Renewable energy sources are attractive but in a sense, powerless. Maybe, someday we'll all live in houses with photovoltaic roof tiles but in the real world, a 1GW of solar plant will require 60 square miles of solar panels. When the demand increases, you can fire up more coal, but how will you cause the wind to blow and the sun to shine 24x7? The earth is already so disabled...

-The Economist   Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...

-The Economist   A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety THE enormous power tucked away in the atomic nucleus, the chemist Frederick Soddy rhapsodised in 1908, could “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.” Militarily, that power has threatened the opposite, with its ability to make deserts out of gardens...

ZAVOORA, India (AlertNet) – Amid thousands of tree stumps stretching over almost 60 hectares (150 acres) of bare plateau, there are signs of life. Delicate saplings of kail and deodar conifers are growing between other newly planted deciduous trees.  The woodland had been cut down illegally by loggers and encroached upon for farming. But forestry officials here in Shopian district, a two-hour drive south of Srinagar, the summer capital of India’s...

India’s decision-makers seem to find it difficult to see that there are children in the country. Being unable to see them, they are unable to perceive that they are hungry. In an age when we are able to use euphemisms like ‘under-nutrition’, this is perhaps not surprising. But it is disgraceful none the less.   This country has a large population of children. Fortyone per cent of its total numbers. The national...