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Twitter is still a young medium, and it's interesting to see yet more uses being found for it. Here's a rather dubious one from South Korea:
Agents from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea posted more than 1.2 million Twitter messages last year to try to sway public opinion in favor of Park Geun-hye, then a presidential candidate, and her party ahead of elections in 2012, state prosecutors said on Thursday.
As the New York Times post quoted above goes on to explain, the whole story is rather murky and complicated. One of the curious claims being made by the Korean spy agency accused of interfering with the election process is the following:
The intelligence service said its online messages were posted as part of normal psychological warfare operations against North Korea, which it said used the Internet to criticize South Korean government policies, forcing its agents to defend them online. In a statement on Thursday, it also accused the prosecutors of citing as their evidence online postings that had nothing to do with its agents.
Even if that's true, other departments may have gone beyond simply defending the government of South Korea to attack its political rivals:
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This 2 bedroom house built from recycled plastic bottles is bulletproof and fireproof and can withstand earthquakes. Oh, and it also reportedly holds a comfy year-round temperature of 64 degrees F.
The bottles were filled with sand and are held together by mud and cement to form a solid wall that supposedly is stronger than cinder clocks.
Click headline to read more and view pix--
Hawaii voters overwhelming support solar power generation and would welcome efforts to make the abundant renewable energy resource more affordable and more accessible, according to a new survey conducted for The Pacific Resource Partnership (PRP) and the Sierra Club of Hawai’i.
The survey found that nearly all voting residents – an astonishing 96 percent – supported solar as an energy source, which is significantly higher than the national average. According to a Gallup poll conducted in March, 76 percent of Americans want the U.S. to put more emphasis on solar production. While that percentage is high, it pales in comparison to solar support in Hawaii. “We rarely see this kind of unanimity in public opinion research,” noted Grace McRae, Senior Polling & Research Strategist at the Sierra Club’s Legislative Office in Washington, D.C. “That Hawaii residents had such strong support for solar energy speaks volumes about its popularity and its effectiveness in reducing our nation’s dependence on costly imported fossil fuels.” What was also striking about the survey, which was conducted in late September, was the high percentage of voters – 85 percent – who believe efforts should be made to make renewable energy such as solar power more affordable for consumers. Only nine percent of respondents felt that nothing should be done to change the cost of solar power. “We should do everything we can to make this clean and abundant energy source accessible and affordable for more residents, organizations and businesses,” said John White, Executive Director of PRP. “The upside of more solar adoption is huge. It helps families save money, creates jobs and generates positive economic activity for the state.” Click headline to read more--
Wind power in the U.K. rose to a record, leading operators from RWE AG to SSE Plc to halt gas-fired power generation plants.
Wind output rose to as much as 6,010 megawatts at 11:30 a.m. London time today, beating a previous record on Sept. 15 and accounting for 14 percent of total supply, according to National Grid Plc data on Bloomberg. Generators halted 7,872 megawatts of gas-fired plants since yesterday, grid data show.
The U.K. plans to almost triple the amount of wind capacity by 2020 as it seeks to meet a target to get 15 percent of power demand from renewable energy sources. Wind and solar have no fuel costs, generally making them cheaper than coal or gas.
“As well as the higher wind power, demand is down by about 2 gigawatts from yesterday as well so it has given the chance for less efficient gas-burn facilities to drop output,” Gary Hornby, energy markets analyst at Inenco Group Ltd., said by e-mail today. Wind may generate an average of 5,517 megawatts for the rest of today, 7 percent more than yesterday, according to Bloomberg’s wind model at 11:15 a.m.
Power demand is forecast to peak at 50,602 megawatts at 5 p.m. today, 4 percent less than yesterday’s maximum of 52,815 megawatts, according to National Grid data. Gas was generating 11,182 megawatts of power at 12:05 p.m., compared with 19,237 megawatts at the same time yesterday, grid data show.
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When a geothermal power plant started spewing hot water into the barren, volcanic landscape of Iceland’s Southern Peninsula in 1976, the locals turned the steaming lake into a health spa that’s now frequented by half a million people a year. Now a small Icelandic company is hoping to turn a profit from waste carbon dioxide from the same plant.
