Posts Tagged ‘earth’
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Posted on: December 12, 2008
Klaatu the spaceman first visited these parts in Robert Wise’s 1951 Cold War classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” when he threatened to blow us all up unless we stopped threatening to do the job for him.
Klaatu wasn’t exactly greeted with open arms back then — he was shot and hounded for his troubles — and if the earth has moved on over the past half century, you wouldn’t know it from the trigger-happy welcoming committee that surrounds his luminous snowball of a space craft in New York’s Central Park.
Where sci-fi films in the 1950s used to see red(s), today they go green. Directed by Scott Derrickson (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose”) and scripted by David Scarpa (“The Last Castle”), “The Day the Earth Stood Still” 2.0 ditches the Cold War theme. Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) means to save the planet, but war isn’t the problem. Mankind is the problem.
The filmmakers have come up with an effective Spielbergian prologue, cutting from the Himalayas in 1928 to contemporary biology professor Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), whisked from her home by uniformed men in response to an undisclosed national emergency. It’s strange to think that in the final hour the government will turn to molecular biologists for guidance, though true to form (as in the 1951 original) the scientists are quickly overruled by the politicians.
But once Keanu-Klaatu emerges from his blubbery placenta spacesuit, the movie shifts into familiar fugitive thriller terrain and the tension slowly drains out of it. Dr. Benson helps him escape to New Jersey where he can meet with an alien undercover agent in McDonald’s, and she can introduce him to a true world leader, a Nobel laureate played by John Cleese.
If you’re going to cast a top star as an alien being, Reeves seems a solid choice. He’s always been able to process human emotion with a Spock-like detachment.
“This body is going to take some getting used to,” Klaatu cautions shakily in his first scene, but in fact he gets the walking-talking thing down pat in no time.
He’s a messianic figure — he fires lasers out of his wrists, like a reverse-stigmata and he has the power to resurrect the dead (though unlike Jesus, Klaatu killed the guy in the first place). The climax even includes a plague of robotic locusts.
But the movie never comes up with a convincing explanation for why his superpowers don’t extend to, say, picking up a telephone. Apparently the aliens have been monitoring us for at least 70 years, but Klaatu is taken aback to discover our emotional side. Mostly he learns this from Jaden Smith, who plays Dr. Benson’s stepson Jacob. It’s not necessarily a good emotional side: Jacob is a whiny, obstinate and disobedient little boy that would lead most extraterrestrials — and not a few of the rest of us — to reach for the destruct button.
Still, it’s surely remiss to wipe out the species before lending an ear to Johann Sebastian Bach.
The original movie is beginning to show its age, but at least it holds up as a story. That’s more than you can say for a preachy, draggy blockbuster that espouses a radical message of Luddite technophobia at the same time as it conspicuously plugs Honda and LG Electronics, and dresses up its half-baked thinking in blinding (but not that brilliant) CGI wizardry.
Johnny Carson used to joke that his 1964 bomb “Looking for Love” was so bad it was transferred to flammable nitrate film stock. If they’re so determined to be green, perhaps the producers of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” would consider something biodegradable.
Shark ecosystem
Posted on: December 11, 2008
There is no animal on earth more vilified than the shark. Pop culture references and annual, over-hyped reports of attacks on swimmers or surfers have put sharks on the top of the list of the world’s most feared living things.
There is however, a creature far more predacious than the shark: Humans.
Sharks existed before there were dinosaurs and they pre-date humans by millions of years. Yet, in a relatively short period of time, humans and their technological arsenal have driven most shark populations to the verge of extinction.
This is bad news for the world’s oceans. Sharks are the top predator in the ocean and are vital to its ecosystem. The rapid reduction of sharks is disrupting the ocean’s equilibrium, according to Peter Knights, director of WildAid International.
“These are ecosystems that have evolved over millions and millions of years,” said Knights. “As soon as you start to take out an important part of it, it’s like a brick wall, you take out bricks [and] eventually it’s going to collapse.”
When sharks attack humans, it inevitably makes news – it is a sexy story. What is rarely reported is that worldwide, sharks kill an average of 10 people every year. It’s usually when people venture into a shark’s habitat and not the other way around. By contrast, humans kill around 100 million sharks every year – a number that has ballooned in recent years because of the enormous demand for shark fins to make shark fin soup.
Shark fin soup is a delicacy reserved for the wealthy on special occasions and it has been part of Chinese culture for centuries. For years, only rich Chinese mostly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore consumed it, so the impact on the overall shark population was negligible.
