There is some great news for all environment lovers. The nuclear fusion project has been given the go ahead, and hopefully, it will not be long before the team of physicists led by Mike Dunne of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, UK, will be able to successfully reproduce the power of the sun on earth.

Amazing is it not? To think how far science has progressed, and that now we will be able to replicate the sun’s energy! Nuclear fusion is the answer for the energy crisis which is looming ahead of us.

What is nuclear fusion? It is a nuclear reaction, in which, two light nuclei (like hydrogen) combine to form heavier nuclei (such as helium). Excess binding energy is released during this process, and it is this energy which scientists hope to harness fruitfully.

Nuclear fusion is not as easy as it seems, because, a considerable energy barrier must be overcome before fusion can occur. The energy barrier is produced because two naked nuclei always repel each other due to the presence of electrostatic force between their positively charged protons.

Do you know it is for the last 50 years that research is undergoing for the production of fusion power? It has definitely not been easy. Hydrogen bombs have been the most successful fusion reactions produced till date.

Well, one fervently hopes that scientists will soon be able to produce fusion power, and thus lessen our dependence on the fossil fuels.

When the world is getting serious with its global warming and greenhouse gas emissions issues, more and more energy producers are shifting to alternative or renewal resources to produce power.

But, it does not seem sufficient to just resort to alternative energy to stay in the ‘competitive paradigm shifting.’ To berge ahead, the companies are pushing hard to create something different, atleast enough to make a headline.

Perhaps, cuing with these lines, the German engineering giant Siemens has planned to build a wind farm. True, wind farms are no more a new concept, but they are planning to erect the ‘world’s first floating wind turbine!’

Alexandra Bech Gjoerv, the head of the energy division at Norsk Hydro — the Norwegian firm spearheading the project – said,

It’s attractive to have windmills out at sea. We can produce a lot of energy, out of sight.

Explaining the advantage of having a floating wind turbine, Walt Patterson, an energy expert at the Chatham House think-tank in London, said,

It’s a logical step. Floating turbines will be easier to make because you can do most of the fabrication on land and then float it out to sea.

But, the questing of keeping the turbines secure in the North Sea, where waves can reach 30m in height, arises. To face the waves, three cables will be loosely anchoring the base of the turbines to the seabed, a technology similar to that used for offshore oil platforms. But, this is with much greener credentials.

The prototype is initially expected to generate about five megawatts of electricity, which can supply at least 1,000 homes. And once successful, a small offshore windpark could be built by 2014, which would consist of about 200 turbines.

The floating wind turbine is expected to be up and running in under two years. Hope this would help environmental campaigners chill down with their claims that turbines are an eyesore for tourists – endangering the tourism industry.

What Sustainable Development Indicators are doing is turning the generic concept of sustainability into action and Zurich-based SAM Group within the Dow Jones and STOXX classifications is currently providing a standardized set of indicators for this purpose.

Continuing their assessments based on companies’ economic, environmental, and social performance, to measure and monitor sustainable development, this year Dow Jones sustainability indexes has ranked Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian aluminum company as overall best performer.

Norsk Hydro’s claimed the top position as it did a great job in risk management and compliance systems citing an example for innovative techniques for better energy use with lower emissions.

While BMW, for the third consecutive year grasped the top rating in automotive index for variety of achievements, including its efficiency enhancements and its steady work on developing hybrid technologies.

On the other side as strong candidate in the social dimension, human capital development, corporate citizenship/philanthropy, social reporting, animal testing and bioethics, Novo Nordisk ranked as best-in-class in healthcare – one of 18 global super sectors in Dow Jones Sustainability indexes.

Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are the first global indexes tracking the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide since 1999 and analyzes almost 2500 companies rating them based on economic, environmental, and social performance every year. This year, 42 companies have entered the index while 33 will loose the eligibility, thus dropping off the list.

For the last few years sustainability indicators, indices and reporting systems gained growing popularity in both the public and private sectors and mainly intended to effect actual policy and practices to put the concept of sustainable development into action.

In the midst of a growing concern about pollution ahead of the 2008 Olympics, China is coming down heavily on the drug industry after focusing on polluted rivers in July. China’s environmental watchdog has closed down or suspended 649 firms and given dozens of others a deadline to improve their waste disposal or face shutdown.

The last standards for Industrial water wastes and emissions in China were set in 1990’s, with no explicit rules or necessities for pharmaceutical companies. In March, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) published a list of 6,066 seriously polluting companies, out of which 117 were pharmaceutical firms.

Zhang Buyong, of the Guangzhou-based South Medicine Economic Research Institution, was quoted as saying:

Due to fierce competition, and to minimize costs, drug companies tend not to prioritize waste control and environmental protection.

Polluters along two of China’s main rivers have defied a decade-old clean-up effort, leaving much of the water unfit to touch, let alone drink, and a risk to a sixth of the population, state media said last week.

Half the checkpoints along the Huai River and its tributaries in central and eastern China showed pollution of ‘Grade 5′ or worse the top of the dial in key toxins, meaning that the water was unfit for human contact and may not be fit even for irrigation, national legislators were told.

As it is China’s pharmaceutical industry, replete with firms that churn out copycat drugs, often in violation of patents, and unproven or fake medicine, remains in desperate need of reform. I wonder how willing these industries would be in trying to turn more environmentally savvy.

Ethiopian authorities have come up with cruel plans to kill thousands of stray dogs ahead of the Coptic millennium celebrations next week. They are to be fed meat laced with strychnine, a cheap and powerful poison often used to kill rats that causes a painful death. The reason sited for the killings is the eradication of rabies.