Carbon Recycling International has built an adjacent plant that converts the carbon dioxide into methanol, a fuel and feedstock for making plywood, paints, and other products. It may be the first company anywhere to demonstrate a commercially viable way of making liquid fuel directly from carbon dioxide, something that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So far, though, the economics work only in rare places that have cheap power and cheap carbon dioxide. For carbon dioxide recycling to make a big dent in emissions, we’ll need breakthroughs in catalysis and almost certainly a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide to provide an incentive to capture and use it.
In Iceland, industrial prices for electricity are only four cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly a third of what industry pays in Germany or in New England in the United States.
The carbon dioxide emitted by the geothermal plant is also cheaper to capture than the carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel power plants. At coal-fired plants, carbon dioxide is a product of burning coal in air—the resulting flue gas, like air, is mostly nitrogen, and separating the carbon dioxide is expensive.
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As urbanization accelerates, information and communications technologies (ICTs) are playing a more significant role in improving urban efficiency and the quality of people's lives. On the back of these developments, Huawei--a leading global ICT solutions provider--will lead discussions with regional leaders at this week's 2nd Middle East Smart Cities Summit 2013, spotlighting the key factors that will drive increased adoption of Smart City infrastructure over the coming three to five years.
As the ICT Platinum Partner of this year's event--being held in Doha from December 9 to 10--Huawei and its partners will be placing particular focus on working with government authorities, urban planners, communication carriers, consulting firms, venture capitalists and investment firms, local universities & research institutes who are involved in the master planning and development of more intelligent city infrastructure. Senior executives and engineers will also be showcasing a wide variety of global case studies demonstrating how applications of cutting-edge ICT platforms are already supporting sustainable socio-economic growth in major metropolitan environments.
"Access to a safe and efficient economy for businesses, citizens, and local governments is the ultimate goal of any Smart City initiative," says Mr. Pan En, Vice President of Huawei Middle East. "Qatar is one of the regional leaders in this respect, as the right foundation is already in place in the form of the National Vision 2030 with a lot of the desired infrastructure being developed. Countries in the region today need to provide services that span the digital divide, meeting citizens' expectations for interacting with and accessing government services at the touch of a button--from healthcare to education, smart transportation, and even tourism services. Technology advancements such as ubiquitous broadband connections, advanced analytics software, and more advanced security protocol will all be required to meet this future, and thus it is particularly important to have public and private organizations cultivating a healthy ecosystem for the development of future information highways."
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A man from Newport, Wales, is searching the dump for a hard drive he threw away despite it having $7.5 million worth of bitcoins.
Bitcoins are a digital currency whose value has benefited from intense attention and speculative investing. They can be stored as data in digital wallets using online services, mobile phones, or computer hard drives.
James Howells chose the latter approach when he stored 7,500 bitcoins away in 2009, when they were worth a trifling fraction of Bitcoins' current value of more that $1,000 apiece. But he threw the old hard drive away, and now it's likely buried several feet deep in trash in a landfill the size of a football field, according to a BBC report.
He's searching the landfill, but lacks the funds for a serious hunt. "The truth is I haven't got the funds or ability to make that happen at the moment without a definite pay cheque at the end of it," he told the BBC.
Those who want to give Howells a hand might be interested in an Indiegogo effort to fund a recovery effort.
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It was like going into the belly of the beast.
This week in Washington is the annual “policy summit” of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful, secretive organization funded by the Koch brothers and other corporate interests that is famous for drafting conservative legislation that Republican state legislatures adopt down to the last semicolon. And the news media were invited to attend!
I descended the escalators at the Grand Hyatt downtown, two floors below street level, excited by the possibilities listed on the ALEC agenda:
The environment and energy task force, led by private-sector American Electric Power. The tax and fiscal policy task force, headed by Altria. The international relations task force, run by Philip Morris. The commerce and insurance task force, by State Farm. And the health and human services task force, by Guarantee Trust Life Insurance.
