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Facts About Cow's Milk By Dr Arvind Kumar Cow is held in high esteem in Hindu religion and cow’s milk is often compared to elixir. However, recent scietific evidence points to dangers facts about cow’s milk. According to a recent report, North Americans are some of the least healthy people on Earth. Despite advanced medical care and one of the highest standards of living in the world, one in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and 50% of US children are overweight. This crisis in personal health is largely the result of chronically poor dietary and lifestyle choices. The renowned nutritionist Dr. Joseph Keon, in his latest book, Whitewash , divulges how North Americans inadvertently impair their health every day by drinking milk, and shows that our obsession with calcium is unwarranted. Citing scientific literature, Whitewash builds an unassailable case that not only is milk unnecessary for human health; its inclusion in the diet may increase t...

Let Billionaires Pledge More Charity By Dr Arvind Kumar Interestingly, in July this year Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett – two of the wealthiest individuals in the world — made a pledge that has since been replicated by 38 other American billionaires: to part with at least half of their net worth to charity. The pledge is likely to raise $600 billion collectively. According to Forbes Magazine, India is home to two of the richest five people in the world. However, the Indian billionaires have yet to make a similar commitment. According to a study published by Bain & Company, Indians collectively donate 0.6% of their country’s GDP to charity, yet this amount of collective donation still pales in comparison to Western nations like Canada (1.3%) and the U.S. (2.2%). Just 10% of charitable giving in India comes from individuals or companies, compared to 75% in the United States. India’s biggest donor is the government. But the giving gap doesn’t necessarily mean...

Facing 'peak water' By Dr Arvind Kumar Rising prices of crude oil in the wake of fast depleting resources of fossil fuel have led experts to warn about impending ‘peak oil’ crisis but this seems small when compared to what lies ahead amid dwindling supply and growing demand for a far more basic commodity – water. About a couple of years ago, Professor Sarah Slaughter of MIT Sloan School of Management in a May 2008 paper had warned: "We once assumed that water is free, air is free and power is cheap. The latter is clearly no longer true and we are increasingly realising the truth about water." Whereas oil prices are breaking all time records, leading many people to face budget challenges, and few have to drive to survive, while water is absolutely critical for personal and public health, which is why governments have always subsidised its cost. It is lamentable that people in the developed world are taking free quality water for granted and consumers seldom recognise t...

Preserving Planet Earth By Dr Arvind Kumar Planet Earth canl be a shared asset capable of sustaining human life long into the future, provided climate change is tackled judiciously. Viewed in a broad spectrum, scientists have not yet informed the public well about climate change, nor have they stimulated governments to take the actions needed to preserve the Planet Earth, which is dangerously close to tipping points. Ice is melting worldwide and many species are stressed by climate change and other factors. Global warming, if we allow it to continue, will cause sea level rise, species extinction and increasing climate extremes out of humanity's control. Stewardship of life on Earth demands action to stabilize climate. Geophysics reveals the requirements: phase out coal, leave tar sands in the ground, do not pursue the last drops of oil. Yet as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy we will burn them, an economic law as certain as the law of gravity. According to James E. Hans...

Stop Wasting Food By Dr Arvind Kumar An effective way of ensuring food security is to minimize food wastage. Avoiding food wastage is also one of the easiest ways to aid the environment. According to one estimate, about 40% of the food produced in the United States isn't consumed and Americans waste 50% more food today than they did in 1974. Squandering so much of what is grown doesn't just leads to wastage of food; it also culminates in wastage of the fossil fuel that went into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating it. According to report published in Los Angeles Times , a recent study estimated conservatively that 2% of all U.S. energy consumption went to producing food that was never eaten. Jonathan Bloom laments that waste of resources continues after food is thrown away food because there is the energy required to haul the discarded food to the landfill. And once there, food decomposes and creates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent a heat...

