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Eco-friendly? Environmentalism

Study: Ethanol emissions understated

A new report disputes the purportedly eco-friendly benefits of biofuels like ethanol.



The report out of England shows that biofuels from corn and rapeseed create 50 to 70 percent more greenhouse gases than oil. Corn is the prime crop for biofuel in the U.S. and is used in the production of ethanol.

Scientists from Britain, the U.S., and Germany found that the use of biofuels released twice as much nitrous-oxide as previously realized. And they found that three to five percent of the nitrogen in fertilizer was converted and emitted, compared to the two percent figure used by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change.

Carrie Lukas, vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women's Forum, says the study is another reminder of the need to be cautious when exploring alternatives to oil. "We all are excited about the possibility of things like biofuels, which might make cheaper energy and cleaner energy. But we need to recognize that we are not entirely there yet -- and we need to let the market work and to encourage cleaner and more efficient fuels to come on market," she explains.

Lukas says that this new report highlights the dangers of "putting all of our eggs in one basket." She hopes the new research will prompt lawmakers to slow their push to increase taxpayer subsidies for ethanol production.

"I think it will help us move in the right direction. I think there has been a lot of information that's been coming out about ethanol -- about how it's not as efficient as an energy source, and about the potential environmental effects, not all of which are positive," she points out. All of which, she argues, "has to start giving politicians some pause before they continue this real push towards [subsidizing] ethanol production and to really skewer energy markets towards greater increases in ethanol."

She says it is that unfortunate most legislation in Congress related to renewable fuels involves regulation of the energy industry and greater subsidies for ethanol.

This has become the normal deceptions used in supposed eco-friendly statements and global warming misconceptions. It follows suit with the CFL's that are not eco-friendly and the fact these people are still standing on statistics of temperature increases that have been proven false.

Gore calls for 'global Marshall plan' 
Urges Bush to commit to mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide emissions

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, on Wednesday called for a “Marshall plan” to make job creation and measures to address climate change compatible and urged President George W. Bush to commit to mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

“This is an emergency,” Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. “I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this.”

Mr Gore said Mr Bush should follow the example of former US president Ronald Reagan, who after an initial delay responded to the 1985 discovery of a hole in the ozone layer by supporting a marked reduction in chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

“We have to have a binding reduction on carbon,’’ he said.

Robert Zoellick, the head of the World Bank, sounded a sceptical note on the developing world’s ability and desire to reduce carbon emissions, however. Poorer countries are worried aid is going to be “hijacked” by the climate change agenda, Mr Zoellick said.

Countries such as China and India threaten to become the world’s top producers of carbon dioxide, as they ramp up energy use to feed rampant economic growth. The rapid development of poorer countries is considered by many scientists and economists to be one of the chief challenges in tackling climate change.

“There is some sensitivity in the developing world that resources that can be channelled to climate change will come at the expense of other development needs,” Mr Zoellick said. “It needn’t be that way, it shouldn’t be that way… but it is the responsibility of the developed world to reassure the developing world that it doesn’t come at their expense and instead can come in support of their aims of overcoming poverty.”

“Every place I went, people are very worried that developed countries are going to hijack spending,” he added. “We have to explain how it fits their energy and growth needs.”

Mr Zoellick said the bank could assist developing countries combat climate change through advice in taking part in carbon-trading markets, assisting in accessing technological advances and innovations, but “always putting the focus on development”.

The World Bank estimates that 1.6bn people around the world do not have access to electricity. The developing world currently has a funding gap of around half of the $160bn investment needed annually to fulfil growing demand for electricity, the bank says.

Bill Clinton, the former US president whose organisation is hosting the philanthropic forum for world leaders and top businesses, also called on the World Bank to promote ways of dealing with climate change to the governments it deals with. He argued that the organisation needed to persuade developing countries that they could grow in ways that would alleviate damage to the environment and benefit economic growth.

“We don’t have a right to ask anybody in the world to stay poor, but if you can show them that they can get rich quicker … by pursuing a cleaner energy path… that would be a valuable role for the World Bank,” he said. “People can’t seize options they are not aware of.”

Unfortunately the things they want people to do would actually make them poorer and have more health risks than what is current.

You are completely right. There are all kinds of examples over the years that have resulted in the deaths of many millions. One example is the ban of DDT and the resulting millions who are still dying with Malaria. But, this still hasn't been corrected and probably won't be. People like Al Gore never make mistakes, so it's impossible for them to admit little ones or whoppers. Catalytic converters is another example. We don't know yet how many people eventually die from the deadly poisons they create.

Everything Al Gore says has already been debunked and shown to be completely false, but there's big money involved and it doesn't appear that the Al Gore money machine will be shut down anytime soon. One immediate plus would be for Al Gore to admit what he's done for money and sit down. There are some REAL fixes to the energy crisis, but the irony is that environmentalists block them. Wind energy might make birds mad or hamper Kennedy's view of the golf course. The only thing that matters to Gore is who writes the check.

Dem plan uses taxes to fight climate change 
Includes 50 cents on gasoline, scaling back breaks for some home owners

ealing with global warming will be painful, says one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. To back up his claim he is proposing a recipe many people won't like _ a 50-cent gasoline tax, a carbon tax and scaling back tax breaks for some home owners.

"I'm trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it's going to have a measure of pain that you're not going to like," Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Dingell will offer a "discussion draft" outlining his tax proposals on Thursday, the same day that President Bush holds a two-day conference to discuss voluntary efforts to combat climate change.

But Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that will craft climate legislation, is making it clear that he believes tackling global warming will require a lot more if it is to be taken seriously.

"This is going to cause pain," he said, adding that he wants to make certain "the pain is shared in a way that is fair, proper, acceptable and accomplishes the basic purpose" of reducing greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

Dingell said he's not sure what the final climate package will include when the House takes it up for a vote. The taxes measures he's proposing, in fact, will be taken up by another House committee. And the Senate is considering a market-based system that would set an economy-wide ceiling on the amount of carbon dioxide that would be allowed to be released.

Dingell says he hasn't rule out such a so-called "cap-and-trade" system, either, but that at least for now he wants to float what he believes is a better idea. He will propose for discussion:

_A 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and jet fuel, phased in over five years, on top of existing taxes.

_A tax on carbon, at $50 a ton, released from burning coal, petroleum or natural gas.

_Phaseout of the interest tax deduction on home mortgages for homes over 3,000 square feet. Owners would keep most of the deduction for homes at the lower end of the scale, but it would be eliminated entirely for homes of 4,200 feet or more.

He estimates that would affect 10 percent of homeowners. He says "it's only fair" to tax those who buy large suburban houses and create urban sprawl. Historic and farm houses would be exempted.

Some of the revenue would be used to reduce payroll taxes, but most would go elsewhere including for highway construction, mass transit, paying for Social Security and health programs and to help the poor pay energy bills.

In the interview Wednesday, Dingell acknowledged he's tackling some of the most sacred of political cows. He's not sure if they will end up in the climate legislation, but he wants to open them for discussion.

"All my friends tell me you can't do this, it's going to be political poison," said Dingell, 81, who has served longer in the House than any of his colleagues and heads one of the chamber's most powerful committees.

Widely known for protecting the automakers who are so prominent in his state, the Michigan Democrat first raised the tax ideas this summer. Some people immediately suggested he was offering proposals he knows won't pass to sidestep other issues such as automobile fuel economy increases.

Dingell rejects such criticism and said he wants to trigger "an intelligent discussion of the whole question."

Many economists have long maintained that a carbon tax is a more-efficient, less-bureaucratic way to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide than a cap-and-trade system, which could be difficult to administer.

A carbon tax would impact everything from the cost of electricity to winter heating and add to the cost of gasoline and other motor fuels. But economists say a cap on carbon also would raise these costs as burning fossil fuels becomes more expensive.

Such tax proposals have gained little traction.

Rep. Pete Starke, D-Calif., has been trying unsuccessfully to get a carbon tax for 16 years. In the early 1990s the House passed a modest "BTU" tax on the heat content of fuels, only to have it die in the Senate. Dingell acknowledged that there are still people who blame the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994 on the ill-fated tax.

The federal 18.4-cent gasoline tax also has been a subject of discussion, but not about increasing it. As gasoline prices soared above $3 a gallon last year a chorus of lawmakers called for suspending the tax.

Yep, the democrats are all for the poor people. All for making them poorer and making it harder for them to get out of the grips of poverty and government controlling their every move.

This just shows all the more what the true agenda is of democrats on the global warming issue.

Bush changes tune on climate change 
Rice: World must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet

The world must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet, Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, told a meeting of governments on Thursday, in the most strongly worded statement on global warming yet made by the US administration.

She told representatives of 16 governments gathered for talks on climate change in Washington: “It is our responsibility as global leaders to forge a new international consensus on how to solve climate change . . . If we stay on our present path, we face an unacceptable choice: either we sacrifice global economic growth to secure the health of our planet or we sacrifice the health of our planet to continue with fossil-fuelled growth.”

She asked the governments present, which account for more than 80 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, to agree a long-term goal on emissions reduction, establish mid-term targets for the same and to help develop markets for low-carbon technologies.

Her words reflected how far US rhetoric on climate change has moved in the past six months.

President George W. Bush, who rejected the Kyoto protocol, had previously called into question the state of scientific knowledge on global warming, and the US has been seen by other governments as holding up progress on international talks.

His decision to host a meeting of big emitters took the world by surprise.The two-day meeting, which finishes on Friday, is intended to be the first in a series whose conclusions will next year be included in the United Nations process on finding a successor to the Kyoto protocol when its main provisions expire in 2012.

Despite the newly warm rhetoric on the climate, however, stark differences remain between the US and other countries which are unlikely to be resolved in this meeting. For instance, the US did not table a proposal for what the long-term goal on emissions cuts should be, suggesting that it sees the issue of emissions targets as contentious.

Yvo de Boer, executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the Financial Times: “It’s difficult to organise a meeting to ask others to come up with proposals but not make one yourself.”

Mr de Boer said that despite differences, the US decision to hold a meeting was “a very useful, positive contribution” to international progress on tackling climate change.

He told the meeting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened body of the world’s leading climate scientists, had concluded that emissions needed to peak in 10-15 years and be halved by 2050, compared with 1990 levels.

Another point of contention is whether reduction goals should be set by international treaty, such as a successor to the Kyoto protocol, or at a national level.

Ms Rice indicated that goals on emissions cuts should be set at a national level rather than being international in scope.

She said: “Every country will make its own decisions, reflecting its own needs and its own interests [and] tackle climate change in the ways that they deem best”.

The US also favours voluntary targets for cuts rather than legally binding commitments.

But the UN argues that the best way to cut emissions is through a market in carbon dioxide, which would put a price on emissions and enable poor countries to gain access to finance for clean technology, and which, for its proper working, would require medium- and long-term legally binding commitments to cut emissions.

“Voluntary targets are a waste of time,” Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a US lobby group, said.

Study: CO2 didn't end ice age 
Counters major premise of global-warming theory

A new peer-reviewed scientific study counters a major premise of global warming theory, concluding carbon dioxide did not end the last ice age

The study, led by University of Southern California geologist Lowell Stott, concluded deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before the rise in atmospheric CO2, which would rule out the greenhouse gas as the main agent of the meltdown.

"There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change," said Stott. "You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."

The study will be published in the next issue of Science magazine.

Another new study published in Science refutes the "Hockey Stick" temperature graph, used by man-made global warming theorists such as former Vice President Al Gore to argue for a recent spike in average global temperature after centuries of relative stability.

Stott's new study suggests the rise in greenhouse gas likely was a result of warming. It may have accelerated the meltdown, he says, but was not its main cause.

He cautioned that the study does not discount the role of CO2.

"I don't want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn't affect climate," he said. "It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change."

Stott's collaborators were Axel Timmermann of the University of Hawaii and Robert Thunell of the University of South Carolina. Stott, an expert in paleoclimatology, was a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.-commissioned group that has published reports blaming warming on human sources.

Stott's study found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increased springtime solar radiation over Antarctica, suggesting this might be the energy source.

The authors' model also showed how changed ocean conditions could have been responsible for the release of CO2 from the ocean into the atmosphere, also accelerating the warming.

The scientists derived their results from a study of a unique sediment core from the western Pacific composed of fossilized surface-dwelling and bottom-dwelling organisms. The organisms incorporate different isotopes of oxygen into their shells depending on the temperature, enabling the researchers to reconstruct deep and surface ocean temperatures over time.

If CO2 caused the warming, surface temperatures should increase before deep-sea temperatures. But the scientists found the water used by the bottom-dwelling organisms began warming about 1,300 years before the water used by the surface-dwelling ones.

"The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms," Stott said. The complexities "have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future."

I never cease to be amazed that scientist rarely consider GOD'S CREATION:

Trends of the Sun and natural events controlled by GOD on the Sun and other planets, including Earth.

Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, water movements, jet stream movements, and other natural events that only GOD has control of.

It's really silly for scientists to believe that mankind can control GOD'S CREATION. I'm not hinting that mankind should abuse GOD'S CREATION, rather that GOD is still in CHARGE and HE always will be!

That would be to admit that they are wrong and that they do not have the control over all things, that they are not God.

