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Rio+20 or Silent Spring-50?

Enviado por ETC Staff el

Governments mark 50 years of failure...and a couple of nano-steps forward

It’s difficult to describe Rio+20 as anything other than a tragedy. Despite years of preparation and months of negotiations, nothing said or done in Rio can cover up not just the 20 lost years since the original 1992 Earth Summit – as seasoned delegates have quietly noted – but also the half-century of intergovernmental failures since Rachel Carson catalyzed the sequence of global environmental congresses following the publication of her book, Silent Spring, in 1962.

Sciences-fictions: le 1er septembre, la royal society de Londres rendra public un rapport majeur sur la géoingénierie

Enviado por ETC Staff el

Pour etc group, il faut interdire les essais grandeur nature

La Royal Society, la plus ancienne académie des sciences du monde, s’apprête à rendre public, le 1er septembre 2009 à Londres, un rapport longtemps attendu sur la géoingénierie. On s’attend à ce que le document préparé par des experts, pour la plupart, des partisans enthousiastes de la géoingénierie, contienne des recommandations pour que les pouvoirs publics soutiennent la poursuite des recherches voire des essais grandeur nature de nouvelles technologies controversées permettant la manipulation délibérée du climat terrestre pour atténuer les effets du changement climatique.

86% of the world's biomass is located in the global South.

Enviado por ETC Staff el

While from space the planet may look green and rich with biomass, the dirty little secret of the biomass economy is that – just like fossilized carbon reserves (oil, coal, natural gas) – the living carbon reserves are not equally distributed. Worldwide, land-based vegetation stores an estimated 500 billion tonnes of carbon. However 86% of that (430 billion tonnes) is stored in the tropics and sub-tropics, while boreal and temperate eco-regions store only 34 billion tonnes and 33 billion tonnes, respectively.

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