Killing Smoke By Dr Arvind Kumar According to a recent study led by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, smoke is a strange mixture of exotic pollutants and incomplete combustion products. Of course, some people smoke cigarettes for the pleasure of it. For most people smoke is unpleasant and should be avoided. Many people watch firework displays and go "wow" and the smoke from them adds a bit of the zest to the event. It is revealed from the study that the metallic particles in the smoke emitted by fireworks pose a health risk, particularly to people who suffer from asthma. It is observed from the report that the composition of smoke depends on the nature of the burning fuel and the conditions of combustion. Fires with high availability of oxygen burn at high temperature and with small amount of smoke produced; the particles are mostly composed of ash or complex aerosols. Carbon and hyd...

Watershed Week for Tigers By Dr Arvind Kumar Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be hosting delegations from tiger-range countries for the first ever International Tiger Summit in Saint Petersburg starting from 22 November 2010. Heads of state from 13 tiger-range countries plus a high-level delegation from the United States are expected to assemble to discuss responses to the alarming decline of tiger populations in the wild. What all parties can agree with going in, is that inaction will inevitably lead to the extinction of this beautiful creature, one of the world's most beloved. The estimated population in the wild tigers today is a mere 3,200, down from hundreds of thousands a century ago. They live in only four percent of their former habitat. Of the nine subspecies of tiger, three have already gone extinct. Demand for tiger parts has fueled poaching and black market trade across international borders. At this moment, there are more tigers locked up in zoos and b...

Insecticides' Destructive Effects By Dr Arvind Kumar Neonicotinoids, a new class of insecticides, is reportedly causing drastic population declines in bird species. It is so effective at killing insects, that it has deprived birds of their basic food. Some scientists also believe these are behind the decline in bee populations in Europe and the United States known as honey-bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Neonicotinoids, which are part of the nicotine family, primarily remain glued to plant seeds, and infiltrate the entire plant. Any bug that eats the plant is immediately infected. The toxin attacks the central nervous system and causes a quick death. It is much less toxic to other animals because the chemical blocks a specific neural pathway found more commonly in insects. Henk Tennekes, researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, in his recent book, The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making , has linked the use of neonicotinoid...

Arab World and Climate Change By Dr Arvind Kumar Arab World is already witnessing adverse impact of climate change whereby dust storms scour Iraq, freak floods wreak havoc in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, rising sea levels erode Egyptian coast. Already the world's most water-defit region, the Middle East is witnessing water scarcity situation further worsened by hot and dry air. Undoubtedly scientists are cagey of linking specific events to global warming, still they have called upon Arab governments to act now to protect against potential disasters. According to Alistair of the Reuters, there are massive differences in per capita greenhouse gas emissions across the region with very high rates for several oil and gas producers. Qatar recorded the world's highest per capita emissions with 56.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006, while Egyptians emitted just 2.25 tonnes each, U.N. figures show. While the region as a whole has contributed relatively little to historic greenhouse ga...

Assault of Devilish Grass By Dr Arvind Kumar A recent study conducted by ateam led by Seema Mangla, a plant ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA, has discovered the prevalence of medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae), a kind of is spreading rapidly throughout the western United States, outcompeting native grasses and even other grass invaders. It is armed with pointed tips so sharp that neither cows nor deer will eat it. The study reveals, "It is a devilish species because it is an invasive grass species absolutely not of any worth, every animal avoids it." The medusahead's long, twisting, snakelike seed stems (which give the grass its name) are stiff and pointed like needles. Any animal that leans in for a snack gets jabbed in the eyes and mouth. The grass is loaded with inedible silica, too, providing few nutrients to would-be grazers. As a result, the grass steadily accumulates, forming mounds of thatch. Seema Mangla opines that ‘it is part of a...

Stop War Against Earth By Dr Arvind Kumar The ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere are small w hen compared to the bigger war being waged against the planet Earth. This war is rooted in an economy that falls short of respecting ecological and ethical limits - limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration. Sinister designs of few corporations and powerful countries to control the earth's resources have been instrumental in transforming the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. As Vandana Shiva, famous environmentalist has rightly put it, “They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.” The war against the earth begins in the mind. And nowhere is this more vivid than in the metaphors and methods on which industrial, agricultural and food production is based. Factories that produced poisons and explosives to kill people during wars were transformed into facto...