Al Gore's fans make 2008 draft pitch 
Full-page letter in N.Y. Times: 'America and the Earth need a hero'

Draftgore.com, which describes itself as a group of grass-roots Democrats, underwrote a full-page open letter to Al Gore in Wednesday's New York Times, imploring the former vice president to enter the presidential campaign.

The ad, which says 136,000 people have signed Draftgore's online petition, was published two days before this year's Nobel Peace Prize is expected to be announced. Gore has been nominated for the prize because of his campaign to bring attention to global warming.

"America and the Earth need a hero right now—someone who will transcend politics as usual and bring real hope to our country and to the world," Draftgore's letter said.

Monica Friedlander, founder and chair of Draftgore.com, said the timing of the $65,000 ad was a coincidence and not related to the prize.

"All we're trying to do is persuade him that it's a moral imperative for him to be a candidate," said Friedlander, 47, a public relations specialist in Oakland, Calif. She said the group raised the money for the ad with an e-mail solicitation sent out last week, receiving more than 2,000 donations.

Although Gore has said he has no intention of becoming a presidential candidate, several groups around the country are trying to persuade him to enter the race.

"He deeply appreciates the heartfelt sentiment behind this ad and understands where this comes from, but he has no intention of running for president," said Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider.

As the Democratic nominee in 2000, Gore won the general election popular vote but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush after a legal challenge to the Florida result that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since then, the former Tennessee senator has worked against global warming and served on corporate boards, including Google and Apple Inc.

Looking in all the wrong places.

Judge: Gore film requires guidance notes 
Ruling aims to prevent political indoctrination in schools

A judge on Wednesday ruled that Al Gore's award winning climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" should only be shown in schools with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.

High Court judge Michael Burton's decision follows legal action brought by a father of two last month claiming the former US vice-president's film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush".

Stewart Dimmock wanted to block the government's pledge to send more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales a DVD of the documentary to demonstrate the need to fight global warming.

Judge Burton said the Oscar-winning film should be accompanied by government guidance notes and to distribute it without them would breach education laws prohibiting the promotion of unbalanced political viewpoints.

But the victory was only partial, as Dimmock failed to get the film totally banned from schools.

The lorry driver said after the case that he was "elated", but disappointed he had not secured an outright ban.

"If it was not for the case brought by myself, our young people would still be being indoctrinated with this political spin," he told reporters.

Dimmock is a member of the New Party, a fringe political organisation which describes itself as "a party of economic liberalism, political reform and internationalism."

Its supporters include industrialists and small- and medium-sized businesses. The party accepts climate change is a major issue but says the argument that it is man-made is not unequivocal.

Instead, it argues for developing new technologies, building new nuclear power stations and providing "positive incentives" for developing countries to support cleaner technologies.

If that is the aim then this film needs to be left out of schools altogether because the entire film has nothing to do with anything but political indoctrination.

Amen!

This is little more than the schools participating in lies and HUGE political fraud. The stakes are over 6 billion dollars, and that would be a beginning figure.

Gore, U.N. panel share Nobel for peace 
For efforts to spread awareness of 'man-made climate change'

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it.

Gore, who won an Academy Award earlier this year for his film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," had been widely tipped to win the prize.

He said that global warming was not a political issue but a worldwide crisis.

"We face a true planetary emergency. ... It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity," he said. "It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

The win is also likely add further fuel to a burgeoning movement in the United States for Gore to run for president in 2008, which he has so far said he does not plan to do.

Kenneth Sherrill, a political scientist at Hunter College in New York said Gore probably enjoys being a public person more than an elected official.

"He seems happier and liberated in the years since his loss in 2000. Perhaps winning the Nobel and being viewed as a prophet in his own time will be sufficient," says Sherrill.

Two Gore advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to share his thinking, said the award will not make it more likely that he will seek the presidency. If anything, the Peace Prize makes the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race less appealing to Gore, they said, because now he has a huge, international platform to fight global warming and may not want to do anything to diminish it.

One of the advisers said that while Gore is unlikely to rule out a bid in the coming days, the prospects of the former vice president entering the fray in 2008 are "extremely remote."

In its citation, the committed lauded Gore's "strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the prize committee, said the award should not be seen as singling out the Bush administration for criticism.

"A peace prize is never a criticism of anything. A peace prize is a positive message and support to all those champions of peace in the world."

Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol because he said it would harm the U.S. economy and because it did not require immediate cuts by countries like China and India. The treaty aimed to put the biggest burden on the richest nations that contributed the most carbon emissions.

The U.S. Senate voted against mandatory carbon reductions before the Kyoto negotiations were completed. The treaty was never presented to the Senate for ratification by the Clinton Administration.

"Al Gore has fought the environment battle even as vice president," Mjoes said. "Many did not listen ... but he carried on."

Gore supporters have been raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for petition drives and advertising in an effort to lure him into the Democratic presidential primaries. One group, Draftgore.com, ran a full-page open letter to Gore in Wednesday's New York Times, imploring him to get into the race.

Gore, 59, has been coy, saying repeatedly he's not running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, without ever closing that door completely.

He was the Democratic nominee in 2000 and won the general election popular vote. However, Gore lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush after a legal challenge to the Florida result that was decided by the Supreme Court.

Gore called the award meaningful because of his co-winner, calling the IPCC the "world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis."

Gore said he planned to donate his share of the prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan nonprofit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

The last American to win the prize, or share it, was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who won it 2002.

The committee cited the IPCC for its two decades of scientific reports that have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming."

It went on to say that because of the panel's efforts, global warming has been increasingly recognized. In the 1980s it "seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent."

"It was a surprise," said Carola Traverso Saibante, spokeswoman for the IPCC. "We would have been happy even if (Gore) had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue."

But some questioned the prize decision.

"Awarding it to Al Gore cannot be seen as anything other than a political statement. Awarding it to the IPCC is well-founded," said Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

He criticized Gore's film as having "some very obvious mistakes, like the argument that we're going to see six meters of sea-level rise," he said.

"They (Nobel committee) have a unique platform in getting people's attention on this issue, and I regret they have used it to make a political statement."

This year, climate change has been at the top of the world agenda. The U.N. climate panel has been releasing its reports; talks on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate are set to resume; and on Europe's northern fringe, where the awards committee works, concern about the melting Arctic has been underscored by this being the International Polar Year.

Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said the prize would help to continue the globally growing awareness of climate change.

"Their contributions to the prevention of climate change have raised awareness all over the world. Their work has been an inspiration for politicians and citizens alike," he said in a statement.

In recent years, the Norwegian committee has broadened its interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts outlined by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in creating the prize with his 1895 will. The prize now often also recognizes human rights, democracy, elimination of poverty, sharing resources and the environment.

"We believe that the Nobel Committee has shown great courage by so clearly connecting the climate problems with peace," said Truls Gulowsen, head of environmental group Greenpeace Norway.

The Nobel Prizes each bestow a gold medal, a diploma and a $1.5 million cash prize on the winner.

and on and on and on ....

Boy was that ever an understatement.   :D :D :D :D

In another news article the following was reported:


He contradicts himself here as he says it is not a political issue and then he uses the statement "lift global consciousness to a higher level" which terminology used frequently to indicate a one world government.

I’m with the Czech President on this:

 ???    ???


All I can say is YUCK! - NO DOUBLE YUCK!

Think tank to Academy: Withdraw Gore's Oscar 
Cites court decision pointing out 11 inaccuracies, situation like sports stars found to be 'cheats'

On the eve of Al Gore's award of the Nobel Peace Prize, a think tank wrote the president of the Academy Awards asking that the Oscar given to his film "An Inconvenient Truth" be taken back in response to a British High Court ruling that found 11 serious inaccuracies in the documentary.

Muriel Newman, director of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, told Academy President Sid Ganis and Executive Director Bruce Davis "the situation is not unlike that confronting sports bodies when their sports stars are found to be drug cheats."

"In such cases, the sportsmen and women are stripped of their medals and titles, with the next place-getter elevated," she said, according the Australian Associated Press. "While this is an extremely unpleasant duty, it is necessary if the integrity of competitive sport is to be protected.

British High Court judge Michael Burton ruled Wednesday Gore's documentary should be shown in British schools only with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination. The decision followed a lawsuit by a father, Stewart Dimmock, who claimed the film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush."

(Story continues below)

The Nobel panel announced today Gore won the peace prize along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their efforts to spread awareness of "man-made climate change" and to lay the foundations for fighting it.

But Newman, the AAP reported, pointed to the British ruling, which requires teachers to tell students of 11 inaccuracies in Gore's film.

"The truth, as inconvenient as it is to Al Gore, is that his so-called documentary contained critical distortions that are quite contrary to the principles of good documentary journalism," Newman said. "Good documentaries should be factually correct. Clearly this documentary is not."

Gore's movie required viewing for city employees 
Lawmakers blast 'political propaganda': 'This is about wasting taxpayer dollars'

Some of the first City of Albuquerque employees required to view excerpts from Al Gore's movie on global warming as part of a mandatory morning-long seminar on energy efficiency are telling elected officials they feel like they were forced to watch "political propaganda."

"An Inconvenient Truth," considered scientifically suspect and alarmist by its critics, won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary and paved the way for the former U.S. vice president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday.

This week's Albuquerque seminar, the first planned for the city's 6,500 employees, was held for blue-collar and clerical workers. The session ran from 8:30 a.m. to noon and included about 50 minutes of excerpts from the Gore movie.

"I think it's probably a waste of employees' time," City Councilor Sally Mayer, a Republican, told the Albuquerque Journal.

A constituent who is also a city employee called her to complain.

"He was livid, and he said, 'I can't believe they took three and half hours of my morning and made me watch the movie,'" Mayer said.

Mayer was not alone in fielding complaints from angry employees.

"I had no idea about it until I got a call from a city employee who was absolutely outraged he had to sit in on a political propaganda videotape from Al Gore," Councilor Brad Winter told the Albuquerque Tribune. "It's totally ridiculous to me. It's a waste of time and taxpayer money."

Council President Debbie O'Malley also said she received calls over the mandatory viewing.

Defending the sessions was Mayor Martin Chavez who said the training seminars were meant to help employees learn how to use energy in city buildings more efficiently.

The controversy over the mandatory seminars comes the same week a British judge identified 11 errors in "An Inconvenient Truth" that must be identified with a disclaimer before the Gore movie can be used in British classrooms. WND reported a New Zealand think tank has written the president of the Academy Awards asking that the Oscar given to the film be taken back in response to the ruling.

Patricia Miller, the city's director of human resources, said 40 minutes of the Gore film were edited out so employees would see only the "scientific portions." Miller said her staff developed the "lesson plan" with the goal of giving workers background in the science of global warming.

"We're not trotting them in there to watch an entire movie. It is a piece of their training followed by a presentation on the city's programs that are available to everyone," Miller said. "We then go into breakout sessions and work with the employees and generate their ideas on how they can make a difference in their work environment."

Although attendance at the sessions are identified as mandatory, Miller said any employee who had a problem could opt out without any repercussions.

"If somebody had a huge issue with the whole concept or the philosophy, we wouldn't force them to go through it," Miller told the Tribune. "What would be the point?"

Councilor Mayer linked showing of the movie to the mayor's political ambitions. Chavez is currently a frontrunner for the Democrat U.S. Senate nomination in New Mexico.

"I believe this is so the mayor can say he's the first mayor to have all the city workers attend a sustainability conference," charged Mayer. "This isn't a partisan issue. This is about wasting taxpayer dollars."

The mayor disagreed.

"The only political part about climate change is the unwillingness of some in Washington to recognize climate change," replied Chavez. "We'll go with the scientific facts and the cost savings. We'll leave the politics to everybody else."

Chavez's endorsement of the seminars to save electricity was backed by Councilor Martin Heinrich, who is seeking the Democrat nomination in the 1st Congressional District.

"Even if you're willing to put your head in the sand on this issue, it makes good fiscal sense," Heinrich said.

I have no problem at all with trying to be nice to the environment and lowering fuel use. My problem is the total pack of lies from Al Gore. It's not about global warming, rather about over 6 billion dollars in taxpayer's money. Al Gore and his so-called scientific proof for global warming and what causes it have already been debunked as lies. Any person without an education at all could spend a few minutes and come up with BETTER AND MORE ACCURATE ANSWERS THAN AL GORE HAS!

Media's 'Saint Al' mantle consistent with promotion of Gore's agenda, says watchdog

A conservative media watchdog says the recent coverage of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize demonstrates the religious fervor of the left when it comes to the former vice president's global warming agenda.

Dan Gainor directs the Business & Media Institute of the Media Research Center. He has testified before Congress on the media's one-sided coverage of global warming, and has followed the media's campaigning for Gore's political cause from the very beginning. Gainor calls Gore a messianic figure to the left.

"They've called him everything from a 'prophet' to what The Washington Post called him on Saturday: 'Saint Al.' They are definitely laying the groundwork for him .... What that means for ordinary Americans is we're all going to pay for it -- and I mean quite literally, it's going to come out of our wallets," he states.

And Gainor says while Gore is out to push his global warming agenda on hard-working Americans, the former VP is not saying a word to countries like China. "Al is a big proponent not just of global warming but of government intervention, at least American government intervention -- not foreign governments, because he doesn't want China or some other countries to do anything to lift a finger. But he wants Americans to pay big-time -- like mandating what light bulbs you can use," says the media watchdog.

