Robert Delfs
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- Name: Robert Delfs
Robert Delfs’s Posts
A moment for remembering Ransom Myers
Fisheries biologist's work revealed extent of loss of oceanic fishes 2
Posted 2 years, 7 months agoFrom the Washington Post:
Ransom A. Myers, 54, the world-renowned fisheries biologist whose research showed that the number of large fish in the world's oceans has dropped by 90 percent in the past 50 years, died of a brain tumor March 27 at a hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The journal Science has just published a major paper co-written by Dr. Myers, "Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean," about the importance of sharks in marine ecosystems. There is an abstract of the paper on the Science website.
More than any other… Read More
Genetically-modified malaria-resistant mosquitoes
But the Franken-mozzies will still bite ... and their eyes glow red in the dark! 56
Posted 2 years, 7 months agoGenetically-engineered mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria could help stop the spread of the illness, according to a report in the The Guardian and other publications.
Liz Hurley's big fat ungreen wedding
But she owns an organic farm! 25
Posted 2 years, 8 months agoBritain's The Independent has got into the spirit of bashing celebrities for their ungreen antics ...
Liz Hurley's long-haul wedding has produced a carbon footprint so large that it would take the average British couple more than 10 years to contribute as much to heating up the planet as she and Arun Nayar have done in little over a week. It would take a typical Indian couple a massive 123 years.
According to an Oxford-based footprinting consultancy, Hurley's celebrations will result in the release of around 200 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon emissions really do mount… Read More
Split over nuclear versus renewables threatens EU global warming pact
Spring summit underway 14
Posted 2 years, 8 months agoFrom an article in the Guardian:
Divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU's campaign to assume a global leadership role in the fight against climate change at the bloc's spring summit which began last night. [...]
But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted carbon-free nuclear power be included within the EU energy mix and rejected [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel's proposal to make a 20 percent target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members.
At his swansong summit, the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would… Read MoreChina nuclear power
Too little, too late? 5
Posted 2 years, 8 months agoChina will award a contract to build two nuclear reactors in its southeast to France's Areva SA, a Chinese official said according to reports in China Daily and other publications.
The deal, covering two reactors for Yangjiang in Guangdong Province, had originally been awarded to Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co., which will get an agreement for two other reactors in Shandong Province. The sources said that China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a 2020 target of increasing the share of nuclear in total power from 2.3 percent to 4 percent. Areva and Westinghouse are competing to… Read More
Robert Delfs’s Recent Comments
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That's not enough
We would also need another Republican to use inside information about the bulb purchase to make money speculating in CFL lamp shares; a former WSJ oped idologue-turned-spokesperson for the Dept of Energy to blame the fact that the old bulb burned out on the lax moral standards of the Clinton administration.
Robert Delfs
On Hey, that's me! posted 2 years, 5 months ago 8 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
Very sad..
Cocktail cube N. P.?
Robert Delfs
On Contest in need of Grist readers and their funny posted 2 years, 5 months ago 18 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
Talking 'bout a revolution
It's a long way from where I live to the closest news stand that carries copies of Harpers, so I appreciate your willingness to risk CTS to retail more of the recent piece by Garret Keizer. "Writer and former minister" might be the more correct tag.
I hope Harpers will eventually see fit to post this. In the meantime, I'd like to respond to the extended quotes you provided. While I very much enjoy Keizer's insights into the often treacherous interplay of environmentalism and class politics, one wonders where he is going with this.
It's easy be scathing about Middlebury students decked in green sweat shirts driving cars their daddies bought them to Sheffield to lecture small town working class people on their environmental responsibilities. Does the fact that children are drowning in our inner city schools mean that nobody should worry about polar bears or climate change until we've brought injustice to an end? Does the fact that some people will make money through trading carbon offsets (they already are) or that some corporations will be able to reduce overall costs render the whole approach invalid or immoral? (Keizer, comparing carbon offsets to selling "lynching offsets" to the Ku Klux Klan, clearly thinks so.
The closing Keizer quote in your posting...
To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wards, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us.
... reads as an ultimatum, presumably intentionally, but betrays a dangerous illusion. Keizer isn't the only person who imagines that where Marx, Mao, and liberation theology have all failed, climate change might yet deliver us into a post-capitalist world, a class free kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Keizer's position is not unrelated to the views of transformational environmentalists such as Curtis White, who believes..
"Even when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least."
(See DR's posting Two Kinds of Environmentalism.)Sadly, Keizer's apocalyptic vision of a post-global warming era that will be "hell for most of us" may be correct. If we imagine for a moment that future history turns out closer to the more pessimistic projections, such as James Lovelock's vision of a new Dark Age beginning in the mid-21st Century as isolated bands of "hot arid world survivors" struggle to reach the last surviving Arctic centres of civilization - it is certain that some who now count themselves among the wealthy and privileged will share in the suffering of the masses. For example, those who mistime their conversion of California beachfront real estate and S&P Index funds into well-stocked, bunkers in Colorado and Idaho, for example.
If it ever came to that, I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Gates and his heirs have a very good of making it to Greenland and finding people to help htem defend their new estates against all comers, at least a better chance than I and mine. When the Keizer's Neo_Christian ChildrenChildren's Crusade launches its first attack across the tundra against Gates' New Seattle mercenary forces in the name of the New World Order, I'm afraid I wouldn't even consider betting against Microsoft.
Robert Delfs
On Garret Keizer burns in anger about 'green capitalism' posted 2 years, 6 months ago 47 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
E. O. Wilson is a hero of mine...
... and I'm incredibly jealous (green?) that DR got to interview him last year. (And did a very nice job.)
On my favorite subject of island biogeography, by the way, I'm off tomorrow on a trip to the Bandas, Wetar, Alor and Flores. There are a couple of E. O. Wilson's books that I left on the boat on previous trips. Great (re-)reading when visiting islands.
Robert Delfs
On Big giant heads, unite! posted 2 years, 7 months ago 6 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
There's are good reasons...
...that I couldn't continue working in China, or living in Hong Kong, anymore. Waking up every morning with a hacking cough and tearing eyes was probably the biggest.
On one of my last working trips to Beijing, it started raining mud, something I'd seen in China a couple of times before, but not that bad. You couldn't see out an autoobile's front window - the windshield wipers just smeared the mud, and after you got out of the car, in seconds you covered in this awful black... well, shit. It was like being on the set of a low-budget, badly-plotted film about a future catastrophic ecological disaster, except that it was real, and already happening.
My candidate for the damn awful worst most polluted place on the planet prize would go to Lanzhou, in Gansu Provice (east of Shanxi, where Linfen is). Trust me, yo don't want to go there.
Robert Delfs
On The most polluted city on earth posted 2 years, 7 months ago 2 Responses