Alas, I was quickly regurgitated from the belly of the beast. Outside the meeting rooms, a D.C. police officer, stationed to keep out the riffraff, turned me away.
“Our business meetings are not open, and so the subcommittee meetings and task force meetings are not open,” explained Bill Meierling, an ALEC spokesman. I could wait a few hours and then attend a luncheon and some workshops, as long as I promised not to record them.
But Meierling wanted to assure me that there was nothing untoward about this arrangement, and that it was absolutely not true that the corporations that fund ALEC were behind closed doors, handing their legislative wish lists to the conservative state legislators who then pass them, rubber-stamp style, from coast to coast.
“What you fundamentally need to know about this organization is it’s completely legislator driven,” he said.
Uh-huh. And ALEC is proving that by keeping reporters from the rooms where the legislators are or are not receiving their marching orders from corporate patrons.
This probably won’t fly much longer. ALEC has been a major force behind the conservative swing in state capitals, and it claims 82 alumni in the House — including Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) — and 11 in the Senate. Its advisory council includes Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, Diageo, AT&T, Peabody Energy, Koch Industries and UPS, and exhibitors at its conference this week include the Charles Koch Institute, the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) are addressing the conference.
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A floating vessel that is longer than the Empire State Building is high has taken to the water for the first time.
The hull of Shell's Prelude was floated in South Korea.
When fully built, Prelude will be the largest floating facility ever created, weighing more than 600,000 tonnes.
It would be used to help in the production of natural gas from 2017, Shell said, and would operate for 25 years off Australia's north-west coast.
The area has a yearly cyclone season from November to April, but Prelude has been designed to withstand such conditions. It is hoped the facility will be able to produce enough gas to power a city the size of Hong Kong.
Despite appearances, Prelude cannot strictly be described as a ship as it needs to be towed to its destination rather than travelling under its own power.
Shell has not disclosed how much the vessel will cost, but industry analysts told Reuters that it would be likely to command a price of between $10.8bn and $12.6bn (£6.6bn - £7.7bn).
Not content with Prelude's record-breaking size, Shell said it had already started work on an even bigger facility.
EE today switched on its superfast 4G network in London’s Tech City, promising to deliver speeds of 300Mbps to mobile devices.
The operator first announced the network in November 2013 at the Huawei Global Mobile Broadband Forum, as it continued its hardware partnership with Huawei for routers. However, it chose the three-year anniversary of the Tech City organisation to go live.
“By pioneering 4G innovation in the UK, we want to help British businesses switch on and start up,” said Olaf Swantee, CEO of EE. “That’s why we’ve partnered with Tech City to deliver superfast services to some of the UK’s brightest new companies.”
Tech City and EE have been partners since May with a joint goal of supporting small companies across the East London technology hub. As part of the deal, EE promised to debut any new network innovations in the east London locale and offer bespoke packages for Tech City accredited businesses, giving them discounts on their line rental, mobile broadband and accessories.
"I am delighted to be welcoming EE as one of Tech City’s key partners,” said Joanna Shields, CEO of Tech City. “We have been working together over the last few months, developing a series of initiatives that will drive real benefit to small businesses in this thriving technology hub.”
“Game-changing investments, such as EE’s 300Mbps network, will catalyse the next wave of innovation and creativity in digital, creative and technology businesses. It will allow them to connect to new markets around the world and supports the growth of our brightest and best businesses.”
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No one died in yesterday morning’s floods – and officials do not believe anyone caught up in the disaster suffered serious injuries.
Some properties were damaged – but officials at the Environment Agency said that a comparatively small number of damage reports had come in so far.
Dr Charles Beardall, area manager of the Environment Agency, said the surge was similar to that in 1953 – but there had been a number of factors that had prevented a major disaster.
He said forecasting technology had enabled meteorologists to spot the surge developing earlier in the week and by Wednesday they were able to be confident about what would happen.
Modern information technology enabled the Agency to contact people at risk of flooding – 96% of people in homes at risk of flooding had signed up for alerts so it was much easier to let them know of potential danger.
The investment in sea defences had worked – resulting in only a limited amount of damage being reported.