Kassahun Addis in a column in this week’s edition of the Sub-Saharan Informer, a weekly newspaper is quoted to have said:

Dogicide is an act that should be condemned in the strongest words possible, and a cause worth fighting for,

Ethiopia follows the Coptic calendar, which is about seven years behind the more common Gregorian. Among the celebrations scheduled is a concert by the U.S. pop group Black Eyed Peas in a $20 million hall being built for the occasion. The celebrations are expected to draw tourists from around the world.

Things seem to be really stirring in the country in preparation for the celebrations: a week ago, a government-funded private organization said it would move thousands of homeless people from the capital to the countryside ahead of the celebration, promising to help them with food, shelter and medicine.

Then the Great Ethiopia Run, a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) race organized by distance legend Haile Gebrselassie that has drawn 30,000 runners, was postponed because of unspecified security concerns ahead of next month’s millennium celebrations. The race, scheduled for Sept. 9, was moved to November.

Instead of the barbaric death sentence, these dogs need treatment and vaccination. The authorities should sterilize street dogs and only those with rabies or chronic conditions should be killed but through more painlessly means.

While researchers and engineers all over the world are busy advocating renewable energies like wind as an answer to reduce the amount of coal emissions, some naturalists believe that wind energy might not be the weapon required to fight coal emissions.

Dan Boone, a naturalist in Maryland, has explained that air pollution would be least effected by adding wind turbines to the gird. This theory seems confusing as we all believe that generating power from wind would not result in any emissions like those in case of coal-fired power plants. But the truth really depends on a system known as the cap-and-trade system. Cap-and-trade system A.K.A Emissions trading is an administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.

Air pollution is already regulated under the system and the system has also shown some advantages and the system has proved itself worthy by effectively reducing NOx which create ozone and sulfur dioxide (SO2) the gas mainly responsible for acid rain. Even CO2 emissions have been reduced by 19% from 1995 to 2003 in Pennsylvania.

We all believe that if we erect thousands of grids that could promise steady electricity generation, we could reduce coal emissions even more. But considering the Cap-and-trade system on its feeble side, the system relies on an established total cap on emissions. If a plant reduces its emission below the mentioned cap then the incentive for the plant is that it can sell that extra to another plant to allow it to pollute more, hence the net effect on the pollution will be a big zero.

Moreover, it’s unlikely that the cap will be lowered because of wind energy. The energy generated by wind is not sufficient to power the entire world. The Department Of Energy hopes that by 2030 the total electricity contributed by wind in the United States will be just 0.89% of the amount required and the rest will still be generated by conventional means.

For now we don’t see much reduction in the emissions till the time wind energy generation systems undergo a major revolution.

The more competitive the environment, the harder it is to remember that the goal is advancing your position relative to the competition. You can do this three ways: by building up your position, by weaking competitors’ positions, or, ideally, by doing both at once. A common mistake is think that you must weaken a competitive position to build up your own. Even in a “winner-take-all” competition, this is not usually the case.

For example, just recently Mitt Romney won the straw poll in Iowa. This built up his position, but it didn’t really hurt the position of his main competitors. However, a victory is still a victory and Romney’s position today is stronger than it was before the win. Brownback’s second place was even more of a victory because it was less expected. Standard methods plus any surprise creates momentum. Romney didn’t build any momentum because his win was more expected, but building a position and building momentum are two different things.

Newfound Rare Fossilized Cypress Trees May Reveal 8-million-year-old Climate

The scientists have already offered several climate models that define the ancient weather on earth. But, now they have perhaps come up with a new source of climate patters that existed 8 millions years ago — this may very soon be revealed by a group of newly discovered fossilized swamp cypress trees.

A team of Hungarian scientists have recently unearthed some fossilized swamp cypress trees that stood on the earth swaying 8 million years ago – i.e. the late Miocene geological period when the Carpathian basin, presently Hungary, was a swamps-surrounded freshwater lake.

To add to the team’s achievement, the wood of 16 Taxodium trees was preserved in an open-cast coal mine instead of getting petrified, i.e. turning to stone. This allows the geologists study samples of the ancient trees as if they were sections cut from a piece of living wood!

Excited about the rare state of the find, Alfred Dulai, geologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum said,

The importance of the findings is that so many trees got preserved in their original position in one place. But the real rarity about these trees is that ... their original wood got preserved ... they did not turn into stone.

Data that can be collected from these fossil trees can definitely throw light on the climatic patters of the pre-historic times.

This would help analyze the changing trend of the earth’s climatic conditions from 300 million years ago till date, through what it was like 8 million years back.

Global Warming woes are on a rise and scientists all over the world are busy finding alternatives to prevent our planet from a certain disaster. While some of us believe that trees can be the answer to the potential threat caused by carbon emissions, some researchers at Duke University state that to fight global warming we need much more than just trees!

Scientists at the Duke University bathed plots of North Carolina pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew in size, the amount of carbon they sucked up depended on the amount of water and nutrients they received.

A project funded by the Department of Energy, called the Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiment compared four pine forests plots that received daily doses of carbon dioxide 1.5 times the current levels of the greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere to four matched plots that did not receive any extra gas. The results showed that the treated trees produced about 20% more biomass on average, but according to these scientists, since water and nutrient availability differed across the plots, averages don’t tell the whole story.

Researchers have also stated that biomass output largely depends on the water and nutrients in the area. If a drought takes hold, trees won’t be able to suck as much carbon dioxide as is required to combat the growing threat of global warming.

Trees need more fertilizers to drink more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but since fertilizers can leave their harmful effects on the environment and the water supply so its use on a large scale is simply impractical.

The best way to restrict global warming is to restrict our own carbon footprint, because now even trees won’t come to rescue us.