How Maglev Trains Work If you've been to an airport lately, you've probably noticed that air travel is becoming increasingly congested. Despite frequent delays, airplanes still provide the fastest way to travel hundreds or thousands of miles. Passenger air travel revolutionized the transportation industry in the last century, letting people traverse great distances in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. The only alternatives to airplanes -- feet, cars, buses, boats and conventional trains -- are just too slow for today's fast-paced society. A few countries are using powerful electromagnets to develop high-speed trains, called maglev trains. Electromagnetic Suspension (EMS) If you've ever played with magnets, you know that opposite poles attract and like poles repel each other. The magnetic field created in this wire-and-battery experiment is the simple idea behind a maglev train rail system. In the next section, we'll take a closer look at the Maglev track.
Damming Tibet: China's destruction of Tibet's rivers, environment and people The wild yak has gone the way of the bison in 19th-century America. Similar to native American peoples like the Blackfoot Indians, Tibetan nomads have become beggars in their own land, with their culture decimated by the Chinese policy of resettlement. Sometimes you just fall right into a story. In late 2005, I returned to Tibet intent on updating my guidebook to the troubled region, and to check out the completion of the new railway linking China with Tibet for the first time. The new Golmud-Lhasa line was completed at a cost of over US$4 billion, more than the entire budget spent in Tibet on education and healthcare since the Chinese invasion in 1950. My railway investigation got derailed when, out of curiosity, I decided to take a one-day rafting trip from Lhasa. I'd never heard of major dam-building in Tibet. I took as much undercover video footage as I could on this trip not knowing what I would do with it, but shooting anyway. China's reign of terror over Tibet The story chose me.
During Fracking Hearing, Nebraskan Challenges Oil And Gas Commission To Drink Wastewater James Osborn pours a mystery concoction into water at a Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission meeting in March 2015. Opposition to a proposal to dump out-of-state fracking wastewater in Nebraska went viral over the weekend, after a community group posted a video of a man offering chemical-laden water to a Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The commission was hearing public comment on a Terex Energy Corp. application to inject up to 10,000 gallons per day of wastewater from fracking in Colorado and Wyoming into an old oil well on a ranch in Sioux County, in the northwest corner of Nebraska. In the video, James Osborn pours three cups of water for the commissioners, then pours a brown liquid into each cup, asking them, “Would you drink it?” Watch the video by Bold Nebraskahere: During hydraulic fracturing (fracking), large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, is injected underground to crack shale rock and release pockets of oil or natural gas.
Whose renewable future? -- New Internationalist In January this year, the energy researcher Jeremy Leggett made a bold claim. He told the Guardian newspaper that we should expect a major oil firm to turn its back on fossil fuels soon and shift to renewable energy. ‘One of the oil companies will break ranks,’ he said, ‘and this time it is going to stick.’ Leggett points to the collapsed oil price, the falling costs of renewable-energy generation and potential government action on climate change as key factors that could persuade an oil corporation to jump ship. But hang on a minute. To answer this question, we don’t need to look far. A renewables revolution? 2014 felt like a big step forward for renewables. These could be early steps towards a better energy future. How much the retail price of solar electricity per KWh in the US has dropped since 1980. In order to avoid runaway climate change, our new cleaner energy sources would need actively to replace fossil fuel generation, not just add to it. What are we up against? At what price?
Belo Monte, Brazil: The tribes living in the shadow of a megadam | Environment By the Great Bend of the Xingu river in the depths of Amazonia, the Juruna tribe is being drowned by what seems at first sight to be a flood of TV game-show prizes. There’s a shiny new motorboat moored by the old canoe, the latest four-wheel drive parked beside a chicken coop, satellite dishes outside every home and wide-screen plasma TVs inside. But these are not the spoils of victory. For three decades, the Juruna have been in the vanguard of the fight against the hydroelectric plant – the world’s fourth biggest – which is being built on the edge of their territory in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. The community have marched, lobbied, seized hostages, burned buses and taken to their canoes to try to stop the project. Next August, the Xingu river will be closed by a 5km-wide dam. “When they close the river, it will be like they are destroying our lives,” says Giliarde Juruna, the chief of a village in the Paquiçamba indigenous territory. “I used to take 50kg each night.
Explicit cookie consent THE oil price has fallen by more than 40% since June, when it was $115 a barrel. It is now below $70. This comes after nearly five years of stability. At a meeting in Vienna on November 27th the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which controls nearly 40% of the world market, failed to reach agreement on production curbs, sending the price tumbling. Also hard hit are oil-exporting countries such as Russia (where the rouble has hit record lows), Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela. Why is the price of oil falling? The oil price is partly determined by actual supply and demand, and partly by expectation. Four things are now affecting the picture. The main effect of this is on the riskiest and most vulnerable bits of the oil industry. Dig deeper:The economics of oil have changed (Dec 2014)Will falling oil prices curb America's shale boom?
Here's a taste of rewards for No - mass fracking Fellow Scots should be aware that even now Westminster is auctioning off licenses to frack across the Central Belt of Scotland. If you don't think that's any cause for concern, read this. While Better Together ask Scotland not to break the UK apart most people in Scotland are totally unaware that the Westminster government plans to break Scotland apart as they are currently inviting shale oil and gas companies to frack the Central Belt of Scotland. According to the Energy Global website, last week, “Scotland is on the verge of an onshore oil and gas exploration boom” as Cuadrilla, Halliburton and three other large companies battle it out to get their hands on DECC exploration licenses in Scotland. A quick look on the the Department Of Energy & Climate Change website confirmed “On the 28th July 2014, the Energy Minister, Matthew Hancock, invited applications for Licences in the 14th Landward Licensing Round. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Scotland will decide.
Can Coal Ever Be Clean? Coal provides 40 percent of the world’s electricity. It produces 39 percent of global CO₂ emissions. It kills thousands a year in mines, many more with polluted air. Environmentalists say that clean coal is a myth. These problems aren’t new. Coal, to use the economists’ euphemism, is fraught with “externalities”—the heavy costs it imposes on society. Last June, on a hot and muggy day in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama gave the climate speech that the American coal and electric power industries had dreaded—and environmentalists had hoped for—since his first inauguration, in 2009. Source: U.S. In 2012 the world emitted a record 34.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. How fast the Arctic melts, how high the seas rise, how hot the heat waves get—all these elements of our uncertain future depend on what the world does with its coal, and in particular on what the U.S. and China do. That October, Mountaineer began a pioneering experiment in carbon capture.
Scotland to create 'buffer zones' for shale gas and onshore oil extraction Planning rules governing the extraction of shale gas and onshore oil in Scotland will be made tougher, the Scottish government has said. It believes there should be reinforced protection for communities near sites of new energy sources, including the controversial fracking method. Climate Change Minister Paul Wheelhouse also said he wanted to see buffer zones between sites and settlements. The new planning policy will come into force next year. Environmental campaigners have welcomed the changes, describing them as a "setback" for firms hoping to extract shale gas. Mr Wheelhouse made the announcement at the SNP conference in Perth. He said: "Any proposals for the extraction of unconventional oil and gas extraction are considered through the planning process and the appropriate regulatory regimes. "In considering such proposals it is important that the views of the local communities, and the impact on the environment are given due consideration in the planning process.