And the co-ordination between the various organisations involved had worked very well – lessons learned in exercises had been very useful.
Dr Beardall said: “Over the last five years the Environment Agency has invested more than £80 million in sea defences in Suffolk, when you include the Ipswich flood defences where work is continuing.
“That investment has paid off. It’s helped to protect properties in Southwold, Felixstowe, Woodbridge, Thorpeness and Aldeburgh.
“It has cost a lot of money but it has helped protect the county from an event like this.”
The Environment Agency is one of the organisations which come together to form the Suffolk Resilience Forum, a statutory body that deals with major civil emergencies.
All counties have resilience forums which work under a “Gold Command” system, usually headed by senior police officers.
The Suffolk Resilience Forum first came together to co-ordinate the response to the flooding threat on Wednesday at the police headquarters at Martlesham Heath.
The forum includes emergency services, local authority officials, Environment Agency managers, and representatives from major utility companies like UK Power Networks, Anglia Water and the National Grid.
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If you’ve never looked at this region using Google satellite maps, I wish you would. Maybe you’ve seen how pivots have taken over as you’ve flown over. It seems like they are almost everywhere that they can be, by now. For those of us who never invested in Valmont, we’ve missed out on a great investment opportunity.
Along with population losses, rural areas such as this one in Nebraska have lost too much wildlife habitat and biodiversity. A couple of barometers for us are the monarch butterfly and the pheasant. According to Harvest Public Media, in Nebraska, wild pheasant concentrations have fallen 86 percent since their peak in the 1960s. As for the monarch, there are no longer milkweeds in the Midwest which are necessary for them to breed on, and so their population is falling dramatically. No longer will first graders in science classes be able to marvel at the story about the massive and mysterious annual monarch migration, like you and I did.
Yesterday, I was reading a twitter feed from the Renewable Fuels Association, because they were testifying to defend ethanol mandates by our government at a hearing discussing the new EPA proposal to cut back the mandate to levels more in line with the blend wall problem. The ethanol-industrial-complex representatives kept saying that the ethanol industry is providing new jobs for rural America.
From what I’m seeing, if anything, the opposite is true, as increased corn production is leading to larger and too-expensive farms making it difficult to begin farming. As farm depopulation continues, the small communities also depopulate and lose their goods and services so that remaining rural residents drive farther for off-farm jobs and groceries.
There is a new USDA report out about ethanol industry job growth. It revealed that the new jobs created, which are negligible in number, are primarily for truck drivers and natural gas pipeline workers (to get the gas piped to the distillation plants and to get the corn hauled to the ethanol plants). Sadly, too, the USDA reports that net job growth in nonmetro areas since 2011 have been near zero, and that between 2010 and 2012, the rural areas have, for the first time ever, experienced a net population loss.
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In the hoopla over Bitcoin, some suggest the virtual currency will challenge Western Union as a way for consumers to transfer money between countries.
The theory got another boost this week when a report by a Bank of America currency strategist noted Bitcoin’s “clear potential for growth” and observed that Bitcoin’s market cap already exceeded that of Western Union:
Western Union executives are probably not shaking in their boots about the chart just yet since Bitcoin’s value has been fueled by speculation, and very few people are using it to actually buy things or transfer money. But they may be worried about how Western Union’s transfer service, which charges around $8 to move $100 worth of money, will fare in the future against a service that charges nothing at all.
And Bitcoin’s potential is not just academic: early this year, entrepreneur Wences Casares described how some in Argentina are responding to a currency crisis by passing around Bitcoin on old Android phones.
So is Western Union worried?
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Olympic sailors on Saturday checked out the venue for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Many didn’t like what they saw.
“I’ve been sailing all over the world for 20 years now, and this is the most polluted place I’ve ever been,” said Allan Norregaard, a Danish bronze medalist in the 2012 London Olympics. “It’s really a shame because it’s a beautiful area and city, but the water is so polluted, so dirty and full of garbage.”
Rio’s local Olympic organizing committee has promised the pollution will be cleaned up when the Olympics open in 2 1/2 years. Government officials have pledged to reduce 80 percent of the pollution flowing into the bay.
