Did China just save the world?

by eKos

Welcome to the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for green diaries and series.

Today's editor: LaughingPlanet

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(Reuters) - China on Monday offered for the first time to submit its voluntary carbon emissions target to a binding U.N. resolution, buoying climate talks where Bolivia accused rich world policies of causing "genocide."

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Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.

All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.

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US Green Energy Fail

by Steven D

Here's we in the United States should be doing now to keep up with the rest of the world's investment in research and development of green energy technologies:

The United States needs to more than triple its spending on energy research, development and demonstration projects, from about $5 billion now to $16 billion, and should review  national energy policy every four years, an advisory group of scientists and engineers said in a report to President Obama this week.

The US is falling behind almost every other major developed country in the world.  Look at this chart from 2007 that shows R & D spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product:

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Weekly Mulch: For Cancun Climate Summit, Activists Consider the Long View

by The Media Consortium

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

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China stops our Green Revolution in its tracks

by gjohnsit

 The news media and the political blogs are enraptured with handicapping the political races. No one has time to worry about real issues anymore. This is the silly season, when immigrant nannies and comments from comedians become "important". When shady television hucksters are inexplicably taken seriously and hold huge political rallies.

 Yet the real world, the one that operates on tangible things that make an actual difference in our lives, keeps chugging along.
  While some of you were busy obsessing about political trivialities, the governments of the world were entering a global trade war. This development entered a scary stage yesterday when Brazil decided not to attend the coming G20 summit.

 However, that was nothing compared to China's latest move.

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EPA v. MTR and USA v. China {eKos Earthship Friday}

by eKos

Welcome to the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for green diaries and series.

Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.

Peruse the eKos Library to find previously listed diaries. You can also follow eKos on Twitter.

Tonight's editor is: Hopeful Skeptic with input from LaughingPlanet

All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.ss

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GOP Wrong: Green Means More Jobs Now

by Steven D

Who could have predicted that while other manufacturing jobs declined, jobs in green industries increased in California, the state with some of the toughest environmental laws?  What a shock, eh?

In a study released Wednesday, Palo Alto-based nonprofit Next 10 and Collaborative Economics Inc. of Mountain View found that manufacturing jobs in the state's green sector grew by 19 percent between 1995 and 2008.

The increase came at the same time that overall manufacturing jobs in California tumbled 9 percent.

Furthermore, who could have known that venture capitalists, seeing California's "friendly" climate for green technologies would invest billions of dollars into growing that part of California's manufacturing sector?

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Line-dried clothing: an "uncivilized" energy smart choice?

by A Siegel

Amid their enthusiastic embrace of western consumer technologies, increasingly affluent Chinese are leaving one appliance behind: clothes dryers.  According to Washington Post front-page reporting,

For reasons practical as well as cultural, most Chinese consumers simply  don't like clothes dryers. Don't want them. Don't trust them. Won't buy  them. And even when they have them around, won't use them.

Business interests complain, in the article, that the dryer market isn't "fully developed".  A PRC domestic brand "stopped  producing dryers since last year because they don't sell."  The only people in China interested in dryers seem to be foreigners and Chinese who have lived overseas.

This is, evidently, something bad.

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Broken food chains

by Steve Masover

I wrote in late May  about industrial food production, as an exemplar of a general thesis  that complexity breeds collapse. And here we go again: news in the U.S.  press this week skews heavily toward eggs contaminated with salmonella.  Not just one or two eggs. We're talking "recall of a half-billion eggs from two mega-farms in Iowa" according to Friday's San Francisco Chronicle.

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Time to Take On Global Warming Deniers

by Steven D

Global warming deniers come in basically one version: the one which holds their hands to their ears and sings lalalalalalala all day, refusing to discuss any and all evidence of global warming or that fossil fuels have anything to do with it.  

They are more willing to believe the craziest conspiracy theories and outright lies rather than deal with facts.  It's a shame really, because the facts are there and they are telling us something needs to be done -- Now.  Not twenty or thirty of fifty or one hundred years in the future, but right fricking now! Like this information, for one:

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Globalization, A Pictorial History

by Richard Lyon

The term globalization came into use in academic circles during the 1950s. By the 1990s it had entered the mainstream vocabulary. Today it is thought of as something that is almost inseparable from the neoliberal economic and political policies that are dominating the process. People who are actively opposed to those policies speak in terms of stopping globalization. The basic purpose of this diary is to present the process of globalization in an historical context that separates it from today's realities. I plan to write other diaries on neoliberalism. This diary will be used as background for those. I wish to make it clear at the outset that I am no fan of neoliberalism. However we will see that there have been a number of points in history where a process of geographical integration has been controlled by one group of people to impose their interests on other people.  

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