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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Yeah. It has if you're looking right now.

I remember it being $4.75 at a local pump during the Obama administration.

That article was written when "Fracking" was Battlestar Galactica's "Gorramit"

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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$4.75/gallon in California was not Obama's doing: "California’s High Gasoline Prices Are No Accident"
www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2019/10/10/californias-high-gasolin
e-prices-are-no-accident/

If gasoline prices in Texas doubled, matching approximately California prices, Texans would double their efforts to burn less gasoline. But some of them would attempt to overthrow the Governor in Austin. It would be a statewide emergency . . . fuel trucks full of gasoline would be stolen, riots over the gas tax, Martial Law declared, etc. All because the price went up $2/gal. Texans would rather kill than ride-share.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Reversible sterilization? India fights back against overpopulation

Many view India’s ballooning population –set to overtake China’s by the next decade– as a ticking time-bomb, but a solution is now at hand that, nevertheless, has taken four long decades to see the light of day.

India had only 54 million on its population chart in 1979 when a slight professor in his 40s, Dr Sujoy Kumar Guha, published his first scientific paper on Risug, a molecular drug he had developed as a reversible contraceptive for men.

He pleaded for clinical trials. But the ‘Doctor’ in front of his name was not from a medical degree; it was courtesy of his PhD studies at an American university. No go, said India’s supreme medical body, the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research).

Guha chose to circumvent this closed door by opting to sit his medical entrance test and by becoming a qualified medical doctor. The ICMR relented and the clinical trials began, but more than a decade had passed and Guha was now in his 50s, an age when most men tend to get somewhat flaccid of mind.
Reversible sterilization? India fights back against overpopulation
© REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Phase One of the clinical trials progressed from rats to rabbits to monkeys and then to humans, and proved spectacularly successful in 1993. But then the ICMR brought them to a halt, after someone complained that certain components of Risug are known to cause cancer.

Guha argued that these individual substances become harmless as compounds, just as chlorine, which could melt human flesh, becomes basic everyday salt when mixed with sodium. The ICMR wasn’t convinced.
Also on rt.com ‘Set your ovaries free’: Tanzanian president urges women to have babies to boost economy

Dr Guha then knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court; Phase Two was set in motion after a few years and, by 2002, Dr Guha’s dreams were close to being realized, before another spanner was thrown in the works.

This time, it was changes to the international norms for clinical trials. It took the Indian medical authorities another five years to put these required norms in place.
The envy that took its toll

Unsurprisingly, Guha’s work evoked interest and envy in equal measure around the world. Peers began sniffing around his wonder drug, and not always with a sense of appreciation. The National Institutes of Health in the US raised questions, causing more delays.

Dr Guha believes to this day that this was meant to promote a pill-in-the-making which, unlike his one-time injectable hormone-based drug, promised a continual demand and endless profits.

Now, after another dozen years and nearly four decades all told, Dr Guha’s dream is close to becoming a reality. Extended tests on Risug have shown no side-effects. The Indian medical authorities are hopeful of introducing his reversible contraceptive to the market in the next six to seven months. It would be the first injectable male contraceptive in the world. Its competitor, the pill, is nowhere in sight.

Indian men prefer to use condoms rather than invasive vasectomy surgery to sterilize their reproductive systems. But Dr Guha’s invention is external, non-invasive and cheap, and could prompt millions to opt for it, given it’s reversible with just two counter injections. There are no barriers to physical intimacy, as with condoms.
Youth and the shackles of population

There’s a great imbalance in India’s population trajectory, with southern states meeting the global trends of less than two children per household. In contrast, families in the northern states, home to 40 per cent of India’s population, tend to have nearly four children per household.
© REUTERS/Jayanta Dey

Education, the economic dependence of women and a rural-urban divide all play roles in India’s population, which is bursting at the seams and poses a great strain on the country’s diminishing resources, such as water and energy. India has more than 600 million young people and needs 12 million jobs for them each year. Population is an issue which can no longer be put off till tomorrow.

In times gone by, around the time when Dr Guha had worked out his invention, Sanjay Gandhi, son of India’s then-reigning prime minister Indira Gandhi, opted for a compulsory sterilization programme to halt the population boom in 1976. Over six million men were sterilized in just a year. Nearly 2,000 men died because of botched operations.
Also on rt.com India halved its poverty rate since 1990s - World Bank

In the ensuing elections, India voted the Gandhis out of power. Nobody in authority has dared to do anything as dramatic as this since those dark days.

Dr Guha, nearing 80 and still sprightly, could finally give India a solution to a problem which has seriously shackled the nation’s future. He won't meet the tragic fate of Dr Subhas Mukherjee, who was the real architect of ‘test-tube baby’ procedure but lost the rights of invention to Louise Brown only because his work hadn’t appeared in any international journal. In 1981, Dr Mukherjee was found hanged in his Kolkata apartment.

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The World Will Finally Have to Confront Its Massive Plastic Problem Now That China Won’t Handle It


Now that China won’t take it, the world will have an extra 111 million metric tons of its plastic waste to deal with by 2030.
Zoë Schlanger

Since the 1950s, when the world was first introduced to the flexible, durable wonder of plastic, 8.3 billion metric tons of it has been produced. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, so technically, all of that tonnage is still sitting someplace on the planet. And a lot of it is in China.

