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<font size="+1"><i>November 26, 2017<br>
</i></font> <br>
Phys.Org <br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-artificial-photosynthesis-device-greener.html">Scientists
develop artificial photosynthesis device for greener ethylene
production</a></b><br>
A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS)
has developed a prototype device that mimics natural photosynthesis
to produce ethylene gas using only sunlight, water and carbon
dioxide. The novel method, which produces ethylene at room
temperature and pressure using benign chemicals, could be scaled up
to provide a more eco-friendly and sustainable alternative to the
current method of ethylene production. <br>
The team first designed a copper catalyst in 2015 that could
generate ethylene from readily available water and carbon dioxide
when powered by electricity. This copper catalyst was subsequently
introduced into an artificial photosynthesis system to convert
carbon dioxide and water into ethylene using only solar energy. The
prototype device designed to carry out the reaction achieved a 30
per cent faradaic efficiency of ethylene based on the amount of
electrons generated from solar energy. The overall energy efficiency
of solar-to-ethylene is also comparable to the level of energy
efficiency of natural photosynthesis by plants.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-artificial-photosynthesis-device-greener.html">https://phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-artificial-photosynthesis-device-greener.html</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a
href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171121095201.htm">Climate
changes triggered immigration to America in the 19th century,
study finds</a></b><br>
From Trump to Heinz, some of America's most famous family names and
brands trace their origins back to Germans who emigrated to the
country in the 19th century. Researchers have now found that climate
was a major factor in driving migration from Southwest Germany to
North America during the 19th century.<br>
The team studied official migration statistics and population data
from the 19th century, as well as weather data, harvest figures and
cereal-price records. They focused on the region that is now the
Baden-Wurttemberg state, where many of the migrants - such as
Charles Pfizer of pharmaceutical fame - originated from. They
started by identifying the major migration waves and then
investigated to what extent climate played a role in driving people
to North America during each of them.<br>
The first wave followed the eruption of the Tambora volcano in
Indonesia in 1815. The volcanic ash and gases spewed into the
atmosphere caused temperatures to drop around the world for a few
years after the eruption. The 'year without summer', 1816, was wet
and cold causing widespread crop failures, famine and emigration.<br>
"Another peak-migration year, 1846, had an extremely hot and dry
summer leading to bad harvests and high food prices," says Annette
Bosmeier, a researcher at the University of Freiburg who also
involved in the study. "These two years of high migration numbers
appear to be quite strongly influenced by climate changes, while for
other migration waves other circumstances appeared to be more
important," she adds.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171121095201.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171121095201.htm</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/damselflies-in-distress-flee-north-to-britain-lwlgk6q7g">Damselflies
in distress flee north to Britain</a></b><br>
The Times<br>
Record numbers of rare dragonflies were spotted across Britain this
year because of changing weather patterns linked to global warming.
A scarlet darter was found at Longham Lakes, in east Dorset, the
first sighting in 13 years and only the eighth time that the insect
had been recorded in the UK.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/damselflies-in-distress-flee-north-to-britain-lwlgk6q7g">https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/damselflies-in-distress-flee-north-to-britain-lwlgk6q7g</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b>George Monbiot</b><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/">Everything
Must Go</a></b><br>
<span>Posted:</span> 24 Nov 2017 01:58 AM PST<br>
<b>Economic growth will destroy everything. There's no way of
greening it – we need a new system.</b><br>
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian November 22, 2017<br>
Everyone wants everything - how is that going to work? The promise
of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the
rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting
through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate
breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea
of plastic, <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations">insectageddon</a>:
all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury
for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological
space exists.<br>
But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative.
