Latest news with #AndrewLang
The Australian
01-08-2025
- Politics
- The Australian
Labor government ignoring better examples on energy transition
Australia ignoring better examples on energy transition Australia's development of a transition to renewable electricity based on wind turbines, solar PV and battery storage clearly is the most costly and least effective of the options but, regardless of that, it is strongly supported by those wanting to profit by it ('Squadron tests ALP green commitment', 31/7). Meanwhile, the examples of Spain, which was almost bankrupted by its own rapid move to develop wind and solar, and of Germany, which went earlier and further than Spain and now is stuck with the consequences, are ignored. Unfortunately, also ignored are the examples of countries including the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries and Austria, which are developing forestry and biomass to energy, resulting in major carbon sequestration and the production of near-zero emission heat, power, transport fuels and biochemicals. And with accompanying benefits of permanent rural jobs, stimulus of regional economies and retention of population in rural areas. The energy data for these countries is all available online from national agencies and the International Energy Agency. Andrew Lang, Lismore, Vic UN lectures insult us What an insult to Australia from UN climate chief Simon Stiell ('Climate chief backed fossil fuel tax breaks', 31/7). What right does he have to lecture us on emissions and threaten our sovereignty? As a politician, Stiell supported fossil fuels and backed subsidies in Grenada. Now he's done a triple somersault, attacking the very energy sources he once endorsed. Double standards doesn't begin to cover it. He heads a UN body with zero credibility. He lectures Australia – responsible for just 1 per cent of global emissions – while ignoring China (33 per cent) and India (7 per cent). Has he ever flown to Beijing to confront the real offenders? Meanwhile, Australia's cost-of-living crisis is driven not by emissions, but by reckless overspending on high-cost renewables, cheered on by climate zealots. The UN should butt out of Australia's affairs. Lee Smith, Kenmore, Qld 'Anti-racism' debacle Thank you, Timothy Lynch, for your thought-provoking article showing how the rise of anti-racism has led to an actual increase in racism, especially anti-Semitism ('Is the anti-racism movement making us more racist?', 31/7). This can be no better demonstrated than in the universities of the US, UK and Australia where, under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion, staff have been hired to stamp out racism, yet anti-Semitism is now rife throughout them all. Resentment from the theocratic, autocratic and monarchic countries of the Middle East and Africa, and from the West's intellectual left, for the amazing success of democratic Israel is no doubt a key factor behind this phenomena. Ron Hobba, Camberwell, Vic I wholeheartedly endorse both of Timothy Lynch's two arguments. Western nations are having to learn lessons familiar to those who have studied developing countries riven by sectarian conflicts. On the first: If a government frames public policy in a racially conscious way, then racial consciousness becomes even more entrenched and social cohesion gives way to tribalism. On the second: Affirmative action policies to eliminate sectarian disadvantage empower group leaders dependent on the perpetuation of victimhood and grievance. The first generation of activists wants equality of opportunity. The next insists on equality of outcomes, which is more contentious. The third generation demands compensation and reparation by guilting the supposedly privileged group, and produces a backlash with the potential for civil disorder. Ramesh Thakur, Ocean Shores, NSW Activists get it wrong John Coyne is right to highlight that activist groups such as the Australia Institute and Jubilee Australia are driven more by ideology than by practical environmental concerns ('Why can't climate ideologues see the benefits of gas exports?', 31/7). I read the report referenced in the article, and its core message was simply to discourage investment in Australia's natural gas industry. It contributed little to the broader energy and climate debate and, more worryingly, offered no serious analysis of the environmental consequences if its proposals were adopted. Its argument around Asian investment in Australian gas was particularly weak. If Australia cuts supply, these nations will turn elsewhere – potentially to suppliers with higher emissions and lower environmental standards. They will not accept poverty to satisfy foreign activists' ideals. A blanket opposition to fossil fuels is easy to promote on social media. Complex, evidence-based solutions that improve environmental outcomes are far harder to explain and harder to fund. But if activists truly want to make a difference, that's where their focus should be. Don McMillan, Paddington, Qld
