Image of the Day

Department. The NYPD has built a massive intelligence network that spys
on Arabs and Muslims around the U.S. It is also setting up satellite offices
in other countries.
Environment:
Solutions exist to avoid climate disaster
By
Simon Butler
Several recent scientific reports on climate change have warned we
are headed for disaster, giving frightening evidence of just how bad things
could get. It’s just as frightening how little world governments intend to
do about it.
But it’s maddening to think how easy it would be to take serious
action on climate, and staggering to add up the benefits of doing so.
Take the example given by US ecologist Lester Brown in a speech in
2008. He said burning coal makes up 40% of world carbon emissions from
energy. To replace that coal with wind power, Brown said we’d need to
build about 1.5 million wind turbines worldwide — and we should aim to
do it in 10 years.
That might seem like too huge a task: 1.5 million wind turbines
would be close to an 800% rise on today’s level.
But Brown pointed out that about 65 million cars had been made in
the past year. If just one industry can produce that many cars in a single
year, there is no question we could build 1.5 million wind turbines in 10
years, if society’s resources were mobilised to that end.
The car industry, such a big polluter, is still not building as many cars
as it wants to. In their 2012 book The Endless Crisis, US Marxists John
Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney said the car industry, even before
the 2008 crash, “was faced with huge amounts of excess capacity — equal
to approximately one-third of its total capacity”.
They quoted a 2008 BusinessWeek article, which said: “Having
indulged in a global orgy of factory-building in recent years, the industry