Gainor says Gore received the same kind of adoring media coverage leading up to his Oscar award for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He says the Nobel Peace Prize win is "essentially a political award from a bunch of foreign lefties who want to stick their thumb in the eye of America."

Roger Harrabin, BBC “Environment Analyst”, claimed that Al Gore was “an environmental science graduate” in a recent BBC article.

I have found the following summary of Gore’s science education:

Mr. Gore’s high school performance on the college board achievement tests in physics (488 out of 800 “terrible,” St. Albans retired teacher and assistant headmaster John Davis told The Post) and chemistry (519 out of 800 “He didn’t do too well in chemistry,” Mr. Davis observed) suggests that Mr. Gore would have trouble with science for the rest of his life. At Harvard and Vanderbilt, Mr. Gore continued bumbling along.

As a Harvard sophomore, scholar Al “earned” a D in Natural Sciences 6 in a course presciently named “Man’s Place in Nature.” That was the year he evidently spent more time smoking cannabis than studying its place among other plants within the ecosystem. His senior year, Mr. Gore received a C+ in Natural Sciences 118….

Another attempt to validate Gore's credibility in the global warming arena and a poor one at that.

Gore graduated in Government, in fact. If anything Gore's education shows that his agenda is purely political.

Al Gore is a rejected carnival act by people with any common sense, but we must remember that big politics and big money is involved. Average and poor people are the ones who are most likely to be hurt with his agenda if it is adopted, and it will do absolutely NOTHING except spend money and put a big grin on the faces of the extreme left. It's almost impossible to imagine that someone got the Nobel Peace Prize for this kind of con game, but we must remember that Arafat also got the Nobel Peace Prize. So, Al Gore is in fine company. I will have to say that Al Gore deserved the recognition from Hollywood but not for a documentary - ACTING! BUT, I don't know if our representatives have the common sense to reject Al's load of baloney, and this is some expensive baloney.

John Stossel Exposes Global Warming Myths

 "20/20” co-anchor John Stossel is going on the attack against “experts” who warn about manmade global warming – along the way berating Al Gore for saying the debate over climate change is over.

In a release from ABC previewing Stossel’s report on Friday’s “20/20,” the veteran newsman and Newsmax pundit – who won 19 Emmys exposing scammers and con artists – says:

“This week on ‘20/20’ (in our new 8 p.m. Eastern time slot) I say ‘Give Me a Break!’ to our Nobel Prize-winning Vice President.

“Mr. Gore says ‘The debate is over,’ and those who disagree with his take on global warming have been ‘purchased’ in order to create ‘the illusion of a debate.’ Nonsense. It's as if the Vice President and his allies in the environmental movement plan to win the debate through intimidation. I interview some scientists who won't be intimidated, even though one has had his life threatened for speaking up.

“The Vice President's much-applauded movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ claims warming is man’s fault and a coming crisis! While the earth has certainly warmed over the last century, plenty of independent scientists say scientists cannot be sure that man caused the warming or that warming will be a crisis.

“They say the computer models that are used to predict the disasters don’t include important variables because scientists don’t fully understand them. For example, warming may cause cloud formations that reflect sun and cool the earth. The computer models cannot know. These scientists call global warming activism more of a religious movement than science.”

Gore's film is filled with “misleading messages,” says Stossel.

“It suggests polar bears are disappearing and that ‘sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet.’ I interview children who are scared. They believe the polar bears are already going extinct and that the oceans will soon rise even higher than 20 feet, drowning them and their parents.

“But polar bear populations appear to be steady or increasing, and a 20-foot rise is a theoretical possibility that wouldn't happen for millennia. The IPCC, the group that shared last week’s Nobel Prize with the Vice President, says in 100 years the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches, not 20 feet. Now a British judge has ruled that British schools must disclose to students nine inaccuracies in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ if they play the movie in class.”

Stossel said it’s “nonsense” for Gore to suggest that we can stop global warming by doing things like changing light bulbs and driving less.

“The only practical thing we can do today that would make a difference in CO2 output is to launch a major shift toward nuclear energy. But the environmental movement rarely utters the word nuclear.

“I suspect that next year's government boondoggle will be massive spending on carbon-reducing technology.

“It reminds me of George Mason University Economics Department Chairman Don Boudreax's suggestion that such schemes really mean ‘government seizing enormous amounts of additional power in order to embark upon schemes of social engineering - schemes whose pursuit gratifies the abstract fantasies of the theory class and, simultaneously, lines the very real pockets of politically powerful corporations, organizations, and “experts."’

“He is so right. The abstract fantasies of the theory class will soon send huge chunks of your money to politicians, friends, activist scientists, and politically savvy corporations.

“The debate is over? That makes me say GIVE ME A BREAK!”

note: The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They are assigned by governmental agencies. Some of the IPCC leading staff are not even scientists but rather activists some of which belong or used to belong to Greenpeace. If the IPCC said global warming is wrong then the IPCC would be closed down with all funding removed since it would no longer be necessary to have such an organization.

Global warming to blame for fires, says Harry Reid
To astonishment of reporters, Senate majority leader makes link

Is there a political angle to the wildfires raging through Southern California?

You betcha – at least according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said global warming is at least partly responsible for the blazes.

"One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming," the Nevada Democrat told reporters, emphasizing the need to pass the Democrats' comprehensive energy package.

Pressed by astonished reporters on whether he really believed global warming caused the fires, he appeared to back away from his comments, saying there are many factors that contributed to the disaster.

Meanwhile, President Bush has declared a state of emergency in California and sent Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator David Paulison to San Diego to assess the situation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would consider sending more aid to California.

"So far, [state officials] have been able to avail themselves of whatever is available from the federal government," the Northern California Democrat said. "We may have to expand on that as the fires continue to rage."

The California congressional delegation is reportedly drafting a resolution expressing Congress' support for the first responders and pledging to make resources available to help stop the fires.

 ;D   ;D   ;D   WOW! Reid never ceases to amaze me. I've watched him several times on news spots recently and would reach a quick conclusion:  He doesn't lie very well, so he desperately needs acting lessons.

Here is a prime example of what the education system has been producing since they took God out and put monkeys in the curriculum.

Yep  ...  donkeys in Congress.

 :D :D :D :D

 :D :D :D  Now you're cracking me up!  I actually laughed out loud on that one ,with customers sitting in my lobby!  :D :D :D

 ;D ;D

Biofuels 'crime against humanity'
By Grant Ferrett
BBC News

A United Nations expert has condemned the growing use of crops to produce biofuels as a replacement for petrol as a crime against humanity.

The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said he feared biofuels would bring more hunger.

The growth in the production of biofuels has helped to push the price of some crops to record levels.

Mr Ziegler's remarks, made at the UN headquarters in New York, are clearly designed to grab attention.

He complained of an ill-conceived dash to convert foodstuffs such as maize and sugar into fuel, which created a recipe for disaster.

Food price rises

It was, he said, a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel.

He called for a five-year ban on the practice.

 Within that time, according to Mr Ziegler, technological advances would enable the use of agricultural waste, such as corn cobs and banana leaves, rather than crops themselves to produce fuel.

The growth in the production of biofuels has been driven, in part, by the desire to find less environmentally-damaging alternatives to oil.

The United States is also keen to reduce its reliance on oil imported from politically unstable regions.

But the trend has contributed to a sharp rise in food prices as farmers, particularly in the US, switch production from wheat and soya to corn, which is then turned into ethanol.

Mr Ziegler is not alone in warning of the problem.

The IMF last week voiced concern that the increasing global reliance on grain as a source of fuel could have serious implications for the world's poor.

Biofuels 'crime against humanity' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7065061.stm)

The move is on to use sweet-stalk sorghum instead of corn. It’s earhead produces grain,
which can be used for making bread, its sweet stem has nearly the same amount of sugar as in
sugarcane and hence the juice can be fermented and used for ethanol production. The bagasse,
left after juice extraction, together with leaves is an excellent fodder for animals. Thus from the
same piece of land one can get food, fuel and fodder. No other crop gives all these three things
together. Besides sweet sorghum uses nearly 50% less water than sugarcane to produce the same
amount of sugar and is a 4-month crop so farmers can grow two crops/year from the same piece
of land. Sorghum can also be grown on less fertile soil than corn or sugar cane and can be grown in conjunction with other crops. Sorghum is also excellent for putting more nutrients back into the soil than is taken out of it by other crops. Also the energy output/input ratio of producing ethanol from sweet sorghum is very positive. Thus about four times more energy is produced by burning ethanol from sweet sorghum than goes in its growing and production. This in effect would solve the problem that is in mentioned in that article. Farmers would make more money as would the processing plants and there would not be a problem with a food shortage.

Besides that it has been proven that ethonal produced from sugar cane and corn produces more CO2 than gas, diesel fuel or oil.

Forecasters Blow It, Again: '07 Hurricane season may rank as most 'inactive' in 30 years...

 2007 Yearly Tropical Cyclone Activity to Date

 Unless a dramatic and historical flurry of activity occurs in the next 9 weeks, 2007 will rank as a  historically inactive TC year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date (January-TODAY, Accumulated Cyclone Energy). For the North Atlantic basin, Tropical Storm Noel is currently too weak to impact any of these results. However, one should always be prepared for late-season developments since hurricane season ends on November 30.

For the period of June 1 - TODAY, only 1977 has experienced LESS tropical cyclone activity than 2007.
There are currently two worldwide tropical cyclones: Tropical Storm Noel and Unnamed Arabian Sea TS...

The North Atlantic hurricane season is currently nearly 30% below normal in terms of a well-known activity metric called ACE. While the number of named storms is above normal, their integrated intensity has not matched the hyper-active expectations of many seasonal forecasters (e.g. NOAA 140-200% above median). The Eastern Pacific off the western coast of Mexico is also experiencing record inactivity. NOAA Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook Update

Note: on average to date (1970-2006), the Eastern Pacific season is 97% completed, Western Pacific 82%, North Atlantic 93% and overall Northern Hemisphere 87%.

Dreamweaver!  You crack me up with that little dog laughing all the time!
Cheers!

Better to be cracked up, then a cracked egg.................... ;D ;D ;D

Hahahahahaha!  Love your humor!  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash'
U.N. environmental chief warns against producing more CO2 than negated

The biofuels bonanza will crash unless producers can guarantee their crops have been produced responsibly, the UN's environment agency chief has said.

Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said there was an urgent need for standards to make sure rainforests weren't being destroyed.

Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News.

Critics say biofuels will lead to food shortages and destroy rainforests.

They point to the destruction of Indonesia's peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly.

The swamps are one the richest stores of carbon on the planet and they are being burned to produce palm oil.

Mr Steiner implied that because of Indonesia's inability to police its land use, biofuels from palm oil grown by the nation might never be deemed to be sustainable.

But he said some biofuels could be considered sustainable. He highlighted ethanol production in Brazil, and a dry land crop called jatropha, which is resistant to pests and droughts.

Mr Steiner urged investors not to turn their backs on developing second or third generation fuels that would use non-food crops and burnable waste.

He feared that beneficial biofuels might be lost as part of a consumer backlash.

Mr Steiner made his comments in response to criticism from a group of independent scientists who said they had written to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) complaining that the climate body's comments on biofuels have been naive.

The independent scientists pointed to two phrases in reports by the IPPC, of which Unep is a co-sponsor, which the scientists said could not be substantiated.

One stated that biofuels were an effective solution in at least a number of countries, while the other suggested that biofuels in the transport sector would generally have positive social and environmental benefits.

False economy

One of the scientists, Tad Patzek from University of California Berkeley, US, said: "In the long-run, the planet cannot afford to produce biofuels because we're going to run out of the land and water and environmental resources.

"In addition, because of the land use changes, drying up peat-swamps, burning tropical forest, these biofuels involve up-front enormous emissions of greenhouse gases that will never be recouped by their later use," he told BBC News.

Professor Patzek also doubted Mr Steiner's confidence in Brazilian ethanol. "The [IPCC] description of Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol production as 'highly advanced' and 'a model' is somewhat of an exaggeration.

"It's neither good nor a model," he said.

Brazilian producers are adamant that their bio-crops are not grown on rainforest land - but the environmental group Friends of the Earth Brazil claim that peasant farmers - dispossessed by biofuel conglomerates - are moving to the Amazon to seek new land.

Mr Steiner said Brazil had enough land to ensure that biofuel cropping could be sustainable.

The group of scientists said their letter to the head of the IPCC, Professor Pachauri, had not been answered.

BBC News has not been able to obtain a comment from Professor Pachauri, though this may be hardly surprising given that the final summit on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (A4R) is currently underway in Valencia, Spain.

Mr Steiner said Unep had set up a high-level task force to study the life-cycle implications of all biofuels. The group is expected to publish its findings next year.

By then much of the Indonesian peat swamps - one of the most valuable stores of carbon in the world - will have been torched.

The only way of stopping may not be through the UN or the Indonesian government, but through one or more private philanthropist with a burning desire to own an Indonesian swamp.

Heather Mills: Drink rat's milk to save planet 
Paul McCartney's ex-wife pushes alternatives to dairy products from cows

Heather Mills has urged the nation's latte drinkers to fight global warming – by switching to rats' or cats' milk instead.

