Announcing today that it is currently generating 250 megawatts of power, Arizona’s Agua Caliente solar project expects to hit 290 megawatts by the time construction is complete in 2014.

While this means that Agua Caliente now beats out India’s Gujarat Solar Park for the title of the world’s largest solar plant, Gujarat is planning on going beyond its current 214 MW.  Topaz Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo County, California is on its way to producing an ambitious 550 MW by early 2015.  Like Agua Caliente, First Solar is involved in that project as well.

Construction began in the fall of 2010, and the plant produced its first 30 megawatts in January.  ”The Agua Caliente project exemplifies how utility-grade solar PV power can be rapidly deployed in a phased approach and seamlessly integrated into the electrical grid,” said Jim Tyler, Vice President of Development Engineering in First Solar’s Engineering, Procurement and Construction Group. “We are extremely proud to set a new benchmark for the industry with Agua Caliente, which incorporates the knowledge gained over years of experience designing, building and operating utility-scale solar projects for leading utilities and energy providers.”

Though initially constructed by First Solar, Agua Caliente is now owned by NRG Solar and MidAmerican Solar.  The American taxpayer also has a stake in the plant’s success: it received financing through a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The plant’s success comes at a good time: the Republican-sponsored “No More Solyndras Act” comes up for a vote later this week.  It would make significant cuts in the Department’s Loan Guarantee program, which ironically was not an Obama creation. Rather, the program was established in 2005 under President George W. Bush.

Featured image via Martin D. Vonka/Shutterstock

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“The earlier it’s caught and supportive care is given, the better the survival rate,” said Dr. Vicki Kramer, chief of vector-borne diseases at the state Public Health Department.  FYI: Early flu-like symptoms include headache, coughing, fever, muscle ache, and shortness of breath.  Symptoms may take up to 60 days to manifest after exposure.

The disease is carried in the excrement and saliva of mice and other rodents. The cabins involved have a double-walled design conducive to mice nesting.  Officials have closed 91 tent cabins in the village and the California Department of Public Health spokeswoman, Anita Gore, said it is possible that one of the infected people visited other parts of the park.

The outbreak occurred despite the park’s efforts in April to increase protection, which were initiated after a state report showed 18 percent of mice trapped in Yosemite were positive for hantavirus.

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Coercion has been seen in India, where poor women from disadvantaged communities are being forcibly sterilized. In other cases, incentives are being offered: In the city of Satara, couples are offered $100 to wait to have their first child, while in Rajasthan, women are offered cell phones and a chance to win a car if they agree to be sterilized. Many more women are not offered a choice of contraceptive method. Instead, long-acting methods such as injectables or implants are being prescribed without regard to the needs or risks to the individual woman. For instance, Depo Provera has been the main method of contraception pushed by health and family programs in Africa, but numerous studies have found that use of this contraceptive increases the risk of contracting the HIV virus, potentially doubling the rate of infection.

Despite this controversy, Depo and a Chinese hormonal implant are the two main contraceptives promoted by the Gate’s Foundation in their recently announced $4 billion family planning initiative in partnership with the British government. The aim is to help 120 million poor women to gain access to modern birth control methods and increase research into new contraceptives but a number of well-respected international organizations—such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and Amnesty International—issued a statement of criticism calling for a focus on human health and pointing out the danger of returning to forced contraceptive methods.

The term “population justice” has been adopted to embody the need for a more balanced and ethical approach to population control, one that respects both women’s rights and the planet’s resource capacity. While it is clear that we are using the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, the cause of this is not simply population growth, and it is unfair to blame disadvantaged women for this environmental degradation. If we really want to control the population, why not make all men go through with this easy and fully effective procedure?

Check out the Making Contact radio program below for a more in-depth discussion of the history of population control, the current problems, the potential solutions, and the ever-present controversy. The following program features Lauri Mazur, author of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge; Jade Sasser, Loyola Marymount University women’ studies professor; Elizabeth Barajas-Roman, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health policy director; and Ben Zuckerman, former Sierra Club board member. It was produced through funding from the Mary Wohlford Foundation.

[audio:http://www.radioproject.org/sound/2012/MakingCon_120620_Ax.mp3]
The audio player is not supported by Mozilla Firefox. Firefox users can download the podcast here.

Main image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Audio credit: National Radio Project

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But progress in making contraceptives available to those who want them has slowed in recent years, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute and the United Nations Population Fund. Between 2003 and 2008, the number of women in the developing world using contraceptives rose by roughly 20 million women a year. From 2008 to 2012, the annual increase was just 10 million.

The issue is not a lack of interest in family planning among people in the developing world. The study found that 222 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy but aren’t using modern contraception. That number is down slightly from 226 million in 2008, but progress varies by region. Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia have increased the use of modern contraception (meaning anything except the rhythm method or withdrawal), while Western and Middle Africa—where contraceptive use is very low—have seen little change.

John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, told the Washington Post that the most important factor in the adoption of contraception is the level of buy-in from nations’ governments. In places with high levels of rivalry among ethnic groups or nations, governments tend to oppose efforts to reduce population growth.