Life Beyond Consumerism By Dr Arvind Kumar Consumerism is the assiduous promotion of cravings which are seemingly satisfied by existing economic system to somewhat extent. The amping up of desire for stuff is so normal here that it's hard to imagine another approach to life. Buddhist practice teaches that life is full of suffering and suffering comes from cravings. The trouble with cravings is that they often can't be satisfied and, when they are, the objects may vanish or degrade. And, in any case, they usually don't ‘make us happy,’ or, if so, not for long. In this view, a system of implanting cravings by sellers who hope to profit by them, of exacerbating desire, would be crazy. Of course, people need the basics such as shelter, clean air and water, food, clothing, education, healthcare, the ability to work. But as Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin asked in their classic, Your Money Or Your Life , to what extent does it serve you to mortgage your life to get more an...

World Energy Outlook 2010 By Dr Arvind Kumar T he International Energy Agency (IEA), in its recently released World Energy Outlook 2010 has predicted energy demand will be rising--especially from China and India; oil prices (in inflation-adjusted terms) will be rising; and conventional oil production will no longer be able to rise. In its 2009 report, the IEA had stressed the importance of oil for economic growth and concluded that 106 million barrels per day (mb/d) would be required by 2030. For 2010, the IEA only predicts 99 mb/d by 2035 and avoids any discussion of economic growth, which some experts feel as meaning that the desired economic growth is not possible. The IEA now sees OECD oil consumption falling from today’s 41.7 mb/d to 35.3 mb/d by 2035. This means that all OECD nations, including Australia, must revise down their future consumption estimates. Non-OECD nations are now expected to increase their oil consumption by 19 mb/d by 2035. Two th...

Climate Protection Under Ozone Treaty By Dr Arvind Kumar A t the recently held 22nd annual meeting of the Montreal Protocol in Bangkok, a growing number of countrieshave supported a proposal to use the ozone treaty to address super greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs. Earlier this year some countries had proposed a formal amendment to the ozone treaty to phase down the production and use of HFCs. Once agreed, the amendment would ensure climate mitigation of up to 100 billion tonnes of CO 2 -equivalent by 2050, many times more than the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. The United States, Mexico, and Canada also proposed a similar amendment. Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, while addressing the Bangkok summit said: “This is the biggest, fastest piece of climate mitigation available to the world in the next few years. Phasing down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is a brilliant and necessary cl...

Children’s Day By Dr Arvind Kumar Today is 14th November; the birth anniversary of India’s first Prime Minister, late Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, and this day is celebrated as Children’s Day throughout the nation. However, the plight of children in India is deplorable as can be judged from following facts: Ø One third of the world’s children living in poverty are in India; Ø Every 6th girl-child’s death is due to gender discrimination, also known as female infanticide; Ø Over 10 million children go to sleep on the pavement each night hungry and unprotected; Ø Over 40% of children live in poverty and extreme hardship Ø Nearly half of India’s children are deprived of their fundamental right to education each day; Ø A startling two-thirds of girl-children cannot read or write; Ø An estimated 111 million children struggling as child labourers - most often working in hazardous and degrading conditions; Ø The third largest crime in India after drugs and gun smuggling i...

Disinformation Campaign on Climate Change By Dr Arvind Kumar For almost three decades some corporations have supported a disinformation campaign about climate change science that has been spreading untruths and distortions about climate science. Several recent books, including a book by Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway, 2010), document how this disinformation campaign began in the1980s. On 21 October 2010, a report in the New York Times reported, that "the fossil fuel industries have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it. It is further revealed that the fossil fuel industry has "created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a ...

Water Scarcity vs. Water Security By Dr Arvind Kumar Water scarcity has become a key global issue for the United States because of its potential to fuel armed conflicts in regions such as the Middle East or between nuclear rivals such as India and Pakistan. Maria Otero, US under secretary for democracy and global affairs told journalists during a visit to Brussels on 4 November this year: "Worldwide, water is not only a problem for billions of people who lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, it is also an issue of security as we see scarcity emerging more and water becoming potentially a source of conflict.” "And that raises a security issue for everyone," she warned. Potential areas where water scarcity could degenerate into armed conflict include the Middle East, the Nile or the Mekong River delta, Otero said. Another hotspot is the Indus River, which is shared by Pakistan and India – both countries that have stockpiled arsenals of nuclear weapon...

