Loring Wirbel, Citizens for Peace in Space
Colorado Springs, Colorado
The speed with which Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles have transformed the face of war-fighting is almost as dazzling as the technology itself. Five years ago, these robot planes were still pretty much generally regarded as the stuff of science fiction. Today, however, unarmed reconnaissance drones (ranging in size from a dragonfly to almost the size of a two-seat Cessna) and the rarer armed drones (equipped with missiles or smart bombs) are staples of the Pentagon’s war-making efforts—their numbers and uses destined only to increase.
Read morePosted In: StratCom & Nuclear Weapons
TIM RINNE
STATE COORDINATOR
A version of this article originally appeared in the February 13, 2010 Lincoln Journal Star.
Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (or ‘drones’) are more and more becoming the weapon of choice for waging America’s international ‘War on Terror.’ The ‘Predator’ and the ‘Reaper’ models in particular have become so popular that, in its 2011 budget, the Air Force is actually requesting more drones than piloted combat aircraft.
Read morePosted In: StratCom & Nuclear Weapons
Paul Olson
UNL Emeritus Professor
My parents didn’t believe in comic books or Big Little Books. They were frivolous, unchristian and expensive. In the age when Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel came to life (the 1930s), I had to bum books off my friends, read them at recess and dream the rest of the day of rescuing the world from evil. One of my favorite comics was Buck Rogers, a space warrior repeatedly forced to battle the villainous Killer Kane and his paramour Ardala. Fighting with Buck to save the world were Lieutenant Wilma Deering and Prince Tallen of Saturn.
Read morePosted In: Speaking Our Peace
HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Both the Bush/Cheney and Obama Adminstrations and the Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress have openly supported the concept of ‘clean coal’—or what is more precisely called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Billions of government dollars have already been allocated to funding test projects that will serve to develop new technologies that (1) remove carbon from the emissions of coal-fired power plants, plants that convert coal to synthetic oil, and other industrial plants that use coal as an energy source; and (2) store the carbon permanently underground.
These technologies will, according to the coal lobby, make our most abundant carbon fuel ‘clean.’ CCS technologies thus simultaneously reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil. The coal lobby then continues to argue that, even though these new technologies are not yet available, spending taxpayer money on test projects and other types of CCS research justifies the construction of more familiar coal-fired power plants instead of more expensive alternative wind, solar or conservation projects because these coal-fired plants can be ‘cleaned up’ in a few years ‘when the technology becomes available.’
Read morePosted In: Environment
James Hansen
Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Coal & Climate Disaster
Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty… ‘Clean coal’ is an oxymoron. The clean-coal concept, at least so far, has been an illusion, a diversion that the coal industry and its government supporters employ to allow dirty coal uses to continue… Coal use must be prohibited unless and until the emissions can be captured and safely disposed of… For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we cannot allow our government to continue to connive with the coal industry in subterfuges that allow dirty-coal use to continue… If we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period.
Read morePosted In: Environment
