Project Earth News

What We Need

2008-03-14T14:58:00.001-04:00

There is a strange near silence on the
Democratic side of the current election campaign regarding the
destabilization of the Earth’s atmosphere or for that matter the
destabilization of the whole Earth. The increasingly fierce tides,
rising seas, floods, earthquakes and winds of change (forecast by
PROJECT EARTH for more than a quarter of a century) are bearing down
upon us.

The same corporate
oligarchy, which has laid waste to so much of our world would rather
not accurately report all the fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes or
all the cities and towns ruined by weather exacerbated by climate
change. As too many of us know, these disasters are increasingly
ubiquitous and cannot be denied.

The
corporate boys would rather change the subject to the economy instead
but alas they have destroyed that too. We the People can’t ignore the
news about the environment or it’s stepchild, the economy. Every week
another town is laid to waste, another factory is closed, another ten
thousand mortgages are foreclosed, another bridge to the future
collapsed.

There were tornadoes in January
again this year. There will be more in February and March and on and
on… The firestorms in Southern California have been replaced by
flooding. Over twenty feet of snow has fallen in the Mountains of
Colorado this year until there is no place left to put it.. The Pacific
Northwest has spent weeks and now months fighting flood after flood and
snowstorm after snowstorm. The Hawaiian Islands are being repeatedly
flooded by un-named storms. Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and parts of
Texas have been shut down for weeks at a time by ice and wind and an
inadequate infrastructure.

In
the weeks and months and years to come more and more of our homes will
be reduced to rubble and so will our neighbors’ homes down the street.
Many of us have now seen first hand how ill prepared our Federal, State
and local governments are for the systemic breakdown of global
environmental stability, which the global corporatocracy has created.
Project Earth has said for nearly thirty years now, “When the
environment of the Earth is bankrupt we will all be homeless. There
will be countless environmental refugees and fewer and fewer refuges.”

It
seems redundant to continue to say this. Then suddenly one day Global
Climate Destabilization comes to your town and you find that you don’t
have water to drink or to clean with (or to flush your toilets with)
and the lights are out and you have no heat or food. So pardon me for
continuing to bring up this sore point again and again but none of this
was necessary.

There have been solutions
available since Tesla. The problem is that all of the real solutions
have been systematically kept from us by compromising politicians and
politically correct “scientists” who, drunk with a false elitism, fear
that their corporate constituents/handlers would replace their sorry
asses with new ones if they ever actually told the truth.

Such
a man is Barrack Obama. His campaign ignores the Emergency on Earth. It
is strange that so many naïve souls seem to think that Barrack Obama is
imbued with some messianic mantle of authority. Unfortunately, a
careful examination of his record reveals that Barrack is large on
rhetoric but low on substance.

When I hear
the starry eyed members of the Barrack Obama cult singing the
jingoistic refrains of their new belief system, I have to say
something. I have to point out that their idol is the same Senator
Obama who bragged about a “Bill”
he introduced to “protect” his Illinois constituents from unreported
leaks of nuclear waste from several nuclear reactors in that state. The
problem with his story is that he allowed this “Bill” to become
meaningless drivel and even then it didn’t pass. Even so, Mr. Obama
implied to voters in Iowa and by proxy all other voters in our nation
that this “bill” did pass and that it had teeth. Curiouser and
Curiouser!

President George W. Bush and
seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President
Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the
two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security
threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

As
much as Mr. Obama wishes to paint himself as a legendary legislative
super-hero, the story is just another fake cartoon scene out of the
Barrack Odrama. The truth is that the political Trojan horse named
Barrack Obama submitted himself and his legislation to his corporate
contributors and handlers at Excelon, who had leaked their nuclear waste into the Illinois water table along with their copious contributions to his campaigns.

Let’s
see, there does seem be a pattern here. I wish it were not so. I too
was once so taken with this candidate that I actually sent out an email
to many of you introducing him as a bright new hope. I was wrong.

I
truly believe that Barrack Obama is the cleverest of all the Trojan
horse candidates ever fielded in our nation’s history. At least he
seems clever until you get down to the radioactive the ground water
beneath his feet.

We do not need to
follow a false prophet into a growing wasteland of unfulfilled
promises. We have had enough lies to kill a planet. We don’t need more
false hope based on political hype.

We
actually need to implement the long withheld solutions of zero point
vacuum fluctuation and hydro-oxy gas based technologies. We need to
cast aside the jargon of mediocre candidates and the band-aids of
1970’s variety technologies.

We need to act
like loving, intelligent beings. We have to be politically, physically
and even spiritually assertive. If we do this, we can send a message to
the rest of the universe that there is intelligent life on Earth.
Perhaps we can even attract the help of more intelligent beings whose
presence frequently leaks across the corporate firewall of denial and
into our living rooms. When we will we have leadership that stops lying
about the fact that we live in a universe in which much more advanced
and intelligent life forms exist than the politicians who usurp our
attention on the evening news.

Whether
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain is the next President, the
United States Government has no right to deny the citizens of our
country or the rest of the world the benefit of very advanced and
pollution free energy technologies, which have been developed at our
expense but never used for our collective good. I know that these
technologies exist because I have actually, physically invented,
developed and worked with them. By grace, I have survived long enough
to tell you about and even physically demonstrate several technologies
before representatives of the corruption confiscated them.

Right
now, we are in an emergency and we cannot afford for our government to
withhold the truth about climate destabilization, zero point
technologies or more intelligent life forms any longer.

Through
our carelessness, we have created a world of extremes, a world of fire
and ice, of deluge and drought. We have created a world of imbalance.
We need to bring this world back into balance. We need to start now.
Charismatic leaders who say one thing and then do another just won’t
cut it in the twenty first century and that is all there is to it.

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate

Adam Trombly

Today's Must Read

2008-03-14T14:52:00.001-04:00

By Paul Kiel - March 14, 2008, 9:46AM — If there's one thing EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson doesn't like to talk about, it's his conversations with the White House. When questioned about some decision that just happened to delight the White House, Johnson, the most disciplined adherent to talking points in recent memory, responds with a version of "the final decision was mine and mine alone" or "I have routine contacts with various officials on a wide range of issues. . . . I value the ability to have candid discussions that are part of good government."

But unfortunately, sometimes you just can't keep a lid on things. Earlier this week, the EPA issued a new rule on the allowable amount of smog-forming ozone in the air. It was a decision taken against the unanimous advice of EPA scientists, who advised a much lower standard than the one ultimately decided upon. That has come to be a sadly regular occurrence. But this time, the role of the White House -- and President Bush himself -- is clear. From The Washington Post:

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Full Story

UN's de Boer says investors tackling global warming while governments spar

2008-02-22T21:11:00.001-05:00

The Associated Press
2/27/08

MONTE CARLO, Monaco:
Private companies will soon be investing more than governments in
cutting the production of greenhouse gases, the U.N.'s top climate
change official said Thursday.

Yvo de Boer said business efforts were good but also not enough —
and that only a binding international agreement on cutting carbon
emissions will make private sector efforts financially viable.

"Business is really beginning to take climate change into account,"
de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention for
Climate Change, told The Associated Press. "There's a momentum building
in the finance community."

READ STORY

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

2008-02-10T15:08:00.001-05:00

Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline

By David Biello

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

Full Article

False Pretenses

2008-01-23T17:40:00.001-05:00

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Read Full Article >>

Senate Takes Up Indian Health Care Measure Under Veto Threat

2008-01-22T16:55:00.001-05:00

The Senate began its 2008 session Tuesday with legislation to reauthorize health care services for American Indians as the White House threatened a veto of the measure.

The White House, in a policy statement, demanded modifications to the bill, which would reauthorize funding for the Indian Health Service, and said President Bush would veto the bill if they were not made.

The veto threat could easily derail what was expected to be a noncontroversial bill. The administration’s main concern was a provision that would expand federal prevailing wage requirements to projects funded under the bill. The White House also objected to what it says are lax documentation requirements in the bill for enrolling patients in Medicaid and other government programs.

The bill would authorize spending for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care for 1.8 million American Indians and Alaska natives, through 2017. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, it would authorize discretionary spending of $16 billion over five years and $35 billion over 10 years.

Since a 1992 reauthorization expired in 2001, the health service has continued operating under old guidelines through annual appropriations. Spending in fiscal 2008 totaled $3 billion.

CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE
Jan. 22, 2008

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

2008-01-22T16:20:00.001-05:00

Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."

"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.

"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

Read Full Article >>

Petraeus Is Undecided About Deeper Troop Cuts

2008-01-20T19:44:00.001-05:00

Army Chief Of Staff: "The Surge Has Sucked All Of The Flexibility Out Of The System"

By Gina Chon and Yochi J. Dreazen

Wall Street Journal | January 17, 2008 02:41 PM

WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq -- The top American commander in Iraq said that 30,000 American troops would leave the country by July but that he had yet to make up his mind about whether to recommend any additional reductions.

In an interview, Gen. David Petraeus said he was working to finalize an assessment of security conditions in Iraq and the wisdom of further military withdrawals in advance of a high-profile appearance before Congress in March.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he hopes to see the U.S. military presence fall below 130,000 by the end of 2008, a position shared by many senior Pentagon commanders who worry the high troop levels in Iraq are causing growing manpower strains on the army.

"The surge has sucked all of the flexibility out of the system," Army Chief of Staff George Casey said in an interview this week. "And we need to find a way of getting back into balance."

But President Bush made clear this week that additional troop withdrawals were far from a sure thing. After a meeting in Kuwait with Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said he was open to slowing or stopping the withdrawal of troops to avoid jeopardizing recent security gains in Iraq. "My attitude is, if he didn't want to continue the drawdown, that's fine with me in order to make sure we succeed," Mr. Bush said, referring to Gen. Petraeus.

Read the rest on the Wall Street Journal.

'Darkest ever' material created

2008-01-20T04:29:00.001-05:00

by Helen Briggs
BBC News science reporter

The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory.