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists gather in St. John's to advocate for greater effort in fight against avian influenza
The world's top experts on avian influenza are in St. John's this week, working toward a global response to the growing amount of the disease being found around the planet. Andrew Lang, a microbiologist at Memorial University and one the co-chairs of this year's International Symposium on Avian Influenza, said the disease continues to spread around the world at a rapid pace. Cases of illness from the D1.1 variant of avian influenza were discovered in Newfoundland and Labrador this spring, the same variant that infected a person in British Columbia and killed another in the United States. "Unfortunately this virus has just not gone away and doesn't seem like it's going to go away," Lang said on Monday. "So we just have to deal with that, and all the new coming changes, when this virus evolves very quickly." More than 400 people will attend the conference this week both in-person and online. St. John's is the first Canadian city to ever host the symposium. Michelle Wille, a post doctoral scientist studying viruses in wild birds at the University of Melbourne, said part of the goal of the conference is to highlight the need for greater resources in fighting the virus. The avian flu panzootic — the animal equivalent of a pandemic — started around the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic, she said. It meant people prioritized COVID-19 over the avian influenza. "COVID has provided us with lots of really useful tools, techniques, updated platforms to analyze and share data. And so we're really leveraging all of those advanced technologies to help us track avian influenza," Wille said. "What we're dealing with, the problem is massive. But we are getting very little resources to deal with that globally." Andy Ramey, part of the United States Geological Survey Alaska Science Centre, said the true scale of disease remains unknown. Birds across each continent — with the notable exception in Australia — have been infected, and antibodies have even been found in animals like foxes and bears. Ramey is pitching the need for a unified approach to fighting the virus at the conference. "One health approach is key here, because we're all connected. There's … just so many ways that health in one sector is not limited within that sector," he said. "The scale of number of infections that we thought we maybe knew about is actually probably order, or orders, of magnitude bigger than what we thought." The symposium runs in St. John's from Tuesday to Thursday. Download our to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our . Click .
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Cynthia Ozick: ‘Alice in Wonderland seems calculatedly cruel'
My earliest reading memory Andrew Lang's Fairy books – the blue, yellow and violet ones. And the unadulteratedly grim Brothers Grimm, evocative phrases like 'avenue of trees', the now and then alluring English archaisms, the always expected three sisters or sons, the youngest first despised and then victorious. The book that changed me as a teenager A late teenager, at 17, and it was two books nearly simultaneously, both histories. One was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in dazzling prose. The other was Heinrich Graetz's 19th-century History of the Jews, translated from the German, far out of date but distinctly not dated. (It was revelatory to learn much later that Kafka was immersed in this multivolume work.) Together they gave me a sense of the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous. The author I came back to My aversion to Dostoevsky was once enduring. His lurching from one extremist position to its opposite, his stubborn bigotries and fanaticisms, the untamed wilderness of his sentences, the freakishness of his protagonists, even, or especially, their feverish moral assertions, were all repellent – in contrast to Tolstoy, his contemporary, whose characters, however askew in temperament, are always instances of recognisable human truth. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time turned me around. Through this masterly biography, I came to see that it is only by means of Dostoevsky's anguished, surreal and delirious art that he can hope to rebuke the devil himself. The book that made me want to be a writer I somehow already felt this inkling from early childhood, even before I could read. That one of my uncles was a Hebrew poet may have been the siren's song. But the book that formulated not so much the why of writing, but the actual how, was (as for so many others, generation after generation) Little Women, which I read compulsively, worshipfully, and reread again and again. Jo in her 'vortex' could do anything! Words, in addition to the bliss of their conjuring, can enter and alter reality! The book I came back to I first read Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and, despite