The day my dog was cooked for dinner
Watch this video (quite strong scenes!) and think about: why to kill mammals for food!?
domingo, 28 de junho de 2015
sexta-feira, 26 de junho de 2015
quarta-feira, 17 de junho de 2015
DESPITE NOT BEING SPECIFICS...NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL...BY CENTURY'S END!!!
The G7 leaders' pledge to eliminate the use of fossil fuels as an energy source by century's end could be the most significant outcome of the most recent meeting. It also reinforces German host Angela Merkel's claim to be the 'climate chancellor'.
As is customary with such pledges, however, the announcement was short on specifics and it's really not clear how reductions in fossil fuel usage can be achieved.
[Reproduced from http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2909340/to_stop_using_fossil_fuels_any_time_soon_japan_must_follow_germanys_lead.html]
To stop using fossil fuels any time soon, Japan must follow Germany's lead
After all, disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 have made key G7 members considerably less enthusiastic about nuclear power, one obvious alternative.
Both Germany and Japan have crucial roles to play over the coming decades in facing up to these challenges. It was Merkel's Germany that decided in the wake of Fukushima to abandon nuclear power by 2020.
Under an aggressive 50% expansion in renewables since then, in 2014 German fossil fuel consumption had fallen to an historic 35 year low.
Both Germany and Japan have crucial roles to play over the coming decades in facing up to these challenges. It was Merkel's Germany that decided in the wake of Fukushima to abandon nuclear power by 2020.
Under an aggressive 50% expansion in renewables since then, in 2014 German fossil fuel consumption had fallen to an historic 35 year low.
But what about Japan?
After Fukushima the country initially shut down all its nuclear plants. However, since then successive pro-nuclear governments have tried to restart its reactors, in part to reduce the spiralling financial and environmental costs of the resulting sharp increase in oil, gas and coal imports.
Japan is now the world's second biggest importer of fossil fuels after China and the world's fifth largest emitter of CO2.
Despite efforts to restart the nuclear programme, all 43 operable reactors remain in shut-down mode due to public unease. Even the scheduled restart for Sendai No. 1 plant in Kyushu has been delayed until August due to technical difficulties. Hence the question the country faces is not whether it should restart its nuclear plants, but whether it can do so in the face of public fears of another earthquake or tsunami.
Those fears are real. Evidence suggests that Japan may have experienced at least 22 tsunamis higher than 10m. Moreover, Japan has experienced the highest density of 8+ magnitude earthquakes in the world since modern records began in 1900.
Within the coming decades seismologists expect powerful undersea earthquakes of the type that occurred off northeastern Japan in 2011 along the Nankai trough to the south of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. This would threaten the huge Hamaoka nuclear power plant, located roughly equidistant between the population centres of Nagoya and Tokyo-Yokohama.
Addicted to oil - in spite of its vast renewable energy resources
As recently as the 1970s just 3% of Japan's electricity came from nuclear power. Since then, however, governments have nurtured nuclear under the assumption that the country lacks domestic energy resources and is vulnerable to overseas political volatility. In the intervening period Japan, like many other countries, has become addicted to oil.
While Japan might not sit on huge oilfields, the idea it lacks domestic energy potential is false. It has abundant geothermal energy, for instance, as the local macaque monkeys know well. Japan mostly receives 1,800 – 2,100 hours of sunshine per year, more than solar-friendly Germany, and at a similar latitude to sunny Spain.
The country also has some of the most plentiful wind, tidal, and wave energy resources in Asia due to its mountainous island and marine geography. Despite this the state has invested huge sums in developing nuclear power while, according to former prime minister Naoto Kan, the electric power companies have treated renewables as a "nuisance".
This treatment appears to be continuing, even as local small-scale, or distributed, solar energy is catching on thanks to new feed-in tariffs which reward renewable generation. At first regional energy companies integrated this energy into the main grid but this has slowed.
