Power generation giant, NRG Inc has just confirmed they received a tempting proposal from the largest nuclear energy company in the US, Exelon Corporation. Exelon have offered $6.2 billion to acquire all NRG Energy’s outstanding shares following the dismal performance of stock prices recently. Since the financial turmoil began, New Jersey-based NRG has lost half of its market value in two months.

Exelon follow the lead of Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest men and owner of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. in acquiring cheapened power assets. Buffet recently bought out Constellation Energy Group Inc for $4.7 billion, less than half of what the company was worth only a week earlier. Unfortunately Buffet also recently invested in NRG, so it seems he could be beaten at his own game.

If Exelon’s offer is accepted the Chicago-based utility company would be in the position to generate substantially more energy through nuclear power. Currently, in the US, it is much cheaper to produce nuclear power than electricity from gas sources by up to 70%, so growth in that sector seems highly likely. It may also mean that a recent bid to build another 24 nuclear reactors, to help generate more energy without increasing greenhouse-gas emissions, will be approved.

Source 1, 2

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Ever had a burning desire to know more about oil? Well, Neatorama have written a great post listing a load of weird and wonderful oil facts bout the precious liquid some people call, black gold.

Discover how much Saudi oil giant Aramco are really worth, what people did with worthless oil at the turn of the 20th century or what role dinosaurs really have in the production of fossil fuels:

“It’s common knowledge that oil came from decomposing dead dinosaurs and plant matters (after all, it is called “fossil fuel,” right?) – but that’s actually wrong. Though most scientists believed that oil has a biological origin, they don’t believe that oil came from dinosaurs. They thought that oil was derived from single-celled planktons that flourished, died and then decomposed hundreds of millions of years ago.”

We were impressed so we thought we’d share it with you guys.
Check out the full article here. Enjoy!

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Biofuels are responsible for a 75 percent increase in world food prices according to the findings of a World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

The bank said concern over climate change and increasing competition for cropland had prompted Europe and the US to encourage the use of biofuels, driving up the price of raw materials used in their production, such as wheat, soy, corn and palm oil. Notwithstanding this, a more likely explanation seems to be the rocketing price of crude oil which has shot up to almost $150 a barrel.

Almost all of the increase in global corn production from 2004 to 2007 was used for biofuel production in the U.S. while existing stocks became depleted by an increase in global consumption for other uses. This comes on top of a 181 percent increase in global wheat prices over the 36 months leading up to last February, and an 83 percent increase in overall global food prices over the same period.

The bank warned that such a global surge in food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty as the trend accelerates into the latter half of 2008, hitting poorest countries the hardest.

The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is calling for donor governments to raise a $500 million deficit identified by the United Nations’ World Food Program and so far about half of that target has been met. He said, “this is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are - this is ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price, too.”

Image by Flickr user Swamibu

The situation looks like it can only get worse as the European Union attempts to meet its target of making 10 percent of all transport fuel use by 2020 renewable - since April all petrol and diesel in the UK has had to include a biofuel component of at least 2.5 percent.

Yet there is at least some hope in the next generation of cellulose biofuel. Zoellick stated that, “there is a second stage of biofuels that is under development with cellulosic materials, and a number of people highlighted that because it may be a way of avoiding some of the energy costs but without using current food production.”

We may still be yet to see the worst results of the crisis, but the situation is yet another sign of the global economic doom forecasted for the coming months.

Sources: 1, 2

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According to the conservation organization WWF, African countries are slowly but surely draining the continent of its natural resources. The statement is part of a report issued by the organization on Africa’s ecological footprint - it takes into account a country’s land and sea surface that is used in meeting the peoples’ consumption needs. The report entitled “Africa-Ecological Footprint and Human Well-being” was released along with a U.S.-based research body, the Global Footprint Network.

“A growing number of African countries are depleting their natural resources — or will shortly be doing so — faster than they can be replaced,” said WWF President, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, in presenting the findings to a Johannesburg conference.

The list is topped by countries such as Egypt, Libya or Algeria, whose people are living well beyond their ecological means. Further down the list, other nine countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe) are using resources beyond their capacity. Despite these consumption needs, Africa’s overall ecological footprint should be 1.3 hectares of land and sea per capita, but is now at 1.1.

If it were to continue at this pace, scientists believe that we will need the equivalent of two planets by 2050. Furthermore, Africa’s population of 680 million is growing rapidly and is expected to represent a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.