Sir Paul McCartney's estranged wife made another pitch for attention yesterday, delivering a sermon from Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park.

But this time she was not preaching about landmines – or the ex-Beatle – but urging people to move towards a vegan diet, to help 'save the planet'.

She and animal rights' charity Viva! say meat and especially dairy products are causing huge damage to the environment by boosting global warming.

Viva! says livestock is the second largest source of greenhouse gases, producing 18 per cent of global emissions, due to the impact of deforestation.

This is more than the 13.5 per cent from all the world's transport modes combined.

Their claims are based on a recent report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

But even as she delivered her eco-message in Hyde Park, her gas-guzzling Mercedes 4x4 sat with the engine running and piles of Selfridges carrier bags in the back.

Mills, who announced her conversion to veganism in May, said: 'It's mad that we are having cows' milk. Even cows don't drink it after [the age of] one year, but we continue for ever.'

She told her Hyde Park audience of campaigners, journalists and bemused tourists: 'There are fields and fields of grain just miles from starving children in Africa being shipped to Europe to feed our livestock.

'There are 25 alternative milks available in health shops and supermarkets. Why do we not drink rats', cats' or dogs' milk?'

Mills said she was turned on to the benefits of giving up cows' milk lattes by Ethiopian famine survivor Birhan Woldu, who was pictured starving in 1984 but appeared healthily on the Live 8 stage two years ago.

She said she did not expect people to become vegan overnight but suggested that they 'cut down on one or two meat and dairy and fish dishes a week'.

'If everyone went vegan, which in 20, 30, 40 or 50 years could happen, there would be no such thing as starvation and famine,' she added.

I think this person has been standing on her head for too long.

Natural disasters quadruple in 2 decades 
British study largely blames events on global warming

More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming.

"Oxfam... says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled," the organisation said, adding that the world's poorest people were being hit the hardest.

The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report.

"This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people," noted Oxfam director Barbara Stocking.

"This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people."

She added: "Action is needed now to prepare for more disasters otherwise humanitarian assistance will be overwhelmed and recent advances in human development will go into reverse."

The number of people affected by extreme natural disasters, meanwhile, has surged by almost 70 percent, from 174 million a year between 1985 to 1994, to 254 million people a year between 1995 to 2004, Oxfam said.

Floods and wind-storms have increased from 60 events in 1980 to 240 last year, with flooding itself up six-fold.

But the number of geothermal events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, has barely changed.

Oxfam urged Western governments to push hard for a deal on climate change at a key international meeting that runs December 3-14 on the Indonesian island of Bali.

Rich Western nations and the United Nations must act to "make humanitarian aid faster, fairer and more flexible and to improve ways to prepare for and reduce the risk of disasters," it said.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali aims to see countries agree to launch a roadmap for negotiating cuts in climate-changing carbon emissions from 2012.

The Oxfam study was compiled using data from the Red Cross, the United Nations and specialist researchers at Louvain University in Belgium.

 ;D  YES - The story on Heather Mills is outrageous and shows the ultimate hypocrisy. Her recommendations for alternative milk sources is all over the news, especially the rat's milk. If someone finds me worried about this, please slap me up side the head and wake me up. If you catch me drinking rat's milk, please call the white coats to take me away. This is almost as ridiculous as Al Gore's global warming baloney.

YES - the natural disasters are getting wild, but there just might be another reason for it. If these are the last days of this age, GOD said things like this would happen. Further, things will get much worse.

More churches preaching 'environmental gospel'

In a growing number of churches, salvation means saving the Earth.

A movement called Interfaith Power and Light offers ministers sermon tips on how to convert churchgoers into environmental activists. One program encourages people to switch to energy
efficient light bulbs on each night they light a holiday candle for Advent or Hanukkah.

Virginia's chapter has focused on developing a three-hour training program for congregations that asks members to calculate their carbon footprints and pledge a 10 percent reduction.

A movement called "Cool Congregations" is afoot in Tennessee, where members of different congregations meet to discuss the connection between faith and environment and then spread the green gospel to their houses of worship.

The program is based on the science presented in Al Gore's an Inconvenient Truth. It contains many statements tying faith to the need to become "green". Such statements as, “To keep the faith, we must keep the earth” can be seen throughout this program. Most definitely the teaching of another gospel.

Fluorescent vs. incandescent?
Environmentalists can't decide 
New concerns over mercury hazards
split green activists on switch to CFLs

Al Gore says switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents can help save the planet from global warming.

California, Canada and the European Union are so persuaded he's right, the three governments are in the process of banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs, following the trailblazing paths of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is on board, urging American citizens to do their part for the environment and switch to the twisty little CFL bulbs that last longer and use less electricity.

But opposition is building among other environmentalists who say the threat of mercury contamination as a result of hundreds of millions of broken CFLS, each containing about 5 milligrams of the highly toxic substance, outweighs any benefits from a switch from Thomas Edison's trusty old invention.

One new voice weighing in against the tide is Andrew Michrowski of the Canadian-based Planetary Association for Clean Energy: "I feel it's very important to warn people these 'green' bulbs contain mercury, which will end up in landfills throughout the country if we make the switch to them. In addition to filling our landfills with mercury, if the bulbs break you will be exposed to the mercury they contain."

He says consumers shouldn't buy them – even though they are now showing up in stores all over America.

Even the EPA, which is cheerleading the mania for the switch to CFLs, offers bone-chilling warnings about the dangers of mercury – if you search for them.

"Exposure to mercury, a toxic metal, can affect our brain, spinal cord, kidneys and liver," says the agency.

When a CFL breaks, the EPA cautions consumers to open a window and leave the room immediately for at least 15 minutes because of the mercury threat. The agency suggests removing all materials by scooping fragments and powder using cardboard or stiff paper. Sticky tape is suggested as a way to get smaller particles. The EPA says vacuum cleaners and bare hands should never be used in such cleanups.

After final cleanup with a damp paper towel, the agency warns consumers to place all materials in a plastic bag.

"Seal and dispose of properly," says the EPA. "Wash hands."

But disposing of properly might be a tough thing to do, because CFLs never should be thrown in the trash like their old-fashioned incandescent predecessors. They need to be turned into recycling centers, which are few and far between.

When laws banning incandescent bulbs take effect, so do the mandatory fines on consumers and businesses that dispose of the new CFLs improperly.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health also offers cautions about mercury.

"Exposures to very small amounts of these compounds [mercury] can result in devastating neurological damage and death," says NIH. "For fetuses, infants and children, the primary health effects of mercury are on neurological development. Even low levels of mercury exposure, such as result from a mother's consumption of methyl mercury in dietary sources, can adversely affect the brain and nervous system. Impacts on memory, attention, language and other skills have been found in children exposed to moderate levels in the womb." A problem that is thought by some to cause ADD and ADHD among a few.

However, critics are concerned that the EPA and environmentalists are minimizing the dangers of mercury contamination from CFLs. Mercury, an essential component of CFLs, is a neurotoxin that the EPA classifies as a hazardous household material.

The craze to get consumers to buy CFLs, instead of the old incandescents, precedes any serious plans for disposal or recycling of the broken or unbroken fluorescents.

A major debate has erupted among architects about the pros and cons of CFLs, with many "now calling for lower mercury in lighting systems," says Michael Driedger, a Vancouver-based architect specializing in green technologies.

"Many people, especially in the lighting industry, are waiting for the lighting industry to develop mercury-free light emitting diode (LED) lighting as a safe substitute for CFLs," he says.

For those that are in areas that already have laws banning the standard incandescent light bulbs the LED light bulbs can be obtained through the internet. The initial cost of these bulbs is significantly higher than the CFL's but the savings and safety of them in the long run is beneficial. These bulbs can be found as low as $19.00 each. The more they become in demand the lower the price of them will become.

Report: Divorce also hurts the environment

WASHINGTON - Divorce can be bad for the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households.

"A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household," said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.

Liu, who researches the relationship of ecology with social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first, and then consider it simple. "A lot of things become simple after the research is done," he said.

Some extra energy or water use may not sound like a big deal, but it adds up.

The United States, for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and just over 60 million households headed by a married person.

Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights.

That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use.

And it isn't just the United States.

Liu looked at 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002.

In the 11, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been a million fewer households using energy and water in these countries.

"People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Liu said.

Liu stressed that he isn't condemning divorce: "Some people really need to get divorces." But, he added, "one way to be more environmentally friendly is to live with other people and that will reduce the impact."

Don't get smug, though, married folks - savings also apply to people living together and Shaker communities or even hippie communes would have been even more efficient.

So, what prompts someone to figure out the environmental impact of divorce?

Liu was studying the ecology of areas with declining population and noticed that even where the total number of people was less, the number of households was increasing. He wondered why.

There turned out to be several reasons: divorce, demographic shifts such as people remaining single longer and the demise of multigenerational households.

"I was surprised because the divorce rate actually has been up and down for many years in some of the countries ... but we found the proportion of divorced households has increased rapidly across the globe," he said.

So he set out to measure the difference, such as in terms of energy and water, land use and construction materials and is now reporting the results for divorce.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

Hanukkah candles
killing our planet?
Environmentalists encouraging Jews
around world to light at least 1 less

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

"The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."

Cofounder Tom Wegner, who heads the public relations firm Update Marketing Media, spread the campaign via mass e-mails and through social interaction Web sites like Facebook and Hook.co.il. He said no money had been invested in the campaign, but it had already raised awareness around the world and made people realize that they have to consider the environment this Hanukka.

Wegner said he did not consider the campaign anti-religious. The unlit candle could be the shamash, which is not required for the mitzva, he said. But he said he would encourage people who do not keep mitzvot not to light a hanukkia at all for environmental and educational reasons.

"We have many environmental traditions in Judaism like Tu Bishvat and Succot, but there are also traditions like Lag Ba'omer and Hanukka that made sense when they were instituted but are more problematic now in the days of global warming," Wegner said.

"There are many people who just light candles for the tradition and for their children," he said. "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment is an act that is not only educational but also will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide that would hurt the environment."

Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev said he was not convinced by the environmentalists' argument. He warned that the campaign would take away from the light of Torah that each and every candle symbolizes.

"The environmentalists should think about how much pollution is caused by one solitary diesel truck on the road," Ze'ev said. "They should be fighting the trucks instead of Judaism. This is so trivial, so anti-Jewish and so anti-religious that even the worst anti-Semites couldn't think of it. Just like the Helenists, they are trying to extinguish the flames of the Jewish soul."

United Torah Judaism MK Avraham Ravitz called the environmentalists "crazy people who are playing with the minds of innocent Jewish people." He said the campaign would only convince people who do not light candles anyway.

"They should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead," Ravitz said.

Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem's Ramban Congregation, who is himself an environmental activist, praised the good intentions of the people behind the campaign. But he said the environmentalists should be trying to reach out to observant Jews instead of running campaigns that turn them away.

"People in the green movement who have an agenda have unfortunately made it anti-religious," Lau said. "This makes religious people think incorrectly that anything environmentalist is against them. The damage ends up being a thousand times the benefit. Tikkun olam [fixing the world] must be done by adding more light and not by adding more darkness."

Suit targets Arctic drilling

Several prominent environmental groups are suing the federal government to block oil and natural-gas development in a polar-bear habitat.

The environmentalists say that when the congressionally approved sale of nearly 20 million acres of public land in Chukchi Sea proceeds Wednesday, the court should void any drilling or development to ensure federal laws are respected.

"The Bush administration is rushing ahead to give oil companies as much of the Chukchi Sea as it can, but they are not disclosing the full impact of oil development on the people and wildlife that depend on the Chukchi," said Eric Jorgensen, an attorney for EarthJustice.

But Interior Department officials say they intend to move forward with the sales Wednesday, and have already done a thorough review of whether species will be adversely affected.

"They have to go 25 miles out to sea before they can do any exploration or development," said one Interior Department official, who requested anonymity because of the pending litigation.

"There are lots of steps along the way like the Marine Mammal Protection Act that we must comply with, and that is much more stringent than the Endangered Species Act when it comes to protection of species," the official said.

The groups, several of which want the polar bear listed as an endangered species, say in the lawsuit filed Thursday that not enough studies have been done on how the energy development and possible oil spills will affect the habitat of the polar bears and protected marine life.

The National Audubon Society says it's home to one-tenth of the world's population of polar bears.

Betsy Loyless, senior vice president of the National Audubon Society, says the habitat of walruses and the endangered bowhead whales are also at risk. Interior Department officials are still studying whether polar bears will be named as an endangered species, due in part to global warming. (Yet polar bear populations are the largest they been in many, many years and are still on the increase.)

"It's regrettable that we now must turn to the courts to protect the polar bear from our own Interior Department," said Miss Loyless, who called the lease sale "about as shameless as this administration has been on the environment."

The suit was filed Thursday against Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in the U.S. District Court of Alaska by the Center for Biological Diversity, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society as well as Alaskan tribal governments.

Rep. Don Young, Alaska Republican and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said the lawsuit impedes his state's ability to develop energy and "could have a chilling and long-standing effect on all resource development in the United States."

"This would be a severe threat to our domestic energy production efforts and national energy security," Mr. Young said.

Lights out, America?

The lights may soon go out in Washington, DC -- and it could happen where you live, too.
 
