Environment

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by Vlad Hilitanu. A new 40-year study discovered the eye-opening fact that what happens in the Amazon Rainforest impacts the entire Earth system. This puts an exclamation point on the fact that the Amazon Rainforest, the planet’s most crucial source of life support, is in deep trouble mainly because of massive deforestation. The Amazon River Basin is the world’s largest rainforest, larger than the next two largest rainforests combined, the Congo Basin and Indonesia, and roughly the size of the forty-eight contiguous United States covering 40% of South America including parts of Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana Suriname and French Guiana. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF): “The Amazon is of vital importance becaus...

BY LINDA PENTZ GUNTER The 13-metre, 500-tonne, reactor pressure vessel arriving last month at Hinkley Point C. It was built at the notorious and scandal-ridden Le Creusot forge. The unfinished nuclear plant is shaping up to be the most expensive in history. (Photo: EDF) Oops sorry. That two-reactor nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point C you thought would cost $19 billion? It’s going to cost $26 billion now. Actually, make that $35 billion. Wait, sorry, no, the actual number is closer to $40 billion. When will it be ready for operation? Um, well, currently says French contractor, EDF, maybe 2027? Ish? And those two American Westinghouse reactors in Georgia at the Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 site? $14 billion tops! That prediction came back in the good old days, ten years ag...

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS The “Trinity” atomic bomb exploding in Trinity, New Mexico, July 16, 1945. US Department of Energy. Public Domain The Bomb The PBS documentary on the history of atomic and nuclear weapons, The bomb, is unforgettable. It brings to light the megalomania for absolute power. We learn that from the “accidental” splitting of the nucleus of the Uranium atom in the late 1930s by German chemists, and the armies of physicists pursuing atomic fission for the development of a powerful bomb, we ended with the real McCoy. This was the atomic bomb “Trinity” the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating the Japanese by the tens of thousands and smashing the cities into dust – in 1945. The PBS documentary concluded that “The Bomb” “started as a...

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS Sustainable small family farms for crops, sheep, and olive trees for olive oil. Village of Machairas, Central Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos. Prologue I remember sometimes in 1980, the last year of the Jimmy Carter administration, when a couple of economists from the US Department of agriculture visited a few of my colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency. They wanted to discuss the costs of transforming conventional agriculture to sustainable farming. This shocked me. Costs, I said, what costs? After all, there are only benefits, no costs, to doing good. I had the impression that sustainability meant more than maintaining an idea or a business unchanged. I thought that sustainable agriculture, for example, was agriculture in the ...

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by Elena Mozhvilo. NASA claims that 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded with record-breaking heat waves around the world, as major commercial waterways, like the Danube, Po, Rhine, Yangtze, and Mississippi rivers temporarily dried up leaving humongous river barges choking in mud. But that was merely global-warming-lite. The real global warming threat is invisible. It’s the oceans where 90% of planet-generated heat is captured, and it’s starting to impact the climate system with increasing ferocity. Statistical records dating back to 1958 show a relentless rise in global ocean temperatures that rapidly accelerated post 1990. By now, it’s evident that climate change got a set of wings during the final decade of the 20th cen...

ByIvor Williams YOU might argue that to say the world is warming is an obvious fact. ‘But,’ as Sherlock Holmes remarked to Dr Watson*, ‘there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’ The meteorological fraternity tell us that as emissions keep growing the temperature of our earth will keep rising. Some of the effects, they say, can be seen in extreme weather such as floods, droughts and storms. However, research has shown the apparent escalation of this kind of event is far more likely to be due to a greater facility for reporting every incident over the last fifty years. Even more doubt lies in the fact that we have been widely recording weather details for about 150 of the 11,000 years since the last ice age. Any claims of records being broken can refer o...

The 27th world conference on climate change took place in Sharm-al-Sheikh in Egypt from 6-20 November 2022.  The urgency of action on climate change was set out in his introductory remarks by Antonio Gutteres, Secretary General of the United Nations, who made the following points: • “These climate conferences remind us that the answer is in our hands and the clock is ticking.” • “We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing.” • “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising…and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.” • “We are getting dangerously close to the point of no return. And to avoid that dire fate all countries must accelerate their transition now, in this decade.” •...