[Biofuel] Venezuela Gives Exxon Ultimatum
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1220-04.htm Published on Tuesday, December 20, 2005 by BBC News / UK Venezuela Gives Exxon Ultimatum by Greg Morsbach Venezuela has given the world's biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, until the end of this year to enter a joint venture with the state. Failure to do so will almost certainly result in Exxon losing its oil field concessions in the country. Venezuela's socialist government has now signed new agreements with almost all foreign petroleum companies. After months of pressure from left-wing leader Hugo Chavez most foreign oil firms working there have caved in. They have agreed to hand over a controlling stake of their oil interests to the Venezuelan state. This means that Venezuela, which has the world's largest petroleum reserves, now calls the shots in what the foreign guests can and cannot do. In addition, the companies which have signed the new contracts - such as Chevron, BP, Shell and Total - will in future be presented with much higher tax bills by the government. Foreign unease But Venezuela says it is only fair that the foreigners are made to pay up as they have got away lightly in the past. Much of the oil revenue in Venezuela goes into social projects in shanty towns and poor rural areas. But the US oil giant, ExxonMobil, is digging in its heels and is so far refusing to agree to the terms of the new deal. Exxon risks losing Venezuelan operations if it fails to comply. There is growing unease among foreign energy companies based Latin America that they may be forced to become junior partners by a string of left wing governments. In the case of Bolivia and the apparent shift to the left there following elections on Sunday, it is possible that the new government will decide to follow Venezuela's example and renegotiate oil and gas contracts with foreign investors. © BBC MMV ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] GM Contamination Accelerating - No Co-Existence Possible
The Institute of Science in Society Science Society Sustainability http://www.i-sis.org.uk This article can be found on the I-SIS website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GMCANCEP.php ISIS Press Release 16/12/05 GM Contamination Accelerating - No Co-Existence Possible Untried and untested GM crops are out of the bottle even in the UK where no GM crops are commercially grown. Rhea Gala GM crops, the vast majority engineered for just two traits - herbicide tolerance and Bt pesticide, or stacked with both - have been released on five continents for up to nine years, causing widespread contamination of food, feed, seed and the environment across the globe. Genetically modified DNA from any part of a GM plant can enter the environment unobserved, for example, through pollen transfer to a conventional crop, through seed dispersal or plant decomposition and persistence in soil ecology. The toxins encoded in the DNA also kill wildlife and contaminate soil and water, as do herbicides such as glyphosate and glufosinate ammonium that are an essential component of the herbicide tolerant crop system. Outcrossing between a GM crop plant and a wild relative and over dependence of the GM crop on herbicides to which the crop is tolerant, are causing a wave of superweeds to emerge in the US and elsewhere; the UK has reported a potential candidate earlier this year. UK's herbicide tolerant weed hybrids The UK government reported genetically modified herbicide tolerant (GMHT) hybrid weed seedlings at field trial sites earlier this year. One was a cross between Bayer's GMHT oilseed rape (Brassica napus) and its distant relative the common arable weed, charlock (Sinapis arvensis), and two were hybrids of Brassica napus and B. rapa. The findings, which were not announced, were nevertheless widely reported and somewhat exaggerated in the press [1] because many politicians and government scientists had repeatedly downplayed the possibility of GM gene transfer to wild relatives, the emergence of GM superweeds, or any other adverse effects of GM crops. For example, in 2000 the EU Environment agency concluded, There appears to be general agreement that natural gene flow is not likely to occur between B. napus and S. arvensis. The EU has an industry-sponsored forward plan for coexistence' in European countries for GM, conventional and organic crops to 2025 (Beware the New Biotech Eurovision http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis24.php ). The report to DEFRA from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Dorset, found that [2], The commercial growing of genetically modified, herbicide- tolerant oilseed rape is seen to result in the potential for the inserted gene to escape from the crop and become incorporated in the genomes of one or more related wild crucifer species, potentially giving a competitive advantage to the recipients. The virtually impossible already happened The emergence of two GMHT B. napus and B. rapa hybrids was inevitable as B. rapa is a parent of the commercial variety B. napus and spontaneous hybrids are well known to occur. Although the two plants generally do not share the same distribution, B. rapa may be overlooked because of its similarity to feral oilseed rape. The finding of these hybrids and the GMHT charlock hybrid show that the difficulties of coexistence between GM and conventional crops will be insuperable. Despite that, the authors still concluded, The risks of transfer of herbicide tolerance to wild relatives of oilseed rape appear to be minimal. But Dr Brian Johnson, an ecological geneticist and head of the Biotech Advisory Unit at English Nature, said that the charlock superweed would be fertile through its pollen to neighbouring plants [1]; and that charlock seeds can remain in the soil for 20 to 30 years before they germinate. Huge problems of cross- contamination and herbicide resistance have arisen in countries like Canada and the US (see for example GM sugar beet turned sour, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis25.php ; Roundup Ready sudden death, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis28.php ). Herbicide tolerant volunteers Herbicide tolerant volunteers were found in the two years following the Farm Scale Evaluations, and they tend to persist, requiring control with toxic herbicides other than glufosinate ammonium. The authors thought that volunteers may pose a greater risk for gene flow of the bar gene into the environment, than hybridization with wild relatives, especially if the same gene construct is introduced into other crop species. They also pointed out that these problems highlight implications for the EU threshold limits of GM content in oilseed rape crops set at 0.1 percent, 0.3 percent and 0.9 percent for organic seed, certified seed and food feed, respectively [2]. GM contamination lasts at least 15 years in soil The BRIGHT report [3] on a study in the UK begun in 1998 with funding from Monsanto, Bayer
[Biofuel] The Gene Rush