“Electric power has already become painfully expensive in Washington and its suburbs. Now, local utilities, say, it could become something even worse: scarce,” reported the Washington Post this week. Maryland, for example, may face rolling blackouts as early as 2011 or 2012 on summer days.
 
The core of the problem is that the region’s ability to meet its ever-increasing demand for electricity is being short-circuited by environmental activists who are doing every thing they can to make it as difficult as possible to generate and transmit power.
 
“Environmental groups say the region should try harder to save energy before it goes out looking for more,” the Post reported. “The cheapest power plant out there is the one you never have to build,” one activist told the Post.
 
The euphemism the environmentalists use for this strategy is “conservation.” But “rationing” is perhaps the most honest descriptor.

The environmentalists’ new tactic in their war against us meeting our basic energy needs focuses on coal-burning power plants, which are at the top of the list of carbon dioxide emitters. “Increasing electricity almost inevitably leads to more global warming emissions,” an activist told the Post.
 
And the activists have used global warming fears to great effect.
 
“Stymied in their plans to build coal-burning power plants, American utilities are turning to natural gas to meet expected growth in demand, risking a new upward spiral in the price of that fuel,” the New York Times reported this week.
 
Since environmentalist-fomented opposition to coal plants is rising around the country -- including a new policy by major banks Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley to discourage coal-plant construction -- utility executives say they have little choice even though the boom in natural gas demand will send electricity prices even higher, according to the Times.
 
Once again, “environmental groups argue that utilities should focus on cutting demand for power, rather than building new capacity,” the Times reported.
 
One possible way out of the global warming-angle of this mess, is to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions of power plants. Although this column recently reported about the difficulty and expense of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the Bush Administration has nevertheless been participating in a project called FutureGen, a futuristic, zero-emission power plant. The federal government was slated to pay for 75 percent of FutureGen’s costs.
 
But just last week, the Department of Energy announced that it was pulling out of FutureGen, after costs skyrocketed from $800 million to $1.8 billion. Undersecretary of Energy C.H. “Bud” Albright told FutureGen officials that the agency wasn’t interested in “building Disneyland in some swamp in Illinois.”
 
With FutureGen off the drawing board, at least for the time being, there are no significant CCS projects ongoing in the U.S. -- meaning that carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants won’t be captured in the foreseeable future.
 
Without a plan for CCS, environmental zealots will then be able to continue their anti-energy jihad against an essentially defenseless coal-based electricity producers and their consumers.
 
Of course, coal-based electricity producers and consumers aren’t really defenseless. They could (gasp!) challenge the dubious notion that manmade carbon dioxide emissions drive global climate -- click to view a video on this subject -- rather than just accepting politically correct myths that have been rammed down their throats without, so far, meaningful opportunity for debate.
 
It’s an idea that’s worth considering, especially given the apparent lack of understanding of the climate issue, even among those who aspire to be president.
 
In response to a question on global warming during the last Republican presidential debate before the Super Tuesday primaries, for example, Sen. John McCain declared that, “I applaud [efforts] to try to eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. Now, suppose that [I am] wrong, and there's no such thing as climate change. And we adopt these green technologies…  Then all we’ve done is give our kids a cleaner world.”
 
But if we rush to blindly adopt greenhouse gas emission controls, we could disrupt energy markets and cause much economic harm. And in real life, a poorer world tends to be a dirtier world. Moreover, since carbon dioxide is a colorless and odorless gas that naturally makes up a very small part of our atmosphere and since manmade carbon dioxide is an exceedingly small part of total global carbon dioxide emissions, it’s hard to see how reducing emissions will make the world “cleaner.”
 
Sen. McCain continued, “But suppose we do nothing…and we don't eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?”
 
Earth to Sen. McCain: U.S. coal-fired electricity doesn’t put a penny in the pockets of Middle East oil producers or terrorists. In fact, inexpensive coal-fired electricity could one day power vehicles so as to drastically cut down on gasoline use and the need for the oil imports that concern him.
 
If we don’t have serious debate on these issues, the combination of unscrupulous anti-growth environmentalists and uninformed grandstanding politicians will certainly lead to lights out for America.

New light bulbs
can poison you
Despite congressional mandate for CFLs by 2012,
U.S. EPA says they shouldn't be used everywhere

Despite a congressional mandate banning the sale of common incandescent light bulbs by 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is warning that their compact fluorescent replacements are not safe to use everywhere.

The EPA says breakage of the energy-saving, mercury-containing CFLs can cause health hazards, especially for children and pregnant women, suggesting use of the bulbs over carpeted areas should be avoided. If bulbs break over carpeted areas, the cleanup may require cutting out pieces of the carpet to avoid toxic exposures.

Mercury is needed for the lamps to produce light, and there are currently no known substitutes. Small amounts of the toxic substance is vaporized when they break, which can happen if people screw them in holding the glass instead of the base or just drop them.

Mercury is a naturally occurring metal that accumulates in the body and can harm the nervous system of a fetus or young child if ingested in sufficient quantity.

For the Maine study, researchers shattered 65 compact fluorescents to test air quality and cleanup methods. They found that, in many cases, immediately after the bulb was broken – and sometimes even after a cleanup was attempted – levels of mercury vapor exceeded federal guidelines for chronic exposure by as much as 100 times.

In a new Maine study, mercury vapor released by the bulbs exceeded even those higher levels.

The study recommended that when a compact fluorescent breaks, consumers should get children and pets out of the room and ventilate it. It warned vacuums should never be used to clean up a broken compact fluorescent lamps. Instead, it recommends using stiff paper and tape to pick up pieces.

Some states require broken compact fluorescent light bulbs to be disposed of as household hazardous waste. Others ban disposal of bulbs in trash.

Talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the mandated new bulbs on his program today, saying, "It is so, frankly, ridiculous and absurd that it insults my intelligence, and it worries me when so many people are so mind-numbed that they go along with these charades and make themselves feel like they're actually doing something to improve their lives. ...

"When you're going to allow a bunch of bureaucrats to turn over as much of your freedom as you have, this is what you get. When you buy into hoaxes and silly things that a little examination with your own common sense can tell you is not true – such as incandescent lightbulbs are destroying the planet, causing global warming – if you're going to buy into this tripe, then you deserve what you get. You deserve it. The problem is, we're all going to get it, too, because of people's stupidity. We're not going to have a choice to put compact fluorescents in our houses or not."

Thanks to pressures from environmentalists, sales are skyrocketing for compact fluorescent lamps. More than 290 million compact fluorescents carrying the EPA's "Energy Star" label sold last year, nearly double the number in 2006. Compact fluorescents now make up 20 percent of the U.S. light bulb market, and sales are all but guaranteed to grow – especially since a new law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush bans sales of common incandescent bulbs starting in 2012.

Compact fluorescents can contain from 1 to 30 milligrams of mercury, according to the Mercury Policy Project. The nonprofit cited a New Jersey study that estimated that about two to four tons of the element are released into the environment in the U.S. each year from compact fluorescents.

Soon-to-be released results of tests conducted by the state of Maine confirm earlier states' findings suggesting that under certain conditions mercury vapor released from broken CFLs can pose a health risk. As a precaution, states such as Vermont are now suggesting removal of carpeting where breakage has occurred when there are infants and pregnant women present. Other states such as Massachusetts are likely to recommend that CFLs not be placed in fixtures subject to breakage in areas frequented by sensitive populations.

Eco-terror suspected
as luxury homes burn
Earth Liberation Front leaves sign at site
near Seattle: 'Built green? Nope BLACK!'

Police suspect an environmental terrorist group is behind the burning of five luxury homes in a model "Street of Dreams" development northeast of Seattle this morning.

A message signed by ELF, the Earth Liberation Front, was left at the scene, north of Woodinville, according to Snohomish County District Seven Chief Rick Eastman in a report by local KING-TV.

The sign, shown in KING-TV video, read, "Built green? Nope black! McMansions in RCD's (rural cluster developments) r not green. ELF"

Agents with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating the fires as a potential domestic terrorism act, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

The furnished houses, valued at up to $2 million each, were unoccupied, and no injuries were reported. The Street of Dreams is an annual showcase of luxury homes, displaying the latest in high-end design and landscaping.

Firefighters were not allowed near the homes, officials said, for fear of booby traps. Eastman said the blazes, which began at about 4 a.m. local time, were set at six houses. Three have been completely destroyed and two others seriously damaged.

The Seattle Time reported the Woodinville development drew fierce opposition from neighbors who said the land has critical wetlands needed to protect an aquifer used by about 20,000 people. The opponents argued the environment would be overloaded by septic systems and said chinook salmon would be endangered.

ELF is an underground movement launched in the United Kingdom in 1992. The now defunct Earth Liberation Front Press Office said the group uses "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment."

Members of the group have been blamed for embedding spikes in trees to cause injury to loggers using power saws.

The FBI in 2001 classified ELF as the top domestic terror threat in the U.S.

Today's blazes come as the trial of a 32-year-old woman charged in an ELF fire-bomb attack at the University of Washington in 2001 gets underway. Briana Waters, a violin teacher, is accused of serving as a lookout for arsonists who destroyed the Tacoma campus's Center for Urban Horticulture, which was rebuilt at a cost of $7 million.

ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers at the university were genetically engineering trees.

The Woodinville homes, according to a homebuilder who served as a judge in last summer's Street of Dreams show, used "Built Green" standards such as water-pervious sidewalks, super-insulated walls and windows and products made with recycled materials, the Post-Intelligencer reported. Advertising emphasized the environmentally friendly aspects of the homes, which were smaller than some featured in previous years.

"It's very disappointing to take a situation where we're tying to promote good building practices - Built Green practices - and that it's destroyed. It's extremely disappointing. I don't understand the logic in that," said Doug Barnes, Northwest division president of Centex Homes and immediate past president of the Master Builders Association of King & Snohomish Counties.

Since when did environmentalists show any sign of logic.

Anti-plastic crusaders
stuck holding the bag
Claim 100,000 animals, 1 million seabirds,
die each year based on 'typo' in 2002 report

A lot of environmentalists are learning how George Bush felt after invading Iraq and finding no weapons of mass destruction.

Scientists are attacking the global campaign to ban plastic shopping bags, saying the activists' claim that the modern conveniences are responsible for the deaths of 100,000 animals and one million seabirds is based on a "typo" in a 2002 report and there is no scientific evidence showing the bags pose a direct threat to marine mammals.

Researchers and marine biologists have told the London Times plastic bags pose, at best, a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

"I've never seen a bird killed by a plastic bag," said Professor Geoff Boxshall, a marine biologist at the London Natural History Museum. "Other forms of plastic in the ocean are much more damaging. Only a very small proportion is caused by bags."

In November, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban large grocery stores from distributing plastic bags. Santa Monica, Calif., and Connecticut are considering similar bans. Last month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, calling them "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste."

That move has caused a number of UK scientists to criticize the government for jumping on the "bandwagon" without sound science to back up its decision.

Driving the campaign is the claim, found in a 2002 report commissioned by the Australian government, that 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds are killed by ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic bags. The figure was derived from a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland that found 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, killed by discarded fishing nets.

The authors of the 2002 study misquoted the Canadian study which made no mention of plastic bags.

In 2006, four years after the figure had been adopted by anti-plastic campaigners to prove the bags' danger, the authors altered their report, replacing "plastic bags" with "plastic debris" and admitting in a postscript that the original Canadian study had cited fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the cause of the animals' deaths.

"The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine," they wrote.

David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, agrees.

"It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags," he said. "The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags.

"It doesn't do the government's case any favors if you've got statements being made that aren't supported by the scientific literature that's out there. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue. It would be great if statements like these weren't made."

Charlie Mayfield, chairman of the UK retailer John Lewis, told the Times plastic bags were a small part of the waste problem, despite the attention recently focused on them.

"We don't see reducing the use of plastic bags as our biggest priority," he said. "Of all the waste that goes to landfill, 20 percent is household waste and 0.3 percent is plastic bags."

He added that efforts in Ireland had reduced plastic bag usage, but sales of trashcan liners had increased 400 percent.

Wanna help planet? 'Let's all just die!'
Group pushes to improve Earth's ecosystem by ensuring human species does not survive

"May we live long and die out" is the unofficial motto of a new movement that seeks to improve the Earth's ecosystem by ensuring that the human species does not survive.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, consists of volunteers who have made active life decisions to remain childless for the benefit of the Earth, thereby preventing the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.

While no one person takes credit for being the founder, Les U. Knight created its name and is the spokesperson for the movement.

"We've already exceeded Earth's carrying capacity for humans by quite a bit," Knight told WND. "We are using up our resources. The best way to stop it is by not breeding. It's really the best way because the people we don't create don't exist, and so there's no impact on them."

VHEMT activists believe a smaller population will benefit the Earth by reducing human and environmental catastrophe.

"There is no problem on the planet that would be more easily solved by adding more people," Knight said. "Everything that we like, including clean air and clean water and wilderness to go and visit, all of those will increase as there become fewer of us."

Knight said the greenest habit humans can have is to prevent creation of another member of the species, reducing humanity's ecological footprint on the Earth.

(Story continues below)

Though VHEMT volunteers have made active decisions to not bring children into the world, Knight said he is not concerned that the movement will literally die out.