And we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy
and choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to
break down our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the
Simple Lifers in <em>Brave New World</em>, be silenced – in this
case by the media. With every generation, the baseline of normalised
consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy
bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today,
worldwide, we use <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change">a
million plastic bottles a minute</a>.<br>
Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish <a
href="http://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/">festival
of destruction</a>. Among the <a
href="https://www.thenational.ae/uae/snow-room-is-the-hot-new-thing-1.124716">snow
saunas</a>, <a
href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/portable-watermelon-cooler/">portable
watermelon coolers</a> and <a
href="https://iheartdogs.com/new-device-lets-your-pet-call-you/">smart
phones for dogs</a> with which we are urged to fill our lives, my
#extremecivilisation prize now goes to <a
href="http://www.pancakebot.com/">the PancakeBot</a>: a 3-D batter
printer that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal or
your dog's bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your
kitchen for a week until you decide you don't have room for it. For
junk like this we're trashing the living planet, and our own
prospects of survival. Everything must go.<br>
The ancillary promise is that, through green consumerism, we can
reconcile perpetual growth with planetary survival. But a <a
href="http://www.erscp2012.eu/upload/doc/ERSCP_Full_Papers/CsutoraM_The_ecological_footprint_of_green_and_brown_consumers.pdf">series
of research papers</a> reveal that there is <a
href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513008537">no
significant difference</a> between the ecological footprints of
people who care about their impacts and people who don't. <a
href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916517710685">One
recent article</a>, published in the journal <em>Environment and
Behaviour</em>, finds that those who identify themselves as
conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do
not.<br>
Why? Because, environmental awareness tends to be higher among
wealthy people. It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the
planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint,
regardless of our good intentions. Those who see themselves as green
consumers, the paper found, "mainly focus on behaviours that have
relatively small benefits."<br>
I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags,
carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their
holidays in the Caribbean, cancelling their environmental savings
100-fold. I've come to believe that the recycling licences their
long-haul flights. It persuades people they've gone green, enabling
them to overlook their greater impacts.<br>
None of this means that we should not try to reduce our impacts, but
we should be aware of the limits of the exercise. Our behaviour
within the system cannot change the outcomes of the system. It is
the system that needs to change.<br>
<a
href="https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf">Research
by Oxfam</a> suggests that the world's richest 1% (if your
household has an income of £70,000 or more, <a
href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?country=GBR&income=70000&adults=2&children=0">this
means you</a>) produce around 175 times as much carbon as the
poorest 10%. How, in a world in which everyone is supposed to aspire
to high incomes, can we avoid turning the Earth, on which all
prosperity depends, into a dust ball?<br>
By decoupling, the economists tell us: detaching economic growth
from our use of materials. So how well is this going?<a
href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733">
A paper in the journal PlosOne</a> finds that while in some
countries relative decoupling has occurred, "no country has achieved
absolute decoupling during the past 50 years." What this means is
that the amount of materials and energy associated with each
increment of GDP might decline, but, as growth outpaces efficiency,
the total use of resources keeps rising. More importantly, the paper
reveals that, in the long term, both absolute and relative
decoupling from the use of essential resources is impossible,
because of the physical limits of efficiency.<br>
A global growth rate of 3% means that the size of the world economy
<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/040104.asp">doubles
every 24 years</a>. This is why environmental crises are
accelerating at such a rate. Yet the plan is to ensure that it
doubles and doubles again, and keeps doubling in perpetuity. In
seeking to defend the living world from the maelstrom of
destruction, we might believe we are fighting corporations and