“Development that ignores the limits of our natural resources ultimately ends up imposing disproportionate costs on the most vulnerable and the most dependent on the health of natural systems, such as the rural poor,” said Global Footprint Network director Mathis Wackernagel.

According to the organization, Africa has been under threat of losing its natural resources for several years. Global warming means reducing rainfall that affects crops and animals alike. The effects of global warming can be seen on top of Mount Kilimanjaro which has shrunk by more than 80% since 1900. East Africa’s corals are not looking better either - more than 50% have either died or have been bleached as a result of heat levels in the water.

sources: 1, 2; photo credits: gvizane

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During the years of the First World War, cars were more attainable for Americans - that over-time replaced the need for commuter services and intra-city mass transit. While rail travel was able to survive this era with the dawn of WWII in the 1940s, it once again faced a new type of competition. Commercial aviation was supported at many levels by the government in creating sprawling airports, provided subsidies to build terminals and funded construction for highways to lead to the airports and to other cities.

Rail travel in the United States seemed destined for disaster. That was until 1970, when the Rail Passenger Service Act was signed by President Nixon. Legislators created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, which allowed any passenger rail company to contract with the corporation to join the system. This helped burden the huge cost of operating passenger rail service in the United States. Notwithstanding this, it created several problems that still haven’t been addressed today.
Original Passenger Car for Amtrak in 1968.

Image via Wikipedia

Currently, Amtrak operates passenger services on 21,000 miles of track and connects to 500 destinations in 46 states. In fiscal year of 2006, Amtrak served 24.3 million passengers; a company record. According to estimates for the fiscal year 2007, Amtrak has served over the 25 million passenger mark, a 6% increase from the previous year. Projections show that in 2008, Amtrak could serve as many as 27 million passengers. Unfortunately, this total is only a faction of the 660 million passengers that flew on airplanes in 2006 in the United States.

So what’s holding back passenger rail service in the States? The largest issue for travelers is the delays. In an era where travelers hate delays, railroads in the US are the worst. Amtrak only has an on time performance rating of 74% in comparison to 82% with commercial aviation. You may ask, “How can service be delayed when they don’t have to contend with weather, security and maintenance issues like the airlines do?”

Image by Rastafabi

Ah, coal. If you live in the United States you’ve been subjected to an advertising blitz in preparation for the upcoming elections assuring you that clean coal is the answer to all of our problems. The four dollar gasoline will go away (or if you sell oil you can switch to selling liquid coal!), we’ll be able to pull out of Iraq (or commit more resources and win!), and it’s all perfectly clean. Not a single, solitary dirty thing about it.

Wait, you may ask–how does coal get clean? Doesn’t it pump billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year? Why yes, yes it does. And the coal companies are planning to get rid of it all somehow. They’ll let you know. Seriously, carbon sequestration for coal won’t be ready until 2030, if there is such a thing. As you might imagine, this has raised the ire of the environmental community quite a bit, and led us to produce stuff like this:

That cartoon is really just the tip of the iceberg–an entire website, Coal-is-Dirty.com, has sprung up to combat the idea that clean coal is like anything other than “fat-free donuts.” They’ve got talent to burn–the cartoon was developed in conjunction with Mark Fiore, an award-winning political cartoonist, and we all know the coal industry isn’t going to stop giving them low-hanging fruit for subject matter.

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Johan Eliasch, Gordon Brown’s deforestation advisor took a step towards joining the ranks of American politicians who don’t know what a national border and sovereignty means by claiming that the entirety of the Amazon rain forest could, and should, be purchased in order to protect it from Brazillian management. This could be accomplished for the bargain price of 50 billion dollars he claimed, sparking minor controversy in Brazil and an investigation into some 160,000 hectares of land he owns privately there.

Mr. Elisach clearly meant well however. When he’s not Mr. Brown’s deforestation advisor, he’s the head of an organization called “Cool Earth” which seeks to control the carbon levels in our atmosphere via natural means of sequestration. One of these methods includes securing the rainforest via sponsorship. Therefore is Brazil’s reaction disproportionate?

The country has for some time been sensitive to overtures by British politicians about the nature of the rain forest, and Brazil’s management of the issues. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s main message was that Brazil remains conscious of the need to conserve the land, but also to develop it in line with its growing economy.

