free electricity across the globe

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Its called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Check it out. The MIT report is a big download (pdf). Table 9.8 gives the cost of electricity generated from EGS to be $0.05kWh to $0.074kWh. That's pretty fucking cheap.

Monki Punk

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Punkscience is listening to a CD from this bunch.They are freakin coool as fuck!

Labour rebels try to save the world

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Needless to say all here at punkscience hope they succeed.

oil price plummeting

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If you look at the widget embedded on this page displaying records of oil prices for the last year or so you will notice that it has dropped below $70 for the first time in a year. This is because of the economic collapse so I'm optimistic that it won't herald a wave of sudden skyrocketing oil consumption from the US. One of the welcome side-effects of this is that tar-sand extraction has become uneconomical, with a break-even point of $70 per barrel. Sweet.

"Arms for Peace"

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Such a sweet-sounding slogan for an arms fair. And Her Majusteez guv'ment is balls-deep in the human rights fuck-pile.

"Clearly, the arms industry has lost much of its privileged access but the business remains the same: promoting arms exports. [The UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation (the DESO's replacement)] is offering to take UK arms companies ‘under its wing’ this November at IDEAS Pakistan, an arms fair operating under the slogan ‘arms for peace’, which has previously hosted delegations from North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe, Iran, Sudan, China and Indonesia."

Sarah Waldron rules.

this is what I call "art"

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Word.

why sustainability makes sense

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I just read this article. The $2-5 trillion loss every year that they calculate for ecosystem services and functions lost to "development" dwarfs the banking crisis and continues each and every year unabated. This astounding annual loss from the planet's balance sheet is simply ignored by the neo-classical economic dogma that sees fit to pay failed business executives hundreds of millions. That this level of dystopia is the product of the prevailing dogma has been publically proclaimed by figures such as Karl Polanyi and Ernst Schumacher for decades. Its pretty much the whole reason the environmentalist movement exists. Back in the 1970s environmental economics was created as a discipline in order to put prices on the various externalities and services the ecosystem provides but this eminently sensible and egalitarian way of doing business has simply been marginalised by those in power at the behest of those who stand to gain fat bonuses and hefty dividends. This research reveals how unsustainable and unjust those practices are as they are based upon the exploitation and pillage of our collective, mutual heritage for the exclusive benefit of a small percentage of society.

So, do you want bankers to continue to earn multimillion bonuses for failing to perform or would you prefer the entire financial industry- that contributes and produces little tangible benefit for society- to continue to plunder our children's heritage.

I may sound like a tree hugging hippy but the facts to support my position are available for anyone who cares to see.

rave reviews for punkscience

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From Bishop Hill's Centre for Climate Change Denial:

"I was reading the posts and then came accross this piece of filth:

http://punkscientist.blogspot.com etc


I do so hope that anyone offended by this ignorant piece of garbage hiding behind blogger dot com will press the "flag blog" button at the top of the site - I am sure Google's TOS has something to say about the crudity of language even if the crudity of its mental process is allowed through their filth filter.

Press the "flag blog" button often enough and this POS will have to wipe his mouth elsewhere."

- "Henry Galt"

Henry, this might be of interest to you.

Lick a dick, rat-bitch.

quote of the day

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"If we had those forty million [aborted] children that were killed over the last thirty years we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today."

- Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay



Addition:

Get Your War On

snigger

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Get Your War On


Addition:

more sniggering

my new fighting technique is unstoppable

not-quite-weekly bible quote

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A spicy little passage today- mmmmMMMmmmmmm . . .

"Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her nakedness, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Ezekiel 23:11-21

More News, Less Views

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Written by Greg Philo, Glasgow Media Group, via the boys at Media Lens:

News is a procession of the powerful. Watch it on TV, listen to the Today programme and marvel at the orthodoxy of views and the lack of critical voices. When the credit crunch hit, we were given a succession of bankers, stockbrokers and even hedge-fund managers to explain and say what should be done. But these were the people who had caused the problem, thinking nothing of taking £20 billion a year in city bonuses. The solution these free market wizards agreed to, was that tax payers should stump up £50 billion (and rising) to fill up the black holes in the banking system. Where were the critical voices to say it would be a better idea to take the bonuses back? Mainstream news has sometimes a social-democratic edge. There are complaints aired about fuel poverty and the state of inner cities. But there are precious few voices making the point that the reason why there are so many poor people is because the rich have taken the bulk of the disposable wealth. The notion that the people should own the nation’s resources is close to derided on orthodox news.