"It's an idea, and it's not transferred genetically," he said. "We aren't born knowing we should go extinct; we have to learn it. We don't need to create new humans in order to indoctrinate them from birth. All of us come from breeding couples, and yet we've decided not to breed."

VHEMT strives to increase the status of women in society with the stated goal of giving them choices besides motherhood by promoting "universal reproductive freedom." While Knight said the main goal of the movement is to prevent procreation, he claims it does not promote abortion or other methods of terminating life.

"There's no need for that. Contraception prevents abortion, and we'll be dead soon enough," he said. "Whatever it takes to avoid creating a new human is what we advocate."

As for the size of the group, Knight said he can only guess because the movement is not an organization that people can join. However, he provided an estimate of the number of subscribers to the VHEMT philosophy:

"There must be several million people who have arrived at the conclusion that we would be better off without humans."

When Knight formed the movement, he had one objective in mind:

"The ultimate goal is one I will never see," Knight said. "I will never see the day that there are no humans on the planet."

Fools and their folly.

Polar bear protection angers Alaskans
Fear decision gives environmentalists new tool for opposing development

Alaska industry and political leaders reacted with disappointment, even vehemence, to the decision Wednesday to protect the polar bear as "threatened," despite assurances from the Bush administration that the listing would mean no new regulation in Alaska.

Industry officials worried that the listing decision would give environmentalists a new tool for opposing development in the Arctic, especially new offshore oil exploration and development. Politicians attacked the science behind the decision as speculative.

"Reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act in this way is an unequivocal victory for extreme environmentalists who want to block all development in our state," said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

National conservative groups are already promising to sue over the decision, predicting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's effort to rule out regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would be overturned in court. One group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the barriers erected by Kempthorne "have all the strength of tissue paper."

For their part, environmental groups responded more positively to the "threatened species" listing, a goal they have sought for three years. They, too, were talking about lawsuits, predicting Interior would be forced to yield on the logic of regulating emissions.

"This is a huge victory for the polar bears. They're now protected," said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and lead author of the 2005 petition. "The administration's attempts to make an exception for greenhouse gases won't stand up in court. The law says what it says, not what the administration wishes it says. The oil industry is probably smart enough to know that."

Kempthorne, announcing his decision Wednesday, said no new regulation of industry or subsistence hunting in Alaska would be necessary under the Endangered Species Act. He said protections already given to the polar bear under the Marine Mammal Protection Act are "more stringent" than those under the ESA and would continue in place.

In an interview, Kempthorne said his approach "gave predictability to the oil and gas industry."

Interior officials cited only one change: polar bear trophies could no longer be imported from guided sport hunts in Canada.

'PANDORA'S BOX'

Under the ESA, the federal government is required to develop a plan for protecting critical habitat, write a recovery plan for the bears, and consult about bear protection before approving federal permits. All now appear to be sources of potential litigation, especially on the issue of excluding greenhouse gas emissions.

The marine mammal act has governed industry activities in northern Alaska for three decades, and the result has been only "negligible" impacts on polar bears, federal biologists say.

But it's probably oversimplifying to say there will be no different regulation of industry in Alaska as a result of Wednesday's decision, said Scott Schliebe, a polar bear specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska.

"It draws a brighter light of scrutiny to our management activities in Alaska," Schliebe said. "We will take a closer look at the activities, particularly the offshore activities."

Industry is not as worried about government scrutiny as it is about environmental lawsuits and resulting costly delays, said Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

"The activities taking place in polar bear habitat are the ones that will become targets," she said. The administration's effort to keep the marine mammals act as the law affecting oil and gas is "very helpful," she said, but the decision to list at all is disappointing.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, made the point more strongly, calling the decision "grossly premature" because climate change models vary so much. She said the decision "opens a Pandora's Box that the administration will now be unable to close."

LEGAL CHALLENGES

Environmentalists were considering Wednesday how to approach future legal challenges to the law, Siegel said.

She said to expect a challenge of the so-called 4(d) rule declaring the marine mammal act would still govern human-bear interactions, effective immediately. The ESA allows for such flexibility if the threatened species is not harmed as a result. But the marine mammal act has shortcomings, environmentalists say, including that it fails to protect habitat.

"If the MMPA were adequate to protect the polar bear, we wouldn't be in this situation," she said.

Siegel said she was glad she could move beyond the basic effort of suing the government over science and listing the bear under the ESA. In his statement, Kempthorne said he accepted the science behind the decision as sound.

That job now falls to Reed Hopper, a lawyer with the conservative property-rights firm Pacific Legal Foundation. Hopper said Wednesday he would file a notice to sue over the decision, testing the scientific arguments. He said polar bear numbers have increased in the past few decades and they are already adequately protected under the marine mammals act, as Kempthorne himself argued.

He dismissed Kempthorne's contention that the polar bear could be listed for protection due to melting ice, but in a way that would have no effect on oil and gas activity or distant emission sources.

"In our view, that's just wishful thinking," Hopper said.

'Green' website tells
when you should die
Calculator reveals when your share
of Earth's resources fully consumed

The Australian Broadcasting Company has created a "green" website that tells you when you should die, based on your usage of Earth's resources.

The PlanetSlayer site, which the network calls the "first irreverent environmental website," includes "Professor Schpinkee's greenhouse calculator," which tells a user when he or she should die, based on their lifestyle and consumption of resources.

The "calculator" is made like a children's video game, with cartoon characters who look like a detective dog and a pig, and asks, "How big a greenhouse pig are you?"

The user goes through a series of questions about how much one drives, is the vehicle fuel efficient, how many miles the person flew – divided by pleasure travel and business travel as if one would be more Earth-friendly than the other, and others.

Those responses are added to answers to questions about the size of your home, how many people live there, how big the utility bills are and does any of the energy come from a renewable resource, and queries about recycling.

Then you click on a skull-and-crossbones button to find out that you should die at 23.4 years, or 9.3, or 5.2, depending on your answers.

With the click on the skull-and-crossbones button, a pig representing the survey-taker, positioned between a fat pig for energy usage and a lean, "green" pig, explodes.

Other parts of the website promote the Kyoto Protocol international agreement under which greenhouse gases are supposed to be regulated and reduced, and various question-and-answer resources.

Regarding the efficiency of various types of heat, for example, the website tells, "As a rule, gas is better than electric, which is better than open flames. The exception to this scenario is on nights where romance is in the air and a deep shag pile is on the floor."

Generally, "For each hour of heat, you'll produce about 0.7 kg CO2 (gas heater), 2 kg CO2 (2 bar electric radiator), 3.3 kg CO2 (open fire)."

"Gas is more efficient because you just burn it where you are – about a quarter of the heat gets lost up the flue, but the rest heats up the room. Electricity on the other hand is pretty hopeless efficiency-wise – 2/3 of the coal's energy is lost at the power station," the report said. "Open fires vary on a scale from pretty inefficient to hellishly inefficient. And as well as their greenhouse excesses, they produce a heap of other pollutants and the odd irate asthmatic neighbor."

As for mitigating such "excesses" by planting trees, the website advises that to counter the usage of an ordinary family, members would have to plant "a helluva lot" of trees.

"Your average Aussie belts out about 24.5 tons of CO2 each year (that covers everything from housing and transport to your share of government and industry). Your average Aussie native tree can soak up about 270 kg CO2 in that time. And your average Aussie science journalist with a calculator reckons that's about 91 trees you'd need to plant every year," the website advises.

"On a national scale, we'd be talking about planting 1729 million trees … EVERY YEAR."

It also includes links to organizations such as the Climate Action Network Australia, the international IPCC, the Australian Greenhouse Office, the Sustainable Energy Development Authority and others.

WND reported only two weeks earlier that more than 31,000 scientists now have signed a petition rejecting the global warming agenda.

That list includes more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then, between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.

But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of 'consensus,' release of the movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Mr. Al Gore, and related events," according to officials with the project.

"Mr. Gore's movie, asserting a 'consensus' and 'settled science' in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse," said project spokesman and founder Art Robinson.

WND submitted a request to Gore's office for comment but did not get a response.

Robinson said the campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded. And reducing energy use "now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries."

The Petition Project's website includes both a list of scientists by name as well as a list of scientists by state.

Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report

Fri Jul 4, 3:34 AM ET

LONDON (AFP) - Biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent, according to the findings of an unpublished World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

The daily said the report was finished in April but was not published to avoid embarrassing the US government, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent.

Biofuels, which supporters claim are a "greener" alternative to using fossil fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and rising food prices will be on the agenda when G8 leaders meet in Japan next week for their annual summit.

The report's author, a senior World Bank economist, assessed that contrary to claims by US President George W. Bush, increased demand from India and China has not been the cause of rising food prices.

"Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases," the report said.

Droughts in Australia have also not had a significant impact, it added. Instead, European and US drives for greater use of biofuels has had the biggest effect.

The European Union has mooted using biofuels for up to 10 percent of all transport fuels by 2020 as part of an increase in use of renewable energy.

All petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include a biofuels component of at least 2.5 percent since April this year.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the report said.

It added that the drive for biofuels has distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production, and sparked financial speculation on grains.

But Brazil's transformation of sugar cane into fuel has not had such a dramatic impact, the report said.

"The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140 percent between 2002 and this February," The Guardian said.

"The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15 percent, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75 percent jump over that period."

Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report  (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080704/ts_afp/climateenvironmentbiofuelsworldbankusbritain)
~~~~~~~

Of course it to blame for the rise in food costs and even with biofuels gas still hasn't gone down so again we are paying the price but in 2 ways now!!

Yup the Eco-friendly/Environmentalism were right, pay more now so were use to the high prices. When they should have left everything alone, and learn how to shut their mouths. Hmmmmmmmm I wonder if this would be known as "Foot in Mouth" syndrome? ;D

Of course the World Bank wants people to think this as it takes all blame off of them. Actually the biofuels are only a portion of the high costs of foods. It is also due to the very large increase in the price of oil and gas production that is caused by oil speculators through the World Bank. We are seeing this continually all over. The U.S. Congress is blaming the oil specualtors and Opec, the oil speculators are blaming Congress and the environmentalists, the environmentalists are blaming Congress and the oil moguls ....

It is actually a combination of all of them.

 ;D   ;D

We'd might as well laugh about everything since there's nothing we can do about it anyway. I think that much of the world has been suffering from foot in mouth syndrome for quite some time. Common sense will NOT prevail. Are there any guesses about whether anything will be done to correct the food crisis? After all, Al Gore's imaginary issues have to be taken care of first.

Now that is laughable.

 ;D ;D ;D ;D

Brought To You By The Pagan Religion of Gaia Worship


The Environmentalist Evil

Environmentalism regards man as a spreading cancer that must be eliminated at any cost. And its leaders mean it. Environmentalism is at root a movement against man. As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand observed, "… [their] ultimate motive [is]…hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life."

Most people would not believe this to be true. A great number of people tend to regard Environmentalism as a movement for cleaner air and water, for a better environment for man. But the environmentalists' actions demonstrate otherwise.

Clear evidence of their disregard for human life is their decades-long campaign to ban the insecticide DDT, even for specific use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Whatever the long-term effects of DDT on human health, they should certainly be an option for the people at risk from the ravaging short-term effects of malaria.

Every year, about half a billion people become ill with malaria -- that's ten percent of Earth's population -- and several million die, mostly children.

Since its inception in the 1940's, the use of DDT has prevented the deaths of about six hundred million people, an average of ten million a year.

From 1993 to 1995 DDT was banned in Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. Malaria increased ninety percent. In the same period, DDT's use was increased in Ecuador, and the incidence dropped sixty percent.

Its introduction in India, in 1960, reduced in the span of a year the number of malaria victims from a million to a hundred thousand, and in Sri Lanka from half a million down to almost zero. Soon after DDT was banned there, the number of victims climbed back to previous levels. Still today, environmentalists keep advocating a worldwide ban on DDT. They must be proud of their record.

Environmentalists are not only against DDT, but also against all insecticides. They aim to eventually ban them all, causing death and disease on a global scale. Their campaign makes perfect sense if we remember that one of the central tenets of Environmentalism is to eliminate overpopulation. As Jacques Cousteau, the famous French oceanographer admitted, "In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate three hundred and fifty thousand people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."

More proof of the their hatred for human life is their persisting campaign to stop chlorinization of water, which kills the germs in it. Their partial success in Peru resulted in thousands of deaths in a single cholera epidemic in 1992. So far they have not succeeded to ban it in the US, though they are hard at it.

Note the Environmentalists' ferocious attack on genetically engineered foods, despite the advantage that they dispense with insecticide use. This new technology promises to enhance the quality of lives by tailoring foods to our specific needs. An example is the invention of engineered rice with beta-carotene, a substance that the body can convert into vitamin A. Every year two million people worldwide go blind and a hundred million more suffer from lack of vitamin A.

If environmentalists really cared about human life and suffering they would have welcomed the new rice and revised their position on banning GE foods. Why don't they?

Maybe David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth has part of the answer: "Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet."

The most glaring proof that Environmentalism is anti human is their stand for animal rights and their opposition to animal use in medical research. Given the alternative of sacrificing a few mice or letting a billion humans die, only the lowest kind of man haters could choose the latter.

How many more people will have to go blind, get sick or die before we see Environmentalism for what it truly is?

A movement of pure hatred for man disguised as a false love of nature.

Listen to Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, whose primary goal is cutting the world's population by ninety percent: "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox."

David M. Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service also puts it in the open: "Human happiness [is] …not as important as a wild and healthy planet. Somewhere along the line…we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth."

He is right that there is indeed a cancer growing on Earth. But it is not man. It is Environmentalism, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.

David Holcberg, a former civil engineer and businessman, is now a writer living in Southern California. He is also a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Frightening Quotes from Environmentalists

"The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state."
—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth”


"We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!"
—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).


"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
—Pentti Linkola


"What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)


"I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems."
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal


"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal


"Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."
—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!


"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service


"The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans."
—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project


"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund


Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”
—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995



"We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels."
—Carl Amery


"To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."
—Lamont Cole


"The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population."
—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)


"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer."
—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

1 broken bulb pushes contamination to 300 times EPA limits
Poisonous vapor so bad, researchers recommend families no longer use CFLs

Compact fluorescent light bulbs have long been known to contain poisonous liquid mercury, but a study released earlier this year shows the level of mercury vapor released from broken bulbs skyrockets past accepted safety levels.

Following a story reported by WND last year about a Maine woman quoted $2,000 for cleaning up a broken fluorescent bulb (or CFL) in her home, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection studied the dangers of broken CFLs and the adequacy of recommended cleanup procedures.

The results were stunning: breaking a single compact fluorescent bulb on the floor can spike mercury vapor levels in a room – particularly at a child's height – to over 300 times the EPA's standard accepted safety level.

Furthermore, for days after a CFL has been broken, vacuuming or simply crawling across a carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times what's considered safe.

Following the study, the Maine DEP made eight new recommendations for usage and cleanup of CFLs, including the recommendation to not even use the bulbs in carpeted rooms where children, infants, or pregnant women live. The likelihood of breakage, near impossibility of cleanup and risk of prolonged exposure, the study concluded, are just too great.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences website acknowledges that Brown University published a similar study last month confirming the Maine results: breaking a fluorescent bulb sends mercury vapor levels to unsafe levels for the elderly, pregnant and young – and those levels remain elevated for days.

The NIEHS website states, "Today’s CFLs underscore mercury's volatile vapor form, which is still a significant health concern – ventilation reduces but does not eliminate this toxicant. Mercury vapor inhalation can cause significant neural damage in developing fetuses and children."

According to a Mercury Policy Project overview paper, unpolluted air contains 1-2 nanograms (or billionths of a gram) of mercury vapor per cubic meter. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established a level of 300 ng/m3 as the safety threshold for prolonged exposure to the poisonous gas.

Some states, though not the federal government, have also established a safety threshold for a one-time, acute exposure to mercury vapor. California, for example, has established that any level of exposure over 1,800 ng/m3 has potentially harmful health effects.

The Maine study, however, discovered that upon breakage of a CFL, mercury vapors can rise "with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp."

In other words, the study found breaking a single bulb can send mercury vapor levels in a room to over 50 times the level that California considers dangerous and to over 300 times what the EPA has established as a safe level for prolonged exposure.

Researchers in the study broke 45 bulbs in a variety of flooring surfaces and then studied lingering gas levels after a variety of cleanup techniques. The results contradicted a number of commonly held thoughts on CFLs, for example:

    • Though proponents of CFLs often argue a single bulb only contains 5 mg of mercury, the study found it was an average. The bulbs actually range from 0.9 to 18 mg of mercury.

    • Though the EPA's Energy Star program recommends placing a broken bulb "in a glass jar with a metal lid or in a sealed plastic bag," the study discovered mercury vapor leaches right through plastic bags. "Of the 12 different types of containers tested during the 23 different tests, the plastic bag was found to be the worst choice for containing mercury emissions," researchers stated. "Based upon this study, the DEP now suggests that a glass container with metal screw lid with a gum seal be used to contain debris."

    • Though the Energy Star guidelines suggest ventilating a room for 15 minutes before attempting cleanup, the study found that in every case – even in well-ventilated rooms – it took over an hour to drop mercury vapor levels below the EPA safety standard.

    • And for cleanup on carpets, the Energy Star guidelines suggest vacuuming and disposing of the dust bag. The Maine study, however, discovered that vacuuming served to simply stir the vapor into the air and "irreversibly contaminate the vacuum". The researchers, acknowledging it was inconvenient, recommended only one course of action for broken bulbs on carpet: remove the carpet.

The Maine study also discovered, however, that carpets aren't the only problem with broken bulbs.

"All three flooring surfaces in this study (pre-finished hardwood, short nap carpet, and shag carpet) were able to be cleaned up with pre-study cleanup guidance so that they looked clean. However, mercury vapors emanating from all three surface types were detected, especially when agitated, for weeks after the cleanup of a break. … Flooring surfaces, once visibly clean, can emit mercury immediately at the source that can be greater than 50,000 ng/m3."

"Flooring surfaces that still contain mercury sources emit more mercury when agitated than when not agitated. This mercury source in the carpeting has particular significance for children rolling around on a floor, babies crawling, or non mobile infants placed on the floor."

As WND has reported, several countries, including the United States, have signed laws that will eventually phase out typical incandescent light bulbs and dictate their replacement with CFLs.

Even the U.S. EPA, however, has recognized that recent studies show CFLs aren't safe for all circumstances.

The Maine study may prove the most condemning of the use of fluorescent bulbs yet.

Part of the study detailed the potential hazards posed by mercury vapor:

"There are a number of studies documenting neurotoxicity as a consequence of inhalation of elemental mercury in adults. … Studies documented changes in EEG, deficits in peripheral nerve function, autonomic effects, psychological and sleep changes, and deficits in fine motor performance, visuomotor coordination, visual reaction time, visual scanning, memory, concentration, and executive function."

In children, and especially unborn children, the results can be far worse:

"It is well established that the developing organism may be much more sensitive than the adult to neurotoxic agents. For example, methylmercury exposure can produce devastating effects in the fetus, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, and even death, while producing no or minimal effects in the mother."

Children are also more susceptible to mercury vapor exposure from broken CFLs:

"Infants and toddlers also have a much higher rate of respiration than adults. Therefore they have a higher exposure to similar concentrations. They also are lower to the floor and therefore closer to the source of the exposure and presumably more apt to obtain a concentrated dose of mercury."

The study, however, didn't leave out the elderly:

"Elderly and unhealthy individuals may already be at comprised health and be more susceptible to mercury effects than a healthy individual. For example, mercury does kidney damage which could exacerbate an already existing kidney disease."

Unlike many poisons that can be flushed out of the body, mercury bioaccumulates, which means the various tissues store the toxin in increasing amounts, a particular concern as the use of CFLs increases.

The Mercury Policy Project summary paper quotes an estimate that the U.S. currently releases 2 tons of mercury vapor into the environment each year from broken fluorescent bulbs alone. Two tons contrasts startlingly with the level the EPA has established as dangerous to human health: a mere 300 billionths of a gram.

Wind Jammers
August 18, 2008; Page A14

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have and I'm sure that they will find something wrong with those also.

Councils recruit unpaid volunteers to spy on their neighbors
'Sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook'

Councils are recruiting 'citizen snoopers' to report litter louts, dog foulers and even people who fail to sort out their rubbish properly.

The 'environment volunteers' will also be responsible for encouraging neighbours to cut down on waste.

The move comes as local authorities dish out £100 fines to householders who leave out too much rubbish or fail to follow recycling rules.

It will fuel fears that Britain is lurching towards a Big Brother society, following the revelation this week that the Home Office is extending some police powers to council staff and private security guards.

Critics said the latest scheme could easily be abused and encourage a culture of bin spies and curtain twitchers.

Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: 'Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook.

'With council tax so high, the last thing people want to pay for is an army of busybodies peering through their net curtains at their neighbours as they put out their rubbish.'

Recruitment adverts appealing for the unpaid environmental volunteers have appeared across the country in recent months.

In Hampshire, Eastleigh council wants locals to 'monitor local environmental quality' and report 'issues' involving recycling and waste. In East London, Tower Hamlets is recruiting volunteers for a crackdown on reluctant recyclers. Other councils are expected to launch similar schemes.

Officially, the volunteers are not encouraged to spy on neighbours or report them. But councils are unlikely to ignore tip-offs.

Earlier this year the Daily Mail revealed that councils have hired 850 agents and informers to catch fly-tippers, tax cheats and other offenders.

The 'covert human intelligence sources' keep watch on suspected law-breakers and yobs. Any evidence they find, such as illegal alcohol sales or wastedumping, can be used in court.

The latest recruits are being hired by council environment departments.

Eastleigh has already taken on around a dozen who answered an advert in a council newsletter which said: 'Volunteers will be involved in reporting issues in their area such as recycling, waste, fly-tipping, graffiti, dog fouling and abandoned vehicles'.

The recruits will also be involved in the 'promotion of recycling and waste minimisation across the borough'.

The LibDem-controlled council denied the volunteers would be asked to spy on neighbours.

'These are all people who care about the environment and they will be ambassadors for their area,' a spokesman said. 'They will be there to report graffiti, abandoned vehicles and local vandalism, but not to report on other individuals.'

The volunteers will be trained on the council's waste and recycling policies and asked to explain them in the community.

'They might go to an over-60s club and talk about recycling,' said the spokesman.

But Labour councillor Brian Norgate said: 'I wouldn't be overkeen on asking volunteers to be snooping, if that's what this turned out to be. We have people trained in doing this.'

Tower Hamlets calls its volunteers 'environment champions'. According to the council they report on 'a number of environmental crimes, issues and concerns, such as graffiti, dumped rubbish and abandoned cars.'

A spokesman said: 'They demonstrate environmentally-friendly behaviour, encourage other residents to recycle and are pro-active in the neighbourhood.'

The Local Government Association said: 'Environment volunteers care passionately about their area and want to protect it. They are not snoopers. They will help councils cut crime and make places cleaner, greener and safer.'

The news follows a trend of recruiting ordinary people to help catch those responsible for minor crimes. On Wednesday, it emerged more than 1,400 people will have police powers under the Home Office's Community Safety Accreditation Scheme.

Security guards, park wardens and other local authority staff can issue fines for a large number of offences, stop cars and seize alcohol from underage drinkers.

Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants
Al claims 'the world has lost ground to the climate crisis'

Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis."

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.

"I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact," he said. "I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that."

The government says about 28 coal plants are under construction in the United States. Another 20 projects have permits or are near the start of construction.

Scientists say carbon gases from burning fossil fuel for power and transport are a key factor in global warming.

Carbon capture and storage could give coal power an extended lease on life by keeping power plants' greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and easing climate change.

But no commercial-scale project exists anywhere to demonstrate the technology, partly because it is expected to increase up-front capital costs by an additional 50 percent.

So-called geo-sequestration of carbon sees carbon dioxide liquefied and pumped into underground rock layers for long term storage.

Solar Wind Influenced Cosmic Rays Not CFCs Produce Ozone Hole


New theory predicts the largest ozone hole over Antarctica will occur this month.