One provider, Kyushu Electric Power, has stopped accepting applications from renewable suppliers, stating that the company can't cope with the destabilisation to their systems.
So how can Japan do it? Only by following Germany's example
Japan had intended to reduce fossil fuel dependence by building 14 new nuclear reactors, under the then-government's 2010 Basic Energy Plan. These new reactors would have raised the nuclear share of electricity from 29% in 2011 to 50% by 2030, and its share of Japan's primary energy mix from 10% to 24%.
But Fukushima consigned that plan to the dustbin, and the country has yet to develop a credible alternative that will satisfy the country's energy demand while simultaneously matching pledges to reduce and, now, eliminate fossil fuel usage.
In the near-term Japan faces huge obstacles in meeting its G7 targets for reducing fossil fuel usage. Over the longer term, the situation looks less bleak. Fertility levels far below the replacement rate means the country's population is shrinking and some local authorities are developing smart compact cities in response, which should accelerate as depopulation deepens.
Japan also possesses deep technological and economic resources to draw on in delivering solutions to the big questions of the 21st century. Once regional energy providers are able to absorb local solar and geothermal energy, the potential for renewables will rapidly expand.
Japan faces perhaps the toughest 21st century energy challenges of the G7 states. Can it simultaneously address safety and environmental concerns by replacing nuclear and fossil fuel energy usage with renewables?
It is in the resolution of this problem that Germany may be able to lend a hand.
Peter Matanle is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
quinta-feira, 11 de junho de 2015
NIGERIA: FROM THE FLOURISHING ECONOMY OF THE 1970s TO 'BOKO HARAM TRAGEDY' OF 2015
Reproduced from http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2824560/nigerias_resource_curse_boko_haram_and_the_poverty_of_plenty.html
After six decades of oil exploitation, Nigeria's failure to provide for its citizens and develop its economy has exposed a hollowed-out state that benefits only the politicians and plutocrats, writes Joshua Goldfond. This is the environment in which Boko Haram has flourished, and as Nigeria proves incapable of effective action or reform, there's no end in sight to the nation's misery.
The 'resource curse' is alive and well in contemporary Nigeria, where cultural and economic schizophrenia has created Africa's largest economy, while also engendering the savage terrorist group Boko Haram.
The 'resource curse', also called 'Dutch disease', is a harmful imperial phenomenon that has followed the same, hackneyed script for generations.
A valuable natural resource is discovered in a developing nation - like Nigerian oil - and the nation's entire economy shifts to accommodate this exploding sector. Government corruption festers with the help of foreign money; domestic inequality rises; infrastructure decays, and chaos ensues.
Such is the case in Nigeria, where the government's failure to protect its citizens and develop the whole of its economy has exposed a hollowed-out state whose shortsightedness endangers all that it has achieved.
And while the glossy sheen of 21st century markets, modern banking and international treaties promise protections from economic exploitation and degradation, the rise of Boko Haram proves otherwise.
The Nigerian government's failure to protect its citizens and develop its economy has exposed a hollowed-out state whose shortsightedness endangers all that it has achieved.
Disorganised but well-armed brutality
With a name translating roughly to 'western education is forbidden', Boko Haram seeks the expulsion of all western influence in Nigeria and the enactment of Sharia law for its 175 million citizens, half of whom are not Muslim.
Although initially nonviolent in their tactics, a change in the group's leadership in 2002 led to terroristic methods that would recur throughout the decade. Its current incarnation - by far its most brutal - began when the rogue imam Abubakar Shekau assumed leadership in 2010. They have since raped, kidnapped, and slaughtered their way through their homeland: barbaric killers lacking in discipline but flush with weaponry.
Boko Haram is a product of Nigeria's northern region, where child vaccination rates hover around 3.6% and illiteracy rates are among the world's highest.
The UN and World Bank estimate it to be one of the poorest places on Earth, but this was not always the case. Northern Nigeria was, comparatively speaking, stable and economically strong until the 1970s, when cheap foreign goods devastated its manufacturing base.
