Assorted news and tech stories

[dracodraconis]

Ontario and Quebec decide to address global warming despite Ottawa - Ontario and Quebec, fed up with Ottawa's handling of climate issues, have signed a joint accord to fight global warming by establishing a cap-and-trade program. Specifically, companies that generate more greenhouse gases than allowed under the program pay fees to those companies who generate less than the limits. They hope that other provinces will also sign onto the accord.

Smallest planet yet found around smallest star yet - A planet only 3 times larger than Earth has been detected around a star 1/20th the mass of our own sun.

Ice! Ice, baby! - At least that is the hope of scientists viewing an image from the Phoenix lander. The images (I'll post one later) appears to show a solid white patch blown clean by the Phoenix's landing rockets. If it is, indeed, ice then the lander will only have to dig through a relatively thin layer of topsoil before getting to the ice it was intended to analyze. At the moment, the lander is being thoroughly tested, including methods to work around short circuit in one of its gas analyzers.

Mars may have been a salty dog - too salty for life, according to a recent study of 4 billion year-old salt deposits from Mars found by the Mars rover Opportunity. This study indicates that the water which flowed on mars might have been extremely briny, making it unlikely that life evolved, or if it did evolve that it would have survived to the present day.

More stories will have to wait until Bloglines is back up.

Comments

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

Transfer payments to solve global warming??

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

Cap-and-trade is kind of like saying that you SHOULD do X, and if you don't then we take some of your toys away to give to the kid that played nice. The downside of this approach is that it might more be cost-effective for some company to just pay off the trade instead of capping their emissions. The "stick" of paying for emission credits only works if the stick is a real deterrent.

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

For those on the borderline it will pay to cutback so that they get a pay out. I suppose that is what they are going for.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

Personally I favour a bigger stick - it must be more cost-effective to solve the problem than pay to let the problem continue to exist. That, however, makes setting the pay-off levels complicated.

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

Perhaps get them used to a stick then up the fees... second stage. Time for them to ramp in and buy in.

My keyboard or mouse is being screwy and making things disappear.

I am also falling asleep sitting up.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

I somehow doubt the documents I'm reading now (ISO standards and proposed modifications) would help in any way.

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

*snore*