Water 2025, rather than dictating a national policy, she proposed to encourage innovations suggested by local officials. "There's no one-size-fits-all policy for water," she said. To Ms. Norton's critics, however, the four C's can seem more like the three M's: a maddening, meaningless mantra. Whatever the strategy means for the environment, it has helped Ms. Norton avoid political trouble, no mean feat for a Republican who manages one-fifth of America's land and was originally the most controversial cabinet nominee. A coalition of environmental groups tried to block her confirmation by running newspaper advertisements that showed half her face and called her "so far on the fringe" that "she's off the page." Today some of those environmentalists say her soothing talk and velvet tactics are providing cover for some of the most destructive policies in decades for promoting development on public lands. Meanwhile, some of her former libertarian allies complain that she is so busy cooperating with entrenched interests, from environmentalists to miners, that she is ignoring the free-market principles she once championed. (06/10/03) | |
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Financial Times -- Natural gas supplies in the US have reached critically low levels in recent months and may be inadequate to meet demand during a hot summer this year. Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, has called an emergency meeting of the National Petroleum Council this month amid calls for the administration to deal urgently with the shortage. Mr Abraham said the US had 696bn cubic feet of gas in storage at the end of March, the lowest since 1976 when record-keeping began. By the week of April 11, levels had dropped to 623bn cubic feet. "Storage has increased since that time, but it is still only half the level of a year ago, and 42 per cent below the previous five-year average," Mr Abraham said. ... Prices are reported to have increased as much as 700 per cent over the past three years, provoking industries from steel to petrochemicals to call on the government to address what they call "the other energy crisis" because it is less well known than the domestic oil shortage. (06/09/03) | |
5:45:48 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
7/1/2003; 5:51:04 AM.
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