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Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.

Not quite
From Wikipedia US electricity consuption per capita (2005 figures) works out to 12.8 MWh/year.

Multiply that by 6.5 billion people gives 83.2 billion MWh/year.

The US's 103 nuclear reactors' highest ever output (2004) was 788.5 million MWh.

Put the numbers together and you find you need around 10,900 nuclear reactors working at the average output for a US nuclear power stations.
Were every one of those stations to be the same design as the world's largest nuclear power station (which actually consists of 7 operating units) you'd still need 1150 of the things to match US power consumption rates.

I was vacationing in Buenos Aires Argentina this spring when there were annual fires lit by farmers to clear their land. I guess that normally, they don't do it all at once, but this time they did. The soot from those fires covered most of Buenos Aires (good air?) and much of Uruguay for about a week. http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/47996 Visibility was so low they closed both airports on opposite ends of the city of 12 million people. Breathing was tough and my eyes watered. For most people, staying indoors solved the problem, but our apartment didn't have any weather stripping, so the air inside was just a bad as outside. Everything we owned was covered in a light soot and smelled of smoke. I have personal photos of the fires from the air - flying back into BsAs from Iguazu Falls at the Brazilian border. Unbelievable. There were multiple traffic accidents and extracity bus service was highly impacted. Besides flying, buses seem to be the major way to get around Argentina's huge spaces. Lots of overnight buses between cities with 22 hour trips quite normal.

Don't get me wrong, I live in the area of highest pollution near Atlanta due to the regional airflow blowing it over my house. http://www.examiner.com/a-1455955~Red_smog_alert_issued_for_Atlanta_area.html Code Orange/Red days happen almost every day in the summer here. I never have issues breathing at home.

That's the thing about predictions, they happen in the future. Since most of the predictions of the 'environmentalists' were not being made before the 1960's, and since the timeframes are usually 50 - 100 years out, it is not surprising that they have yet to be proven true or false. If you discount falling sperm counts in some men in industrial agriculture areas, rising rates of autism in American children and rising rates of leukemia, by ignoring the possible- but by no means proven- environmental component behind them. To claim any of these is proof of prior claims is inaccurate, to dismiss them as possible proof of prior claims is disingenuous. We are in the middle of things, and can't definitively say what they mean, or if they mean anything at all. As if to dismiss everything, you say there is no 'doomsday prediction' that's come true-but you don't admit any of the evidence unless it is positively uncontrovertable (which is not the way of law or science-which argue the meaning of evidence all the time), so what good is the conversation? Extremist wackos like the ones you quote are not representative of most environmentalists, anymore than a parade of right wing cranks who say equally demented stuff are representative of your views. (Unless I miss my guess and you are a devotee of Pat Robertson). So, you are left with rising rates of species extinction as the only proven, predicted environmental disaster that we know of. Still, it's pretty compelling if you think about it at all. Oh, yeah, and there's that ozone hole thing.

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid /17813/story.htm

There's plenty of arable land left for now - so much so that certain governments pay their farmers NOT to plant crops.

The problem with this is that (according to some sources) we don't have enough water suitable for irrigation. See this for example.

I will lease a mazda and enter it in the contest.

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid /35142/story.htm

Just thought I'd ask.

Any hope of lessening global warming through plankton activity are about zero. As the oceans are warming the plankton are dying. It may have gone to far to rely on mother nature to help us turn this juggernaught around. And it's not just global warming that is killing the plankton but oceanic pollution as well (info at bottom of article).
Creatures as well as humans have survived through many devistating climate/environmental changes, but these changes took place over hundreds and more often thousands of years. We are at a point where we are seeing major climate change within a single generation. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, and it will undoubtedly take more that one solution to fix this mess, but something had better be done soon or we (as a civilization) are in for a bad hangover.

These are the same folks that like to release (um, set free) non-native mink into the natural environment causing devestation of the local animal population, right?

Not that I'm aware of. Do you have a documented instance of this? Here's an article on a mink farm raid. It says that no one claimed responsibility. I've seen such acts attributed to groups "like" Greenpeace, PETA, and the ALF. But Greenpeace is "like" these groups in the same way that terrorist groups in Iraq were "like" al Qaida. That is: They're totally different. The association exists only in the statements of someone who finds it advantageous to tar all their opposition with the same brush.