its literary ingenuity, was put off by its premise: an adult male obsessed by a 12-year-old girl. But after reading, in 2003, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, it came to me that if a group of women living under repression could meet in secret, throw off their headscarves and feel themselves liberated by this novel, they must see what I hadn't seen. The book I rereadThe Longest Journey. For many successive years I was drawn to reread this early novel by EM Forster, and after a hiatus of perhaps two decades I read it again only two months ago. Forster's judgment of his characters – veiled, and by implication – is what leads me repeatedly to be carried away. The book I could never read againAlice in Wonderland, read over and over again in childhood. What seemed both mysterious and delightful and comical and obscurely perplexing then, today, strikes me as calculatedly cruel. In Lewis Carroll's fanciful dance of verses and antics and morphings there is a kind of abstract design, distant and cold. 'Sentence first, verdict afterwards' is a joke steeped in horror. The book I discovered later in lifeWalden by Henry David Thoreau. I can't say I discovered it; it was always eminently there. But I didn't actually open its pages until recently, and in this sense caught up with – and belatedly (and shamefacedly) recouped – a major figure in American literature. The book I am currently reading Not a book, and nothing new: a return to the sublimely unequalled short stories that always inspirit and renew the visceral itch to write. Henry James: The Pupil, The Real Thing, The Figure in the Carpet; Agnon: Two Tales: Betrothed and Edo and Enam; Borges: The Aleph; Lampedusa: Lighea; Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Chaim Grade: My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner; Isaac Babel: My First Goose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort read Jane Austen chick lit: Persuasion. In a Yellow Wood by Cynthia Ozick is published by Everyman (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy for £18 at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Beets by they: Funding for PFAS alternative considered
The Brief Lawmakers have proposed $10 million in grants to build businesses offering alternatives to the forever chemicals known as PFAS. FOX 9 has investigated the impacts and origins of PFAS for several years and Minnesota lawmakers made it illegal to use in a large number of products, effective this year. A company hopes to start a business in Renville, Minn., making a water-resistant coating -- like those made with PFAS -- using beet waste. They're asking the state for startup funding. ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - An entire industry could grow in Minnesota to replace the dangerous chemicals known as PFAS. Crunching numbers A bipartisan idea would kickstart a business building an alternative, but a budget crunch makes it no sure thing. Lawmakers agree this is probably a worthwhile idea, but they're not sure whether now is the right time for an investment from the state. Minnesota-made The health and environmental consequences from PFAS forever chemicals spread from Minnesota around the globe. A safer alternative may also come out of the state. "I think that we all know that PFAS is something we're dealing with and we definitely want it removed from our packaging," said Sen. Susan Pha, (DFL-Brooklyn Park.) Beets by they Legislators proposed $10 million in grants to companies that can produce safer alternatives, but right now they only know of one making moves in western Minnesota. And they saw it in action during a Senate jobs committee hearing. "It is the plastic-y coating," said the bill's chief author, Sen. Andrew Lang, (R-Olivia). "It's not plastic. They actually told me it's edible. I don't know if it tastes very good." Cellucomp is the company making a water-resistant coating out of beet waste, which is abundant in the Renville area where they'd build a manufacturing facility if they get a $5 million grant. They'd initially create about 20 jobs, but with hopes of expansion. "We'd like to commit to that," said Christian Kemp-Griffin of Cellucomp. "Of course, to scale and to make it really successful, that's, getting the product the cost we need it to sell it at scale, then we need some help." State competitions? Some lawmakers pointed out it's a big taxpayer investment for just a few jobs. But Minnesota will compete with the Dakotas to get the facility started and potentially build an entire industry. And the environmental groups that got PFAS products banned are excited at the prospect. "Minnesota has an opportunity to be a leader in manufacturing safe products for global sale and this also means growth of jobs in multiple sectors," said Avonna Starck of Clean Water Action. All or nothing? The bill got unanimous approval in committee, but it has a few more stops and because of the budget situation, it may end up with less funding or none at all.
