Green Day

Professor Stephen Salters Pelamis Wave Power (PWP) system launches in Portugal today. The system was designed and built in Scotland but lacked institutional support by either Westminster or the previous Labour administration. So once again we are giving away an advantage to a competitor and not putting Scotland in the forefront of renewables, research, technology and jobs. Taken with the failure to support the Carbon Storage and Capture plant at Peterhead, it makes Brown recklessly culpable for these missed opportunities. Why?

There's more here on this criminal negligence of what has been called 'the Saudia Arabia of Renewable Energy off Scotland's Coast'.

Elsewhere, Vandana Shiva here outlines what she sees as the triple threat of cheap oil, human-induced climate change and resource scarcity. She’s my answer to the question put here...

“Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You've seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can't use it. They're locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it's still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.

The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it's only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we're talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.” *

Full article here.

* Vandana Shiva from at a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis -- Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction," in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization's website.