Afghanistan
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Critical List: Green jobs program flounders; India calls Monsanto out on biopiracy
Oof. Only 10 percent of people the Labor Department trained for green jobs have found work.
Using solar energy to extract oil must be the ultimate example of greenwashing.
In Afghanistan, networking generators together can relieve 7,900 fuel trucks of their duties and keep soldiers from risking their lives to bring oil into the country.
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Tropic of Chaos: a book review
“Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer lies what I call the Tropic of Chaos, a belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid-latitudes. In this band, around the tropics, climate change is beginning to hit hard. The societies in this belt are heavily dependent on agriculture and […]
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What we could have bought with the $4 trillion we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan
Americans like us some war, but to the tune of $4 trillion? In adjusted dollars, that's just short of what it cost us to whup the Nazis.
Here's a look at what we could have done with that money, had we spent it on something besides stoking Americans' confusion over whether or not the world's 1.5 billion 'Muslims' are in fact a monolithic group whose every member is a terrorist.
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How to build an open-source internet from household trash
If there's anything we learned from the revolutions in the Middle East, it's that the internet has become a critical tool for burgeoning democracies. So what to do in places where the internet is tightly controlled, or just unreliable? For residents of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the solution is: build your own. Using help from the National Science Foundation and a pile of household trash, they've built an open-source wireless network that can transmit up to several miles.
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The Afghan Price
Earlier this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke about discovering that truckloads of single-use plastic shopping bags imported into his war-torn nation were squandering precious resources of fuel while risking the lives of truck drivers as they passed through insurgent held territories. Recognizing the true cost of wasting scarce resources in a place with so […]
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Make cities, not war
Mayors from around the country are wondering why we're building bridges in Kandahar when bridges at home are falling to pieces.
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Military spends more to air condition tents than NASA's entire budget
Steve Anderson, a retired brigadier general who was Petraeus' chief logistician in Iraq, says that the Pentagon spends $20 billion a year just to air condition tents and temporary buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's more than NASA's entire annual budget. There's an easy fix, says Anderson: Spray tents with polyurethane foam. An existing $95 […]
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Renewable energy saving lives in Afghanistan
The Wall Street Journal today reports on efforts to make U.S. troops safer by reducing dependence on fossil fuel-powered generators and batteries: Batteries make up as much as 20% of the weight of the 100 pounds of gear a Marine infantryman typically carries. A Marine uses four times as much fuel as his counterpart did […]
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Afghan-produced biofuels could be one good thing to come out of the war
In a larger sense, nobody wins in the war in Afghanistan. But Marine sergeant Brian Nelson is hoping that in one particular instance — encouraging Afghans to convert some of their crops to biofuel — everyone can win. Marines win because they can help meet their alternative energy goals. They want to cut fuel usage […]