Voters in Cary, North Carolina became the first in the state to use instant runoff voting, and the vote seems to have gone very smoothly.

“I thought it was really positive,” said Alex Funk, a retired engineer who biked to the Herbert C. Young Community Center to vote. “I mean, why do this all twice?”

Next month voters in Hendersonville, North Carolins will use the system in their City Council election.

On the negative side,

On October 14, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 1294, the bill to let all cities and counties use Instant-Runoff Voting for elections for their own officers. His veto message says, “This represents a drastic change to the way we vote. I am concerned that we don’t yet know enough about how voters will react to such a dramatic change. Charter cities and counties already have the right to hold ranked voting elections, yet only one city has done so thus far.”  Several cities in California have already voted to use Instant-Runoff Voting, but state law prevents them from implementing their choice because they aren’t charter cities.

The National Research Council has released a report that claims increasing corn ethanol production will stress the nation’s fresh water supplies.

Growing lots more corn using current farm practices will come at a huge water cost to Nebraska and other states where the fuel is made. Industrial farming methods would deplete underground water supplies and result in a flow of agricultural chemicals and eroded soil into rivers, lakes and oceans, according to the report, “Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States.”

“It is equivalent to ‘mining’ the water resource, and the loss of the resource is essentially irreversible,” the report said.

The following chart shows world oil production as well as production of other oil liquids. All appear to have peaked.

Chart is reproduced from The Oil Drum.

Andrew Leonard writes in Salon that global stockpiles of grain are plunging. A fascinating article that dovetails quite nicely with the documentary “The End of Suburbia.” Here’s a link to an article about sugar cane-derived biofuel.

In an age of global warming and increasing energy prices, living in a neighborhood where you can walk to stores or services in an important consideration.

Now there is a website that will calculate how walkable your neighborhood is.  Just type in your address and it will calculate a walk score from zero to a hundred, with a hundred being the best.

Kensington, an older neighborhood that was originally built around a rail line scores a 69 out of 100.  See how your neighborhood compares.

House Democrats have dropped two proposals that would have required higher mileage standards for new automobiles. The proposals would have raised mileage standards for cars by 27 to 40%.

Nancy Pelosi released a statement that she supported requiring automakers to make more fuel efficient vehicles but that the issue was deferred “in the interest of promoting passage of a consensus energy bill.”

The issue will now be decided in a House-Senate conference committee.

Co-op America reports that Dominion Power has canceled three of four planned coal fired power plants, including two in Virginia.  This comes after a campaign that gathered at least 20,000 signatures opposing the plants. 

Co-op America’s Climate Change Program Director Todd Larsen had warned:

Dominion’s plans for our future are a giant step backwards for America. At a time when energy companies are increasingly recognizing climate change, and even calling for federal regulation of carbon, Dominion is moving forward with three polluting plants that will pump enormous amounts of carbon into our skies. Dominion has refused calls to report out on its climate emissions and how it can curb them, despite growing interest from their own shareholders. Dominion is also pushing for nuclear power - touting it as a safe, environmentally sound energy solution - and ignoring local opposition and real concerns around safety and proliferation.

Now Dominion and the US Department of Energy have reported that three of four new coal-fired power plants are no longer scheduled to be built.   Now they pledge to triple wind power investments in West Virginia over the course of this year, and also, at this year’s shareholder meeting, Dominion finally recognized the reality of climate change. 

Activist pressure combined with the steady drumbeat of news confirming global warming fears can make a difference.  This sort of pressure should be extended to other major utilities as well.

Okla. Senator Vows Block, Saying Author Stigmatized Insecticides

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday.

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In a statement on his Web site yesterday, Coburn (R) confirmed that he is holding up the bill. In the statement, he blames Carson for using “junk science” to turn public opinion against chemicals, including DDT, that could prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

The male bovine fecal material that this S.O.B. is spouting reminds me of the right wing revisionist claims of the Vietnam War. Here he is negatively spinning the work of Carson. (Click here to see his claims debunked.) Tom Coburn is truly an S.O.B. to denigrate a woman who gave so much even as she was dying from breast cancer; a woman who hid her desperate plight because she knew in her bones that if the chemical lobby found out about her cancer, then they would distort that fact to claim that her work was biased. Coburn is an absolute slimeball.

Click here to see a very short retrospective of Carson’s life.

Happy birthday, Ms. Carson.

Data from the Energy Information Agency seems to indicate that we may have hit peak oil. Graphs from a Live Journal blog show oil production hitting a plateau in the last two years and starting to decline.

Extrapolating the trend out for the next two years shows oil production falling 8 mbd short of expected demand.

This summer’s gas prices may only be a prelude of things to come.

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers’ Prying Eyes

In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories.

Talk about gall! Telling a physician what he should be subscribing to his patients!

Now the issue is bubbling up in the political arena. Last year, New Hampshire became the first state to try to curtail the practice, but a federal district judge three weeks ago ruled the law unconstitutional.

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“In this case commercial interests took precedence over the interests of the private citizens of New Hampshire,” Rosenwald said. “This is like letting a drug rep into an exam room and having them eavesdrop on a private conversation between a physician and a patient.”

The April 30 ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, nominated to the federal bench in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, called the state’s pioneering law an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech.

How typical of a REPUGNican judge! To place the interests of Big Pharma over the interests of the patients! This is an unequal contest — Big Pharma has more resources to lobby physicians than states do.

A drug company might use the database to help determine whether physicians prescribing a particular high-risk drug have undergone required training about the medicine, said Marjorie E. Powell, senior assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade association.

“If you don’t have that information, then you are in a very difficult situation,” Powell said. “There is no way you can implement the risk-management plan that the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] is requiring you to implement in order to allow the drug to be on the market.”

To me, this sounds like a threat; but judge for yourself — here’s the link to the article.