But the sailors doubt the problem can be fixed after festering for decades, and many worry about their health. Environmentalists call measures being taken “stopgap,” likely to mask the problem and not cure it.
The Associated Press has documented over the last several weeks that nearly 70 percent of Rio’s waste goes untreated into surrounding waters. Famous beaches like Copacabana and Ipanema are dirty. Untreated sewage pours into a lagoon bordering the Olympic Park, the heart of the games.
Norregaard said that while sailing the last few days he’d seen entire trees floating in the bay, doors, chunks of timber with nails protruding, swollen mattresses and endless plastic bags.
Another sailor talked about a horse carcass in the 148-square-mile bay, which opens into the Atlantic just above Rio’s famed Copacabana beach.
The Dane said the floating debris makes racing unfair and dangerous. The other issue is the health risk with high levels of fecal coliform bacteria in the water.
“I would definitely not swim in it,” Norregaard said. “We have had a couple of incidents where people went in the water and came up with red dots on their body. I don’t know what’s in the water, but it’s definitely not healthy.”
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A statue of famed scientists Nikola Tesla is being unveiled today in Palo Alto after the successful completion of a six-figure Kickstarter campaign.
Here’s a first look at the seven-foot-tall monument, which is equipped with free Wi-Fi and a time capsule to be opened in 2043:
“This unique project pays respect to a great inventor who never had the historical recognition he deserved,” says project organizer Dorrian Porter in a statement on the news.
“But it also is intended to inspire the entrepreneurs who come to the Silicon Valley to think big and selflessly — as Tesla did — on important opportunities like energy and wirelessly. The free exchange of information and affordable access to sustainable energy have the potential to solve the critical issues of poverty and education and inspire peace.”
Tesla memorial statues also have been erected in Croatia, the inventor’s birthplace; Long Island, the site of his laboratory; and Niagara Falls.
Here’s a slideshow of Tesla monuments around the world:
Click headline to view the Tesla slideshow--
It’s easy for Americans to laugh at Donald Trump when he goes off on a rant, like when he joined the birthers during the last presidential election. But when Trump starts picking fights with other countries, and wind energy, it’s just embarrassing. As environmentalists and global citizens we feel the need to offer the world an apology for Trump’s attempt to blackmail Scotland, as the country attempts to spur economic growth, cleaner air and a safer climate.
Several years ago, the real estate tycoon took his personality parade to Scotland, where he fought local environmentalists for approval to build a luxury golf resort on a pristine section of the nation’s northeast coast. Now, because it will affect the view from his golf club, Trump’s begun a fierce legal battle over Scotland’s plans to install offshore wind turbines near his property.
To fully appreciate Trump’s hypocrisy, it’s worth exploring some of the story’s background. Back in 2007, when Trump sought approval for construction of the Trump International Golf Links, he promised more than 900 high-end condos, 500 luxury homes, a huge hotel and two 18-hole golf courses. The project, Trump said, would attract over a billion dollars of investment and generate more than 4,000 full time construction jobs and 1,200 full-time jobs.
Ultimately, the mega-plan was approved, over the objections of local residents and environmentalists. As Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond put it, “A thousand new homes and 6,000 jobs outweigh environmental concerns.”
Since then, as E&E News’ Erica Rex recently reported, only one golf course, a temporary clubhouse, a restaurant and “a handful” of guest rooms have been built. The compound employs 200 people at most. All those new homes and thousands of jobs are nowhere to be found.
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First Wind, a Boston-based company that owns and operates 12 wind farms in six states, said Friday that it has reached an agreement with the Burlington Electric Department in Vermont to sell the utility power generated from the planned Hancock Wind project near Ellsworth, Maine. In a press release, First Wind said it will sell 25 percent of the power and renewable energy certificates generated at the 54 megawatt wind farm for the next 10 years under a fixed-price agreement to the Vermont utility.
“This project will help provide clean, renewable energy to Burlington ratepayers at a highly competitive cost, and the Hancock Wind project will deliver significant economic benefits throughout Down East Maine,” First Wind chief executive Paul Gaynor said in a statement.