http://www.alternet.org/story/29532/ The Gene Rush By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted December 14, 2005. A crop of absurd genetic patents are bamboozling U.S. patent examiners and stifling innovation among farmers and scientists. As biotech crops blanket more and more of the countryside, America's organic farmers are struggling to keep their crops organic. The natural tendency of pollen and seed to wander from field to field, along with improved genetic-detection methods, have made it harder than ever to produce organic food that can be labeled as free of patented, engineered genes. So in 2002, a group of plant breeders led by scientists at Cornell University set out to breed organic corn varieties with built-in protection against stray genes. To do so, they took advantage of a well-known, naturally occurring gene, GaS, that inhibits fertilization of a corn plant by uninvited pollen. It looked like a neat way to keep patented pollen out of the organic gene pool, but there was one hitch. The key to the breeders' plan, the GaS gene, was patented. Last April, Nebraska seedcorn company Hoegemeyer Hybrids was awarded United States Patent 6875905, entitled Method of producing field corn seed and plants. It described the use of GaS to block foreign corn pollen. When I asked Tom Hoegemeyer, chief technology officer of his family's company, how he first hit upon the idea, he said, There was no particular flash of insight. It just occurred to me back in '95 or thereabouts. I remembered reading about it back in grad school. But members of the Cornell team don't understand how patent examiners ever could have approved the application. They say the gene GaS is extremely common in tropical corn varieties, that it has been transferred many times into US strains, and that the idea has been published in the scientific literature. Novelty and non-obviousness have always been two essential characteristics of a patentable idea. But the use of GaS, says Frank Kutka, who worked on the project as a Cornell graduate student, is not novel and is perfectly obvious. He points to an article published exactly 50 years ago in Agronomy Journal, then the premiere journal of agricultural research. In that paper, an Iowa State University scientist described the use of GaS for virtually the same purposes that are described in the Hoegemeyer patent. But until someone invests considerable time and money to challenge the GaS patent, it will stay on the books. Hoegemeyer's is only the latest in a long parade of patents laying claim to naturally occurring plants and genes. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the validity of patents on crop varieties and all of their parts, including pollen, egg cells and genes. The effect of the Court's opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was to declare the agricultural gene pool open to genetic prospectors. And the rush is on. Bean counters and melon squeezers In the world of patents, novelty is supposed to be king. Many of today's genetic patents demonstrate cleverness -- no argument there -- but too often it's the cleverness of the poacher, not the inspiration of the inventor. In one widely discussed case, a Colorado business executive named Larry Proctor obtained a patent on a yellow version of the common dry bean. To come up with his invention, he pulled a few yellow specimens out of a bag of normal-colored beans bought in a Mexican market. After growing plants and selecting among them for a few generations (a generally ineffective way to breed beans), Proctor applied successfully to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The 1999 patent covers much more than his own variety of bean. If you want to market any beans with a similar shade of yellow in the United States, the patent requires that you get a license from Proctor. Proctor has brought lawsuits to defend his claim, but as of July 2005, his family professed never to have collected a penny. News of Proctor's patent caused more than a little bafflement in Latin America, where people have been growing, trading, cooking and eating yellow beans for millenia. Indeed, Proctor's beans are almost identical genetically to yellow varieties from Mexico. Despite protests, the patent continues in effect. Shamrock Seed Co. of California wants to patent a honeydew melon with improved firmness. If the patent is granted, other melon breeders will either have to make sure their own varieties are a bit mushier than Shamrock's, or pay a license fee. The company's January 2005 application applies not only to its own strain of melon, but to any honeydew melons that meet certain specifications in a standard squeeze test. Pure World Botanicals, Inc. of South Hackensack, New Jersey now holds patents on root extracts from maca, a plant native to Peru, for use in treating sexual dysfunction. As you might have guessed, maca has long been used by indigenous Peruvians to improve fertility,
[Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1671722,00.html Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution' Ian Sample, science correspondent Wednesday December 21, 2005 The Guardian Motorbikes are churning out more pollution than cars, even though they make up only a small fraction of vehicles on the roads, according to a report. Tests on a selection of modern motorbikes and private cars revealed that rather than being more environmentally-friendly, motorbikes emit 16 times the amount of hydrocarbons, including greenhouse gases, three times the carbon monoxide and a disproportionately high amount of other pollutants, compared to cars. Ana-Marija Vasic at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, who led the research, said the need to legislate on emissions from motorbikes has been overlooked because there are so few on the roads. The oversight has lead to a paucity of research into ways of making their engines run more cleanly. In Britain, there are 1,060,000 motorbikes on the road but more than 25m private cars. Dr Vasic's tests showed that, especially in urban traffic, when motorcyclists frequently accelerated quickly, motorbike engines burned fuel inefficiently, giving a sharp peak in emissions. The yearly hydrocarbon emissions of the average two-wheeler in urban traffic measured up to 49 times higher than that of the average car, according to the study, due to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The importance of [motorbike] emissions has been underestimated in legislation, giving manufacturers little motivation to improve aftertreatment systems, said Dr Vasic. The tests were carried out on a variety of Yamaha, Piaggio and Honda 50cc scooters and Suzuki, Honda and BMW motorbikes with engine sizes ranging from 800cc to 1150cc. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] New Zealand scraps Kyoto carbon-tax plan
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNewsstor yID=2005-12-21T061205Z_01_MOL122269_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-ECONOMY-NEWZEALA ND-TAX-DC.XMLarchived=False Science News Article | Reuters.co.uk New Zealand scraps Kyoto carbon-tax plan Wed Dec 21, 2005 6:11 AM GMT WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand scrapped plans on Wednesday to introduce a carbon tax from 2007, saying it would not achieve its aim of cutting greenhouse gases. The tax of NZ$15 ($10.20) a ton of carbon was due to be introduced from April 1, 2007 under the country's commitment to the Kyoto protocol. It would have increased electricity, fuel, gas and coal prices, bringing in about NZ$360 million a year. Officials now advise that the proposed carbon tax would not cut emissions enough to justify its introduction, the Minister for Climate Change issues, David Parker, said. The decision followed a review, which the ruling Labour Party agreed to in order to get support of two smaller parties for the new minority coalition government after the September 17 election. Labour also could not guarantee a majority in the 120-seat parliament to have such a tax approved. A narrower-based carbon tax targeting the electricity generators and major power users was possible and a more broad-based tax might be considered after 2012, Parker said. Alternative policies aimed at reducing emissions would be considered early next year. The scrapped tax would have cost the average household about NZ$4 a week, although the government had intended to recycle the revenue back into the economy through tax breaks and concessions in other areas. Agreements