Uncategorized14 Oct 2007 08:34 am
by karma432 “I’m sick and tired of only hearing the bad news. Why can’t someone talk about the good news?” Captain Edward Smith, Titanic, 11:40 PM, April 12, 1912.
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Uncategorized19 Jun 2007 11:25 am
Companies hoping to build power plants in the USA
by Professor MattElectricity companies in the US are asking the Government to change the rules of the loan guarantees being offered so that 100% of the loan is covered, instead of 90%, as currently proposed. The electricity companies are being advised by finance experts that the 90% loan scheme won’t work well, as it would create “two tier” risk in any finance package to fund the construction of a new nuclear power plant.
The load guarantees are meant to protect companies from the possibility that they start to build a new nuclear power plant and then have a new government policy on nuclear power emerge that might jeopardise the success of that new build project.
click below for the full story
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/industry/Usec_joins_loan_guarantee_bidders_190607.shtml
Uncategorized29 Apr 2007 07:40 pm
A Benefit Concert for Friends International Center in Ramallah
by AdministratorSaturday, May 12, 7-10pm Sandy Spring Friends Community House, 17715 Meetinghouse Road, Sandy Spring, MD (just off Rt. 108 in Sandy Spring) Directions: call 301-774-9792 or email office@sandyspring. org
Donation requested. Snacks, hot drinks and a ton of music.
Featuring:
- Richard Broadbent, Jesse Paledofsky and Dennis Botzer !
Friends International Center in Ramallah offers a ministry of hospitality; creating an atmosphere of care and respect in which positive, civic and civil discourse can be pursued; and a witness to hope and reconciliation can be made in a region where despair and violence have too often reigned. In this we seek to express the deepest values and highest aspirations of the Quaker faith.
Singer songwriters Richard and Jesse will inspire you with their music and Dennis will rock you with traditional Irish music.
by Administrator
January 10, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
My Favorite Green Lump
Colstrip, Montana
All environmentalists have their favorite “green” energy source that they think will break our addiction to oil and slow down climate change. I’ve come out to Montana to see mine. It’s called coal.
Yes, yes, I know, you thought I was going to say corn ethanol or switch grass or soybean diesel. Well, one day they all might reach a scale that can get us off oil. But the cheap, available fuel that China, India and America all have in abundance today — and are all going to burn for the next decade — is coal. So unless we can burn coal in a cleaner way, you can kiss the climate goodbye — we’ll all be wearing bikinis and shorts in Manhattan in January.
When it comes to what it will take to “green” coal, there’s no more informed or intrepid tour guide than Montana’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer. The governor, a bulldozer of a man, met me in Billings in his little prop plane, we flew into a winter gale that tossed us around like salad pieces, and then we set down on a makeshift runway in Colstrip, on the edge of a coal strip mine. On the way back, after flying through another howling storm that caused me to dig my nails so deeply into the armrests I left my fingerprints in the leather, I thanked the pilots profusely. The governor simply bellowed, “I’m glad we had our best interns flying today!”
When it comes to cleaning up coal, though, Governor Schweitzer is dead serious.
“Here in Montana we make our living outside,” said the governor, an agronomist who got his start building farms in Saudi Arabia, “and when you do that, you know the climate is changing. We don’t get as much snow in the high country as we used to … and the runoff starts sooner in the spring. … The river I’ve been fishing over the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it is hard on our trout population. … So when Exxon Mobil hires someone who calls himself a ‘scientist’ to claim this is not true, you don’t have to get The New York Times to know the guy is blowing smoke.”
But here’s what the governor also knows: Montana has one-third of all the coal deposits in America — 8 percent of all the coal in the world. Montana’s coal is roughly equivalent to 240 billion barrels of oil. “That’s enough to replace all our imported oil for 60 years,” he noted.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that because of global warming — fueled in part by carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning electricity plants — the only way we’ll be able to use all those coal reserves is if we can burn coal without emitting the CO2. Otherwise we’re cooked, literally.
So Governor Schweitzer’s crusade is to get the coal-burning industries to take the lead on this, in partnership with government. The governor recalled a recent conference of coal-dependent industries, held in Phoenix, at which he held up a lump of coal and warned: “You are the people who represent the companies who will decide whether I’m holding up the future of energy or the past. Take a look at all the other people sitting at your table. You know who you see? You see the last remaining people on the planet who don’t believe CO2 is a problem. … The only way you will make this the energy of the future is to recognize C02 as a problem and that you have to be part of the solution.” And by the way, he added, “there is a lot of money in it for you guys. You can sell this technology all over the world.”
Governor Schweitzer has a plan for Washington: 1) Set a floor price for crude oil in the U.S. at $40 a barrel forever. That will tell Wall Street that if it invests in new, clean coal technologies — which can be run profitably at the equivalent of $40 a barrel — OPEC will never undercut them. 2) Set up a European-style cap and trade system rewarding companies that buy clean coal technologies and punishing those that don’t. 3) Have Washington co-invest in a dozen pilot gasification and liquefaction technologies — which already exist — for cleaning coal and sequestering the carbon dioxide. Then we’ll identify the best technologies quicker and move down the innovation curve. 4) Write the regulations now for how we will manage carbon dioxide that is removed from coal and stored underground.
As we talked, four smokestacks from the coal-fired electricity plant in Colstrip, which helps power Portland and Seattle, were belching CO2.