That’s because when hundreds of countries around the world said they were “recycling” their plastic over the past few decades, half the time what they really meant was they were exporting it to another country. And most of the time, that meant they were exporting it to China. Since 1992, China (and Hong Kong, which acts as an entry port into mainland China) have imported 72 percent of all plastic waste.

But China has had enough. In 2017, China announced it was permanently banning the import of nonindustrial plastic waste. According to a paper published in June 2018 in the journal Science Advances, that will leave the world—mostly high-income countries—with an additional 111 million metric tons of plastic to deal with by 2030. And right now, those countries have no good way to handle it.

As of 2016, the top five countries exporting their plastic to China were the US, the UK, Mexico, Japan, and Germany.

For example, that year, the US exported 56 percent of its plastic waste to China, with another 32 percent going to Hong Kong (of which most is then exported to China). The US exported its remaining 12 percent to Mexico, Canada, and India. Germany, meanwhile, exports 69 percent of its plastic to China.


But because flows of plastic are convoluted, it’s possible these numbers don’t tell the whole story. For example, the researchers note that the UK exports 51 percent of its plastic to Germany, but given how much plastic Germany exports to China, it’s seems plausible that much of the UK’s plastic ultimately ends up in China. The same goes for Mexico, which exports 55 percent of its plastic to the US. The US, in turn, exports most of its plastic to China. But the researchers write the United Nations trade data on which they based their research does not monitor flows of plastic between countries, so “we do not know whether that waste is then processed domestically or exported to Hong Kong or China,” they write.

China has in the past tried to limit plastic imports. In 2013, the country implemented a “Green Fence” policy of restricting the types of plastic waste it would accept, with the goal of reducing contamination. The policy lasted only a year, but it was enough to rattle the waste industry. “As a result, plastic recycling industries experienced a globally cascading effect since little infrastructure exists elsewhere to manage the rejected waste,” the researchers write.

That’s already happening again, and now the ban is permanent.

The rule went into effect on January 1, 2018, and plastic immediately began piling up in several European countries, the port of Hong Kong, and the US. “My inventory is out of control,” Steve Frank, who owns recycling plants in Oregon, which up until then had exported most of its materials to China, told the New York Times at the time. He hoped he’d be able to start exporting more waste to countries like Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Malaysia—“anywhere we can”—but “they can’t make up the difference,” he said.

At the end of the day, even the 111 million metric tons of plastic that the researchers found would be back in the laps of countries who used to export to China is still a fraction of all the plastic that gets produced.


“We know from our previous studies that only 9 percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled, and the majority of it ends up in landfills or the natural environment,” Jenna Jambeck, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s college of engineering who co-authored the study, said in a statement. ”Without bold new ideas and system-wide changes, even the relatively low current recycling rates will no longer be met, and our previously recycled materials could now end up in landfills.”

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With the construction phase largely to blame, wind turbines emit slightly more particulate matter (PM), a form of air pollution, at an "exception" rate higher per unit of energy generated(kWh) than a fossil gas electricity station("NGCC"),[31][32] and also emit more heavy metals and PM than nuclear stations, per unit of energy generated.

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Sovacool estimated that in the United States wind turbines kill between 20,000 and 573,000 birds per year, and has stated he regards either figure as minimal compared to bird deaths from other causes. He uses the lower 20,000 figure in his study and table (see Causes of avian mortality table) to arrive at a direct mortality rate per unit of energy generated figure of 0.269 per GWh for wind power. Fossil-fueled power plants, which wind turbines generally require to make up for their weather dependent intermittency, kill almost 20 times as many birds per gigawatt hour (GWh) of electricity according to Sovacool. Bird deaths due to other human activities and cats total between 797 million and 5.29 billion per year in the U.S. Additionally, while many studies concentrate on the analysis of bird deaths, few have been conducted on the reductions of bird births, which are the additional consequences of the various pollution sources that wind power partially mitigates.[69]

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol @ Michael Shellenberger and anyone who takes him seriously.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by reaverfan:
Both Republicans and Democrats tend to underestimate the percentage of adults in the U.S. population who think global warming is happening, are worried about it, and support climate policy
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027249442030044
X

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
^ Hey. It might be for different reasons, but at least we can all come together and agree that Google and Facebook are evil.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I do.

I just didn't get it from whatever concentration camp impersonating a college campus you got yours from.

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Originally posted by reaverfan:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I do.

I just didn't get it from whatever concentration camp impersonating a college campus you got yours from.

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You have zero understanding of any of it. You prove it every day.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


Seriously dude, are you just talking about yourself every time you post?

You're the least self aware life form that I've ever encountered.

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Originally posted by reaverfan:
Title changed by a racist, openly fascist Nazi. Butthurt, much?

You've been getting your ass kicked quite a bit lately. Maybe you should stop being so jealous and obsessing over your betters.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by reaverfan:
Title changed by a racist, openly fascist Nazi. Butthurt, much?

You've been getting your ass kicked quite a bit lately. Maybe you should stop being so jealous and obsessing over your betters.

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^ Homophobe.

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