Home | India Environment Portal
This is a very useful undertaking by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) to gather up a lot of technical information about India’s environmental research and activism.
They have a small multimedia section as well and I found this movie, appropriately titled Faecal Attraction to be an informative watch…
[youtube=’http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlkOLLa31s’]
Canada’s long and sorry saga of exporting death (asbestos) and defending it loudly and proudly in international fora is over and I needed to mark this happy day on the blog. The newly elected provincial government in Quebec, the Parti Quebecois have followed through on their campaign promise to finally end this small “industry” employing a few workers. Canada will no longer produce asbestos, or fight the listing of asbestos as a toxic substance.
It is going to take $50 million in government funds, a fraction of the cost of one fighter jet, to transition the workers away (if they get the money, not the mine owners). That’s it, why were we exporting death to India and other countries for this, I don’t know.
Canada’s many conservative and liberal governments fought hard for years to preserve the industry, using techniques lifted from tobacco propaganda, or today’s climate change challenges. I leave you with the ruling Canadian government’s response: Finely tuned to appeal to everyone who likes mesothelioma, cancer and death.
“Mrs. Marois’s decision to prohibit chrysotile mining in Quebec will have a negative impact on the future prosperity of the area,” (Industry Minister) Mr. Paradis said in a statement.
That about sums it up. But, it is a good day for public health, nevertheless.
Citing PQ pressure, Canada to cease defending asbestos mining – The Globe and Mail.
Featured image courtesy wikipedia used under a Creative Commons license (a micrograph of asbestos fibres causing lesions in the lung).
The dreary Victorian winter is here. The temperature will drop a little from what it is now, but not much, rarely below zero, but we’ll see the sun every other week for a short while, maybe once a month!
India’s efforts at combating AIDs through the use of superior statistics and survey techniques (yes, we are geeky like that only!) pays off as the number of AIDs cases is slashed from 5.7 million to close to 3 million.
Study: Fewer Indians with HIV seen – Yahoo News
The number of Indians infected with HIV is far smaller than previously believed, according to new data that appears to vindicate critics who said earlier U.N. assessments of the country’s epidemic were vastly overestimated.
Experts say the still-unreleased survey is likely to show that India’s number of HIV cases, which last year was said to be the highest in the world at 5.7 million, is actually well below that mark.
“The actual number we’ve come up with in aggregate is likely to be lower, and perhaps substantially lower,” said Ashok Alexander, director of the Avahan, the Indian program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped fund the study.
Now, if we can only make the other 3 million cases go away. Unfortunately, math is not going to get us there. But this is good news, I guess, for the 2.7 million people who we thought had AIDs, but actually did not. Were these poor people clued in?
The real reason this is good news is that if money was budgeted to take care of 5.7 million cases, then it will go a little further now! Happy Friday, takes away from all the other crap going on in my world that I am too jaded and cynical to blog about.
Sure makes my graduate work in air quality seem a little tame!
The man behind the subterfuge (Researcher 2, male) was Ryan David Kennedy, 34, a scrappy Canadian graduate student with crooked glasses who is studying the impact of tobacco on air quality.He crossed the border at Buffalo on Monday morning and on Tuesday crashed the giant cigar party and trade show sponsored by the publisher of Cigar Aficionado magazine at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.
At a Cigar Show, an Air-Quality Scientist Under Deep, Smoky Cover – New York Times
Well, what did he find? Particulate matter readings four times higher than “hazardous”. Sometimes I think of strapping on a sampler and going to the local bar just out of curiosity. I can leave the bar if it gets smoky, the bartenders and wait staff can’t. I don’t see why this is not a clear case of hazardous working conditions leading to an immediate indoor smoking ban. but what do I know, I’m just a scientist!
Happy Thanksgiving.
Blogged with Flock
An act of quite some chutzpah, “outbidding” oil and gas companies in a public land auction. The land was going over for even more oil and gas exploration at a time when we should really be ramping down gas and oil usage.
More on contributing to his cause here. He needs 45,000 dollars in downpayment to the US government to keep the process going. He appears to be well on his way, but needs some more money to get over the top. It is more than likely that the Obama administration is going to cancel the land grab process anyway, so he will be off the hook soon enough.
Audacious, brilliant and brave.
One Utah » Blog Archive » Why I Disrupted A Fraudulent Auction.
Yesterday I decided that the crisis facing us requires more critical action than has been taken in the past. When faced with the opportunity to seriously disrupt the auction of some of our most beautiful lands in Utah to oil and gas developers, I could not ethically turn my back on that opportunity. By making bids for land that was supposed to be protected for the interests of all Americans, I tried to resist the Bush administration’s attempt to defraud the American people.
At this point it appears that I was successful in my attempts to disrupt this fraudulent auction. The federal officials who took me into custody said that I cost the oil companies in the room hundreds of thousands of dollars and prevented 22,500 acres of land from being sold for fossil fuel development. I had a very open conversation with the federal agents about my motivations and values. They were friendly, respectful, and somewhat sympathetic.
The Hindu : Front Page : PSLV makes commercial launch
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Monday successfully made the first commercial launch of a foreign satellite through the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C8). Italian satellite, Agile, weighing 352 kg, was placed in a precise orbit about 550 km above the earth.
The PSLV also carried an ISRO payload, Advanced Avionics Module (AAM), to establish the next generation computers, navigation, guidance, control and telemetry systems that will be used in future launch vehicles. It weighed 185 kg.
ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair called the mission “a 100 per cent success” and “a remarkable achievement.”
He said: “We have made a good entry into the launch business. I hope we will get more and more business opportunities in future. The contract [to launch the Italian satellite] came at a time when there was a complex, competitive environment.”
Indian space research has always been way ahead of just about any other field, a good indication of the research priorities set in the 1970s. The take home message is that if India throws money and attention at a problem, it does seem to have some success. Now if they can only fix this…