Johan Eliasch’s move is highly charged: coming from a man that can only be assumed to be a surrogate of the British government (until his dismissal of course) must bring back feelings of colonialism to a continent that was raked by it, and still feels the negative economic effects of their former colonial overlords. For their part, the Brazilians have done well since emerging from Portuguese rule in 1825, unlike many of their neighbors. The last thing they want, is to be stumped economically by British environmental policy.

[Times of India]

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The Creation Museum, an international abomination laying just a few miles from the Cincinnati-Northern KentuckyAirport, is only one year old, but it’s already had enough success that it’s planning to expand over the next year. Ken Ham, who founded “Answers in Genesis,” the fundamentalist religious organization that established the museum, said that the focus would be largely on making it more “kid-friendly” with a series of kiosks throughout the museum, and an outdoor playground

The creation museum, which is an outpost of “young earth” creationists, seeks to establish proof that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that science to the contrary is the deceptive work of the devil. Among the more controversial claims made at the state-of-the-art facility are that Adam and Eve’s children were given an exemption from being susceptible to incest by God, and that dinosaurs lived peacefully with humans until the flood of Noah. The latter claim is displayed in especially ludicrous fashion– velociraptors munch calmly on stalks of ferns as human children play behind them, and triceratops is featured with a saddle blanket and mount for a rider.

The museum has been the subject of criticism for obvious reasons, and from a multitude of scientific and cultural sources, but continues to be wildly popular among evangelical Christians–over 400,000 have visited in the last year.

[Lexington Herald-Leader]

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In the wake of the first Gulf War, the American Press was enamored with military technology in a way that they never had been before, trumpeting the ability of the modern Roman Legions to put a single bomb through a single window anywhere in the world, or of a soldier to see through the chaos of night combat. Part of the rush of positive media was reserved for the 21st century silver bullet, depleted uranium. It was harder than steel, we were all told, and could cut through enemy armor like it was mere paper. What we didn’t know, was that it would bring rise to a death toll higher than the atomic bombs used at the end of World War II.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs killed approximately 250,000 people at the end of the second world war; a grim statistic that’s been accepted to be relatively accurate. DU shells, however, are estimated to have claimed 500,000 lives in between 1990 and 2000, not through the force of their violence, but by inhalation and the cancers they’ve caused.

There were 200 tons of the stuff dumped into the Saudi and Iraqi deserts in the first Gulf Warl; a number that has only increased in light of the 2003 invasion. Fortunately, the need for depleted uranium shells has fallen as the current conflict has shifted from a force-on-force conflict to counterinsurgency. However, the toxic armaments are still carried and used, representing a serious threat to the Iraqi population and U.S. veterans of the conflict. So how significant can we expect the fallout from this conflict to be?

Since the first Gulf War, the rate of birth defects and childhood cancer in Iraq has increased sevenfold. In addition, more than 35 percent (251,000) of U.S. Gulf War veterans are dead or on permanent medical disability, compared to the 400 or so that were killed in conflict.

[RINF]

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The real breakfast of champions. Image from Betacells

We human beings have finally reached that point in our development where science is going to begin making a giant difference to how we interact with the world. For several years now we’ve been able to use laser eye surgery to repair eyesight, but now repaired vision is often better than 20/20. We’ve always used coffee to energize our minds, but now there’s Ritalin, which according to 1 in 5 readers of the journal Nature, isn’t just for ADD patients anymore. No, we can now give ourselves a competitive advantage over each other if we only bend the rules a little bit. And this is just the first generation of development.

The problem is that the driving force behind the use of these drugs is social attitudes towards them. The reality is that more people want drugs, of all kinds, more than they can get their hands on -it’s just the nature of the beast. To think that that’s how it works right now, when there’s a marginal improvement, is one thing–imagine the amount of abuse that could potentially be encountered once the next generation of cognitive stimulants comes to market.

And because people want the drugs, and in numbers far too high to effectively police–ask any official about cracking down on vicodin abuse, and the right-wingers will think about it; ask about ritalin and you’ll receive bipartisan laughter. It may yet be time to consider deregulating “smart pills.” We already have coffee out on the market, and it’s a stimulant that’s progressively more addictive, psychoactive, and forces consumers to drink more and more every day. Why not ritlain? Or whatever the next wonder drug is? If it’s readily available online, or through a friend, or a complicit doctor, shouldn’t we just be able to take our business into public?

Source: Economist

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