When built, the Hancock Wind project will feature 18 turbines. First Wind currently operates five wind projects in Maine and one in Sheffield, VT. Combined, the six projects generate enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes, the company said.
A November story in the Globe noted that First Wind has prospered by following an unconventional strategy that often avoids towering ridgelines, instead building at lower elevations and taking advantage of technological advances that allow turbines to generate electricity at lower wind speeds. Even so, the company’s projects have still attracted controversy, provoking outrage from some residents of rural and remote areas who say the peace, quiet, and beauty of natural landscapes is marred by the industrial developments.
The company’s portfolio is made up of more than 500 turbines with a combined generating capacity of roughly 1,000 megawatts, or enough to power about 285,000 homes. First Wind has annual revenues of about $250 million.
Most folks probably think that paying $600 to $900 per lighting fixture is overkill. I mean, it would take forever to get payback on that, right? Not necessarily.
Atlas Box & Crating, which installed Digital Lumens smart lighting in its 292,000-square-foot warehouse, recovered its cost inside of 2 years, said Frank Tavares, GPE for that Sutton, Mass.-based company. That payback came in the form of drastically reduced energy bills as well as additional incentives from its utility company and tax incentives from the state.
Tavares expected lower electricity bills, more surprising was the upside from all the data collected by those smart fixtures, which work in part by sensing occupancy so they light an aisle only when there is foot traffic on that aisle, for example. “We set the parameters in the lighting and timing to track occupancy in each area… we have a lot of product out there and by using the occupancy sensors on the lamps I was many aisles that were heavily traveled in one part of the warehouse and another aisle across the warehouse that was also heavily traveled.” In between there was a dead zone.
Using that data, Atlas rearranged and consolidated the inventory on that single, remote aisle, placing it closer to where the rest of the action was. That greatly increased efficiency.
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Two German scientists have just confirmed that you can’t balance the Earth’s rising temperatures by simply toning down the sunlight. It may do something disconcerting to the patterns of global rainfall.
Earlier this year a US-led group of scientists ran sophisticated climate models of a geo-engineered world and proposed the same thing. Now Axel Kleidon and Maik Renner of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, have used a different theoretical approach to confirm the conclusion, and explain why it would be a bad idea.
The argument for geo-engineering goes like this: the world is getting inexorably warmer, governments show no sign of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so why not control the planetary thermostat by finding a way to filter, block, absorb or reflect some of the sunlight hitting the Earth?
Such things can be done by pumping soot or aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the skies a fraction, or even floating mirrors in Earth orbit to reflect some of the sunlight back into space.
Either way, the result is the same: you have global temperature control, tuned perhaps to the average at the beginning of the last century, and you can then go on burning as much petrol or coal as you like.
But now the two biogeochemists at Jena report in the journal Earth System Dynamics that they used a simple energy balance model to show that the world doesn’t work like that. Water simply doesn’t respond to atmospheric heat and solar radiation in the same way.
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The National Security Agency and its allies face a long, painful drip of classified documents relating to their intelligence operations. The quantity and range of leaks facilitated by Edward Snowden have become clear in recent news stories.
First, The Australian reports that Edward Snowden stole as many as 20,000 Aussie signals intelligence files from the NSA's systems. Australia's attorney general called the disclosures the most damaging in the country's history.
That, combined with 58,000 documents from Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency and an unknown but substantial number of NSA files, means the claim Snowden took as many as 200,000 files is not far-fetched.
Second, on Thursday Swedish television reported that Sweden's signals intelligence agency, the FRA, has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership. A previous report said that Sweden is also a key partner of the GCHQ.
Glenn Greenwald, who provided the documents for at least the Swedish TV report, tweeted: 'The closeness of the US/Sweden relationship cannot be overstated - this is just the first of many stories that will show this."
The Swedish TV report is especially striking because the disclosures seem to fly in the face of something Greenwald told the Daily Beast in June: "We won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing.”
