Blaine Brownell
3/13/2010
Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the world’s tallest building, is made of reinforced concrete, a material that has surpassed the use of steel used to build the previous recordholder for height. This engineering achievement shows that the strength of concrete has tripled in the last four decades, allowing concrete structures to be thinner, lighter, and far taller.
Brownell, the author of “Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment,” is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture.
Currently, nuclear power plants supply about one-fifth of the nation’s energy. And no member of the public has ever been injured by a nuclear power plant in the United States, nor has any nuclear worker died of a radiation-related incident. California would have to remove more than half a million passenger cars from its roads to eliminate the amount of carbon dioxide prevented by the state’s four nuclear reactors. The two reactors in Georgia will create an estimated 3,500 jobs during construction and 800 permanent jobs when the reactors are up and running. In California, where a state moratorium on new reactors has been in place since 1976, a majority of residents responding to the most recent California Field Poll on nuclear energy approved of building new reactors. Countries such as France, Japan, and Britain already have made great strides in extracting unused energy from used nuclear fuel, at the same time reducing the amount and longevity of waste byproducts. By employing advanced recycling techniques, advanced fuel fabrication, and new reactor designs, we could turn what is now considered waste into one of our most valuable future energy resources.
The UK lags well behind other European countries and the US when it comes to bringing prosecutions for bribery, writes Falconer. This is largely due to outdated laws that leave the Serious Fraud Office ill-equipped to fight corruption, especially when it involves UK companies trading outside the UK. For this reason, Falconer says it is vital that the Bribery Bill makes it through parliament before the general election. Failure to do this could lead other nations to doubt that the UK is serious about tackling the problem.
Google has reacted to accusations that its internet searches produce results that can be unfair to rival firms by saying that they are “neutral both in appearance and fact”. Caldwell says there would only be a need for Google to declare its neutrality if the company had no real competition. With Google, people either think that there is a big problem and the company is enjoying a monopoly or that there is no problem at all. Google tends to cast attempts to regulate it as assaults on fundamental freedoms, but Caldwell says such a view smacks of 1990s utopianism and needs to be re-examined.
Roger Cohen
The campaign against human presence on the planet is not relegated to a radical fringe, but permeates the upper echelons of science and mainstream organizations. The concept that humans are merely carbon dioxide emitters and our presence is primarily destructive has dangerous implications. Applebaum points out that human ingenuity and creativity are largely responsible for raising living standards around the world. And it is human innovation and compassion that will help to bring about the cessation of fossil fuel use. Engendering hatred for mankind teaches only apathy.
Comparing global climate change to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Tidwell claims that sweeping, political change is the only hope of saving the planet from large-scale destruction caused by greenhouse gas emissions. While many distractions and inhibitions have prevented legislation that would effectively cease the burning of fossil fuels, the “go green” movement–hyped by the media and thus appearing larger and more significant than it really is–shares the blame. Rather than obsessing over green fads, the author calls Americans to real action.
Over the past week there have been resignations and investigations of top scientists in England and the US. This event amounts to a peer review of a putative scientific “consensus” by bloggers. The story so far has played itself out largely on blogs, often run by the same scientists who had a hard time getting printed in the scientific journals. “Climategate” has provided a voice to the scientists who had been frozen out of the debate. While this episode raises disturbing questions about scientific standards in highly political areas such as global warming, Crovitz says it’s remarkable to see how quickly corrective information can now spread.
The newly elected Greek government is faced with an economy in a recession, a grave fiscal situation, and deep-rooted structural problems, with a public deficit estimated at 12.7% of GDP and debt above 110% of GDP. On top of this, Greek statistics and Greek policies now suffer from a lack of credibility as a consequence of the previous government’s reporting a fiscal deficit only half as high as we now know to be the case. However, Papaconstantinou makes the case that as the new government in Athens pushes for economic and budgetary change, skeptics should suspend their disbelief.