Facing 'peak water' By Dr Arvind Kumar Rising prices of crude oil in the wake of fast depleting resources of fossil fuel have led experts to warn about impending ‘peak oil’ crisis but this seems small when compared to what lies ahead amid dwindling supply and growing demand for a far more basic commodity – water. About a couple of years ago, Professor Sarah Slaughter of MIT Sloan School of Management in a May 2008 paper had warned: "We once assumed that water is free, air is free and power is cheap. The latter is clearly no longer true and we are increasingly realising the truth about water." Whereas oil prices are breaking all time records, leading many people to face budget challenges, and few have to drive to survive, while water is absolutely critical for personal and public health, which is why governments have always subsidised its cost. It is lamentable that people in the developed world are taking free quality water for granted and consumers seldom re...

Rich Media, Poor Democracy By Dr Arvind Kumar Huge expenses incurred on elections in modern democracies in terms of advertising make the media owners fill th eir coffers and democracies face deficit syndrome. According to broad estimates, the recent midterm elections in the United States have costed close to $4 billion, $3 b illion of which went to advertising. This reminds us of the 1999 book by media scholar Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy . McChesney has opined, "Broadcasters h ave little incentive to cover candidates, because it is in their interest to force them to publicize their campaigns." Election campaigns have become multibillion dollar business and media owners make a moolah. Bulk of media in modern democracies is privately-owned but using public airwaves. Ralph Nader, former US presidential candidate, has aptly observed: "The elections have become a commodity, a profit center for these radio and TV stations. The public airwaves, as we know,...

Welcome Obama By Dr Arvind Kumar US President Obama’s current visit to India is welcome in terms of reinforcing mutual desire to further consolidate the friendly relations between New Delhi and Washington. Under the present global situation, US needs India as much as India needs the United States. In other words, it is a relationship based on mutual interests and between the two equal powers. Washington needs to shed its old perception of India as a developing country and reckon the ground reality of India as a giant nation. The bunch of agreements that have been signed between the two countries in the wake of US President’s visit is continuation of the earlier commitments and requirements of both sides. What is needed at this juncture is sincerity and commitment on the part of Washington to treat India as an equal partner in the comity of nations and not as rival of Pakistan or countervailing force to China. Our foreign office should also chart an independence course in inte...

Dispel Darkness of Ignorance This Diwali By Dr Arvind Kumar Asato maa sadgamaya Tamaso maa jyotirgamaya M ṛ ityor maa am ṛ itan gamaya Om shaanti shaanti shaanti “From the unreal, lead us to the Real; from darkness, lead us unto Light; from death, lead us to Immortality. Om peace, peace, peace.” Lighting the lamp of true knowledge to dispel darkness of ignorance looming large on our minds is the need of the day. On this festive occasion of Diwali, let’s pray to God: `Tamso Ma Jyotirgamaya’ (Lead me from darkness unto light). Without emphasizing the obvious we may say that it is the inner darkness that needs to be dispelled. When the pall of ignorance envelops the inner self, and the individual loses his sense of direction, his mind becomes numb and he loses his mental equilibrium. He fails to tell what is right and what is wrong. He becomes aimless and rudderless. He is caught in the whirlpool of false beliefs and superstitions leading to observance of meani...

Celebrate Green Diwali By Dr Arvind Kumar T he entire nation is brimming with enthusiasm and joyful spirits of the festival of lights ‘Diwali’. This festive occasion is celebrated with renewed fervour and on this occasion, people buy new house, new cloths, many houses and shops get a fresh coat of paints, and are well decorated. There is exchange of sweets and gifts among relatives and friends, business clients and partners and last but the least, buying the firecrackers. This means a huge business for the apparel industry, firecracker, paint and household items and for sweets and gifts. According to broad estimates, the budget of corporate “gift” alone exceeds Rs 3,200 crore, and the sale of firecrackers to above Rs 500 crore. In all, India spends over 5000 crore rupees for the celebration of this annual event. Excessive consumerism, high-energy consumption and air pollution through firecrackers, are the three major concerns from the environment point of view. We should celeb...