Russia is one of America's top five priority spying targets and the NSA's primary mission is foreign signals intelligence. It's hard to fathom that many people object to the U.S. spying on the Kremlin.
No matter the editorial parameters, there is clearly more material to report: As of November 27, about 552 pages of Snowden's documents have been published in a variety of media outlets. This week Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger testified that the paper published 1% of the 58,000 files it had received from Snowden.
Given that the leaks appear to be exposing not only government spying on citizens but also basic functions of the NSA and that the documents provided to Greenwald spurred the creation of a new media organization, this could theoretically go on for years.
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Australian experts are warning Canada about the damaging economic fallout of adopting U.S.-driven Internet censorship rules under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The warning comes as Trade Ministers, including Canada’s Ed Fast, prepare to gather in Singapore for a crucial round of TPP talks this weekend, with U.S. negotiators aiming to strong-arm Canada into adopting extreme rules that would make the Internet more expensive, censored, and policed.
Australia was forced to adopt similar rules under the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) with deeply damaging results. Australia’s Productivity Commission estimated that extensions to copyright terms alone cost the Australian economy $88 million in revenue flowing overseas. The U.S. is trying to force the 12 TPP countries to agree to extended copyright terms, along with many other economically damaging Internet censorship measures in the TPP.
“‘A net loss’ is how the Productivity Commission labelled the copyright obligations,” says Trish Hepworth, Executive Director at the Australian Digital Alliance. “The copyright extension alone was estimated to cost up to $88 million per year in revenue flowing overseas.”
Hepworth continued: “Provisions in the TPP have the potential to bring the Internet to a grinding halt, through the extension of reproduction rights into the digital context. Australia is now an unattractive place to locate facilities that deliver, in particular, data analysis and search services over the internet. Telcos and universities are concerned that cloud computing isn’t supported, putting Australia in a technological backwater.”
Hepworth went on to highlight that: “Alarmingly, the TPP proposals being discussed this weekend in Singapore go further than those of AUSTFA. The increasing move towards criminalisation, provisions on ISP liability, formalities and parallel imports could all have long-lasting consequences for Australia and other countries. A secretly negotiated trade deal is not the right place for overly controlling and technical copyright provisions. Australia’s experience under AUSTFA should stand as a warning to other countries considering their position in the TPP.”
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Today, SolarCity—a company that’s grown quickly by installing solar panels for free and charging customers for the solar power—announced a new business that will extend that model to providing batteries for free, too. SolarCity is a rare success story for investors in clean technology, and its business model has sped the adoption of solar panels.
The batteries could help businesses lower their utility bills by reducing the amount of power they draw from the grid. They could also help address solar power’s intermittency, which could prevent it from becoming a significant source of electricity. The batteries are being supplied by Tesla Motors, whose CEO, Elon Musk, is SolarCity’s chairman.
Other solar companies have failed in recent years. But SolarCity’s business model has helped it grow quickly. It had a successful IPO a year ago, and its stock price has risen from its IPO price of $8 to over $50 today (see “SolarCity IPO Tests Business Model Innovations in Energy”).
CEO Lyndon Rive says that eight years from now, the company might not be able to continue selling solar panel systems unless it packages them with batteries, because of the strain on the grid that solar power can cause. “It could be that, without storage, you won’t be able to connect solar systems to the grid,” he says.
Solar power intermittency isn’t currently a big problem for utilities, since solar panels generate just a tiny fraction of the total electricity supply. But solar power will become a strain on the power grid as it grows. Power from solar panels can drop in less than a second as clouds pass overhead, before surging back again just as fast. The tools that utilities use now to match supply and demand typically can’t respond that fast. Batteries could be a solution, but they’re too expensive to be used widely now. Rive thinks SolarCity can help drive down their costs by scaling up its use of batteries with the new business model.
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Schneider Electric, a specialist in energy management, and Dong Energy, an energy group in Northern Europe, announced an agreement to cooperate on a technological and commercial partnership for a more sustainable energy supply of remote islands in Africa. The aim is to enable African electric network operators of remote or isolated island grids to increase the share of renewable used while maintaining grid stability and reliability for consumers.
