BBC Science — A global review of the world’s primates says 48% of species face extinction, an outlook described as “depressing” by conservationists. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species says the main threat is habitat loss, primarily through the burning and clearing of tropical forests. More than 70% of primates in Asia are now listed as Endangered, it adds. …

Other threats include hunting of primates for food and the illegal wildlife trade, explained Russell Mittermeier, chairman of the IUCN Primate Specialist Group and president of Conservation International. “In many places, primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction,” he warned. “Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but now it appears that hunting is just as serious a threat in some areas, even where the habitat is still quite intact.”

The survey, involving hundreds of experts, showed that out of 634 recognised species and subspecies, 11% were Critically Endangered, 22% were Endangered, while a further 15% were listed as Vulnerable. Asia had the greatest proportion of threatened primates, with 71% considered at risk of extinction. The five nations with the highest percentage of endangered species were all within Asia. …

The findings, issued at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, will be included in a survey described as an “unprecedented examination of the state of the world’s mammals”, which will be presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in October. (08/04/08)
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Richard Heinberg writes: Recent reports on global coal reserves, surveyed in previous chapters, generally point to the likelihood of supply limits appearing relatively soon—within the next two decades. According to this near-consensus, coal output in China, the world’s foremost producer, could begin to decline within just a few years.

Since coal is the most significant source of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, releasing about twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced as natural gas, the news that there may be much less coal available to be burned than commonly thought should be heartening to climate scientists and environmental activists, and to policy makers and citizens concerned about the fate of the planet. Reduced estimates of future coal supplies should be factored into climate models—which typically assume that there is enough coal available to permit continued expansion of usage well into the next century.

At the same time, because global warming has emerged as the central environmental issue of our era, climate concerns will inevitably impact how much coal we continue to burn and how we burn it—whether these concerns come to be expressed through caps on emissions, carbon taxes, cancellation of orders for new coal-fired power plants, or the promotion of new carbon sequestration technologies. In any case, the coal industry will be—indeed, already is being—forced to change. …

Clearly, the world needs energy policies that successfully address both Climate Change and fuel scarcity. Such policies are likely to be devised and implemented only if both crises are acknowledged and taken into account in a strategically sensible way.

If policy makers focus only on one of these problems, some of the strategies they are likely to promote could simply exacerbate the other crisis. For example, some actions that might help reduce the impact of Peak Oil—such as exploitation of tar sands or oil shale, or the conversion of coal to a liquid fuel—will result in an increase in carbon emissions. On the other hand, some actions aimed to help reduce carbon emissions—such as carbon sequestration or carbon taxes—will make energy more expensive, which, in a situation of energy scarcity and high prices, may be politically problematic and therefore a waste of climate activists’ and policy makers’ limited resources.

However, many policies will help with both problems—including any effort to develop renewable energy sources or to reduce energy consumption.

For strategic purposes, it is important to understand our human tendency to discount future problems. We must assess which threats will come soonest, and make sure that our sometimes frantic efforts to respond to these immediate necessities do not exacerbate problems that will show up later. Peak oil is clearly the most immediate energy and resource threat that policy makers must deal with. Peak Coal and Climate Change may seem comparatively distant. But all must be taken seriously if we are to do any better than merely to lurch from crisis to crisis, with each new one worse than the last.

If energy scarcity forces policy changes before climate fears can do so, then perhaps world leaders will find that it makes more sense to ration fuels themselves by quota, rather than the emissions they produce. In any case, it will help everyone concerned to have a clear idea of the ultimate extent of coal, oil, and natural gas reserves and future production, as well as a realistic understanding of climate sensitivity and hence the environmental and economic costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels even in depletion-constrained amounts. Otherwise, the policies pursued may simply waste precious time and investment capital while actually making matters worse. (08/04/08)
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Ellen Brown writes: Using the “produce the note” strategy is something all homeowners
facing foreclosure can do. If you believe you’ve been treated unfairly,
fight back. We have created templates for a legal request, a letter to your lender and a motion to compel to help you through the process.

