Environment

"Renewable fuels got a "bit ahead of themselves in the public eye in 2008 when gasoline was over $4 a gallon and the race to biofuels was on," said Chris Kraft, president of Nashville, Tenn.-based CKFutures.com. "High fossil fuels lead to high demand for ethanol, which lead to historically high grain prices, which made ethanol as expensive as gasoline." "this year, 12.95 billion gallons of renewable fuels are mandated to be used in fuels sold in the U.S., up from 11.1 billion gallons in 2009," While that mandated demand will not be satisfied exclusively by ethanol, "demand for ethanol…

When I was  child my mother used to worship BARGAD  i.e. Ficus bengalensis and  PEEPAL  i.e.   Ficus religiosa on a particular day in month of June calling Badmawas i.e. dark moon day falling in summer. BOTH THE TREES HAVE LIVES OF OVER SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS. We have to find a tree to worship it The idea was to grow this tree which will protect the people. It was sin to cut the twigs of Ficus religiosa. A festival in winter time was to worship AMLA i.e Phyllanthus emblica  Lord Shiva has to be worshiped with leaves of Belpatra Balanites aegyptiaca…

Women in rural India spend hours together traversing vast tracts of hilly terrain to collect the firewood for household leaving their family and children at home. Some times there is "Pakad" i.e. Forest Officials detain them and fine them Rs 2100 as they nerrated. Besides facing the hazards to wild life and human beings praying on lonely women in woods they face the smoke and closed door cooking in dingy houses without the smoke outlet their kids are also exposed to high dosages of smoke. However during interaction with villagers it was pointed out that their husbands would not like the food…

Amazon rain forests were unaffected by a major drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims made the by the IPCC, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. "We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought," said Arindam Samanta, the study's lead author from Boston University. A study published in Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because…

Mother Earth Cycles To Work Anthropogenic global warming. AGW Human-caused warming. Call it what you will: is it real? In short: can humans modify Earth's climate? There are two major views on this question: 1 - human emissions of CO2 cause global warming. 2 - global warming is part of a natural cycle. I suggest that neither view is sufficiently correct because the underlying suppositions and simplifications are false. The Earth's dynamic systems are many.  They are complex in and of themselves.  They do not act in isolation, but interact amongst themselves. Accordingly, one might…

Having once been an environmental activist, one thing that bothers me about modern day environmental activists (*) is their insistence, despite any evidence, that jamming people into cities and going to Farmer's Markets and having governments buy huge swaths of land that can't be used by anyone is a good thing.   Emotional arguments mobilize zealots who are already convinced but do very little for the undecided.  But common sense and data do. If most people were going to predict which city would instead have a common sense plan to get greener without more bloated government…

Professor Dr. Ashwani Kumar Professor of Botany Hon Director, Life Sciences Energy Plantation Demonstration Project Center, Department of Botany, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, 302004. Phone 00 91 141 654100 Fax 00 91 141 565905 Email. msku4@hotmail.com Summary: Biomass contributes a significant share of global primary energy consumption and its importance is likely to increase in future world energy scenarios. Current biomass use, although not sustainable in some cases, replaces fossil fuel consumption and results in avoided CO2 emissions, representing about 2.7 to 8.8 % of 1998…

Biofuel is not ‘worse than regular petrol or diesel’ provided a three tier model is adopted and forests are not cleared to raise biofuel “Tropical deforestation contributes around 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions – similar to the amount generated by America and China. Forests are lost for a variety of reasons, but the production of biofuel crops is undoubtedly playing a part”. “The environmental impact of clearing forests to make way for biofuel crops is such that using fossil fuel in cars is better for the environment than biofuels made from crops such as palm oil”. “Under the minimum…

Biofuel  is not ‘worse than regular petrol or diesel’ provided a three tier model is adopted and forests are not cleared to raise biofuel   “Tropical deforestation contributes around 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions – similar to the amount generated by America and China. Forests are lost for a variety of reasons, but the production of biofuel crops is undoubtedly playing a part”.   “The environmental impact of clearing forests to make way for biofuel crops is such that using fossil fuel in cars is better for the environment than biofuels made from crops such as palm oil…

During a meeting of Plant tissue culture association wonderful explanations about the genomes of rice strctural and functional genomics are presented. At the same time a a dozen or more presentations are about transgenic plants and some on plant tissue culture. Where will the botanist go if all the plant sciences is now  molecular biology We do need people with fundamental knowledge of structure and function of plants discover new plants as sources of drug and food fiberand fodder from amongst the unutilized plants. In the realm of GM crops and transgenics pure botany is lost and…