exempting high-energy-consuming businesses from the charges in return for improved management of emissions were likely to be retained in some form, Parker said, assuming a narrower-based carbon tax goes ahead. Such businesses include the aluminum smelter at the bottom of the South Island operated by Rio Tinto subsidiary Comalco. Under the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which came into force in February, developed countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by about five percent from 1990 levels on average within the first commitment period of 2008-12. New Zealand produces 70 million to 90 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, making it the fourth-largest per capita producer after the United States, Australia, and Canada. About half of its greenhouse gases come from the methane and carbon-dioxide emissions of more than 50 million sheep and cattle, whose products earn about a third of New Zealand's export earnings. The United States, the world's biggest air polluter, has refused to ratify the protocol, which it sees as flawed because it does not similarly bind developing countries. Australia has also refused to ratify the protocol. Ten days ago in Montreal, environment ministers agreed to a road map to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, as well as agreeing to launch new global talks to fight climate change. ($1=NZ$1.38) ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Bolivia's Charge to the Left
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1216-20.htm Published on Friday, December 16, 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor Bolivia's Charge to the Left by Mark Engler and Nadia Martinez With presidential elections in Bolivia on Sunday, Washington is buzzing with talk that another Latin American country may be lost. Evo Morales, a former president of Bolivia's coca-growers' union and the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism party, is the current front-runner, according to the latest polls. If he wins the election, Mr. Morales will be the latest head of state to join the ranks of the region's burgeoning New Left, already comprised of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. For the Bush administration and conservative pundits, this would qualify as an unmitigated catastrophe. Bolivia, however, is far from lost. By proposing a new path to development, a Morales administration would offer genuine hope of alleviating endemic hardship and inequality in South America's poorest country. And if spreading democracy is truly the goal of US foreign policy, the United States should welcome such new approaches rather than demanding that other nations elect officials subservient to the views that currently prevail in the White House. The Bush administration's consistent mistake in dealing with Latin America has been to equate freedom with the pursuit of a rigid program of its preferredeconomic policies. It has valued free markets over democratic independence. This stance, not a novel one for US administrations, has repeatedly generated tensions with such progressive leaders as Argentina's Néstor Kirchner, Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez. The administration's most prominent antagonist in the region, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, needs only to point to the White House's early celebration - if not active support - of an antidemocratic coup against him in 2002 to illustrate the thinness of Bush's prodemocracy rhetoric. In Bolivia, democracy is now set to collide with the economic policies Washington prefers. American oil and gas companies doing business there reaped substantial profits from privatizing the country's gas industry in the early 1990s, and they had high hopes of being able to increase their windfalls by exporting Bolivia's gas to the energy-hungry US market. Corporate gains did not trickle down to Bolivia's poor, however, and massive protests against privatization have forced the resignation of two presidents in two years. They have also made a political star of Morales, a candidate who promises to redirect gas industry profits toward Bolivia's social needs. The Bush administration has watched Morales's rise to prominence with a sense of quiet hysteria. Morales has been slandered by conservatives who label him a drug trafficker, a charge that has never been substantiated. He and other coca farmers point out that although coca is used to produce cocaine, the natural plant leaves have ancestral importance for Bolivia's indigenous people. State Department officials regard him as a puppet of Mr. Chávez and Fidel Castro. If their regular stream of insults has been muted of late, it is only because the administration is aware that its past criticism has boosted Morales's popularity in a region where Washington's policies are viewed with skepticism. There's no reason to fear a Morales victory. While he is committed to pushing for a political program that will benefit Bolivia's poor and indigenous majority, Morales has shown consistent respect for the democratic process. Since US-sponsored coca eradication efforts in Bolivia and elsewhere have had little to no effect on cocaine use in the US, a Morales victory should be occasion for Washington to reevaluate its failed drug war rather than to propagate alarmist rhetoric. In terms of economic policy, Latin American leaders have increasingly concluded that the fiscal austerity and market reforms implemented in past decades under direction from the US, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank have only exacerbated inequality. Despite an abundance of natural resources, over two-thirds of Bolivians live in poverty, and nearly half subsist on less than one dollar per day. According to the World Bank, extreme poverty increased 5.8 percent between 1999 and 2002, and the gap between the rich and poor grew wider. Across the continent, per capita income hardly inched upward during the 1980s and '90s, when policies of corporate globalization held sway, while it had surged in previous decades. It remains to be seen if Latin America's New Left will be able to reverse this situation by fashioning bold solutions to poverty in Bolivia and beyond. Certainly, it deserves the chance to try. In this context, demonizing Morales will not advance our true national interests of promoting freedom and human development. But cheering an independent and democratic Bolivia
[Biofuel] Bolivia's Morales brands Bush a terrorist
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=worldNewsstoryi d=2005-12-20T205100Z_01_ARM074001_RTRUKOC_0_UK-BOLIVIA-MORALES-BUSH.xm l World News Article | Reuters.co.uk Bolivia's Morales brands Bush a terrorist Tue Dec 20, 2005 8:51 PM GMT DUBAI (Reuters) - Evo Morales, the winner of Bolivia's presidential election, branded U.S. President George W. Bush a terrorist, in an interview with Arabic satellite television on Tuesday. The only terrorist in this world that I know of is Bush. His military intervention, such as the one in Iraq, that is state terrorism, he told Al Jazeera television. The leftist won slightly more than half the votes cast in Bolivia's election on Sunday and is set to become the country's first indigenous president. There is a difference between people fighting for a cause and what terrorists do, he said in comments, which were translated into Arabic. Today in Bolivia and Latin America, it's no longer people that are lifting their weapons against imperialism, but it's imperialism that is lifting its weapons against people through military intervention and military bases. Morales has alarmed the Bush administration with his opposition to its strategy in the war on drugs and his admiration for U.S. foes President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fidel Castro of Cuba. A Morales government in Bolivia will add to a shift to the left in Latin America, where left and centre-left leaders are in power in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. Latin Americans are unhappy with corrupt and inefficient governments and many, like the Bolivians, mistrust U.S.-backed free market policies. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Evo Morales Has Plans for Bolivia