The material was created from carbon nanotubes - sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders.

Researchers say it is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths.

The discovery is expected to have applications in the fields of electronics and solar energy.

Theoretical clues

An ideal black object absorbs all the colours of light and reflects none of them. In theory, it should be possible to make something that approaches the "perfect absorber".

MORE >>

World moves into the ecological red

2007-10-06T02:51:00.001-04:00

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - The world moved into 'ecological overdraft' on
Saturday, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of
the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New
Economics Foundation think-tank said.

Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006
which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had
moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond
its environmental means in the 1980s.

"As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes
deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20
tonnes of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tonnes,"
said NEF director Andrew Simms.

"And why would that wasteful trade be more the rule than the exception," he added.

Not only was there a massive gulf between rich and poor but there
were deep variations in environmental profligacy between the rich
countries, NEF said.

If everyone in the world had the same consumption rates as in the
United States it would take 5.3 planet earths to support them, NEF
said, noting that the figure was 3.1 for France and Britain, 3.0 for
Spain, 2.5 for Germany and 2.4 for Japan.

But if everyone emulated China, which is building a coal-fired power
station every five days to feed its booming economy, it would take only
0.9 of a planet.

The NEF report comes as diplomatic momentum builds for UN
environment ministers meeting in December on the Indonesian island of
Bali to agree to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on
curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History

2007-09-23T18:04:00.001-04:00

SETH BORENSTEIN | September 22, 2007 10:32 PM EST |

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American
settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that
sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are
predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming _ through a combination of melting glaciers,
disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding _ is expected to
cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen
regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several
leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street
and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the
locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront
getaways of rich politicians _ the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John
Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches
in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring
Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by
The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University
of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree
with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50
years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a
scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,"
said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author
of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what _ the question is
when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what
they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland
scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big
national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday,
world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At
week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes
an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms
and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher
and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states
would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan
Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at
the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land
loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the
Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina,
Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland
areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers
of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far
more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise,
other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the
daily loss of Louisiana wetlands _ which serve as a barrier that
weakens hurricanes _ are previews of what's to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water
tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director
of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in
California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts
said.

"Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the
population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can
think of," said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal
geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a
scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the
seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he
tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in
100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the last century."

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

"It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and
you turn the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."

Could Time Travel Actually Be Possible?

2007-08-16T21:35:00.001-04:00

Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light.

Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take
an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light
barrier.

Travelling faster than light also turns back time with bizarre consequences.

An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving.

But
two German physicists now claim to have forced light to overcome its
own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as quantum
tunnelling.

The research, published in the new Scientist
magazine, involved an experiment in which microwave photons, energetic
packets of light, appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two
prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart.

When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected.

Oil report's conclusion: Broad effort needed to satiate energy demand

2007-07-19T00:52:00.001-04:00

Original Source
 
WASHINGTON: It started with a simple question by
Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary: "What does the future hold for oil
and natural gas supply?"

The query was made in October 2005 in a one-page letter sent to Lee
Raymond, the former chairman of Exxon Mobil and head of the National
Petroleum Council, a federal advisory group representing the oil
industry.

After nearly two years, Raymond has finally delivered his answer.
The result is a colossal 476-page study entitled "Facing the Hard
Truths About Energy" that involved 350 participants, suggestions from
over 1,000 people, submissions by 19 foreign governments from Australia
to Saudi Arabia, and dozens of subcommittees.

The report, which was made public in Washington on Wednesday, was
billed as one of the most comprehensive analysis of the global energy
challenge.

In answering Bodman's question, it also provides a sobering picture
of the energy problem facing the United States and the world. Most
strikingly, some of the recommendations adopted by the petroleum
council also probably far exceed what Bodman had in mind, or what the
Bush administration is prepared to endorse.

Because the world's population is growing and living standards are
rising worldwide, energy consumption globally is expected to jump by
more than 50 percent over the next 25 years. But finding supplies to
match that growth is going to be increasingly tough, and will require
massive new investments in coming decades.

The council's report warns of "accumulating risks" to energy
production, including rising geopolitical barriers, inflation in costs,
dwindling petroleum engineers and growing constraints on carbon dioxide
emissions. Although it does not say so explicitly, the subtext of the
council's study suggests that high energy prices might be here to stay.

The study's release comes as frustrations grow over high energy
costs and questions are raised over the security of U.S. energy
supplies. Congress is currently considering a new law to bolster the
development of alternative fuels and increase vehicle fuel efficiency.

Unlike the Bush administration's energy task force, which was led by
Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001 and fought efforts to disclose whom
it met with, the petroleum council's study makes no secret of who
participated in its mammoth effort.

The list of contributors to the report is a roster of top industry
leaders and consultants, including senior executives from Exxon and
Chevron. But the council also enlisted the help of private think tanks,
academic institutions, banks, governmental agencies and a handful of
nongovernmental groups, including the Alliance to Save Energy and
Resources for the Future.

"It really reflects the zeitgeist of the times," said Daniel Yergin,
the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and an energy
consultant who participated in the council's study.

Given that the report reflects the views of the oil industry, some
of its conclusions would seem hardly surprising, for example in
dismissing predictions from so-called peak oil theorists that the
world's oil deposits are on the decline. Quite the contrary, the
industry's view is that the world's resources remain abundant.

"Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources," the
report says in a 40-page summary. "Coal, oil and natural gas will
remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth."

But while the council calls for expanding and diversifying
traditional energy supplies - oil and gas, coal and nuclear power - it
is also backs the development of alternative fuels, including biofuels
like ethanol or gas-to-liquids.

"There is no quick fix" to the energy challenge, Raymond said at a
press conference Wednesday. "To assume that we have the option of not
pursuing one of the sources of energy is a fake choice."

There were other surprises. The petroleum council said that the U.S.
government should take steps to reduce oil consumption. In fact, the
report's first recommendation is a call for the U.S. government to
moderate energy demand by increasing vehicle fuel economy standards,
the main sources of growth in oil demand around the world, and improve
energy efficiency at buildings and homes.

"The world will need better energy efficiency and all economic,
environmentally responsible energy sources available to support and
sustain future growth," the petroleum council's report says.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Raymond, who was well known for
his skepticism of the causes of global warming when he was chairman of
Exxon Mobil, has given his backing to a report addressing how oil
companies should deal with carbon emissions on a global level. The
report said oil companies and governments need to address carbon
emissions and offers some suggestions for how the industry can help
trapping carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs.

"It is a hard truth that policies aimed at curbing carbon emissions
will alter the energy mix, increase energy-related costs and require
reductions in demand growth," the report said. It said the U.S.
government should establish a regulatory framework for managing carbon
emissions, but did not recommend any specific policy.

Still, the bias toward the industry's view is not a surprise given
the history of the council. It was created by President Harry S. Truman
in 1946 to represent the position of the oil and gas industry to the
federal government and recommend policy options, after their successful
wartime collaboration.

U.S. leg of Live Earth hits key notes

2007-07-10T02:57:00.001-04:00

Go to Original

BY GLENN GAMBOA

glenn.gamboa@newsday.com

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - The American leg of Live Earth: The Concerts
for a Climate in Crisis, like the other concerts on all seven
continents, proved to be as complex as the issue it is trying to solve.

...for organizers, the solution will come with raised awareness.
"Today, more than 2 billion of us have come together in more than 130
countries on all seven continents," said former Vice President Al Gore,
the event's organizer. "Times like these demand action," he added,
after announcing the 7-Point Pledge that he hoped millions would sign
while watching the concert.

...it was
nonmusicians at this concert who made the most passionate pleas about
demanding action for the environment. "Get rid of all these rotten
politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than
corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist
author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son,
who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start
treating them as traitors."

Primatologist Jane Goodall offered
a greeting in chimpanzee language, before saying, "Up in the North the
ice is melting, what will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?"

Armies must ready for global warming role: Britain

2007-06-28T01:58:00.001-04:00

Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:23PM EDT
REUTERS

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming is such a threat to security that
military planners must build it into their calculations, the head of
Britain's armed forces said on Monday.

Jock Stirrup, chief of the defense staff, said risks that climate
change could cause weakened states to disintegrate and produce major
humanitarian disasters or exploitation by armed groups had to become a
feature of military planning.

But he said first analyses showed planners would not have to switch
their geographical focus, because the areas most vulnerable to climate
change are those where security risks are already high.

"Just glance at a map of the areas most likely to be affected and
you are struck at once by the fact that they are exactly those parts of
the world where we see fragility, instability and weak governance today.

"It seems to me rather like pouring petrol onto a burning fire," Stirrup told the Chatham House think-tank in London.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett chaired the first debate
on climate change at the U.N. Security Council in April this year. She
argued that the potential for climate change to cause wars meant it
should be on the council's radar.

Stirrup said the unpredictability of the immediate effects of global
warming on rainfall patterns and storms meant flashpoints could be
advanced by years without warning.

He did not identify the problem areas, but Bert Metz of the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the meeting they
included Central America, the Amazon Basin, large parts of north,
central and southern Africa and swathes of Asia.

Scientists say average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0
degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and
transport, melting ice caps, bringing floods, droughts and famines, and
putting millions of lives at risk.

Stirrup said the security threat was far more immediate than those figures might suggest.

"If temperatures rise towards the upper end of the forecast range we
could already start to see serious physical consequences by 2040 -- and
that is if things get no worse."

"If things do get worse you don't need to come very much forward
from 2040 before, in my terms at least, you are talking about the day
after tomorrow," Stirrup said.

He said the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington
showed the devastation that attacks fuelled by political, economic and
social deprivation could achieve.

"Now add in the effects of climate change. Poverty and despair
multiply, resentment surges and people look for someone to blame," he
said.

Even if the world agreed quickly on a way of equitably tackling the
climate crisis -- which was far from sure -- the nature of the problem
meant a significant degree of adverse change was already in the
pipeline.