Around the same time, vast sums of multinational capital flooded the south's oil rich Niger Delta. Economic development followed the money, creating a socioeconomic chasm within the nation that has only grown with time.
Indeed, a recalculation of the nation's GDP in 2014 determined that Nigeria had surpassed South Africa as the continent's largest economy, yet the financial rewards continue to accumulate in the hands of a diminishing number of citizens.
Who benefits from the Niger Delta's $1.6 trillion oil revenues?
And while tax revenues on oil extracted by western companies have earned the Nigerian government roughly $1.6 trillion since 1956, little of this can be evidenced even in the more educated and developed south.
In the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, the number of Nigerians living on less than $2 a day has risen from 17.1 million (27% of the population) to a staggering 112 million (69% of the population).
Boko Haram does its recruiting drive no favours with the mass terror it perpetrates, but the destabilising effects of its atrocities ripples beyond Nigeria's borders. Nigeria's already unsuccessful efforts to stop the group were recently hindered when government soldiers and state-sponsored militias sent north to fight Boko Haram began committing war crimes of their own.
August 2014 brought fresh Amnesty International reports pointing to the widespread slaughter of young male villagers arbitrarily deemed terrorists by rampaging soldiers and commanders.
Embarrassed by the international outrage and seemingly unable to defeat its foe, president Goodluck Jonathan's government has since allowed neighbouring Chad to launch several devastating cross-border attacks into its territory to strike at Boko Haram.
This campaign is no act of charity by Chad's president Idriss Déby, whose failed state is widely regarded as even more corrupt than Nigeria, but rather Chad's effort to prevent Boko Haram from seizing the resource-rich Lake Chad near their common border.
The resource curse reaches its end game
The unraveling of social structures and the dissolution of national borders has rarely been anything but a recipe for disaster, particularly in a region as traditionally unstable as west Africa.
Nigeria's ruling class dreams of international engagement, economic influence, and leveraging their natural resources for a seat at the table of world power. Boko Haram has a parallel vision no less grandiose, using its infamy to align itself with ISIS and the global Jihadi movement.
Unfortunately, economic alienation and societal misery fuels terrorist movements just as oil does the automotive industry. Given the chance, men like Abubakar Shekau - Nigeria's Boko Haram leader - will harvest the country's squandered human capital with a seductive, supremacist ideology that promises power through violence and euphoria through madness.
In this respect, Boko Haram represents the resource curse's disastrous end game, a dire condition easily duplicated throughout a rapidly globalising developing world.
Joshua Goldfond is a second-year master's student at NYU Steinhardt's Department of Media, Culture and Communication, where he recently finished his thesis studying the role of online gaming in forging and maintaining relationships. He has sold film scripts and is the author of the critically-acclaimed fantasy/satire eBook 'The Hunting of the Bubblenuff'. He is also the editor and writer of the arts and culture website, 'The Oculus Online'. He currently resides in New York City.
This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
domingo, 7 de junho de 2015
ATLANTIC FOREST: ONE OF THE GREATEST 'MEGADIVERSITY BIOMES' OF THE WORLD
Seven new microendemic species of Brachycephalus(Anura: Brachycephalidae) from southern Brazil
Abstract
Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) is a remarkable genus of miniaturized frogs of the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest. Many of its species are highly endemic to cloud forests, being found only on one or a few mountaintops. Such level of microendemism might be caused by their climatic tolerance to a narrow set of environmental conditions found only in montane regions. This restriction severely limits the chance of discovery of new species, given the difficulty of exploring these inaccessible habitats. Following extensive fieldwork in montane areas of the southern portion of the Atlantic Rainforest, in this study we describe seven new species of Brachycephalus from the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. These species can be distinguished from one another based on coloration and the level of rugosity of the skin in different parts of their body. These discoveries increase considerably the number of described species of Brachycephalus in southern Brazil.
quarta-feira, 3 de junho de 2015
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