Over the last decade, the exploding middle class in China has changed the fate of the shark. With an unprecedented number of people making more money than ever, the demand for all things that signal an improvement in status is gargantuan. The ability to serve and consume shark fin soup is among the most revered of activities, because it signifies that one has made it.
Shark fin soup can be expensive. A bowl of imperial shark fin soup can cost upwards of $100. These days, shark fin soup is so fashionable that it’s becoming commonplace. Buffets serve versions of it for as low as $10 a bowl. The irony is that shark fin is flavorless — its cartilage has a chewy consistency. Tens of thousands of sharks are being killed for a gelatinous thing in a soup.
To satiate the appetites of upwardly mobile Chinese, fishermen traverse all corners of the Earth’s oceans in search of sharks or, more specifically, their fins. Because space is limited on fishing vessels and shark bodies are bulky and not considered as valuable, fishermen often catch the sharks, saw off their fins and toss the sharks back into the water. Without their fins, sharks cannot swim and they sink to the ocean floor, where they’re picked at by other fish and left to die.
Because of the sensitivity over this issue, few people were willing to talk to us.
Shark finning is not illegal. Taiwan has no law against fins taken from international waters coming into its ports. However, Taiwan does have what it calls a “plan of action” that requires the bodies of the sharks the fins came from to be accounted for and not dumped into the sea.
But at this port, we see more fins than bodies as a forklift scoops up large piles of fins and dumps them into a truck. There are no signs of anyone monitoring the weight ratio or making sure there’s no illegal fishing of the five shark species protected under international treaty.
“The laws are weak and when you take the fins off, identifying these species is almost impossible,” Knights said. “You can see they all look almost identical and yet they’re makos and threshers and blue sharks; there [are] all kinds of species there, but identifying them and monitoring them and having a regulated fishery is virtually impossible.”
Taiwan is not alone. Shark finning thrives off weak regulations around the world and only a few countries demand that sharks arrive in port with fins attached.
Knights says it comes down to economics.
“The fin is one of the most expensive pound-for-pound item from the sea. And the beauty about the fin is that it’s very compact … it doesn’t take up your hull and you can make a lot of money from it,” said Knights.
Fins can sell for $500 per pound, according to WildAid, which is campaigning for a global ban on shark finning.
In recent years, Cocos Island has become another battleground in the fight to save the shark.
Located 300 miles off the coast of Costa Rica, the only way to get to this uninhabited islet in the eastern Pacific is by boat. Cocos Island, recently declared a national park, is a nearly pristine and richly preserved ecosystem where thousands of sharks have roamed for centuries. Scientists think there are more sharks there than any other place on Earth.
Fishermen come from all over the world to catch the sharks that swim around the island. It is illegal for fishing boats to get within three miles of the island, but the law is routinely ignored. On any given day, one can see numerous fishing boats no more than a mile away from the island.
The fate of the shark is grim. Increasing public awareness of the shark’s role in the marine ecosystem and the rapid rate of extinction because of the demand for shark fin soup may be the best hope for the shark, which has inhabited the planet for 400 million years.
With fossil fuel prices escalating and countries searching for ways to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions, capturing the earth’s heat for power generation is garnering new attention. First begun in Larderello, Italy, in 1904, electricity generation using geothermal energy is now taking place in 24 countries, 5 of which use it to produce 15 percent or more of their total electricity. In the first half of 2008, total world installed geothermal power capacity passed 10,000 megawatts and now produces enough electricity to meet the needs of 60 million people, roughly the population of the United Kingdom. In 2010, capacity could increase to 13,500 megawatts across 46 countries—equivalent to 27 coal-fired power plants.
Originating from the earth’s core and from the decay of naturally occurring isotopes such as those of uranium, thorium, and potassium, the heat energy in the uppermost six miles of the planet’s crust is vast—50,000 times greater than the energy content of all oil and natural gas resources. Chile, Peru, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Russia, China, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries along the Ring of Fire (an area of high volcanic activity encircling the basin of the Pacific Ocean) are rich in geothermal energy. Another geothermal hot spot is the Great Rift Valley of Africa, which includes such countries as Kenya and Ethiopia. Worldwide, 39 countries with a cumulative population of over 750 million people have geothermal resources sufficient to meet all their electricity needs.
Typically, power generation using the earth’s heat required underground pockets of high-temperature water or steam to drive a steam turbine. Now, new technologies that use liquids with low boiling points in closed-loop heat exchange systems allow electricity to be generated at much lower temperatures. This breakthrough is making geothermal power generation viable in countries such as Germany that are not known for their geothermal resources and is one reason why the number of countries using the earth’s heat to generate electricity could almost double by 2010.