"That rapidity, alongside the size of the global population and the
complexity of today's society, leaves us particularly vulnerable,"
Stirrup said. "It is bound to present substantial security challenges
of one kind or another."

Asked on the margins of the meeting if that meant military planners
should opt for preemptive action where they saw a security crisis
emerging, he said: "Only in the sense of building governance.
Recognizing the problem is the first step."

'Mile-wide UFO' spotted by British airline pilot

2007-06-23T02:44:00.001-04:00

ThisIslondon.co.uk

One of the largest UFOs ever seen has been observed by the crew and passengers of an airliner over the Channel Islands.

An official air-miss report on the incident several weeks ago appears in Pilot magazine.

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying close to Alderney first spotted
the object, described as "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light".

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, described what he thought to be a UFO
as 'a cigar-shaped brilliant white light', similar to the image
supplied by Dennis Plunket of the British Flying Saucer bureau

As the plane got closer the captain viewed it through binoculars and said:
"It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area.

"It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away,
although I later realised it was approximately 40 miles from us. At
first, I thought it was the size of a [Boeing] 737.

"But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide."

Continuing his approach to Guernsey, Bowyer then spied a "second identical object further to the west".

He said: "It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was
further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can't explain it. This was
clearly visual for about nine minutes.

"I'm certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I'm saying is that I have
never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying."

The sightings were confirmed by passengers Kate and John Russell. John, 74,
said: "I saw an orange light. It was like an elongated oval."

The sightings were also confirmed by an unnamed pilot with the Blue Islands airline.

The Civil Aviation Authority safety notice states that a Tri-Lander aircraft flying close to Alderney spotted the object.

"Certain parts of the report have not been published. I cannot say why," said a senior CAA source.

Earlier this year, however, the MOD declared its intentions to open its UFO files to the public.

Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for Protecting Classified Information

2007-06-21T14:44:00.001-04:00

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Administration Oversight

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the
National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the
presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for
safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice
President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the
executive branch.”

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice
President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's
position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these
letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse.
The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency
within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the
President's executive order.

In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes:
"I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. ... [I]t
would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your
history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that
apply to all other executive branch officials."

A fact sheet prepared by Chairman Waxman describes other
instances in which the Vice President's office has sought to avoid
oversight and accountability.

'Earth Mother getting angry'

2007-06-20T12:55:00.001-04:00

American Indians fight climate change

The Associated Press

June 18. 2007 8:00AM

From New Hampshire to California, American Indian leaders are speaking out more forcefully about the danger of climate change.

Members of six tribes recently gathered near the Baker River in the White Mountains for a sacred ceremony honoring "Earth Mother." Talking Hawk, a Mohawk Indian who asked to be identified by his Indian name, pointed to the river's tea-colored water as proof that the overwhelming amount of pollution humans have produced has caused changes around the globe.

"It's August color. It's not normal," he said.

"Earth Mother is fighting back - not only from the four winds, but also from underneath," he said. "Scientists call it global warming. We call it Earth Mother getting angry."

At a United Nations meeting last month, several American Indian leaders spoke at a session called "Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change." Also in May, tribal representatives from Alaska and northern Canada - where pack ice has vanished earlier and earlier each spring - traveled to Washington to press their case.

Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You

2007-06-16T13:41:00.001-04:00

Friday, June 15, 2007

FMNM

Free-Market News Network, Corp.

The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the
president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common
sense of the citizens of this nation.

It sure isn't thanks to the quality of the news we're getting here in America.!

Here are some of the things you don't know if you just depend on the corporate media for your information:

Most Americans would like to see this
president and vice president impeached and removed from office.
Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that
51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of
Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally hasn't met a
poll it won't publish, didn't publicize this one. And now, when the
numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can't even
pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who
favor impeachment still think they're odd ducks.
There is a bill, filed in the House of Representatives on
April 24 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for the impeachment of
Vice President Cheney. Since it was filed, it has gained six
co-sponsors, including a member of the House Democratic leadership,
Rep. Janice Shakowsky (D-IL). Most major media have ignored this
important story completely. Most Americans also don't know that the
Vermont State Senate voted overwhelmingly this spring to call on
Congress to impeach the president.
The president has been declared a felon in federal court.
Yet even after Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last
August that President Bush and the National Security Agency were
committing serial Class A felonies and were violating both the First
and Fourth Amendments by spying on Americans' communications without
first obtaining warrants, Bush continued ordering the NSA to continue
the patently illegal program for at least half a year. In reports on
the spying program, the corporate media never mention that it has been
declared a felonious activity by the federal court.
Fifteen Democratic Party state organizations have passed
impeachment resolutions calling on Democrats in Congress to initiate
impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president. The
most recent of these, the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, passed its
resolution at the party's annual convention on May 19. Other Democratic
Party conventions, in states from Nevada and California to
Massachusetts and North Carolina, have passed similar resolutions. Most
have been ignored by the corporate media even in their own states.
Bush's so-called "coalition of the willing" is not so
willing and is not really much of a coalition either. When's the last
time you've heard how many countries are on board with the US in the
war and occupation of Iraq? The reality? Britain, the only significant
contributor of combat troops besides the U.S., is pulling out, as did
Italy and Spain, and many other countries, like Denmark, Lithuania and
others, plan to be out of Iraq by August or at the latest December. One
indication of the seriousness of situation: The Pentagon no longer
lists the countries that are members of the "coalition." The only
mainstream report I've seen laying this out this collapse in
international support for Bush's war was in USA Today last February.
The Homeland Security Department last year awarded
Halliburton $385 million in a no-bid contract to construct prison camps
designed to hold tens of thousands of unspecified prisoners in the
event of domestic unrest. Meanwhile, President Bush has signed a bill
altering the insurrection act so that he can declare martial rule and
order active duty troops to take charge anywhere in the domestic US in
the event of "public disorder." No one in the corporate media has
reported on these developments or asked the White House to explain what
it's all about.
There is evidence that Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a
patron of the Washington Madam whose client book of high-class
call-girls is causing many in Washington political circles-mostly
Republicans it appears, who apparently need to pay for their sex-to
sweat. So far no mention of the Cheney angle in the corporate media,
though they've been having fun with the broader story of a political
sex scandal. No mention either of how a brave West Point cadet refused
to shake Cheney's hand on stage when the vice president was handing out
this year's diplomas at the Army's premiere academy.
Among the "worst of the worst" of the "evildoers" captured
and held as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo were children, some of
them preteens and kids who were under 15 when captured and brought to
Cuba-so many in fact that the military had to set up a special
facility, called Camp Iguana, just for adolescent and pre-pubescent
"fighters." The corporate media have barely reported on this atrocity
(the New York Times ran only one article mentioning child captives, in
June 2005). The only wider coverage of this outrage came recently when
the government tried to prosecute one such alleged child
"terrorist"-Omar Khadr-only to have the military judge in charge toss
his case out because the government had misclassified him. Khadr, we
learned, was captured in 2001 in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 15,
making him one of the older child captives brought to and interrogated
at Guantanamo. Under international law, the U.S. was supposed to treat
this and other child soldiers as victims, not as war criminals. Khadr,
a Canadian by birth, instead has spent five years doing hard time in US
captivity.
Well-researched reports on the rampant theft of both the
2000 and 2004 elections, and on Republican plans for theft of the 2008
election, such as Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, have gone
unmentioned in the corporate media. Books on the subject, like Miller's
and like Greg Palast's best selling Armed Madhouse, have never been
reviewed.
And of course, there's my own book. The Case for
Impeachment, despite its having sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover,
and despite its having now come out in a mass-market paperback edition,
in both cases printed by a mainstream publisher, St. Martin's Press,
has not received a single review in the corporate media. In this, my
co-author Barbara Olshansky and I are not alone. None of the books on
the impeachable crimes of this administration, including one by
Nixon-era impeachment panelist and former congresswoman Elizabeth
Holtzman, and one by Judiciary Chair Rep. John Conyers, has been
reviewed by a mainstream media outlet.

What we're talking about here is a media blackout of important stories and news.

Thanks to the internet and to the grapevine, and thanks to their
basic native intelligence, most Americans seem to understand that we're
being lied to and cheated. What the media blackout of important news
does manage to do, however, is keep us all thinking that we are in a
minority in opposing things like illegal wars, a trampled Constitution,
and stolen elections.

In fact, however, we're actually the majority.

Once we realize this, maybe we will have a movement, instead of a just nation of isolated cynics and complainers.

Native hum

2007-06-16T13:32:00.001-04:00

As honeybees vanish, farmers turn to the wild pollinators in their back yards

In 1940, alfalfa-seed farmers in the desert of central Utah made an
interesting discovery: The primary pollinator of their crop was not the
honeybee, but the alkali bees that nested in the region’s salt flats.
For all its status as the workhorse of American agriculture, the
European honeybee didn’t really like foraging in alfalfa. But alkali
bees loved it, pollinating some 5,500 flowers daily. Farmers lucky
enough to live next to them were raising three times more alfalfa seed
per acre than those who didn’t.

From Utah to Washington state, farmers started transplanting thousands
of cubic feet of soil with alkali bee nests to aid in the production of
alfalfa seed — a hugely important crop because the alfalfa grown in
hayfields produces almost no seed on its own. The largest managed
alkali bee nesting bed is now five acres in size and is home to more
than 5 million bees.

“It gives me conniptions, it’s so big,” says Jim Cane, an entomologist
at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Biology and Systematics
Laboratory in Logan, Utah. “It’s just roaring with bees. The ground is
shimmering for several acres.” Cane says these farmers harvest at least
20 percent more seed than needed to break even.

The humble alkali bee had turned the attention of a whole sector of
commercial farmers away from the European honeybee. It was the first
time this had happened. It would not be the last.