This isn't Greenpeace's M.O. They're out to save the whales, not the minks. They have snuck onto mink farms to film the minks being (illegally) fed whale meat. They were there because of the whale meat, though, not the minks. (Not that they're fans of the fur industry; it's just not their mandate the way opposition to whaling is.)

To be fair to the ecoterrorists, it seems more likely that their objective was to economically damage the farming operation, not some hippy-dippy fantasy about happy minks roaming freely in their non-native habitat. I agree, though, that it would be more environmentally responsible to kill the minks rather than set them free. But that's another reason why it's not Greenpeace's M.O. Greenpeace is an environmental group; the people who did this were most likely animal rights' activists.

...Biodiesel, according to the British Association of Biofuels and Oils (BABFO), is the solution to many of the world's ills and could give Britain up to 10 percent of its motor fuel needs...

...The European Commission in 2001 directed that biodiesel make up 3.5 percent of the diesel fuel transport market by 2007...

I don't actually think that veg oil is a panacea, but it can certainly help.

Link: (planetark.org). Story came off the Reuters wire originally. The venture's being bankrolled by some pretty heavy hitters.

If we can actually produce various oils, it'd certainly change the picture. This being /. and all, though, I have to ask the chemists among us--is this possible? Likely? Feasible?

This vehicle is strictly a concept car. Not too many will be sold at this price. The real front in the auto wars is the hybrids. Toyota is taking the lead on this. The US automakers are being left in the dust in this market segment. Check out this article. When hybrids go mainstream, it will be like the 70's when the US automakers were so far behind in quality.

A small flightless bird living off the coast of South Africa.

Korea, which I was in recently as well as many other modernizing southeast nations have in the last few years mandated that all vehicular public transportation, mostly buses but also taxis run on compressed natural gas. While this make greater economic sense in smaller countries or where the the infrastucture has yet to develop (India), I would not be surprised that if in the next 10 years that California or other "green" states begin the same regulation on public vehicles for further benefit of the public good.

For example, there are some trees with seeds in pods that only open when burnt - without fires, this species of tree would have died out thousands of years ago. The problem is twofold: people have chosen to live in areas designed to burn down, and having people there increases the chances of a fire starting thus making it more frequent than it has to be. The fires will continue - we are the ones that have to change.

You can learn a bit more here..

I noticed a lot of comments both to the effect of "what's so bad about GMOs anyway?" and "here's something wrong!" so I thought I'd try to pull a bunch of them together and clarify it a bit. I used to be headed for a biotechnology job myself, but have gotten rather disillusioned with it.

1) Horizontal gene transfer can happen. We frequently use viruses to insert DNA into an organism. This DNA has flanking sequences, little bits of viral DNA surrounding the actual genes. The viral enzymes that insert this DNA use these sequences to figure out where to make breaks, so the whole thing goes in place, and not just some useless fraction of it. Once the gene is part of the host cell's DNA, the sequences are still there. Other viruses may enter the cell once its out in the wild and accidentally extract the DNA by keying off those viral sequences. Now instead of packaging its own DNA, the virus can end up carrying the artificial sequence, which can then infect other plants.

2) Bacteria are far more prone to slurping up stray DNA than more complex organisms. Many transgenic organisms have antibiotic resistance genes in them, a vestige from back in the lab when it was necessary to harvest the gene-insert in large quantities from bacteria. But now it could be absorbed by free-living bacteria from the GM plant.

3) If the gene you inserted generates a protein from the original donor organisms, people with allergies to that original organism may have them to your new creation. So you move a blight-resistance gene from peanuts to potatos, and someone allergic to peanuts (several friends of mine) keels over after a nice baked potato (thankfully not yet).