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2438/ -- In These Times Features December 18, 2005 Evo Morales Has Plans for Bolivia By America Vera-Zavala Evo Morales is a polarizing figure in Latin American politics: a proudly left-leaning indigenous activist who defends the traditional rights of peasants to grow coca and describes the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas as colonization. While opponents have labelled him a narco-trade unionist, the charismatic Morales enjoys widespread popular support. As In These Times went to press, he was expected to win the special December 18 Bolivian presidential election. His election would place him in power alongside other Latin American leaders who are critical of America's neoliberal economic agenda: Hugo Chavez of Venezula, Lula de Silva of Brazil and, of course, Fidel Castro in Cuba. Morales' upbringing shaped his political philosophy. The son of coca farmers, he was raised in the barren altiplano region, where he worked as a coca farmer and llama herder before rising to power as the national leader of the coca-growers union. In 1995, he founded MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), an indigenous-based political party that calls for the nationalization of industry, legalization of the coca leaf (the main ingredient of cocaine) and fairer distribution of national resources. Morales ran for president in 2002 on the MAS ticket, losing to the heavily favored Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada by two percentage points. A major plank in his current platform is to convene a constituent assembly, that would re-write the country's Constitution with input from the indigenous groups that make up approximately 62 percent of the population, but who only won the right to vote in 1952. Morales is an Aymara Indian, and many observers note that MAS has successfully brought together two strands of the left--the indigenous and the liberal--in one party. The political climate in Bolivia is tense. This presidential election comes after June protests against an oil export deal that forced the resignation of then-President Carlos Mesa. These protests were only the most recent: In 2000, protests in the city of Cochabamba stopped the IMF-mandated privatization of the public water system, and in 2003 protests erupted in La Paz over a tax increase aimed at the poor. If Morales wins less than 50 percent of the popular vote, the election will be decided by a congressional vote in January, and critics say that he has moved to the center in an attempt to win. But when In These Times spoke with Morales in early November, he was sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, and his resolve to equalize access to the country's resources was clear. What is the most important issue that you plan to address as president? The most important thing is to create public well-being, to combat poverty and take care of our natural resources. To form a government is to form a family that will work together to eliminate poverty. In this project the state has to be a central actor, generating development, housing, sports and so on. The state has to be the motor: We will nationalise the forests and the petroleum and natural gas reserves. In several cases the management of the companies has been disastrous. To develop the country, we have to get rid of the colonial and neoliberal model. We want to tax the transnationals in a fair way, and redistribute the money to the small- and medium-size enterprises, where the job opportunities and ideas are. To get this on its way, we want to create a development bank. The properties of big land owners will have to be redistributed; we'll respect the productive land, but the unproductive land must be handed out to landless peasants--this will start a true process of economic redistribution. We also want to industrialize and give people more access to technology. We want to govern with our indigenous ancestors' models: That means a different concept of participation, community work and honesty. How important is the Constituent Assembly? The Constituent Assembly is our number one priority and main proposal in the campaign. The majority of people in this country--people from more than 30 indigenous groups--did not participate in the foundation of Bolivia in 1825. We have to re-found Bolivia in order to end the colonial state, to live united in diversity, to put all our resources under state control, and to make people participate and give them the right to make decisions. If I become president, I have to swear to respect the laws--and if the laws are neoliberal, I can't do that. Our constitution says that Bolivia is a multiethnic democratic country, but that is only in theory. If we win we have to change the country, not only in theory but in reality. What will the process of transforming political representation look like? We would like to have elections for the Constituent Assembly six months after these [December]
[Biofuel] The Unfriendly Skies
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051220/the_unfriendly_skies.php The Unfriendly Skies Frank O'Donnell December 20, 2005 Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch, a 501 (c) 3 non-partisan, non-profit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act. The Bush administration is about to give an early Christmas present to the coal-burning electric power industry-while putting a sooty lump of coal in the stockings of breathers. Specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to unveil a proposal that will probably shield the power industry from further air pollution cleanup beyond that already planned. By doing this, the EPA will ignore the recommendations of its own outside science advisers and lie to the public about when the outdoor air is safe to breathe. The proposal involves fine particle pollution, the most lethal of widespread air pollutants. Fine particles are often-invisible emissions from coal burning, diesel engines and many other types of combustion. Experts believe that as many as 60,000 Americans may be dying prematurely each year from inhaling these toxic tidbits, which cause health problems including heart attacks, asthma attacks and lung cancer. For example, in a new study to be released this week, New York University School of Medicine researchers found that long-term exposure to fine particle pollution-even at levels permissible under current federal standards-helps to clog arteries and cause heart disease. The EPA, by law, is supposed to review the science involving particle pollution every five years, and update national health standards if necessary to protect public health. The standards are the legally binding goal that is supposed to inform the public what level of pollution is safe to breathe. In this case, the American Lung Association had to sue the Bush administration to enforce the law. Under a legal settlement, the EPA has to propose new standards by December 20 and issue final standards by next September. Scientific knowledge has evolved considerably since 1997, when the EPA last set health standards for this pollutant. In fact, there have been about 2,000 studies which collectively point to the need to reduce public exposure to this contaminant. An internal EPA analysis concluded