While honeybees spent thousands of years honestly earning their
place in our hearts with their honey production, easily manipulated
colonies, generalist pollinating tendencies and heroic work ethic,
their wild cousins lived in obscurity. As the pioneers swarmed this
country, dubbing Utah “The Beehive State” and opening newspapers with
names like The Sacramento Bee, 3,000 to 4,000 species of wild bees
buzzed the landscape, largely unnoticed.

Native bees do not typically share the desire of the honeybee to live
in a small space with 10,000 members of the family. They do not produce
honey to keep their colony fed through the winter. These bees have
different habits, some of them so singular that they make scientists
laugh out loud with puzzlement. The female of one species likes to
burrow nine feet under a sand dune to lay a single egg. Another chews
away at sandstone walls to make its tiny nest. Yet another hangs on the
stalks of dead plants at night, alone and balled up, resembling a
berry. Some develop fabulous coloration — one orchid bee is metallic
gold with a blue abdomen and a red and gold thorax.

And they pollinate plants, often better than European honeybees. The
natives’ pollinating abilities are attracting more attention because
the honeybee on which most American agriculture depends has run into a
series of problems: It started mating with aggressive Africanized bees
that swept over the border from Mexico in 1990, rendering its children
often impossible to work with. It is vulnerable to parasitic mites and
fungi, weakened by insecticides and disease. In the past several
months, headline after headline has announced a dramatic drop in
honeybee populations due to a mysterious malady called Colony Collapse
Disorder.

Wild bees don’t mate with Africanized bees, nor do they suffer from the
same diseases and mites that afflict honeybees. There has never been a
better time to develop wild bee pollination talent for use in American
agriculture. The bee lab in Logan — one of five federal research labs
devoted to bee research, and the only one that doesn’t deal in
honeybees — is doing just that.

“There’s no real danger of the honeybee going extinct,” said Jamie
Strange, an entomologist who is preparing to spend the afternoon
trapping bumblebees near his lab in Logan to study for use in
greenhouses and tomato production. “But it’s like investing. Diversify
your portfolio. Diversify!”

Source

US to Meatpackers: Don't Do Mad Cow Test

2007-05-29T19:55:00.001-04:00

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to
keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered
cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted
beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all
of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested
its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the
expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The
ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said
Tuesday it would appeal - effectively delaying the testing until the
court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. The first,
in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been
imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The
third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to
a false positive that would harm the meat industry. U.S. District Judge
James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the
government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority
to restrict it.

Algae Biodiesel May Soon Be Reality

2007-05-29T19:22:00.001-04:00

by Green Options Blogger Clayton Bodie Cornell. Originally published May 24, 2007.

The biodiesel community has always been marked by spirited enthusiasm, a clear sense of mission, and the dream that biodiesel could one day play a significant role in our energy future. That dream may soon be a reality. Researchers at Utah State University say that farming algae, with reported oil yields of 10,000 gallons per acre, could become an economically feasible biodiesel feedstock by the end of the decade.

This is the Holy Grail of biodiesel: an oil source that could make a serious dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Our most productive feedstock today, the oil palm, doesn’t even come close with yields of 635 gallons/acre, and is followed distantly by the U.S. standard, soy, at 48 gallons of oil/acre.

More

Pentagon Limits Troops' Web Access...

2007-05-15T00:23:00.000-04:00

Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in
Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then "to basically keep my friends and family up to date" back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers. No more using the military's computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the
Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department's computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

"I put my blog on there and my family reads it," said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

"It scares the crap out of them sometimes," he said.

"I keep it as vague as possible," he said. "I'm pretty responsible about it. It's just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here" he said.

He's regularly at a base where he doesn't have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He'll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department's network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Gore sees 'spiritual crisis' in warming

2007-05-07T22:46:00.001-04:00

Playing equal parts visionary, cheerleader and comedian, Al Gore brought his message of how to fight global warming to a capacity crowd of receptive architects Saturday in San Antonio.

The former vice president referred continually to a "new way of thinking" that is emerging in the country and offered hope in the battle to control the effects global warming will have on the planet.

"It's in part a spiritual crisis," Gore told the crowd in the Convention Center at the American Institute of Architects national convention. "It's a crisis of our own self-definition — who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not."

Full Article

S Pacific to stop bottom trawling

2007-05-07T02:57:00.001-04:00

BBC News

A quarter of the world's oceans will be protected
from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South
Pacific nations have agreed.

The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which
experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that
suffocate marine life.

Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.

The South Pacific contains the last pristine deep-sea marine environment.

It extends from the Equator to the Antarctic and from Australia to the western coast of South America.

The high seas encompass all areas not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a country.

'Precautionary measures'

The agreement reached in the coastal town of Renaca in Chile will come into force on 30 September.

It will close to bottom trawling areas where vulnerable
marine ecosystems are known or are likely to exist, unless a prior
assessment is undertaken and highly precautionary protective measures
are implemented.

Memo to media and pundits:

2007-05-06T19:26:00.001-04:00

The public wants Dems to be confrontational with Bush and the GOP.

TMP Cafe

"...the choice the public faces isn't between "fighting" and "gridlock" on the one hand, and "bipartisan cooperation" on the other. Rather, it's between (a) accepting the disastrous Bush/GOP status quo; and (b) backing Democratic efforts to change it. And the public supports the latter. Even though those efforts are partisan and confrontational. Is that really so hard to fathom?

In a front page Washington Post article today by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton about how the Democratic Congress is faltering, the reporters quote Leon Panetta making the case that  Dems had better watch out and not be too confrontational with the White House:

    "The primary message coming out of the November election was that the American people are sick and tired of the fighting and the gridlock, and they want both the president and Congress to start governing the country," warned Leon E. Panetta, a chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House. "It just seems to me the Democrats, if they fail for whatever reason to get a domestic agenda enacted ... will pay a price."

Panetta, it appears, has become the go-to person for reporters eager to make the case that Dems are at risk of overreaching or failing. Indeed, it just so happens that this is the second time in just over a month that WaPo has gone to Panetta to get a quote arguing this. Funny coincidence, that.

But let's put that aside and ask a larger question: Is it really true that the public is fed up with partisanship and "sick and tired of the fighting," as Panetta says, and as David Broder and Joe Lieberman keep lecturing?

No doubt one could dig up polls showing that people don't like generically defined "fighting" or "gridlock." But here's another way to look at this: The polls show clearly that the public strongly supports efforts by Dems to confront Bush both on Iraq and on corruption. Check out the numbers in this recent Pew poll:

Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

2007-05-06T16:50:00.001-04:00

ROME (AP) — Organic food has long been
considered a niche market and a luxury for wealthy consumers. But
researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to
organic agriculture could actually help fight world hunger while
improving the environment.

Crop yields initially can drop as much as 50%
when industrialized, conventional agriculture using chemical
fertilizers and pesticides is converted to organic. While such
decreases often even out over time and promote other benefits, the
figures have kept the organic movement largely on the sidelines of
discussions about feeding the hungry.

Researchers in Denmark found, however, that
there would not be any serious negative effect on food security for
sub-Saharan Africa if 50% of agricultural land in the food exporting
regions of Europe and North America were converted to organic by 2020.

While total food production would drop, the
amount per crop would be much less than previously assumed, and the
drop in world food prices that resulted could be mitigated by
improvements in the land and other benefits, the study found.

A similar conversion to organic farming in
sub-Saharan Africa could help the region's hungry because it could
reduce their need to import food, Niels Halberg, a senior scientist at
the Danish Research Center for Organic Food and Farming, told the U.N.
conference on "Organic Agriculture and Food Security."

FIND MORE STORIES IN:  | | | |

Farmers who go back to using traditional
agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive
chemicals and would grow more diverse crops that are more sustainable,
the report said. In addition, if their food is certified organic,
farmers could export any surpluses, bringing in cash since organic food
has such premium prices.

Alexander Mueller, assistant director-general of
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, praised the report
and noted that projections indicated that the number of hungry people
in sub-Saharan Africa was only expected to grow.

Considering that the impact of climate change
will target the world's poor and most vulnerable, "a shift to organic
agriculture could be beneficial," he said.

The Rome-based FAO's Nadia El-Hage Scialabba,
who organized the conference, pointed to other studies of a
hypothetical food supply that she said indicated that organic
agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the current
world's population.

One such study, by the University of Michigan,
found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least
2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world's current
production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per
day, researchers reported.

"These models suggest that organic agriculture
has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional
agriculture today, but with reduced environmental impacts," Scialabba
said in a paper presented to the conference.

However, she stressed that the studies were only that — economic models.

The United Nations defines organic agriculture
as a "holistic" food system that avoids the use of synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the
health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in
120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba
said.

Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

2007-05-06T16:37:00.001-04:00

FIND MORE STORIES IN:  | | | |

Considering that the impact of climate change
will target the world's poor and most vulnerable, "a shift to organic
agriculture could be beneficial," he said.

However, she stressed that the studies were only that — economic models.

Freeze 'condemned Neanderthals'

2007-05-05T01:00:00.001-04:00

A sharp freeze could have dealt the killer blow
that finished off our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals, according
to a new study.

The ancient humans are thought to have died out in most parts of Europe by about 35,000 years ago.

And now new data from their last known refuge in
southern Iberia indicates the final population was probably beaten by a
cold spell some 24,000 years ago.

The research is reported by experts from the Gibraltar Museum and Spain.

They say a climate downturn may have caused a drought,
placing pressure on the last surviving Neanderthals by reducing their
supplies of fresh water and killing off the animals they hunted.

Sediment cores drilled from the sea bed near the
Balearic Islands show the average sea-surface temperature plunged to 8C
(46F). Modern-day sea surface temperatures in the same region vary from
14C (57F) to 20C (68F).

In addition, increased amounts of sand were deposited in
the sea and the amount of river water running into the sea also
plummeted.

Southern refuge

Neanderthals appear in the fossil record about 350,000
years ago and, at their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters
dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to
Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago.

Full Article

Climate change 'can be tackled'

2007-05-05T00:53:00.001-04:00

The growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed
at reasonable cost, experts at a major UN climate change conference in
Bangkok have agreed.