governments and the general foolishness of humankind. But they are
all proxies for the real issue: perpetual growth on a planet that is
not growing.Those <a
href="http://glineq.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-illusion-of-degrowth-in-poor-and.html">who
justify this system</a> insist that economic growth is essential
for the relief of poverty. But <a
href="http://wer.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/WEA-WER-4-Woodward.pdf">a
paper in the World Economic Review</a> finds that the poorest 60%
of the world's people receive only 5% of the additional income
generated by rising GDP. As a result, $111 of growth is required for
every $1 reduction in poverty. This is why, on current trends, it
would take 200 years to ensure that everyone receives $5 a day. By
this point, average per capita income will have reached $1m a year,
and the economy will be 175 times bigger than it is today. This is
not a formula for poverty relief. It is <a
href="https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2017/11/19/why-branko-milanovic-is-wrong-about-de-growth">a
formula for the destruction</a> of everything and everyone.<br>
When you hear that something makes economic sense, this means it
makes the opposite of common sense. Those sensible men and women who
run the world's treasuries and central banks, who see an indefinite
rise in consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers, smashing
through the wonders of the living world, destroying the prosperity
of future generations to sustain a set of figures that bear ever
less relation to general welfare.<br>
Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth: all are
illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us
to catastrophe. The current system, based on private luxury and
public squalor, will immiserate us all: under this model, luxury and
deprivation are one beast with two heads.<br>
We need a different system, rooted not in economic abstractions but
in physical realities, that establish the parameters by which we
judge its health. We need to build a world in which growth is
unnecessary, a world of <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/11/labour-global-economy-planet">private
sufficiency and public luxury</a>. And we must do it before
catastrophe forces our hand.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.monbiot.com">www.monbiot.com</a><br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/">http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://gizmodo.com/the-switch-to-outdoor-led-lighting-has-completely-backf-1820652615">The
Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired</a></b><br>
George Dvorsky<br>
To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world
are transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research
shows, this solid-state solution hasn't yielded the expected energy
savings, and potentially worse, it's resulted in more light
pollution than ever before.<br>
Using satellite-based sensors, an international team of scientists
sought to understand if our planet's surface is getting brighter or
darker at night, and to determine if LEDs are saving energy at the
global scale. With the introduction of solid-state lighting - such
as LEDs, OLEDs, and PLEDs - it was thought (and hoped) that the
transition to it from conventional lighting - like electrical
filaments, gas, and plasma - would result in big energy savings.
According to the latest research, however, the use of LEDs has
resulted in a "rebound" effect whereby many jurisdictions have opted
to use even more light owing to the associated energy savings.<br>
Indeed, as the new results show, the amount of outdoor lighting
around the world has increased during the past several years. "As a
result, the world has experienced widespread 'loss of the night,'
with half of Europe and a quarter of North America experiencing
substantially modified light-dark cycles," write the researchers in
the new study, which was published today in Scientific Advances.
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528">https://gizmodo.com/the-switch-to-outdoor-led-lighting-has-completely-backf-1820652615</a><br>
-<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528">Artificially
lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent</a></b><br>
<blockquote>Abstract<br>
A central aim of the "lighting revolution" (the transition to
solid-state lighting technology) is decreased energy consumption.
This could be undermined by a rebound effect of increased use in
response to lowered cost of light. We use the first-ever
calibrated satellite radiometer designed for night lights to show
that from 2012 to 2016, Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew
by 2.2% per year, with a total radiance growth of 1.8% per year.
Continuously lit areas brightened at a rate of 2.2% per year.
Large differences in national growth rates were observed, with
lighting remaining stable or decreasing in only a few countries.