that thousands of people would die early even if the current standards were met. As a result, EPA staff scientists, the agency's official outside science advisers and many prominent air pollution researchers have all called on the agency to make the current standards significantly stronger. Doing that, of course, would mean smokestack industries would have to clean up more than they currently plan to do. And so a rogues' gallery of polluters-including the American Iron and Steel Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, the [diesel] Engine Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-has worked hard behind the scenes to undermine the EPA's efforts. No polluter group has worked harder to shape these new standards than the Edison Electric Institute, the electric utility lobby whose chief, Tom Kuhn, was a college chum and later big fundraiser for President Bush. The particle-pollution caper is the latest sorry chapter in the coal-burning electric power industry's domination over Bush administration air pollution policies. You will recall that this is the same industry lobby that: * Killed any efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions * Killed any mercury-specific pollution controls for more than a decade * Killed federal enforcement of the pollution-reducing new source review program A spokesman for the institute conceded last week that it was urging EPA to make only modest changes to allow industry to adjust to previously issued standards, according to Reuters. And that's exactly what EPA appears about to do-recommend changes that on paper would appear to make modest improvements to current standards somewhat, while not requiring any additional cleanup from the power industry beyond what's already planned under earlier, industry-friendly rules. An EPA staffer gave the game away at a little-publicized meeting in California in late October. He unveiled a map which showed that EPA could appear to lower the standards-yet still not require additional cleanup. The Bush administration initially tried to keep reporters from seeing this telltale map, but Greenwire ultimately obtained it after filing a freedom of information request. President Bush has made much of the fact that the current head of the EPA, Steve Johnson, is a career scientist. Deplorably, it looks as if political science means a lot more to the administration than health science. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
[Biofuel] Warming Globally, Acting Locally
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051216/warming_globally_acting_locally.php Warming Globally, Acting Locally Scott Paul and Samuel Stein December 16, 2005 Scott Paul is a Program Coordinator and Samuel Stein is the Press Secretary at Citizens for Global Solutions. At least a few American news publications have dubbed President Bush the modern day Nero for his inattentiveness to global warming and his obstructionism at the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Montreal. But such a characterization cannot be extended to the United States as a nation; as President Bush plays the fiddle while the world warms around him, local American leaders are moving the United States forward in spite of his stubborn refusal to confront climate change, one of the most daunting challenges of our time. If the events in Montreal have shown us anything, it is that President Bush is incapable of preventing a timely and historic re-orientation toward clean, renewable energy. Much as the administration would like the United States to stay on the sidelines in the fight against climate change, mayors and local officials are making that impossible. This is unprecedented: throughout history, heads of state, and occasionally national legislatures, have determined their nations' identities in the world. In today's America, however, mayors and sub-national legislators, with their bold action to fight climate change, are setting the course. For perhaps the first time ever, local governments are carving out a nation's role in the world. While municipalities have a long history as laboratories for progress, 2005 was the year in which U.S. cities filled the leadership vacuum left vacated by the Bush administration when it decided that a livable world for future generations was not a national priority. In 2005-the first year in which cities comprised over half of the world's population-mayors created two comprehensive treaty systems to promote cooperation on environmental issues. In mid-June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously approved the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement; today, 195 mayors-representing more than 40 million Americans and a substantial portion of America's greenhouse gas emissions-have signed on. Earlier that month, a group of more than 50 mayors from around the world launched the Urban Environmental Accords on World Environment Day in San Francisco. The Accords continue to gain steam at home and abroad. The two agreements have different strategies, but both will achieve the same goal: coordinated local action to make a difference on a global scale. Municipal leaders took another giant step forward this week in Montreal. The World Mayors and Municipal Leaders Declaration on Climate Change, released on Thursday, calls for a 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. By comparison, the Kyoto Protocol's target is 5.2 percent by 2012. More importantly, they come at a critically important moment. Global temperatures have risen steadily, with eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurring in the past decade and with 2005 on track to be the hottest year since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. If it continues, this trend will have severe implications for communities around the world, including droughts, more severe hurricanes, higher sea levels and unpredictable disease patterns. What's worse, it will be low-income, indigenous and marginalized communities that will be hardest hit without a deliberate and ambitious set of policies to combat climate change. Mayors aren't the only U.S. officials who made waves in Montreal. Over the week, a bipartisan group of 24 U.S. Senators wrote a letter to President Bush, expressing serious concerns about the deliberate decision of the U.S. delegation to refuse to engage in negotiations. The letter came just days after seven northeast states decided to move forward with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an agreement that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions levels by 10 percent by the year 2020. In light of this activity at the grassroots level, one would think-wait for the pun-that the heat is on the Bush administration to set a clear course for the nation. Yet in Montreal, the Bush administration merely stuck its head in the sand while nearly every other industrialized country indicated a willingness to make even more ambitious commitments. That's not to say that the international community was indifferent to President Bush's inaction. The boldest denunciation of the Bush position came from Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, who said: To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it. Prime Minister Martin and the rest of the world community are right to be angered at the Bush administration for its opposition to making concrete
[Biofuel] Nuclear Comes Back To the Party