Bongaarts said pro-contraception policies became less popular overall in the 1990s when many people worried that AIDS would prove devastating to population levels, particularly in Africa. Despite the disease, he said, the continent’s population has continued to grow, and contraception is becoming more attractive as a way to conserve natural resources and reduce the demands on resources like schools and hospitals created by growing numbers of people.

The new report finds the current level of contraceptive care in the developing world costs $4 billion a year but saves $5.6 billion in maternal and newborn health services alone—not counting other economic impacts of a rising population. Fully meeting the need for modern contraceptives would require an additional $4.1 billion annually.

Main photo credit: Dave Proffer/Flickr

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Worldwide, approximately 358,000 women and 3 million newborns die each year due to complications arising in pregnancy and childbirth, almost entirely in developing countries.  In these countries, between 10 and 15 percent of pregnancies lead to the mother’s death due to unsafe abortions.  According to the study’s lead author, Saifuddin Ahmed, MBBS, “Our findings reinforce the need to accelerate access to contraception in countries with a low prevalence of contraceptive use where gains in maternal mortality prevention could be greatest. Vaccination prevents child mortality; contraception prevents maternal mortality.”

The researchers pointed to three main ways that contraceptives reduce maternal mortality: by postponing first pregnancies which are riskier in younger women, by lowering the need for unsafe abortions, and by allowing women to take longer breaks between pregnancies.

The study comes just days before a major family planning conference will be held in London, organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government.  The goal is to focus international attention back on the issue, which in 1995 received 55 percent of international population assistance funds, but fell to just 6 percent in 2008.  As population growth increases, instead of stabilizing as expected, experts are most worried about the effects in sub-Saharan Africa where fertility is high but food and water is very low, and getting worse.

Discussions of birth control in the United States almost invariably get entangled in religious debate.  But as this study makes clear, and the upcoming conference will no doubt emphasize, access to contraceptives does more than just give so-called “sluts” a free pass – it saves lives.

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Economists are remiss in equating job growth with economic prosperity, according to Rethinking Growth in a Finite World, a 2012 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Here’s why: Job creation causes people to swarm areas with new job growth in an attempt to take advantage of those finite employment opportunities. In doing so, newcomers burden infrastructure and the local tax base and contribute to overpopulation and urban sprawl. Local job growth coupled with this population surge actually offsets gains in overall employment, the study found.

An analysis cited by the study found that a 1 percent population growth rate between 2000 and 2009 was associated with a $2,500 drop in per capita income.

The study also criticizes subsidies and tax breaks offered to corporations by local governments as a means to lure new business to their municipality. ”These subsidies do not create jobs, but redistribute them,” the study states.

The U.S. government spends $50 billion annually on economic development incentives for corporations, which lead to higher taxes and cuts in local services, according to the study.

“State and local governments should stop prioritizing ‘job creation’ and start prioritizing the creation and continuation of policies that actually improve the quality of citizens’ lives,” the study states. “Increasing the overall size of the economy is less important than improving the quality of life. Economic development should improve the well-being of all citizens, and should not be a code word for growth policies that favor powerful special interests at the expense of the majority.”

Featured photo credit: Malouette/Flickr

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Atomic clocks are the most accurate time keepers in the world,  and the timepieces by which the world sets all other clocks. The rotation of the Earth is not quite as constant. It can change pace due to phenomenon such as global warming or changes in mass distribution caused by earthquakes. As a result, the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis and complete one full day is two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, according to Geoff Chester, the spokesman at the U.S. Naval Observatory where the official U.S. atomic clocks are kept. Because of this difference, after many years the world’s atomic clocks would be ahead of planetary time, and the sun would set at noon.

To remedy this disparity, atomic clocks must be periodically synchronized, explained Daniel Gambis, head of IRES. “We want to have both times close together and it’s not possible to adjust the earth’s rotation,” he told Reuters. The system was first adopted in 1972 and this will be the 25th leap second. The last one was December 31, 2008 and the next one likely won’t be needed until 2015 or 2016.  Much like the extra day in a leap year, which makes sure the calendar and the seasons are in line, the leap second matches human measurements with planetary time. In a hundred years or so, we may have to start adding 2 leap seconds a year.

The leap second is not without some controversy. Atomic clocks are used to set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and as such, are important to govern time standards for sattelite navigation, astronomy, banking computer networks, and international air traffic systems. Opponents would like a simpler less costly system with reduced room for error in making these manual changes. This past January, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.N. agency responsible for international communications standards called to abandon the leap second, but the group failed to reach consensus and will try again in 2015. A much broader discussion on the consequences of abandoning the leap second is needed, said Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society spokesman Robert Massey, as we would be decoupling measured time from the position of the sun.

If only cinderella had had an extra second at the stroke of midnight, before her coach turned into a pumpkin and her glass slipper disappeared. Here is your chance to use this additional time wisely.

Image credit: nist.gov 

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