When Northern Rock was nationalised, TV news showed us pictures of British Leyland and the old problem ridden car industry. Never mind that it was actually privately owned when most of the problems occurred and that company policy had been to distribute 95% of profits as dividends to shareholders, rather than to invest in new plant and machinery. This is all lost in the mists of history and what is conveyed is the vague sense that nationalisation is a “bad thing”.

We showed how this affects public understanding by asking a sample of 244 young people in higher education (aged 18 –23) about the great spate of privatizations which had taken place in the 1980s. We asked whether the industries involved had in general been profitable or unprofitable. Actually, the major ones of gas, electricity, oil and telecommunications were both profitable and major sources of revenue to the state, but nearly 60% of the sample thought that the industries had been losing money.

This is especially poignant now that energy prices are being jacked up and the foreign owners of many of these companies are not interested in passing on their windfall profits to the British people. Countries such as China, Venezuala and even Russia keep key industries very firmly in state hands, but where are the critical voices in broadcasting here, who are given space to raise these arguments? They can be heard in the outer reaches, occasionally on Question Time, Channel 4 News or Newsnight.

But is this what the population want? At the start of the Iraq war we had the normal parade of generals and military experts, but in fact, a consistent body of opinion then and since has been completely opposed to it. We asked our sample whether people such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein and Michael Moore should be featured routinely on the news as part of a normal range of opinion. Seventy three per cent opted for this rather than wanting them on just occasionally, as at present.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is another area of great imbalance in the views that are heard. Our study of the main TV news output showed that pro-Israeli speakers were featured about twice as much as Palestinians. This year BBC News covered Israel’s ‘birthday’ of 60 years since the setting up of the state. This was of course also the anniversary of what, from the Palestinian perspective, was the great disaster when they were forced from their homes and land. Israel’s superior public relations machine meant that they set the agenda on broadcast news. The Palestinians were featured, but rather less and as a sort of afterthought. As a presenter on BBC’s Today programme put it, “Today Israel is 60 years old, and all this week we have been hearing from Israelis about what it means to them”. Quite so.

We commissioned YouGov to ask a sample of 2086 UK adults whether they thought that more coverage should be given to the Israeli point of view, or more to the Palestinians, or equal for both. Nearly twice as many people thought that the Palestinians should have the most as compared with the Israelis, but the bulk of the replies (72%) were that both should have the same. Only 5% of the population supported what the broadcasters have actually been doing in the main news output.

Politicians and broadcasters say they are worried about a growing lack of interest in politics especially amongst the young. Our work shows there is no lack of interest in lively critical debate. The problem is that a news which largely features the views of two political parties with very similar free market policies at home, and an international agenda which follows America, does not provide this.

nuclear power stations are shit

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More evidence to add to the mountain.

gullible.info

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I love this website.

• Teenagers who have pledged themselves to an abstinence program are 28 percent more likely to try drugs.

• Among American adults who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design, 14.6 percent believe the Bible was originally written in english.

undo

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Why is it that when I am typing an email or a blog entry or a comment and I use ctrl+z to undo something it sometimes cuts a massive block out of my text that I then cannot retrieve?

THIS IS THE MOST ANNOYING FUCKING THING IN THE FUCKING WORLD

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHH!!

algal biofuels

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I had dinner tonight with a researcher visiting our lab, who works in the field of algal biofuels. He told me that they are far from commercial reality. The numbers you see in the press are extrapolations from lab studies and attempts to scale them up to commercial scales suffer huge losses in efficiency, producing ~20% of the frequently quoted figures, probably due to the need to keep the cultures on a knife edge balance between lethal stress and rapidly reproducing.

Eg.

"diatom algae needs silicon in the water to grow, whereas green algae requires nitrogen to grow^. Under nutrient deficiency the algae produced more oils per weight of algae, however the algae growths also were significantly less."

From here.

I can't help but be disappointed as I had fallen under the spell of the PR and was poising myself to spring into this line of research and save the world. I haven't abandoned that idea, I'm just going to have to work a bit harder for it. But then a slightly demented man once said "nothing that's worth having in this world comes easy".