http://www.alternet.org/story/29591/ Nuclear Comes Back To the Party By John Elkington and Mark Lee, Grist Magazine. Posted December 21, 2005. The industry that was once consigned to the corner seems set to become the belle of the business world's ball. Most of us know what torture it is to be a wallflower, so it's hard not to feel at least a slight frisson of sympathy for the nuclear industry. Once considered most likely to succeed, this promising power source found itself stumbling in the 1970s. It was bad enough after Three Mile Island in 1979 -- particularly when Jane Fonda got to work in The China Syndrome. But this wallflower status was taken to an altogether different level in 1986, in the wake of an event whose ongoing repercussions will provide some of next year's great news hooks. After Chernobyl, nuclear folk worldwide found themselves not just wallflowers, but actively disinvited wherever people came together to dance around the subject of sustainable energy. It was rather like Cinderella's coach and horses turning back into something a lot more mundane. And when the ill-fated Chernobyl site was shut down for good in 2000, some critics hailed the closure as the beginning of the industry's end. Was it? Hardly -- and not just because of the high-level waste that will undoubtedly outlive our civilization by several hundred thousand years. In fact, this industry that was once consigned to the corner seems set to become the belle of the business world's ball. Sting Your Partner The sheer horror of the statistics that will no doubt be rolled out in 2006 would give even a nuclear engineer pause. Take thyroid cancer, normally a rare disease, with just one in a million children falling victim; a third of children who were younger than 4 when exposed in the main Chernobyl fallout zone are thought likely to develop the disease. In Belarus -- where 60 to 70 percent of the fallout landed, contaminating some 25 percent of the country's farmland and forest -- nearly 1,000 children have come down with thyroid cancer, compared to seven in the 10 years before the accident. This type of thing has made the nuclear industry a darned unattractive prospect for NGOs and anyone else wanting to fill their partnership dance card. Today, anti-nuclear folk point with glee to the trend line for reactor construction starts -- which, having sketched the spiky outline of a pine forest from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, plummeted over the subsequent 20 years to the stuttering outline of melting snowdrifts. If the message weren't so gloomy for the nuclear folk, it might have made a nice Christmas card. But irony of ironies, the industry is back, thanks in great part to environmental concerns. In 2004, for example, greens were shocked when one of their idols -- James Lovelock of Gaia hypothesis fame -- warned that only a massive expansion of nuclear power would save our current industrial civilization from rapidly advancing climate change. The peak-oil debate has been another driver, and it's all left environmentalists wondering: should we open our arms to the industry? It's a complicated question. Much of the 20th century was spent in a hate-love-hate relationship with nuclear technology, mainly thanks to the shadow of the A-bomb. One of us remembers his father shipping off in 1957 to fly monitoring missions around the British H-bomb bursts above, yes, Christmas Island. On the upside, we were told we were going to zoom around in nuclear cars, trains, and planes. Energy too cheap to meter, we were promised, and a glowing cornucopia of atomic toys and gadgets. Now, again, nuclear is being dangled as the great, white-hot hope. Even as today's giant companies like BP and GE begin to tilt to windmills and other renewable-energy technologies, countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are thinking seriously of going nuclear. The World Energy Council claims that the industry is poised to expand its role in world electricity generation. Plant life will be extended in some markets, such as Finland or Sweden; new plants will be built in Asia; governments and voters will accept the inevitability of new nuclear power stations in Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, and even the Middle East. If the Slipper Fits ... So the question arises: is the environmental movement in danger of letting its allergic response to nuclear power blind it to a scenario filled with new technologies and players? If commercial opportunity -- like some Prince Charming -- does come a-knocking at the nuclear industry's door, we will desperately need to know who the Ugly Stepsisters are, and whose foot we might be happy to see the slipper fit. What do we really know about the nuclear activities of companies like GE, TVO, or Westinghouse? If we ignore the whole sector and some form of nuclear renaissance does occur, are we in danger of losing the chance to shape the industrial
[Biofuel] Loving Nuclear Power
http://www.alternet.org/story/29596/ Loving Nuclear Power By Peter Asmus, AlterNet. Posted December 21, 2005. Why are growing numbers of 'green' visionaries hopping on the bandwagon of the most ill-conceived and dangerous energy source in the world? One would think that environmentalists these days would be giddy over the high price of fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas. It has long been the prediction that when these finite and polluting fuels increased in cost due to supply shortages, that we as a society would finally make the transition to the renewable, sustainable energy system that has always seemed to lie just out-of-reach, beckoning to us just over the horizon. But then something shocking happened. Growing numbers of green visionaries started beating the drum for more nuclear power, a technology that in the past has been a lightening rod to spur on activists to protest and demand for a greater reliance upon efficiency and solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies. Among those endorsing the process of splitting atoms to generate the majority of our future electricity are the following environmentalists: * James Lovelock, the fellow from London who came up the Gaia theory of the earth being a self-regenerating organism, proclaimed that nuclear power was the only green solution to our power supply woes, maintaining that there wasn't enough time to allow renewable energy technologies to fill the gap. * The Bay Area's Stewart Brand, the utopian thinker behind the Whole Earth Catalog, echoed Lovelock's claims, adding that the nuclear power industry's half century of experience rendered concerns about safety and waste as obsolete. * Patrick Moore, co-founder of the radical Greenpeace activist group, has proclaimed: There is now a great deal of scientific evidence showing nuclear power to be an environmentally sound and safe choice. Nuclear power is suddenly in vogue. Even the alternative LA Weekly newspaper has a two-part feature touting nuclear power by author Judith Lewis, whose blog is entitled Another Green World. In essence, she argues the good outweighs the bad when it comes to nuclear power. Is it possible that we have come to this: a choice between a catastrophic warming trend and the most feared energy source on earth? she asks in the first of a two part series entitled How I tried to stop worrying and love nuclear power. Our federal government has now launched a Nuclear Power 2010 program that hopes to jump-start a nuclear industry that has not constructed a new power plant in two decades. Certainly, the biggest push for nuclear has come from the Bush Administration. While visiting a Maryland nuclear power plant earlier this year, President Bush proclaimed: There is a growing consensus that more nuclear power will lead to a cleaner, safer nation. It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again. But you can add Democratic Senators Joe Liebermann of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois to the growing list of federal lawmakers calling for the construction of new nuclear power plants. I first learned about nuclear power in my own