Boosting renewable energy, reducing deforestation and improving energy efficiency can all help, they said.

This is the third report this year from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and aims to set out
the costs and benefits of various policies.

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri said the report was "stunning".

Full Article

Organism found at SRS amazes scientific world

2007-05-01T04:00:00.001-04:00

By Rob Pavey| Staff Writer
Augusta Chronicle

Monday, April 30, 2007

One of the world's tiniest celebrities hails from one of the planet's toughest neighborhoods.

Its story began a couple of years ago, when scientists fished a
strange slime off a probe used to examine decades-old, high-level
nuclear waste inside tanks stored at Savannah River Site.

"At first, nobody was sure what it was," said Christopher "Kitt"

Bagwell, a senior scientist at the top-secret Savannah River National
Laboratory.

Turns out, the greenish-orange slime was alive.

The more it was studied, the more it enamored scientists who were
fascinated with its ability to survive radiation doses thousands of
times greater than what is considered lethal to humans.

"Finding an organism in such a toxic environment is very unexpected," said Dr. Bagwell, who will present a paper about the bacteria - dubbed kineococcus radiotolerans - to the American Society for Microbiology next month.

In addition to thriving in the face of normally-lethal radiation, the organism also demonstrates remarkable survival characteristics in terms of its DNA.

Humans and most organisms can tolerate few breaks in DNA molecules, he said, but kineococcus radiotolerans has the ability to reassemble itself.

"With this organism, we can take an intact DNA molecule, blast it
into little pieces, and in five to six hours the organism is restored
and growing normally again," Dr. Bagwell said.

Dr. Bagwell and others who have studied the organism hope further
research will yield clues that could aid in medical research, cancer
studies and other areas.

"There's a lot of excitement about this organism because of its
ability to withstand tremendous abuse," he said. "What we don't know is
how it does these things - and what more it can do. That's the
direction we're going now."

U.S. memorializes massacre of Native Americans

2007-04-29T04:18:00.001-04:00

SAND CREEK MASSACRE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Colorado (AP) --

More than 142 years after a band of state militia volunteers massacred
150 sleeping Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in a misdirected act
of vengeance, a memorial to the tragic event was officially dedicated
Saturday.

The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic site, 160
miles southeast of Denver on Big Sandy Creek in Kiowa County, pays
tribute to those killed in the November 29, 1864, attack.

Seeking revenge for the killings of several settlers by Indians, 700 militia
members slaughtered nearly everyone in the village. Most were women or
children.

Descendants of some of the victims were among several
hundred people at Saturday's dedication on the rolling hills of the
southeastern Colorado plains. A mock village of a dozen tepees was set
up in a grove of cottonwood trees along the creek that historians
believe marks the site of the killings.

Full Article

Poll Finds Majority See Threat in Global Warming

2007-04-26T20:43:00.001-04:00

New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. Nineteen percent said it was not necessary to act now, and 1 percent said no steps were needed.

Several recent international reports have concluded with near certainty that human activities are the main cause of global warming since 1950. The poll found that 84 percent of Americans see human activity as at least contributing to warming.

The poll also found that Americans want the United States to support
conservation and to be a global leader in addressing environmental
problems and developing alternative energy sources to reduce reliance
on fossil fuels like oil and coal.

Draft Gore Petition

2007-04-26T18:19:00.001-04:00

A new site with sign-up for Gore candidacy

Please sign below and spread the word
to all your friends and fellow activists. With your help, we can create an unprecedented show of support for Al Gore that will hopefully make a Gore candidacy in 2008 a reality. Thank you.

Dear Vice President Gore:

Americans from every corner of our nation are calling on you. Please listen to
our plea and run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of
the United States in 2008.

Never before has America needed a leader of your stature, vision and experience more than now. The next presidential election will be the most crucial one in our history, and you are the only Democrat who can unite the country and lead us to victory. And this country -- indeed,
the entire world -- cannot afford anything less.

Our nation and the planet itself are entering “a period of consequences,” as you so well stated in “An Inconvenient Truth,” but in more ways than one. We are ruled by a government
of the powerful and for the powerful -- a government that tramples our Constitution, wages unjust war in our name, sacrifices our economic future, and puts our very planet on the endangered species list.

America and the world need you now more than ever. Be our candidate. Run for president. And we pledge that we'll be there for you every day until the last vote is counted.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned,

Study Shows Sudden Sea Level Surges Threaten One Billion

2007-04-20T22:13:00.001-04:00

By Michael Kahn
Reuters
Friday 20 April 2007

San Francisco - More than one billion people live in low-lying areas where a sudden surge in sea level could prove as disastrous as the 2004 Asian tsunami, according to new research presented Thursday.

New mapping techniques show how much land would be lost and how many people affected by rapid sea level rises that are often triggered by storms and earthquakes, a U.S. Geological Survey-led team determined.

E. Lynn Usery, who led the team, said nearly one-quarter of the world's population lives below 100 feet above sea level - the size of the biggest surge during the 2004 tsunami that pulverized villages along the Indian Ocean and killed 230,000 people.

"What we are suggesting is what kind of areas are at risk (in) a catastrophic event," Usery told a meeting of the Association of American Geographers.

"The fact that there are that many people living at that sea level means there are probably a lot of people potentially in harm's way."

The team also found that a 100-foot rise in sea level would cover 3.7 million square miles of land worldwide.

A rise of just 16 feet would affect 669 million people and 2 million square miles of land would be lost.

Sea levels are currently rising about 0.04 to 0.08 inches each year, making it unlikely such a scenario would suddenly occur across the globe, Usery said.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Scientists Levitate Small Animals

2007-04-14T17:57:00.001-04:00

Scientists have now levitated small live animals using sounds that are, well, uplifting.

In the past, researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China, used ultrasound fields to successfully levitate globs of the heaviest solid and liquid—iridium and mercury, respectively. The aim of their work is to learn how to manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to alloys without the aid of containers. At times compounds are too corrosive for containers to hold, or they react with containers in other undesirable ways.

"An interesting question is, 'What will happen if a living animal is put into the acoustic field?' Will it also be stably levitated?" researcher Wenjun Xie, a materials physicist at Northwestern Polytechnical University, told LiveScience.

Xie and his colleagues employed an ultrasound emitter and reflector that generated a sound pressure field between them. The emitter produced roughly 20-millimeter-wavelength sounds, meaning it could in theory levitate objects half that wavelength or less.

After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to a little more than a third of an inch long in midair. When they levitated the fish and tadpole, the researchers added water to the ultrasound field every minute via syringe.

The levitated ant tried crawling in the air and struggled to escape by rapidly flexing its legs, although it generally failed because its feet find little purchase in the air. The ladybug tried flying away but also failed when the field was too strong to break away from.

"We must control the levitation force carefully, because they try to fly away," Xie said. "An interesting moment was when my colleagues and I had to catch escaping ladybugs."

The ant and ladybug appeared fine after 30 minutes of levitation, although the fish did not fare as well, due to the inadequate water supply, the scientists report.

"Our results may provide some methods or ideas for biology research," Xie said. "We have tried to hatch eggs of fish acoustic levitation."

The research team reported their findings online Nov. 20 in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Convention Cleanup Includes Pigeon Poop

2007-04-07T00:19:00.001-04:00

AP  |  April 5, 2007 03:39 PM EST

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Pigeon poop has long sullied downtown St. Paul sidewalks, but the slippery, smelly mess is gaining urgency with the Republican National Convention coming to town next year.

Sticky foam, hawk balloons and nets haven't gotten rid of the birds, so officials have a new plan: stealing pigeon eggs.

After pigeons lay their eggs on rooftop nesting grounds, maintenance workers plan to sneak up through trap doors and grab the next generation before it hatches.

"We'll build them little condos. We'll keep taking the eggs, and they won't have little ones," said Bill Stephenson, the city's animal control supervisor. "Slowly they'll die off."

The scheme has the blessing of the St. Paul Audubon Society. Member Val Cunningham said pigeons aren't native, and their eggs aren't protected. If the plan works, "it would be sweet for the city," Cunningham said.

City officials also considered feeding contraceptives to the pigeons but rejected that idea on fears of also inadvertently sterilizing eagles or hawks.

Government must deal with greenhouse gases: US Supreme Court

2007-04-02T16:27:00.001-04:00

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider greenhouse gases as pollutants, in a blow to the White House.

"Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act's capacious
definition of 'air pollutant' we hold that EPA has the statutory
authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor
vehicles," the court ruled.

Led by Massachusetts, a dozen
states along with several US cities and environmental groups went to
the courts to determine whether the agency had the authority to
regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide emissions.

"The harms associated with climate change
are serious and well recognized," said judge John Paul Stevens as the
ruling was carried by five votes in favor to four against.

The
Republican administration of US President George W. Bush has fiercely
opposed any imposition of binding greenhouse limits on the nation's
industry.

Environmentalists have alleged that since Bush came
to office in 2001 his administration has ignored and tried to hide
looming evidence of global warming and the key role of human activity in climate change.

As the issue has come to the fore in the US, the White House earlier
this year issued a rare open letter defending Bush's record on climate
change, rejecting criticisms that he has only recently awakened to the
problem.

Monday's ruling was immediately hailed by
environmental campaigners which has been fighting for greater
regulations in a nation which accounts for a quarter of global
greenhouse gas emissions.

"It is a watershed moment in the
fight against global warming," said Josh Dorner, spokesman for the
Sierra Club environmental group.

"This is a total repudiation
of the refusal of the Bush administration to use the authority he has
to meet the challenge posed by global warming.

It also "sends
a clear signal to the market that the future lies not in dirty,
outdated technology of yesterday, but in clean energy solutions of
tomorrow like wind, solar," he added.