One advantage of geothermal power plants, beyond the benefit of producing electricity from a low-carbon, indigenous energy source with no fuel costs, is that they provide baseload power 24 hours a day. Storage or backup-power is not required.
The United States leads the world in generating electricity from the earth’s heat. As of August 2008, geothermal capacity in the United States totaled nearly 2,960 megawatts across seven states—Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. California, with 2,555 megawatts of installed capacity—more than any country in the world—produces almost 5 percent of its electricity from geothermal energy. Most of this capacity is installed in an area called the Geysers, a geologically active region north of San Francisco.
Thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which made geothermal power generation eligible to receive the federal renewable energy production tax credit, electricity generated from geothermal resources now costs the same as fossil-fuel-based electricity in many markets in the western United States. With favorable economics, the geothermal industry is experiencing a surge in activity. As of August 2008, some 97 confirmed new geothermal power projects with up to 4,000 megawatts of capacity were under development in 13 states, with some 550 megawatts of this already in the construction phase. Expected to create 7,000 permanent full-time jobs, the new capacity will include numerous large-scale projects such as the 350-megawatt and 245-megawatt projects by Vulcan Power near Salt Wells and Aurora, Nevada; the 155-megawatt project by CalEnergy near the Salton Sea in southern California; and the 120-megawatt project by Davenport Power near the Newberry Volcano in Oregon.
Current development is only scratching the surface of what is possible. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that with emerging low-temperature technologies, at least 260,000 megawatts of U.S. geothermal resources could be developed. A study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that an investment of roughly $1 billion in geothermal research and development over 15 years (roughly the cost of a single new coal-fired power plant) could lead to commercial deployment of 100,000 megawatts by 2050.
In Europe, the top countries in geothermal energy development are Italy with 810 megawatts and Iceland with 420 megawatts. Italy is expected to nearly double its installed capacity by 2020. Iceland, with 27 percent of its electricity needs met by harnessing the earth’s heat, is number one in the world in the share of its electricity generated from geothermal energy. Germany, with only 8 megawatts of installed capacity, lags behind but is beginning to see the effects of a feed-in tariff of €0.15 (US $0.23) per kilowatt-hour that was implemented in 2004. Almost 150 plants are now in the pipeline in Germany, with most of the activity centered in Bavaria.
Ten of the top 15 countries producing geothermal electricity are in the developing world. The Philippines, which generates 23 percent of its electricity from geothermal energy, is the world’s second biggest producer behind the United States. The Philippines aims to increase its installed geothermal capacity by 2013 by more than 60 percent, to 3,130 megawatts. Indonesia, the world’s third largest producer, has even bigger plans, calling for 6,870 megawatts of new geothermal capacity to be developed over the next 10 years—equal to nearly 30 percent of its current electricity-generating capacity from all sources. Pertamina, the Indonesian state petroleum company, anticipates building most of this new capacity—adding its name to the list of conventional energy companies that are beginning to diversify into the renewable energy market.
The geothermal development potential of the Great Rift Valley in Africa is enormous. Kenya is the frontrunner in the effort to tap this potential. In late June 2008, President Mwai Kibaki announced a plan to install some 1,700 megawatts of new geothermal capacity within 10 years—13 times greater than the current capacity and one-and-a-half times greater than the country’s total electricity generating capacity from all sources. Djibouti, aided by Reykjavik Energy Invest’s commitment to provide $150 million for geothermal energy projects in Africa, aims to tap the earth’s heat to produce nearly all of its electricity within the next few years. Further stimulating development is the African Rift Geothermal Development Facility (ARGeo), an international organization partly funded by the World Bank that seeks to increase the use of geothermal energy in the Great Rift Valley by protecting investors from losses during early stages of development.
Industry, which accounts for more than 30 percent of world energy consumption, is also starting to turn to reliable, low-cost geothermal energy. In Papua New Guinea, a 56-megawatt geothermal power station owned by Lihir Gold Limited, a leading global gold company, meets 75 percent of corporate power demand at a notably lower cost than oil-fired power generation. In Iceland, five geothermal power plants planned near Reykjavik, which are slated to have a total capacity of 225 megawatts when completed in 2012, will provide electricity to new aluminum refineries.
Despite development potential measured in the hundreds of thousands of megawatts, tapping this renewable source of power is still in its infancy. But as more and more national leaders begin to see renewable energy as a cost-effective, low-carbon alternative to price-volatile, carbon-intensive fossil fuels, geothermal power generation is expected to move rapidly from marginal to mainstream.
Karthik007's Blog 
Recent Comments