4) In the case of natural pest-control toxins (like Bt), does your new Bt-corn produce just as much as the soil bacteria normally would? Probably not, or you'd just use the bacteria. Does this increased level decompose as harmlessly as the low soil dose? Maybe, maybe not. Does the increased dose kill the pollinating or soil-aerating organisms? The Bt trapped inside plant tissues doesn't get exposed to sunlight, and thus doesn't break down. Thus a lot more ends up in final human or animal food.

5) The company that produced the GMO now owns it. Farmers can't save the seed without being charged for it. This is particularly nasty in developing nations where this is standard practice. And if the GMO crops are growing in a field nearby your own traditional crops, but get pollenated by them? You evil thief, using wind and insects to steal from those poor hardworking biotech companies.

6) Pesticide-resistant crops promote the use of pesticide. No longer do you have to be careful to use sub-toxic doses and maybe miss some weeds, just drench the crops, they don't mind! Naturally this leads to more build up on the produce and more runoff.

7) Even a good GMO can be overused. Golden Rice (Monsanto's I think) has vitamin A in it, which would doubtlessly be a good thing in many undernourished parts of the world. This leads to an ever larger monoculture, whose genetically identical plants can be devestated when the right disease comes along. Traditional crops exhibit a larger genetic diversity and better resistance to a single strain of disease. Think of what happens every time a new Outlook virus shows up and tears through the wall-to-wall windows machines out there.

8) They are tough to contain. Even if your transgenic pollen isn't blowing into a neighbor's field, it could easily jump a gap within your own farm. So produce intended for human consumption might end up with genes for producting drugs or even plastic. Yum. This has already happened with Starlink corn.

I've always been an inveterate technophile, but I regard genetic engineering as dubious at best. Too much has been rushed to market with too little study and oversight.

Unfortunately, this is hard to do as the Earth spins once in every 24 hrs (relative to the Sun) while the Moon orbits the Earth in a month. So, gathering wave power actually cashes in on the Earth's spin energy, moving the Moon out.

The only way to do it would be to build a giant ball on an arm pivoting on the North (or South) pole and keep it 90 degrees out of phase with the Moon, so the Moon's gravity would always pull it forward. It would do one RPM (revolution per month!) You could put a generator on the arm, and tap out the power, which would slow the Moon down in its orbit, and gradually lower it toward the Earth.

Much easier is to put a lot of nukes on the Moon, and beam microwave energy back to Earth. If the occasional reator blows up, it is no big deal on the Moon.

Just to speak about Open Source, it has gained media coverage in France in two of the main newspapers (Libération and Le Monde - the latter raising the subject again today).

Europe is also lucky enough that the vast majority of press agencies/newspapers/etc are not owned by big greedy conglomerates and are therefore marketing independent. Economy biased media exist, but they are the minority here. The Diana hype has occured here too (hey, it happened in Paris, how could this be ignored), but the death of Mother Theresa, OTOH, hasn't gone unnoticed.

Marketing disease in the media is of particular worry because medias are a political force today. See the pedophilia "trend" (again in Europe), for example, which all started with the case of Marc Dutrou, in Belgium, several years ago. Raising this case led to 1. politicians looking at the problem and 2. people, aware or victims, starting to speak on public whereas they would remain silent prior to that. The media can influence people in the good way, like in this case, but the other way around is also true.

I just hope that this disease doesn't infect us, honestly. I just don't want to see presidential campaigns turning into commercials just like they are in the US.

<rant>

Speaking of news, I hope you US citizens know that Mr Bush refuses to adhere to the Global Court because he doesn't want his soldiers to be subject to its juridiction. Crimes are crimes, period. FYI the two other countries refusing to adhere are Russia and China. Nice refereces. This is a blatant insult to the rest of the world, as was his rebuttal of the Kyoto Treaty (need I say which country emits the more pollution in the world?). If not, then the rot in your media is not only about marketing.

</rant>

> I don't think there is much of a fire hazard on a long train.

Not so fast, they may still do this and this, but their rail-bound parents might do this, so thats improvement! (Fun with search engines!)

What I find interesting is the large amounts of water that the Odyssey is finding. A mars with a significant amount of water has the potential to be much more interesting than a mars without water.

Some links:
CNN article

BBC article

Yet another article

Hopefully they are correctly intrepreting the data.