Unlike large dams, now widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and ineffective, micro-hydro involves the use of small mills and dams to provide clean energy and an alternative source of income for rural communities.
The community of Machynlleth has gone beyond just investing in someone else’s wind turbine. They’ve clubbed together and planned, built and paid for one of their own.
Within two years, Britain could be facing a series of blackouts and the ignomony of importing the resource it once considered so plentiful from a host of politically unstable countries.
Do wind turbines provide an affordable means of harnessing a limitless source of clean power, or are they inefficient blots on the landscape that devastate birdlife and are more likely to exacerbate than reduce CO2 emissions?
Some 245 Indian villages are in the middle of being destroyed by a $7 billion dam project that will consume more energy than it provides and has even been condemned by its World Bank sponsors.
Costing over $1 billion, the Karahnjukar hydroelectric dam in Iceland is a hugely controversial project. Mark Lynas journeyed to the blasting face, hoping to work out for himself whether this industrial elephant is green or brilliant-white.
‘Refined'. Of a higher quality. The result of conscious improvement. Not so with sugar. Refined sugar has been depleted of its vitamins and minerals. What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates.
Isolated by the surrounding desert, Kashgar was once
an oasis on the old Silk Road. Now the city is being overwhelmed in the rush to open up the region’s oil and gas reserves. By Dan Box.
Isolated by the surrounding desert, Kashgar was once
an oasis on the old Silk Road. Now the city is being overwhelmed in the rush to open up the region’s oil and gas reserves. By Dan Box.
For all its obsession with international terrorism, Washington fails to see how the phenomenon is driven by its own model of globalisation – a model that is itself uniquely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Fritjof Capra on security and sustainability