Your goal is to make certain the institution suing you is, in fact,
the owner of the note (see steps to follow below). There is only one
original note for your mortgage that has your signature on it. This is
the document that proves you owe the debt.

During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to
another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as
securitized packages on Wall Street. In the rush to turn these over as
fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did
not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage.
This is the key to the produce the note strategy. Now, many lenders are
moving to foreclose on homeowners, resulting in part from problems they
created, and don’t have the proper paperwork to prove they have a right
to foreclose.

If you don’t challenge your lender, the court will simply allow the
foreclosure to proceed. It’s important to hold lenders accountable for
their carelessness. This is the biggest asset in your life. It’s just a
piece of paper to them, and one they likely either lost or destroyed.

When you get a copy of the foreclosure suit, many lenders now automatically include a count to re-establish the note.
It often reads like this: “Öthe Mortgage note has either been lost or
destroyed and the Plaintiff is unable to state the manner in which this
occurred.” In other words, they are admitting they don’t have the note
that proves they have a right to foreclose.

If the lender is allowed to proceed without that proof, there is a
possibility another institution, which may have bought your note along
the way, will also try to collect the same debt from you again. (08/04/08)
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Bruce Molholt writes: Today, nuclear power is being heavily touted as an answer to global warming, not only by the nuclear industry but by some political candidates, most notably John McCain, who advocates building 100 nuclear plants in the U.S., 45 in the next 22 years.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the accident at Three Mile Island, just south of Harrisburg, which essentially killed nuclear power development in the U.S. No new plants have been planned or built in the U.S. since the March 1979 accident.

Although the accident was less severe than the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, an estimated 95 percent of the reactor core melted and containment was breached within an inch of the infamous “China syndrome.” This catastrophe occurs when molten uranium fuel and a myriad of radioactive byproducts leak into groundwater and release highly radioactive steam into the air for hundreds of miles around, depending on wind speed and direction.

It’s true that, unlike coal or natural-gas fired plants, nuclear reactors don’t emit carbon dioxide — a major contributor to global warming. But nuclear power is still hardly “clean.” There has been a dismal failure of the industry and government to solve the dirtiest aspect of nuclear power — the production of 30 tons of highly radioactive wastes per year for each reactor.

Over the years, the U.S. has tried to deal with highly toxic radioactive wastes in spent fuel in several different ways: Spent fuel reprocessing, long-term disposal of spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nev., and long-term storage of spent fuel on-site.

Each method has proven untenable and portends potential widescale health hazards even with the present U.S. total of 104 nuclear plants, let alone Sen. McCain’s proposal to essentially double that number.

We tried spent fuel reprocessing at West Valley, N.Y., south of Buffalo, in 1966-72. During that six years, the plant reprocessed only a year’s worth of spent nuclear fuel from 21 reactors.

It is now permanently closed due to poor performance, environmental contamination and exposure of workers to dangerously high levels of radiation. The environmental cleanup tab alone has reached $5 billion. (08/04/08)
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Johann Hari writes: Imagine if tomorrow the CIA and MI6 discover that Osama bin Laden has invented an incredible new weapon. This machine – stashed away in some dusty Afghan cave – doubles the intensity of hurricanes, causing them to drown a US city and kill nearly 2,000 people. It turns Spain and Australia dry in the worst droughts on record. It makes the oceans acidic, killing essential parts of the food chain. It is causes these acidic seas to rise and wash away whole nations like Bangladesh and Tuvalu. And if the machine is left switched on for too long, it will drown London and New York and Lagos and Kinshasa too.

This machine exists. It is called global warming – and we are our own Bin Laden. The world’s scientists say our greenhouse gas emissions are causing this planetary cooking as surely as HIV causes Aids or smoking causes lung cancer.

If al-Qa’ida was unleashing this weather of mass destruction, we would do anything – anything – to stop them. But because the enemy is inside each one of us, we stagger on, building more airports and coal power stations and shrieking for cheaper oil. We are suffering from what psychologists call an “external context problem”: this is so far outside anything we have experienced before, it instinctively seems it cannot possibly be true, no matter how much evidence washes at our feet. (08/04/08)
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