These data are not consistent with global scale energy reductions
but rather indicate increased light pollution, with corresponding
negative consequences for flora, fauna, and human well-being.<br>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528">http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
Harvard Business Review<br>
<b><a
href="https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-bold-corporate-climate-change-goals-deteriorate-over-time">How
Bold Corporate Climate Change Goals Deteriorate Over Time</a></b><br>
Christopher Wright Daniel Nyberg <br>
One response to today's climate crisis has been a belief that
markets and corporate innovation will provide the solution... But
how much faith can we place in business to save us from climate
change?<br>
In <a href="http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short">a recently
published paper in the <em>Academy of Management Journal</em></a><em>,
</em>we explore how major business corporations translate the grand
challenge of climate change into strategies, policies, and practices
over an extended period of time. Our research involved a detailed
cross-case analysis of five major corporations operating in
Australia over 10 years, from 2005 to 2015...<br>
...we found a common pattern of response over time: initial
statements of climate leadership degenerated into the more mundane
concerns of conventional business activity. In other words, talk of
addressing climate change because it was the right thing to do
eventually became a conversation about how climate change
initiatives affected the bottom line. A key factor in this
deterioration of corporate environmental initiatives was ongoing
criticism from shareholders, the media, governments, and other
corporations and managers. This "market critique" continuously
revealed the underlying tensions between the demands of radical
decarbonization and more basic business imperatives of profit and
shareholder value...<br>
Our study highlights the policy limitations of relying solely on
market responses to the climate crisis. Today, businesses often
operate on short-term objectives of profit maximization and
shareholder return. Avoiding dangerous climate change requires the
radical decarbonization of energy, transportation, and manufacturing
on a scale that is historically unprecedented. Because of these two
facts, we need to imagine a future that goes beyond the comfortable
assumptions of corporate self-regulation and "market solutions" and
instead accept the need for regulatory restrictions on carbon
emissions and fossil fuel extraction. We also must reconsider
corporate purpose and the dominance of short-term shareholder value
as the pre-eminent criteria in assessing business performance.<br>
Our research highlights an inconvenient truth, if you will, for
politicians and businesspeople alike: we can't simply depend on
corporations and markets to address one of the gravest threats to
our collective future.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-bold-corporate-climate-change-goals-deteriorate-over-time">https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-bold-corporate-climate-change-goals-deteriorate-over-time</a></font><br>
-<br>
<b><a href="http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short">An
Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change
into Business as Usual</a></b><br>
Christopher Wright Daniel Nyberg<br>
Abstract<br>
<blockquote>Climate change represents the grandest of challenges
facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial
development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the
atmosphere and oceans, with devastating consequences. Business
organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support
the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also
offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper,
we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five
in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a
10-year period (2005–2015), we identify three key stages in the
corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing, and
normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the
revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the
mundane and comfortable concerns of "business as usual." We find
that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously
revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge
and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature
on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why
corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More
specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on
business and market responses to the climate crisis.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short">http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a
href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-24/what-does-sexy-vampire-have-do-climate-change">What
does a sexy vampire have to do with climate change?</a></b><br>
Stephen Snyder<br>
A sexy vampire is on a mission to save humans and their blood - she
is a vampire, after all. So what does that have to do with climate
change? Not much in the first issue, but if you can wait for Dark
Fang #2...<br>
Take an oil spill and an undersea vampire with tremendous sex
appeal. Mix them together and you get Dark Fang - the new comic book
series by writer Miles Gunter and illustrator Kelsey Shannon. The
series' publisher, Image Comics, puts the environmental out front in
a press release that tells the backstory of the lead character, a
curvaceous vampire named Valla.<br>
"When Valla lived, she was a fisherwoman," the release says. "In
death, she is a vampire, peacefully residing on the bottom of the
ocean-until a mysterious dark plague descends upon her aquatic
paradise. Searching for answers on the surface, Valla finds a world
headed toward an environmental collapse that will ultimately wipe
out her food supply. Now, to stay fed, she must take on the
juggernaut that is the global fossil fuel industry."<br>
As the series begins, though, she may appear less like an
environmental crusader and more like a porn star. "I'm not sure that
how she looks is related to the environment," says Shannon, "but it
certainly helps ... for readers that, maybe, aren't interested in
the subject, that are used to the typical comic book T&A fare."
<br>
"It is a piece of entertainment, and we definitely want to address
the very serious theme of climate change," says Gunter, "but we also
want to entertain people. And I think that when you can do that, you
can maybe disarm people that may be resistant to the reality of
what's going on with our planet right now."<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-24/what-does-sexy-vampire-have-do-climate-change">https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-24/what-does-sexy-vampire-have-do-climate-change</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA">This Day in Climate History
November 26, 2006 </a> - from D.R. Tucker</b></font><br>
November 26, 2006: In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gov.<br>
Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) notes that fellow Republican Sen. James<br>
Inhofe of Oklahoma is someone who has his "thinking in the Stone
Age"<br>
on climate.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA">http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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