backyard when I was living in Sacramento, California in the late 1980s. A laundry list of safety, environmental and economic issues resulted in a ballot initiative vote to close the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant in 1989. Energy experts across the country predicted that the owner of this nuke -- the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) -- would be in dire straits once such a large portion of its power supply portfolio went away. Interestingly enough, SMUD's closure of its nuclear power plant was the best thing to happen as it was forced to launch major solar, wind and energy efficiency programs. Instead of being viewed as one of the biggest losers among electric utilities, SMUD's embracing of clean power sources helped this troubled municipal utility turn around, gaining it respect from around the world. SMUD is now in the process of expanding its service territory due, in part, to its progressive and attractive clean power plans. The underlying assumption of those now clamoring for a major expansion of nuclear power is that the threat of global climate change is so great, that we have no other choice. What a bunch of baloney! Wind and solar power have been the fastest growing power sources globally over the past several years, and we have barely begin to tap these abundant non-polluting and increasingly cost-effective sources of power. Today, wind power is already cheaper than the dominant competition -- natural gas-fired power plants -- in many regions of this country and the rest of the world. Solar power, though still expensive, is the kind of modular, small-scale and customer-friendly power sources that allow communities, businesses and individuals to take control of their own energy needs, the key trend of the future if we truly
[Biofuel] Record US greenhouse gas emissions in 2004
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8495 New Scientist Breaking News - Record US greenhouse gas emissions in 2004 * 12:35 21 December 2005 * NewScientist.com news service * Shaoni Bhattacharya Greenhouse gas emissions by the US reached their highest annual total on record in 2004. A report released by the US department of energy on Monday revealed that the emissions rose by 2% in 2004, from 6983 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2003, to 7122 million tonnes. This output is the highest annual total so far recorded by the US, says the UK's premier science academy, the Royal Society. The world needs to act with even greater urgency and resolve in order to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which cause climate change, urges Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society. The aim of the Kyoto Protocol is to curb climate change by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of industrialised nations to an overall level 5% beneath those of 1990. But despite being the world's biggest generator of greenhouse gases - responsible for about one-quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions - the US refused to ratify the treaty, citing doubts about the science of climate change and the protocol's effect on economic growth in the US. The new US report reveals that US greenhouse gas emissions for 2004 were 16% higher than in 1990. Fall in intensity But the report highlights that the increase in greenhouse gases in 2004 is less than the nation's economic growth, meaning that greenhouse gas intensity fell. It notes that the greenhouse gas emissions per unit of Gross Domestic Product fell by 2.1% in 2004, compared with 2003. The 2004 increase is well below the rate of economic growth of 4.2% but above the average annual growth rate of 1.1% in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, says the US Energy Information Administration. We should not underestimate the challenge of achieving economic growth whilst reducing emissions and the US is not the only country that is struggling to do this, says Rees. But it seems unlikely that the present US strategy of only setting emissions targets to reduce greenhouse gas intensity will be enough to cut annual total emissions, he warns. Indeed, the US government's own projections suggest carbon dioxide emissions could grow by 30% to 47% between 2000 and 2025. Business as usual The hike in US greenhouse gas emissions from 2003 to 2004 is the biggest annual rise in four years, says the Royal Society. It also notes that UK emissions have also risen in each of the last two years. In terms of consequences for global climate - it seems to be 'business as usual' with no real sign yet of reduced emissions, and hence no immediate prospect for reductions in potential climate change, says Chris Jones at the UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. Although greenhouse gas emissions from the US are increasing faster than the rest of the world on average, he notes that levels for rapidly industrialising nations are rising faster. For example, between 1992 and 2002, emissions in China have increased by 33% and in India by 57%. Rees says that industrialised nations need to cut emissions by at least 60% by 2050 in order to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial levels. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Turkey and all the trimmings: 2m tonnes of extra greenhouse gases
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1671846,00.html Turkey and all the trimmings: 2m tonnes of extra greenhouse gases Alok Jha, science correspondent Wednesday December 21, 2005 The Guardian During the eating marathon of Christmas day, spare a thought for the effects of the over-consumption on the Earth. While we make merry and indulge in too much turkey, mince pies and wine, our planet has to live with the hangover of extra greenhouse gases. Festive Britons will release almost 2m tonnes of extra carbon dioxide over the Christmas holidays, according to a new survey. Scientists at the Institute of Physics calculated the extra energy used in roasting the perfect turkey, driving to see the relatives, watching television and opening the door to carol singers to work out the potential impact of a merry Christmas on climate change. The biggest culprit is our fascination for Christmas lights: going overboard with brightly-lit Santa Claus, sleigh and reindeer on the roof of your house for 12 days might be a bad idea for reasons other than taste. A typical set of twinkling Christmas lights for every family would use up 3.5bn kilowatt-hours (KWh) of electricity, releasing 1.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And with television schedules full of Christmas specials and seasonal repeats, Britons watch their favourite shows for an average of 30 hours over the festive week (up from an average of about 17 hours a week). According to the IoP, this is enough to consume an extra 61.5m KWh of electricity, generating more than 28,000 tonnes of CO2, the same amount released by almost 50 full return flights across the Atlantic in a Jumbo jet. Cooking the turkey has a much smaller effect in comparison: last year we consumed 10m birds at a cost of 29m KWh and 13,500 tonnes of C02, enough to fill 2,695 hot-air balloons. Trips to visit friends and family will release around 281,000 tonnes of C02 (assuming every family travels about 100 miles) and the extra cost of keeping your house warm when you open the doors to carol singers is 338 tonnes of C02. On a more positive note, Christmas shopping seems to have its up side. As a nation, we burnt 134,100m calories Christmas shopping last year - enough exercise to burn off 725m mince pies. Sam Rae, the scientist at the IoP who worked on the calculations as part of the celebrations for the centenary of some of Albert Einstein's most important discoveries, said: In Einstein year we tried to show that physics comes into our everyday lives, and the festive season is no different. We're not saying don't celebrate it, but physics gives us some real excuses to get out of some of the more dreaded chores. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] China lays down gauntlet in energy war