“For the last 100 years we built plants like this one,” the governor said. “It takes crushed coal, ignites it to heat water that produces steam, and that turns a turbine and produces electricity. … You build that smoke stack real high so that nasty stuff goes to someone else’s backyard. Well, we’ve run out of backyards.”
Uncategorized21 Jul 2006 07:27 am
by Angry White Liberal …it describes a google search that turns up just one entry. Supposedly, finding such a search is a special thing. If that is the case then I present the below google search:
“Mary Rooker” larch md
Was a Car Dealer, Now Ambassador to the U.K.
by adamThis jolted me out of my “it can’t get any worse, my expectations can’t get any lower” attititude. The key sentence for me: “Although Mr Tuttle, a Beverly Hills car dealer and major donor to George Bush’s re-election campaign, has been ambassador in London only since the summer, he is proving to be accident-prone.” If I donate enough money, can I be the one to drive the fighter jet/nuclear sub/aircraft carrier? Mr. President, can I make my mark by driving some species into extinction? Can I flatten the Appalachian mountains and destroy miles of natural beauty with my mining efforts if I donate enough money? Can I turn the key on the Minuteman missiles if I pay enough? Pretty please$$? Those positions are filled? But you’ll let me be Ambassador to the U.K? Well, OK, I’ll take it.
US Embassy Close to Admitting Syria Rendition Flight
By Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 27 December 2005
Statement contradicts ambassador’s interview. Correction could leave Britain open to challenge.
The US embassy in London was forced to issue a correction yesterday to an interview given by the ambassador, Robert Tuttle, in which he claimed America would not fly suspected terrorists to Syria, which has one of the worst torture records in the Middle East. A statement acknowledged media reports of a suspect taken from the US to Syria.
Torture is banned in the US but the CIA has been engaged in a policy of rendition, flying terrorist suspects to countries in the Middle East and other parts of the world where torture is commonplace.
Although Mr Tuttle, a Beverly Hills car dealer and major donor to George Bush’s re-election campaign, has been ambassador in London only since the summer, he is proving to be accident-prone. Last month he vigorously denied British media reports that American forces used white phosphorus as a weapon in Iraq, only to be undercut by an admission from the Pentagon the next day.
Mr Tuttle gave an interview to the BBC Today programme on Thursday for broadcast yesterday morning. On Friday, the US embassy returned to the BBC with a lengthy statement of clarification, which was also broadcast yesterday at the end of the interview.
Uncategorized & In Appreciation & Ecological Wisdom & Future Focus/Sustainability & Energy13 Dec 2005 11:22 pm
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) gives an excellent discussion of Peak Oil on the House floor
by adamKudos to Maryland 6th District Republican Representative Roscoe Bartlett who is currently, as I write this, giving a long (going on more than 45 minutes) discussion on the House floor on the dangers of impending Peak Oil, including extensive charts and graphs from SAIC’s Dr. Robert Hirsch that are consistent with everything we have discussed regarding dwindling oil resources. “We are about 100-150 years through the age of oil (about 1/2 way).” “The world has never faced a problem like this.”
His website indicates that Peak Oil is a key interest of his.
Uncategorized10 Dec 2005 10:50 am
Bush on Constitution: ‘It’s just a goddamned piece of paper’
by karma432Capital Hill Blue claims to have three sources present in a meeting where Bush called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.” In fairness, some 0f the stories that make it into Capital Hill Blue are more rumor than fact, which should be kept in mind, although they were the first to report on White House staffers’ concerns about Bushs erratic behavior under stress, and similar stories have been cropping up in more mainstream outlets. In any event, the scary part is that this story is entirely believeable.
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
Scary.
Uncategorized & Grassroots Democracy & Community Based Economics & Personal and Global Responsibility & Future Focus/Sustainability & Living Wages and Affordable Housing20 Nov 2005 09:09 pm
The Greening of Suburbia in Great Britain
by karma432Ministers in the British department, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, are pushing for a plan, drawn up by Essex county council, to be adopted by other local authorities as they try to accommodate the 1.2m new homes the government has said must be built in southeast England by 2021.
This blueprint for a “sustainable suburbia” maps out a future in which cars glide along at 10mph, children play in the streets and back gardens are reduced to tiny yards.
Developers must meet an elaborate system of “green points”, in which they must install features to encourage biodiversity, from ponds and climbing creepers to nectar-laden flowers and bat boxes.
Electricity will have to come from street-corner stations powered by wind, ground heat or other renewable sources.
Cars will be allowed into play streets, but obstacles such as trees, cycle racks and sand pits will be placed so that drivers have to slow down to 10mph to weave through them.The idea is that parents will feel confident enough to let their children play in the street without worrying about the traffic.
To achieve the required density of housing and minimise the amount of countryside destroyed, the government wants householders in the new developments to settle for spaces such as roof gardens, play streets and balconies rather than private gardens. Because of the need to pack many more homes into each acre, few will be allowed private gardens or yards of more than 15ft by 15ft.
Kitchens in the new homes will have to have six fitted recycling bins, each for a different material. The bins must be of 10-litre capacity for one-bed properties and 20 litres for larger homes.
As America moves more and more toward McMansions with more and more space, much of which a single family will never use, Europeans are beginning to seriously face up to a future where energy and resources are limited and precious and fhe ecological damage of human society must be limited.