Of the world’s fifty-two Small Island Developing States (SIDS), six are in Africa. They include; Cape Verde, Comoros, Guinea Bissau, Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe and Seychelles. These countries range in size from the smallest, Seychelles, which is composed of 115 small islands representing the largest number among African SIDS, to the largest, Guinea Bissau, which comprises close to 80 islands.
In Africa alone, there are at least 300 remote islands distanced from mainland grids. These isolated island grids are often heavily diesel-dependent, incurring high electricity costs and subject to fluctuating fuel prices. This is a barrier for local economic development, for improving living standards and for reducing carbon emissions. Many island utility operators aim to replace diesel with renewable generation to reduce costs and reach renewable targets. However the main challenge of integrating intermittent renewable energy is the ensuing complexity of balancing the grid and maintaining reliability and stability.This can put a limit on the amount of renewable energy that can be efficiently integrated.
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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on Tuesday vigorously defended his decision to publish a series of articles based on the secret files leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, telling a parliamentary committee that the right to continue pursuing the story goes to the heart of press freedoms and democracy in Britain.
Rusbridger also told lawmakers that the Guardian had published only 1 percent of the 58,000 files it had received from Snowden.
“I would not expect us to be publishing a huge amount more,” he said.
The hearing on the Guardian’s handling of intelligence data leaked by Snowden, who is living in self-imposed exile in Moscow, drew the attention of free-speech advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. Rusbridger faced more than an hour of questioning during the Home Affairs Select Committee’s counterterrorism hearing, testifying in an occasionally combative public grilling of both the Guardian and its editor.
Along with The Washington Post, the Guardian — a London-based news outlet with a print circulation under 200,000 but online readers numbering in the many millions — was the first to publish reports based on the Snowden leaks. In response, British authorities have acted far more aggressively than U.S. or other European officials, launching what Rusbridger and international free-speech advocates have decried as a campaign of “intimidation” against the paper. Actions taken include the coerced destruction of Snowden data being held at the Guardian’s London headquarters and public denunciations by Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as the decision to summon Rusbridger for questioning by lawmakers on Tuesday.
During the hearing, a number of left-leaning politicians appeared to cheer the editor on for shedding light on the lengths to which U.S. and British intelligence agencies have gone to in their global information-gathering efforts. But others, particularly Conservative lawmakers, challenged the decision to publish and pressed Rusbridger on whether he had violated British law.
Mark Reckless, a Conservative, questioned Rusbridger repeatedly about the Guardian’s decision to share its trove of Snowden files — including documents containing the names of British intelligence operatives — with the New York Times. Names in the documents, Rusbridger said, were not redacted before being handed over because of the vast resources that would have required.
Reckless said the decision appeared to violate British counterterrorism laws. He then asked Rusbridger whether he felt he should be prosecuted for allowing such a transfer of information.
Rusbridger responded, “I think it depends on your view of a free press.”
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The chemistry of the oceans is changing. And it isn’t just the corals and the baby oysters that are unhappy. It makes juvenile rockfish really anxious, and it upsets the digestion of sea urchins.
The pH (a measure of acidity – the lower the pH, the more acid the water) of the planet’s oceans is dropping rapidly, largely because the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are increasing. Since carbon dioxide dissolves in water to form carbonic acid, the seas are responding to global change.
The first and clearest victims are likely to be the corals, which are adapted to a specific value of pH in the oceans, but there have also been problems reported by oyster farmers.
Now Martin Tresguerres of the University of California, San Diego reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that at least one species of juvenile fish responds badly to the changes in ocean chemistry.
There is a natural aspect to ocean acidification – submarine volcanoes discharge carbon dioxide and turn the deep seas around them to a kind of fizzing champagne, and upwelling ocean currents can occasionally deliver a stressful level of lower pH sea water to blight fishing waters.
But Tresguerres reports that he and colleagues subjected young Californian rockfish to the kind of water chemistry predicted as atmospheric carbon levels rise, and then measured their behaviour in response to changes of light in the aquarium, and to an unfamiliar object in the tank.
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