The Impact of Logging

2007-04-02T00:26:00.001-04:00

Corruption Stains Timber Trade

Forests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry

By Peter S. Goodman and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page A01

MYITKYINA, Burma -- The Chinese logging boss set his sights on a thickly forested mountain just inside Burma, aiming to harvest one of the last natural stands of teak on Earth.

He handed a rice sack stuffed with $8,000 worth of Chinese currency to two agents with connections in the Burmese borderlands, the men said in interviews. They used that stash to bribe everyone standing between the teak and China. In came Chinese logging crews. Out went huge logs, over Chinese-built roads.

A railway in northeastern China receives timber from the Russian Far East, where the World Bank says half of all logging is illegal. Ikea products are made here and shipped to the U.S.

A railway in northeastern China receives timber from the Russian Far East, where the World Bank says half of all logging is illegal. Ikea products are made here and shipped to the U.S.

Full Article

Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps

2007-03-30T01:57:00.001-04:00

NEW ORLEANS — Google's popular map portal has replaced
post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the
storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even
fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.

Scroll across the city and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and
everything is back to normal: Marinas are filled with boats, bridges
are intact and parks are filled with healthy, full-bodied trees.

"Come on," said an incredulous Ruston Henry, president of the
economic development association in New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th
Ward. "Just put in big bold this: 'Google, don't pull the wool over the
world's eyes. Let the truth shine.'"

Chikai Ohazama, a Google Inc. product manager for satellite imagery,
said the maps now available are the best the company can offer.
Numerous factors decide what goes into the databases, "everything from
resolution, to quality, to when the actual imagery was acquired."

He said he was not sure when the current images replaced views of
the city taken after Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, flooding an
estimated 80 percent of New Orleans.

In the images available Thursday, the cranes working to fix the
breach of the 17th Street Canal are gone. Blue tarps that covered
roofless homes are replaced by shingles. Homes wiped off their
foundations are miraculously back in place in the Lower 9th. So, too,
is the historic lighthouse on Lake Pontchartrain.

But in the Lower 9th Ward, the truth isn't as pretty, 19 months after Katrina.

"Everything is missing. The people are missing. Nobody is there," Henry said.

After Katrina, Google's satellite images were in high demand among
exiles and hurricane victims anxious to see whether their homes were
damaged.

The new, virtual Potemkin village is fueling the imagination of
locals frustrated with the slow pace of recovery and what they see as
attempts by political leaders to paint a rosier picture.

Pete Gerica, a fisherman who lives in eastern New Orleans, said he
printed pictures of his waterside homestead from Google to use in his
arguments with insurance adjusters.

"I think a lot of stuff they're doing right now is smoke and mirrors
because tourism is so off," Gerica said. "It might be somebody's weird
spin on things looking better."

Henry also wondered whether Google's motives might be less than pure.

"Is Google part of the conspiracy?" he said. "Why these images of pre-Katrina? Seems mighty curious."

Ceeon Quiett, spokeswoman for Mayor Ray Nagin, said that as far as she knew, the city did not request the map change.

"My first reaction was, that's a bit problematic," she said.

Ohazama, the Google product manager, said he "personally" was not
asked by city or state officials to change the imagery, but he added
that Google gets many requests from users and governments to update and
change its imagery.

Google has become a go-to service for people looking for up-close satellite imagery.

"I use it on a regular basis in my class," said Craig Colten, a
geographer at Louisiana State University who has written extensively on
New Orleans. He called Google's switch "unbelievable."

"I'm sure the mayor is thrilled," he quipped.

World must pay poorer nations to keep forests:

2007-03-24T02:21:00.001-04:00

By Ed Davies

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A major U.N. conference on global warming in December should target setting up a system to pay developing nations such as Indonesia and Brazil to keep their forests, an influential climate change expert said on Friday.

In the short term, up to $15 billion extra a year should be set aside by richer nations to preserve forests, which help soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Nicholas Stern, author of an acclaimed report published last year, told a forum.

Original Article

Gore Implores Congress to Save Planet

2007-03-21T19:57:00.001-04:00

WASHINGTON
(AP) — Al Gore made an emotional return to Congress Wednesday to plead with
lawmakers to fight global warming with moral courage while revealing nothing
about whether he'll join the 2008 presidential race.

The former vice president is a Democratic favorite for the presidential nomination even
though he says he's not running. Fresh off a triumphant Hollywood appearance in
which his climate-change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth'' won two Oscars,
Gore drew overflow crowds as he testified before House and Senate panels about
a “true planetary emergency.''

Another report on the effects of climate change

2007-03-19T21:32:00.001-04:00

World's Most Important Crops Hit by Global Warming Effects

Global warming over the past quarter century has led to a fall in the yield of some of the most important food crops in the world, according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops.

Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused a loss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn.

Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed yields of cereals from around the world during a period when average temperatures rose by about 0.7C between 1980 and 2002 - although the rise was even higher in certain crop-growing regions of the world.

By Steve Connor

The Independent UK Go to Original

Monday 19 March 2007

The Great Channel Four Swindle

2007-03-17T02:16:00.001-04:00

And let us not forget that we all want to believe them. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe that the science is unsettled, that all that carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere really has no effect, and that we do not have to worry about the future.

It would be entirely possible to put together a similar programme, with a string of credible former academics, to argue that smoking does no cause cancer, that HIV does not cause AIDS, or that black people are less intelligent. However, Channel Four would not dare broadcast the programme and we would not believe them if they did. Is it not a reflection of the deep public ambivalence about climate change that these dissenters are given such a prominent and uncritical showcase and that we are so keen to listen to them?

Make up your own minds from their track records. Here is a little more information on some of the people who appeared on the programme:

Fred Singer. Despite the caption on the programme, Singer has retired from the University of Virginia and has not had a single article accepted for any peer-reviewed scientific journal for 20 years. His main work has been as a hired gun for business interests to undermine scientific research on environmental and health matters. Before turning to climate change denial he has argued that CFCs do not cause ozone depletion and second hand smoke does not cause cancer (more... ). In 1990 he founded "The Science and Environment Policy Project", which aggressively contradicts climate science and has received direct funding from Exxon, Shell, Unocal and ARCO. Exxon is also among the funders ($20,000 in 1998 and 2000)

Patrick Michaels is the most prominent US climate change denier. In the programme he claimed "I've never been paid a nickel by the old and gas companies" which is a curious claim. According to the US journalist Ross Gebspan Michaels has received direct funding from, among others German Coal Mining Association ($49,000), Edison Electric Institute ($15,000), and the Western Fuels Association ($63,000) an association of US coal producing interests. The WFA is one of the most powerful forces in the US actively denying the basic science of climate change, funding, amongs other things, the Greening Earth Society which is directed by Patrick Michaels. Tom Wigley, one of the leading IPCC scientists, describes Michaels work as "a catalog of misrepresentation and misinterpretation". (More on Michaels...)

Philip Stott was captioned as a Professor at the University of London although he is retired and is therefore free of any academic accountability. Stott is a geographer by training and has no qualifications in climate science. Since retiring Stott has aimed to become Britain's leading anti-green pundit dedicating himself to wittily criticizing rainforest campaigns (with Patrick Moore), advocating genetic engineering and claiming that "global warming is the new fundamentalist religion."

Patrick Moore is Stott's Canadian equivalent. Since a very personal and painful falling out with Greenpeace in 1986 Moore has put his considerable campaigning energies into undermining environmentalists, especially his former friends and colleagues. Typical of his rhetoric was his claim in the programme that environmentalists were "anti-human" and "treat humans as scum". Throughout the 1990s Moore worked as lead consultant for the British Columbian Timber Products Association undermining Greenpeace's international campaign to protect old growth forest there. Whenever he has the chance he also makes strong public statements in favour of genetic engineering, nuclear power, logging the Amazon, and industrial fishing- all, strangely, lead campaigns for Greenpeace (more on Moore..)

Piers Corbyn has no academic status and his role in such programmes is to promote his own weather prediction business. He has steadfastly refused to ever subject his climatological theories to any form of external review or scrutiny.

Richard Lindzen. As a Professor of Meteorology at the credible Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lindzen is by far the most reputable academic among the US climate deniers and, for this reason, he is heavily cited by sympathetic journalists such as Melanie Phillips and Michael Crichton. His arguments though are identical to the other deniers – for example an article in the Wall Street Journal (June 11 2001) he claims that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends or what causes them".
He is strongly associated with the other people on the programme though co-authored reports, articles, conference appearances and co-signed statements.

Tim Ball was captioned as the University of Winnipeg. In fact he left in 1996 since when he has run political campaigns through two organisations he helped found: the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science which, according to their websites aim to run "a proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol"; and "encourage and assist the Canadian Federal Government to re-evaluate the Kyoto Protocol". Ian Clark is also on the board of the NRSP.

Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice "Has Reached Tipping Point"

2007-03-16T19:05:00.001-04:00

By Steve Connor Science Editor

The Independent

Friday 16 March 2007

A catastrophic collapse of the Arctic sea ice could lead to radical climate changes in the northern hemisphere according to scientists who warn that the rapid melting is at a "tipping point" beyond which it may not recover.

Bee vanishing act baffles keepers

2007-03-15T22:08:00.001-04:00

Honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate from 24 US states, threatening the production of numerous crops.

The cause of the losses, which range from 30% to more than 70%, is a mystery, but experts are investigating several theories.

American bee colonies have been hit by regional crises before, but keepers say this is the first national crisis.

Full Story

How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet: A Review

2007-03-15T17:55:00.001-04:00

By Leslie Thatcher

t r u t h o u t | Review

Thursday 15 March 2007

"Ingenuous comrades, there are bad men on the Earth. If you want to be an ecologist, you have to stop being a dummy." From Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet."