A University of Waterloo scientist says that cosmic rays are a key cause for expanding the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole—and predicts the largest ozone hole will occur in one or two weeks. Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy who studies ozone depletion, says that it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer is depleted by chlorine atoms produced by sunlight-induced destruction of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. But more and more evidence now points to a new theory that the cosmic rays (energy particles that originate in space) play a major role. The ozone layer is a layer in Earth’s atmosphere that contains high concentrations of ozone. It absorbs almost all of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet light, which is potentially damaging to life on Earth and causes diseases such as skin cancer and cataracts. The Antarctic ozone hole can be larger than the size of North America.

Lu says that data from several sources, including NASA satellites, show a strong correlation between cosmic ray intensity and ozone depletion. Lab measurements demonstrate a mechanism by which cosmic rays cause drastic reactions of ozone-depleting chlorine inside polar clouds. Satellite data in the period of 1980-2007, covering two full 11-year solar cycles, demonstrate the significant correlation between cosmic rays and ozone depletion. “This finding, combined with laboratory measurements, provides strong evidence of the role of cosmic-ray driven reactions in causing the ozone hole and resolves the mystery why a large discrepancy between the sunlight-related photochemical model and the observed ozone depletion exists,” Lu says.

For example, the most recent scientific assessments of ozone depletion by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, which use photochemical models, predict ozone will increase by one to 2.5 per cent between 2000 and 2020 and Antarctic springtime ozone is projected to increase by five to 10 per cent between 2000 and 2020. In sharp contrast, Lu says his study predicts the severest ozone loss—resulting in the largest ozone hole—will occur over the South Pole this month. The study also predicts another large hole will probably occur around 2019.

Noble Savage myth covers up truth
David Deming
The Edmond Sun

The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. “Aspiration,” Campbell explained, “is the motivator, builder and transformer of civilization.” Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon’s myth of the New Atlantis.

Competing with Bacon’s vision of a scientific society based on intelligence, knowledge and innovation, is an older, more persistent fable: the Noble Savage. The Noble Savage is not a person, but an idea. It is cultural primitivism, the belief of people living in complex and evolved societies that the simple and primitive life is better. The Noble Savage is the myth that man can live in harmony with nature, that technology is destructive and that we would all be happier in a more primitive state.

Before Christ lived, the Noble Savage was known to the Hebrews as the Garden of Eden. The Greeks called it the lost Golden Age. In all the ages of the world, otherwise intelligent and learned persons have fallen swoon to the strange appeal of cultural primitivism. In the 16th century, French writer Michel de Montaigne described Americans Indians as so morally pure they had no words in their languages for lying, treachery, avarice and envy. And Montaigne portrayed the primitive life as so idyllic that American Indians did not have to work, but could spend the whole day dancing.

In 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that what appeared to be human progress was in fact decay. The best condition for human beings to live in, according to Rousseau, was the “pure state of nature” in which savages existed. When men lived as hunters and gatherers, they were “free, healthy, honest and happy.” The downfall of man occurred when people started to live in cities, acquire private property and practice agriculture and metallurgy. The acquisition of private property resulted in inequality, aroused the vice of envy and led to perpetual conflict and unceasing warfare.

According to Rousseau, civilization itself was the scourge of humanity. Rousseau went so far as to make the astonishing claim that the source of all human misery was what he termed our “faculty of improvement,” or the use of our minds to improve the human condition.

Since Rousseau wrote, more than 250 years of archeological and ethnographic research have shown that most of the imaginative conceptions associated with the Noble Savage are simply wrong. Archeologist Steven A. Leblanc wrote that “warfare in the past was pervasive and deadly.” Conflict between bands of hunter-gatherers was universal and intense, and the practices of cannibalism and infanticide were common.

Before the Industrial Revolution disease and poverty were endemic, even in civilized societies. In 18th century Europe half of all children died before their 10th birthday, and life expectancy at birth was only 25 years.

Neither did pre-industrial civilizations live in a state of ecological harmony with their environment. Their exploitation of nature was often destructive. The Mediterranean islands colonized by the ancient Greeks were transformed into barren rock by overgrazing and deforestation. The Bay of Troy, described in Homer’s Iliad, has been filled in by sediment eroded from surrounding hillsides destabilized by unsustainable agricultural practices.

All of this would be of academic interest only, were it not the case that the modern environmental movement and many of our public policies are based implicitly on the myth of the Noble Savage. The fountainhead of modern environmentalism is Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” The first sentence in “Silent Spring” invoked the Noble Savage by claiming “there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”

But the town Carson described did not exist, and her polemic, “Silent Spring,” introduced us to environmental alarmism based on junk science. As the years passed, Carson was elevated to sainthood and the template laid for endless spasms of hysterical fear-mongering, from the population bomb, to nuclear winter, the Alar scare and global warming.

The truth is that human beings have not, cannot, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.”

When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the ages when human lives were “nasty, brutish and short.”

DAVID DEMING is a geologist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

Beavers snitched on for 'illegal logging'
Police: 'The [environmentalist] campaigners are feeling pretty stupid'



GREEN campaigners called police after discovering an illegal logging site in a nature reserve – only to find the culprits were a gang of beavers.

Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked with notches for felling at a beauty-spot in Subkowy, northern Poland.

But when officers followed a trail left by a tree which had been dragged away, they found a beaver dam right across the river as reported by the Austrian Times.

A police spokesman said: "The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There's nothing more natural than a beaver."

_____________________

(http://img116.exs.cx/img116/1231/z7shysterical.gif)

Let's arrest the beavers and implement a carbon tax on them. That will take care of it.

(http://img116.exs.cx/img116/1231/z7shysterical.gif)

Someone that can't tell the difference between beaver cuts and axe cuts has no business being that far out in those woods without an experienced guide. The beavers might use them as logs.

(http://img116.exs.cx/img116/1231/z7shysterical.gif)

 ;D   ;D   ;D

That might be a good thing.

Environmentalists are continuing to grab onto anything that they can in order to further their agenda. They have pushed their agenda a long time ago to the point that it has become a religion all of it's own. Now they are high-jacking the bible, God's holy word, for furthering the agenda even more. They are using an NSRV and highlighting scripture that they think promotes environmentalism.

In addition to the "Green Letter Edition" it contain an "green index" to aid in the study of environmentalism. The book is also made of "Recycled paper, using soy-based ink with a cotton/linen cover."

The purpose of using God's word for their agenda which actually detracts from God's message is evident in their advertising. "With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth."

Since this message is for the earth I wonder who will teach the earth to read it.  ::)

As usual much of mankind misses the whole point of God's message and makes one of their own.

1Jn 1:1  That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life;
1Jn 1:2  (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;)
1Jn 1:3  That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.
1Jn 1:4  And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.
1Jn 1:5  This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.


Rom 1:16  For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
Rom 1:17  For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

Salvation, salvation from death under the law by God's perfect grace.

Rom 3:10  As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
Rom 3:11  There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
Rom 3:12  They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

Rom 3:23  For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

Rom 5:12  Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

Rom 6:23  For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Rom 1:18  For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

Rom 3:20  Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.

Rom 3:27  Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.

Rom 5:8  But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Rom 5:9  Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.

Rom 2:4  Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?

Rom 3:22  Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:

Rom 3:28  Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

Rom 10:9  That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Rom 4:21  And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.

Rom 4:24  But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead;

Rom 5:1  Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:

Rom 10:10  For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Rom 10:13  For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

And I said before..........


Also AMEN Pastor Roger!!

Eco-laws turn housewives into smugglers
'I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with'

The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

But it's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds.

Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.

"Yes, I am a smuggler," she said. "I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with."

(In truth, the ban applies to the sale of phosphate detergent - not its use or possession - so Marcotte is not in any legal trouble.)

Marcotte said she tried every green brand in her dishwasher and found none would remove grease and pieces of food. Everybody she knows buys dishwasher detergent in Idaho, she said.

Supporters of the ban acknowledge it is not very popular.

"I'm not hearing a lot of positive feedback," conceded Shannon Brattebo of the Washington Lake Protection Association, a prime mover of the ban. "I think people are driving to Idaho."

Steve Marcy, manager of the Costco in Coeur d'Alene, about 10 miles east of the Washington state line, estimated that sales of dishwasher detergent in his store have increased 10 percent. He knows where the customers are coming from.

"I'll joke with them and ask if they are from Spokane," Marcy said. "They say, 'Oh yeah.'"

Shoppers can still buy phosphate detergents in Washington state by venturing outside Spokane County, but Idaho is more convenient to many Spokane residents.

Phosphates - the main cleaning agent in many detergents and household cleaners - break down grease and remove stains. However, the chemicals are difficult to remove in wastewater treatment plants and often wind up in rivers and lakes, where they promote the growth of algae. And algae gobble up oxygen in the water that fish need to survive.

While traditional detergents are up to 9 percent phosphate, those sold in Spokane County can contain no more than 0.5 percent.

The Washington Lake Protection Association has launched a campaign to encourage people to give the environmentally friendly brands a fair chance. The group suggests consumers experiment with different brands or install water softeners to help the green detergents work better.

"Clean lakes and clean dishes do not have to be mutually exclusive," said association president-elect Jacob McCann.

Phosphates have been banned in laundry detergent nationally since 1993. Washington was the first state where the Legislature passed a similar ban against dishwasher detergents, in 2006. The ban is being phased in, starting with Spokane County.

"It's nice to be on the cutting edge," Spokane resident Ken Beck, an opponent of the ban, said sarcastically.

Among other states that have banned or are banning phosphates in dishwasher detergent are Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. A bill on Capitol Hill would impose a nationwide ban.

The Soap and Detergent Association, which represents manufacturers, initially fought the bans. But as the movement gained strength across the country, the association asked legislatures to delay bans until July 2010 to allow for a uniform rollout of products.

The industry has been working to develop better low-phosphate detergents, said Dennis Griesing, vice president of the manufacturers group.

"This is an irrevocable, nationwide commitment on the industry's part," he said.

For his part, Beck has taken to washing his dishes on his machine's pots-and-pans cycle, which takes longer and uses five gallons more water. Beck wonders if that isn't as tough on the environment as phosphates.

"How much is this really costing us?" Beck said. "Aren't we transferring the environmental consequences to something else?"

Farmers gets carbon credits for not farming
'They called me a tree-hugger. Then I showed them my 1st check'

Rex Woollen grows corn and soybeans. In 2007, the Wilcox, Nebraska, farmer started cultivating a new commodity: carbon.

By not tilling his 800 acres, Woollen by some estimates keeps 470 tons of carbon per year in the ground and out of the atmosphere. Because of that, Woollen gets carbon credits he can sell on the Chicago Climate Exchange. At first, neighboring farmers were skeptical.

“They called me a tree-hugger,” Woollen said. “Then I showed them my first check.”

Woollen gets about $3,000 a year from the climate exchange’s carbon-trading pilot program. While it isn’t much, to Woollen it hints at bigger potential profit as Congress considers mandatory, nationwide greenhouse-gas limits.

President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress back a “cap-and-trade” system to ease global warming by making companies obtain government-issued pollution permits. As allowable emissions drop over time, companies would have to reduce pollution or buy extra allowances. Businesses adopting clean-energy methods like wind or solar power could sell permits for a profit.

Some farm-state lawmakers and agriculture groups want to let farmers like Woollen create a separate source of carbon allowances. Farmers who use eco-friendly farming techniques or plant trees would earn so-called offsets to sell alongside government permits on carbon markets.

Rural Votes Crucial

Agricultural offsets may be crucial to attracting enough votes from rural lawmakers to pass climate-change legislation, said Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a South Dakota Democrat. “We have to insist that agriculture has a seat at the table,” she said.

Republican congressional leaders have likened Obama’s cap- and-trade proposal to a tax increase on energy, and the plan may pit coal-producing states against other areas. Farm organizations are also divided.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the biggest farm group, has opposed cap-and-trade plans, saying they would raise fuel and fertilizer costs. The National Farmers Union likes the idea and is lobbying for a slice of the carbon market.

In ideal circumstances, farms have the potential to capture one-third of the carbon pollution now produced by the U.S., said Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center. Obama has said that by 2050 he wants to cut emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels.

‘New Income Source’

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has called carbon “a new income source” that could “change the old ways of supporting farms.”

At this point, Climate Exchange Plc’s Chicago Climate Exchange runs a pilot program that lets farmers supply credits for sale to companies, such as Ford Motor Co. and American Electric Power Co., which have agreed to voluntary emissions limits. Its sibling Chicago Climate Futures Exchange last November began trading futures that can be used if a mandatory cap-and-trade law is enacted.

The North Dakota Farmers Union is the climate exchange’s biggest aggregator of farm-related carbon credits, with 3,900 participating farmers who will get about $9 million this year, Farmers Union President Robert Carlson said.

U.S. greenhouse-gas trading would skyrocket if Congress adopts a program like the European Union cap-and-trade system, which started trading carbon permits in 2005. The Chicago climate and futures exchanges together handled credits for 28.8 million metric tons in February, compared with a record 447 million metric tons at London’s European Climate Exchange Ltd.

Higher Costs

While farm-state votes may make or break a cap-and-trade bill, proponents face questions about whether agricultural offsets reliably cut greenhouse gases, and whether carbon’s price will rise enough to justify farmers’ costs.

By leaving land undisturbed, no-till farming keeps decaying organic matter in the soil so that carbon produced by decomposition isn’t released into the atmosphere. It also requires less machinery use, cutting fuel consumption.

No-till farmers may get lower yields along with lower expenses, so fuel costs and commodity prices influence tillage decisions. Agriculture Department research in 2007 said no-till corn farmers could save $83 per acre, enough to make up for crop yields that fell by 23 bushels per acre.

Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman said a cap-and-trade system, on balance, would probably hurt farmers by raising their costs. He would prefer greater government support for ethanol, which burns more cleanly than gasoline.

Defeat the Purpose

Some environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, say offsets may let companies buy their way out of pollution caps. Allowing offsets in a cap-and-trade system also requires some way to verify that farm practices genuinely cut emissions.

“If companies are buying offsets that aren’t real, we’re really defeating the purpose of climate-change legislation,” said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president for the Environmental Working Group.

Dow Chemical Co. and General Electric Co. are among companies that have backed the idea of offsets to help companies comply with carbon caps while working to curb emissions.

“You need offsets as a bridge,” said Graeme Martin, manager of business development for environmental products at Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s Shell Energy North America.

Jumping into the carbon market wasn’t much of a gamble for Woollen, he said. A self-described “true believer” in the dangers of climate change, Woollen, 61, already was practicing no-till farming when the carbon exchange opened. With no new equipment to buy, he said selling carbon credits was an easy decision.

Wes Niederman, 49, was also a no-till farmer when he joined the exchange three years ago. A North Dakota Farmers Union board member, he made about $1,500 last year from carbon credits.

“I’m getting that for doing nothing out of the ordinary,” Niederman said.

Where is the logic, where have the sensible people gone? I really do think that these politicians and environmentalists behind all this really do want to kill a whole lot more people.

They will increase the misery index of people, and it really doesn't matter if their cause is scientifically correct or not. They know that average people are going to suffer in many ways with the new environmental laws, but they simply don't care. Whether something is ACTUALLY bad for the environment or not is a moot issue. Al Gore makes up his so-called facts as he goes, and he got by with it. As a result, he and his co-conspirators in crime are raking in the money - SO crime does pay in this case. Some prison terms and confiscation of ill-gotten gains might change the way of thinking on this. In the meantime, average people will be suffering.