Robots, oilcrash, water, Cement, Hurricanes, Apes, Walrus, Greenhouse, body counts, screaming hairy armadillo

rad robots

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More oilcrash sites:
theenvironmentsite
lifeaftertheoilcrash
oilcrash
I just got V Smils latest book on energy. VS must be one of the premier numbers guys, but he's not entirely convinced of oilcrash.
Since publication in 2003 (2 years is a long time in this story!) the huge price for oil has exposed the fragility of supply.
The very idea of oilcrash is, of course, what will cause oilcrash, sometime before the price crashes the worlds economies
Australia has recently dropped subsidies for alternative energy, effectively abandoning the field.

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Aus water:
THE cost of installing a rainwater tank, a symbol of environmentally friendly housing, would take families a lifetime to pay off if they used the funds saved on their water bills. The Housing Industry Association also estimates that using recycled water for the toilet would leave a household worse off by as much as $150 a year. The gap would only be partly covered by boosting the first-home owner grant by $3000 to $10,000, as a federal parliamentary committee proposed this week in a report into building sustainable cities.

What is required is for people to take responsibility for their water, which means double tanks to allow for rain flushing of roofs, filters, and regular inspection and changing of filters. This kind of responsibility for basic facilities has been lost, replaced by the idea that money solves every problem. So people die of thirst within days of a storm


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Cement is usually made by heating limestone and clay to over 2,500 degrees F. The resulting chemical reaction, along with fuel burned to heat the kiln, produces between 7 and 10 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions.
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Wangari Maathai speaks
_______________________________16/09/2005 12:21PM

The number of storms that reach Category Four and Five..has nearly doubled over the past 35 years. .the frequency and duration of hurricanes overall have stayed about the same.
Category 4: 211 to 249 kph Category 5: 251 kph+
..the increase in hurricane intensity coincides with a rise in sea surface temperatures around the world of 0.5°C between 1970 and 2004.
Science..Peter Webster, said, "I'm prepared to make an attribution to global warming."
..unless there's a dramatic reduction in fossil-fuel use, the trend of more intense hurricanes will continue..
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Wasp.. wings span 13 inches, .. 4.25 ounces of lithium-ion batteries. The whole rest of the plane -- including video cameras front and back -- adds 1.75 ounces to the total 6-ounce takeoff weight.
..In 2002, a rudimentary Wasp set an endurance record for micro air vehicles (MAVs) of 107mins It has since .. an autopilot ..that uses .. GPS.

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The Kinshasa Declaration acknowledges that the root cause of poaching and deforestation is poverty,..
Numbers of gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo and orangutan have fallen sharply,.. some wild populations could disappear within a generation.
..UN Great Ape Survival Project (Grasp)
..a priority to develop and implement policies which promote ecologically sustainable livelihoods for local and indigenous communities", it says.
EU pledged 2.4 million euros .. to Grasp.
..100 sites, most of them in Africa, where viable great ape populations could be saved from extinction by implementing intensive conservation programmes.
..some populations of great apes, notably the Sumatran orangutan and the mountain and Cross River gorillas, could be extinct in the wild within a human generation.

- This is perhaps the saddest factor in the current global poverty/war... Our cousins, the great apes, are vanishing while we dither

________________________________16/09/2005 11:41AM


DARPA's press release, "the Walrus aircraft will be a heavier-than-air vehicle and will generate lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and gas buoyancy generation and management."
payload 500 tons 12,000 miles in < clear="left">
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________________________________________screaming hairy armadillo Chaetophractus vellerosus


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Crypto conspiracies:
CIA sources have confirmed that the neo-con penetration of NSA’s raw telecommunications intercept data by John Bolton was part of a multi-pronged attempt by Israeli intelligence to access the 'Fort Knox' of America’s cryptologic secrets: the massive repository database of global intercepts of phone calls, email, faxes, and telexes now known as '
ANCHORY but will soon be expanded into a super database code named OCEANARIUM. As a result of former NSA Director Michael Hayden’s outsourcing contracts named "Groundbreaker" and "Trailblazer," companies with ties to Israeli intelligence are gaining increased access to NSA’s operations and its massive archives of secrets.
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Last Chance Texaco cont...

Safavian
David Hossein Safavian, the Bush administration’s top federal procurement officer in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was arrested yesterday based on a three-count criminal complaint filed in federal court, according to a Justice Department statement.
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Halliburton made the news recently when Bunnatine Greenhouse, a civilian manager at the Pentagon who oversaw the Corps of Engineers contracts, lambasted a multibillion contract between the Corps and Halliburton as an example of "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed." She was demoted for "poor performance."
[gives new meaning to "Greenhouse warnings"]
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body counts
After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west.

Lynch, the military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region..
It was not clear, however, how many of those detained or killed in the offensives were insurgents. Since 2003, U.S. forces have detained 40,000 people, twice U.S. generals' highest public estimate of the number of fighters in the insurgency. On Saturday, the Iraqi government said it had released for lack of evidence more than 500 of the 757 suspects detained in ongoing operations in the northern city of Mosul.