In 2006, Le Monde environmental editor Hervé Kempf's article, "New Suspicions about GMO" (translated and republished at Truthout) was nominated for a Project Censored award for covering an important topic neglected by the mainstream press. Earlier this year, Truthout reported the publication of Kempf's new book, "How the Rich are Destroying the Planet." I was intrigued, all the more so as a few readers asked when the book would be available in English, and asked Mr. Kempf to send me a copy of his book as well as for permission to translate the Preface (see below). My own appreciation of this completely original and fundamentally necessary little book - a scant 125 pages of text - follows. That review precedes a short online discussion with Hervé Kempf, while a translation of the Preface to "How the Rich are Destroying the Planet" appears at the end of this feature, along with a number of links to related subjects.

Although familiar with much of the information Kempf marshals in "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet," I was nonetheless amazed by the long and elegant arc of his argument, his ability to discern and convey a crystalline pattern in phenomena as diverse as elevated PCB levels in the sediment of "pristine" Alaskan lakes and the increase in length of billionaires' yachts. The book's central thesis - that the "oligarchy," a global stateless class composed of the hyper-rich and the "new Nomenklatura," is responsible for our species' headlong rush to environmental destruction, both indirectly, through the rest of society's attempts to imitate and emulate their wasteful habits of conspicuous consumption, and directly, through their control of the levers of power, all presently fixed at the "Catastrophe" setting - is buttressed by twenty pages of footnotes and direct citations from sources as varied as Adam Smith and James Lovelock; the scientific monograph, "Effects on the Marine Environment of Ocean Acidification Resulting from Elevated Levels of CO2 in the Atmosphere" and Alexis de Tocqueville.

The first stage in Kempf's argument is to adduce the irrefutable evidence of an accelerating ecological catastrophe as humanity's use of the planet's resources overshoots the Earth's carrying capacity: While, according to one researcher Kempf cites, humanity's resource use was at 50 percent of the Earth's biocapacity in 1950, by 2003, it had reached 120 percent - consuming resources faster than the Earth can reproduce them. Foretastes of the ultimate catastrophe are suggested by avian flu worries, the destruction of New Orleans by the combined impact of Hurricane Katrina and infrastructure failures before and after the storm, and by increased mortality associated with the 2003 heat wave in Europe. Each environmental "problem" is linked to all the others; their synergy and imbrication propel us "in the direction of unstoppable destruction" and preclude any idea of separate crises, "solvable independently of one another." Why, Kempf asks, when the situation is so clear and alarming, does it remain so stubbornly intractable to change? He concludes that "if nothing happens even though we're entering an ecological crisis of historic gravity, it's because those who have power in the world want it to be this way."

Kempf goes on to document the return of widespread poverty and economic precariousness to the rich world and the globalization of poverty in spite of economic growth and some reduction of poverty in China and India. However, economic growth and greater agricultural productivity are achieved at the expense of environmental degradation and, finally, there is a vicious "synergy between the global ecological and social crises: they respond to one another, influence one another and worsen correlatively." And the poor are the first victims of environmental degradation everywhere.

In spite of a distinct coolness of tone and a controlled reliance on statistics and citation, Kempf's depiction of "The Powerful of This World" echoes Old Testament prophetic outrage. He quotes Peter Drucker on the destructiveness of unbridled executive compensation, St. Augustine on government ("If there is no justice, what are kingdoms, but vast systems of robbery?"), "Forbes, "The Economist,' and the "Financial Times" to create a portrait of a predatory, self-perpetuating elite that has become wealthy "not through success in production, but through constant redistribution of collective wealth" (think Halliburton or Blackwater senior executives and shareholders) and that lives "... separated from the plebians. They are not aware of how the poor and wage-earners live; they don't know and don't want to know." No sense of the public good or civic virtue moves "this predatory and greedy controlling class, wasting its rents, misusing its power, (it) congeals as an obstacle on the way. It bears no proposal, is animated by no ideal, delivers no promise ... is blind to the explosive power of obvious injustice. And blind to the poisoning of the biosphere that growth in material wealth provokes, a poisoning that means a degradation of the conditions for human life...."

More

Strong Suspicions of Toxicity in One GMO Corn

2007-03-13T21:00:00.001-04:00

By Stephane Foucart
Le Monde

Tuesday 13 March 2007

Allowed to go on the market in France and Europe, MON 863, a transgenic corn invented by Monsanto, has been at the center of a controversy over its innocuousness for over two years (April 23rd, 2004, Le Monde). These debates could resume after the March 13th publication in "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology" of a study suggesting this genetically modified organism (GMO) is toxic to the liver and kidneys.

According to this work, consumption of MON 863 corn disturbs numerous biological parameters in rats to a greater or lesser extent: weight of the kidneys, weight of the liver, the level of reticulocytes (new red blood cells), the level of triglycerides, etc. Urinary chemistry is also changed, with reductions in excreted sodium and phosphorus going as high as 35 percent. The effects vary with the sex of the animals. "Female rats exhibit an increase in blood fat and sugar levels, and an increase in body weight - all associated with greater hepatic sensitivity," says Mr. Seralini, principal author of this study and, moreover, president of the Research Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering (Criigen). "Among males, the impact is opposite, with a drop in body and kidney weights."

The authors of this work used data drawn from an experiment sponsored by Monsanto, which bore on the study of 400 rats for 90 days. The statistical treatment applied to these data by the experts of the agrochemical firm was published in August 2005, by "Food and Chemical Toxicology." That work brought to light significant variations in biological parameters between animals fed MON 863 and those fed with its isogene - the same plant variety without the genetic modification.

MORE

It's Expensive to Ignore Global Warming

2007-03-13T20:53:00.001-04:00

By Bruce Barnbaum

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Sunday 11 March 2007

Some leaders -- notably President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney -- have stated they will do nothing to stem global warming if it will harm our economy. Let's examine two examples of what would happen to our economy if we follow their advice and do nothing.

Note that predictions of climate change have been quite accurate, so a high degree of confidence exists (and, in fact, a growing degree of confidence) that future predictions will be borne out.

Look at the consequences of rising sea levels. If the oceans rise 20 feet, much of our coastal land would be imperiled. What would that mean?

Most of Florida is barely above sea level. A 20-foot ocean level rise would put half of Florida under water, including Miami, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville, Florida's three largest cities.

What would be the cost of building dikes around all this real estate? Hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps well into the trillions. Florida has the longest coastline of any state except Alaska, and the dikes needed to protect Florida would have to be extended across the other Gulf States and up the East Coast to truly be protective.

We can't build a Maginot Line of dikes just around Florida, allowing the rising waters to flow around the ends of the dikes. If we build protective dikes for some areas, we have to protect them all. Not only are we looking at excessive expenditures, but we're looking at an impossible amount of material needed to build thousands of miles of dikes 20-plus feet high.

The Clean Green Bag

2007-03-10T16:09:00.001-05:00

The horrible facts!: paper vs. plastic:

plastic bags consume 40% less energy to produce than paper pags, and plastic bags generate 80% less solid waste than paper bags.

as waste, paper bags produce 70 times more air pollutants than plastic bags, and as waste, paper bags produce 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.

Plastic takes up to 1,000 years to decompose!

Researchers wonder where all the pollinators have gone

2007-03-08T11:22:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON -- Pity the honeybee, hummingbird, and bat.

And possibly us.

A report issued yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences said that the three species are ``demonstrably" declining in the United States and Canada, and that their losses are affecting not just their populations -- but potentially parts of various ecosystems, including some parts of our food supply.

The birds, bees, and bats are pollinators, and nearly three-quarters of all flowering plants depend on them to spread pollen so that fertilization can occur and fruits, nuts, and vegetables can grow.

The decline of pollinators ``is one form of global change that actually has credible potential to alter the shape and structure of terrestrial ecosystems," May R. Berenbaum , chairwoman of the committee that studied the issue, said in a statement.

BioClimate Buildings

2007-03-07T03:49:00.001-05:00

Designing with Nature in Mind

Usable energy is a scarce resource, even if we have not passed Peak Oil then we are still faced with a worldwide competition among nations for a limited resource . Ultimately the price trend is up whether that energy source is petroleum, synfuel or biodiesel. In the built environment. Even the green(er) built environment the tendency is to use lots of technology to create a high performance building. LEED structures are creations that incorporate a tremendous number of labour and energy saving devices. They use the latest technologies to provide natural light, clean circulating air, conserve water and energy. Computer controlled shades that move up and down with the sun and energy conserving lighting systems.

In Defense of Al Gore

2007-03-04T17:03:00.001-05:00

The Lastest from Adam Trombly over at Project Earth Online

I find myself having to come to the defense of Al Gore. I have to say something about the moronic comments that Michael Crichton recently made about Al Gore’s predictions about the climate. According to Mr. Crichton the weather is just going through a phase and Mr. Gore is basing his claims of imminent disaster on bad science and scaring people for no good reason. It is really like a chapter from one of Crichton’s own books.

Best selling author of spy novels with heavy ties to the “intelligence” community is fed a lot of crap by certain members of that community and used as a mouthpiece for an insidious group of corporate interests whose agenda is alien to the good of all life. In the mean time those same interests are pulling every trick they can behind the scenes to diminish Mr. Gore’s credibility. The fact is that Al Gore was robbed of being the lawfully elected President of the United States by both the popular and the actual electoral vote of the People of the United States of America, largely because of his commitment to the Earth and her people.

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug

2007-03-04T16:40:00.001-05:00

Cattle Antibiotic Moves Forward Despite Fears of Human Risk

By Rick Weiss

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, March 4, 2007; A01

Original Article

The
government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a
pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups
and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision
will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome,
belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among
medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No
drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in
animals.

Dazzling New Saturn Images Released

2007-03-02T13:50:00.001-05:00

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The international Cassini spacecraft has beamed
back to Earth never-before-seen angles of Saturn from high above and
below its majestic rings. The planet is fully surrounded by the rings
in images released Thursday by NASA.

"Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," Cassini
scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder,
Colo., said in a statement.

"It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breathtaking, it almost gives you vertigo," Porco said.

Cassini snapped the images while in a highly inclined orbit during the past two months.

The $3.3 billion Cassini mission, funded by NASA and the European and
Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997. It is managed by NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Our food-chain and the "cool-aid" conspiracy

2007-03-01T00:25:00.001-05:00

It is said that upwards of 80% of the food we eat is directly attributed to honey bees as pollinators. We've been hearing for the last few years here it the Maryland bee world that it's the greed of bee keepers that is causing the bees to fall prey to a intestinal mite that attacks their immune systems. Greed that motivates the keepers to take all the honey from a hive before winter sets in - leaving only sugar water as food for the hive to survive till spring. That's the ticket: feed em cool-aid for a few more jars of honey. Not to mention the "Cherry blossom bloom in January" reports you have the a dangerous die off of our most important link in the human food chain.

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril
By Alexei Barrionuevo
New York Times

Visalia, California - David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable.

"I have never seen anything like it," Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. "Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home."

The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.

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Party time as world’s worst car celebrates 50th birthday

2007-02-21T05:08:00.001-05:00

The Trabant, the smoke-spewing communist car whose coughing two-stroke engine has been compared to a death rattle, is celebrating its 50th birthday and east Germans are preparing for a year of nostalgic road pollution.

“We’re calling on Trabi owners everywhere to join in the festivities,” says Katrin Marquardt, of Citynet, the marketing organisation for Dessau, one of several cities planning parties, rallies and exhibitions.

Only Berlin is not paying due tribute to the Cold War relic. It is banning Trabants — 52,432 are still registered — from the centre of the capital. “We all have to make our contribution to preventing climate catastrophe,” a city spokesman said.

His concern is justified. Although its spluttering engine is barely stronger than a lawn-mower, it remains one of the dirtiest small cars ever devised.

The car is a freak. It started to roll off the production lines of East Germany in 1957 as the communists’ answer to the Volkswagen Beetle. That was the year that the Soviet Union launched a Sputnik into space and the two were billed as the onset of a modern, scientifically advanced socialism.

The reality was that the car had primitive brakes, no fuel pump and no oil filter. Instead of a fuel gauge it had a dip-stick. Wise drivers carried not only a spare wheel but also a spare engine.

Because there was a steel shortage, it was made from compressed cotton waste held together with a phenol-based resin. An original plan to build it out of compressed cardboard foundered after the test model was left out in the rain: it was the first soggy car in history.

But despite the flaws, waiting lists for the car ran up to 14 years. As a result it held its value for decades; the trick was to stockpile spare parts.

Now, 17 years after the fall of the East German state and the end of production, there are still 82 Trabi drivers’ clubs across Germany and they are being mobilised for the birthday parties.

One celebrant will be Werner Buhtz, an engineer who bought his first Trabi in 1964. “I remember how the front left wheel fell off as we were taking a corner,” he says. “The whole car threatened to topple to the right and roll on to the roof, so we all threw ourselves to one side to restore the balance. Pas-sers-by, familiar with the situation, held down the car until we could get out.” Then a second wheel fell off.

Such stories these are being collected and will form part of a birthday album for the car which still has a hold on the German soul — even if these days it is more likely to be used as a flower box or chicken coop than to try to go anywhere.

-How do you double the value of a Trabant?

Fill its petrol tank

-How do you treble its value?

Put a banana on the back seat

-How do you make a sports car out of a Trabi?

Put a pair of trainers in the boot

-Why does the Trabi have a heated rear window?

Keeps your hands warm while you push it

-Man in garage: Do you have two windscreen wipers for a Trabi?

Garage-owner thinks long and hard. “OK,” he says at last, “it’s a deal”

-Factory rings lucky East German on Trabi waiting list. “Comrade Schulz, you will get delivery of a Trabant in ten years time, on February 20, 1998”

Schulz: “Morning or afternoon? I have the plumber coming in the morning.”

Humans' beef with livestock: a warmer planet

2007-02-20T15:59:00.001-05:00

American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year.

[Original Article]

As Congress begins to tackle the causes and cures of global warming, the action focuses on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly bovines.

Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. And as meat becomes a growing mainstay of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may prove as hard as changing what we drive.It's not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that's the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems," Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.

The latter two gases are particularly troubling – even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Methane could become a greater problem if the permafrost in northern latitudes thaws with increasing temperatures, releasing the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. What's more certain is that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products.

FEDERAL COURT FINDS USDA ERRED IN APPROVING GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ALFALFA WITHOUT FULL ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW

2007-02-20T13:46:00.001-05:00

Precedent-setting Decision May Block Planting, Sales of Monsanto Alfalfa

Washington, DC (February 14, 2007) - In a
decision handed down yesterday, a Federal Court has ruled, for the
first time ever, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture failed to
abide by federal environmental laws when it approved a genetically
engineered crop without conducting a full Environment Impact Statement
(EIS).

Gathering of the science tribes

2007-02-19T20:27:00.001-05:00

From "How the World Works Column" by Andrew Leonard at Salon.com (Original Article)

Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction

Feb. 16, 2007 - At a press conference in San Francisco on Friday, listening to four distinguished scientists discuss ambitious plans to replace one-third of annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels, it was impossible not to imagine what would have happened if Tad Patzek, the Berkeley chemical engineering professor who is one of the nation's leading critics of biofuels, had been present. Nearly every assertion he made in a lecture I attended at Berkeley in October was directly contradicted.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley Livermore Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs. Ethanol produced via cellulosic technology, said CalTech biologist Mel Simon, who helped develop one of the key technologies employed in DNA sequencing, was just a handful of years away from being cost-competitive with conventional gasoline. The technical problems involved "are just an engineering problem," said Chris Somerville, a Stanford plant biologist who is considered a contender to be the director of the new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley. Not only that, but we can actually increase the current biodiversity and fertility of farmland by correctly introducing new feed stocks into the industrial farming landscape, said Gerry Tuskan, the leader of the team that completed the sequencing of the poplar genome last year.

Study sees harmful hunt for extra oil

2007-02-19T16:10:00.001-05:00

All the world’s extra oil supply is likely to come from expensive and environmentally damaging unconventional sources within 15 years, according to a detailed study.
A report from Wood Mackenzie, the Edinburgh-based consultancy, calculates that the world holds 3,600bn barrels of unconventional oil and gas that need a lot of energy to extract.

So far only 8 per cent of that has begun to be developed, because the world has relied on easier sources of oil and gas.

Only 15 per cent of the 3,600bn is heavy and extra-heavy oil, with the rest being even more challenging.

The study makes clear the shift could come sooner than many people in the industry had expected, even though some major conventional oil fields will still be increasing their production in 2020. Those increases will not be enough to offset the decline at other fields.

more

Mystery dust baffles residents

2007-02-19T15:19:00.001-05:00

Ash-like dust baffles residents

REDMOND, Wash. - Residents around Puget Sound were baffled Sunday when a thin layer of ash-like powder suddenly appeared, coating their cars and homes.

Redmond is just one of the places where people spotted the mystery dust. Residents near Carnation, Gig Harbor and Kingston also reported seeing it.

Dave and Edith Creed of Maple Valley were mystified when they discovered the thin layer of dust coating their truck, SUV and camper. On some surfaces, the dust seems to turn orange and, mixed with some moisture, it formed circles, they said.

Redmond is just one of the places where people spotted the mystery dust. Residents near Carnation, Gig Harbor and Kingston also reported seeing it too.

"We've never seen anything like this," said David Creed.

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Project Earth News

What We Need

Today's Must Read

UN's de Boer says investors tackling global warming while governments spar

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

False Pretenses

Senate Takes Up Indian Health Care Measure Under Veto Threat

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

Petraeus Is Undecided About Deeper Troop Cuts

'Darkest ever' material created

World moves into the ecological red

Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History

Could Time Travel Actually Be Possible?

Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light.

Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible.

Oil report's conclusion: Broad effort needed to satiate energy demand

U.S. leg of Live Earth hits key notes

Armies must ready for global warming role: Britain

'Mile-wide UFO' spotted by British airline pilot

Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for Protecting Classified Information

'Earth Mother getting angry'

Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You

Native hum

As honeybees vanish, farmers turn to the wild pollinators in their back yards

US to Meatpackers: Don't Do Mad Cow Test

Algae Biodiesel May Soon Be Reality

Pentagon Limits Troops' Web Access...

Gore sees 'spiritual crisis' in warming

S Pacific to stop bottom trawling

Memo to media and pundits:

Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

Freeze 'condemned Neanderthals'

Climate change 'can be tackled'

Organism found at SRS amazes scientific world

U.S. memorializes massacre of Native Americans

Poll Finds Majority See Threat in Global Warming

Draft Gore Petition

Study Shows Sudden Sea Level Surges Threaten One Billion

Scientists Levitate Small Animals

Convention Cleanup Includes Pigeon Poop

Government must deal with greenhouse gases: US Supreme Court

The Impact of Logging

Corruption Stains Timber TradeForests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry

By Peter S. Goodman and Peter FinnWashington Post Foreign ServiceSunday, April 1, 2007; Page A01

Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps

World must pay poorer nations to keep forests:

Gore Implores Congress to Save Planet

Another report on the effects of climate change

The Great Channel Four Swindle

Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice "Has Reached Tipping Point"

Bee vanishing act baffles keepers

How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet: A Review

Strong Suspicions of Toxicity in One GMO Corn

It's Expensive to Ignore Global Warming

The Clean Green Bag

Researchers wonder where all the pollinators have gone

BioClimate Buildings

In Defense of Al Gore

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug

Dazzling New Saturn Images Released

Our food-chain and the "cool-aid" conspiracy

Party time as world’s worst car celebrates 50th birthday

Humans' beef with livestock: a warmer planet

American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year.

FEDERAL COURT FINDS USDA ERRED IN APPROVING GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ALFALFA WITHOUT FULL ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW

Gathering of the science tribes

Study sees harmful hunt for extra oil

Mystery dust baffles residents

Corruption Stains Timber Trade

Forests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry

By Peter S. Goodman and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page A01