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GL21Ad01.html Dec 21, 2005 China lays down gauntlet in energy war By F William Engdahl On December 15, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) inaugurated an oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to northwest China. The pipeline will undercut the geopolitical significance of the Washington-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)oil pipeline which opened this past summer amid big fanfare and support from Washington. The geopolitical chess game for the control of the energy flows of Central Asia and overall of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the China Sea is sharply evident in the latest developments. Making the Kazakh-China oil pipeline link even more politically interesting, from the standpoint of an emerging Eurasian move towards some form of greater energy independence from Washington, is the fact that China is reportedly considering asking Russian companies to help it fill the pipeline with oil, until Kazakh supply is sufficient. Initially, half the oil pumped through the new 200,000 barrel-a-day pipeline will come from Russia because of insufficient output from nearby Kazakh fields, Kazakhstan's Vice Energy Minister Musabek Isayev said on November 30 in Beijing. That means closer China-Kazakhstan-Russia energy cooperation - the nightmare scenario of Washington. Simply put, the United States stands to lose major leverage over the entire strategic Eurasian region with the latest developments. The Kazakh developments also have more than a little to do with the fact that the Washington war drums are beating loudly against Iran. The new China pipeline runs 962 kilometers (598 miles) and will take China a third of the way to Kashagan in the Caspian Sea, one of the world's largest accessible oil reserves. Kashagan is the largest new oil discovery in decades and exceeds the size of the North Sea. This is a major reason Washington has such a strong interest in supporting democratic regime change in the Central Asia region of late. In the next 10 years, Kazakhstan plans to almost triple oil production, prompting the landlocked nation to seek new export routes because the country wants to avoid pipelines through Russia and excessive Russian dependence. China is now among Kazakhstan's major target markets. Best public estimates are that Kazakhstan has 35 billion barrels of discovered oil reserves, twice the amount in the North Sea, and may hold about three times more, according to a Kazakh government report released on November 18 in London. German oil engineers have privately reported that recent drilling by Italy's AGIP, the current oil consortium leader for Kashagan, a huge field offshore Kazakhstan southwest of Tengiz, has confirmed enormous oil deposits there. The government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to produce 3.6 million barrels a day of oil from all fields in Kazakhstan, onshore and off, by 2015. For 2005, they expect to average about 1.3 million barrels a day, making Kazakhstan far larger than Azerbaijan, and second in oil production of the former Soviet states only to Russia. The December 15 opening of the new Kazakh-China pipeline was a major event for Beijing. Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, attended the opening. CNPC has invested more than $2.6 billion in Kazakhstan since 1997. Beijing takes the geopolitical prize In October, Beijing scored a second major geopolitical coup when China completed a $4.18 billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan Inc. It was, in a sense, revenge on Washington for the blocking of the China acquisition of Unocal. US oil majors had made major efforts to lock up Kazakhstan oil after discovery of major oil offshore in the Kashagan field. They failed. ExxonMobil was charged with bribery of Kazakh officials to win a presence in the Kazakh oil business, and a senior Mobil executive was later jailed on US tax evasion in New York tied to the Kazakh bribery payments. Nazarbayev enjoys good relations with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. He was general secretary of the Communist Party when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR, and is regarded as a sly fox in terms of dealing with Moscow, while also keeping a clear distance from Moscow. In October, Russia's Lukoil failed in its bid to buy up the Kazakh state oil company, PetroKazakhstan, in a privatization. Nazarbayev indicated a major geopolitical shift in strategy, compared with a decade or more ago, when it appeared that Washington was to be the major foreign ally of Nazarbayev. At that time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's company, Chevron, became the lead oil contractor and operator in the Kazakh Tengiz oil field. That was just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US oil presence in Kazakhstan was a major US political priority supported by the Bill Clinton administration. The Chevron Tengizchevoil consortium
[Biofuel] 'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1222-07.htm Published on Thursday, December 22, 2005 by Editor Publisher 'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last NEW YORK - Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the I word, or at least the IO phrase: impeach or impeachable offense. The sudden outbreak of anger or candor-or, some might say, foolishness-has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting. Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as Hutch to the president), observed that some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment. Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news. Newsweek online noted a chorus of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president's dictatorial perfidy. The 'I-word' is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year - much more. When chief Washington Post pollster Richard Morin appeared for an online chat, a reader from Naperville, Ill., asked him why the Post hasn't polled on impeachment. This question makes me mad, Morin replied. When a second participant made the same query, Morin fumed, Getting madder. A third query brought the response: Madder still. Media Matters recently reported that a January 1998 Washington Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked about impeachment. A smattering of polls (some commissioned by partisan groups) has found considerable, if minority, support for impeachment. But Frank Newport, the director of the Gallup Poll, told EP recently that he would only run a poll on the subject if the idea really started to gain mainstream political traction, and not until then. He noted that he had been besieged with emails calling for such a survey, but felt it was an organized action. Still, he added, we are reviewing the issue, we take our responsibility seriously and we will consider asking about it. Conservative stalwart Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online takes the talk seriously enough to bother to poke fun at it, practically begging Bush foes to try to impeach him. The main reason Bush's poll numbers would skyrocket if he were impeached, Goldberg wrote, is that at the end of the day the American people will support what he did [with the spy program]. And the folks at conservative blog RedState.org took issue with Fineman's prediction, noting that for all his fearmongering he fails to note the essential point: the more the Dems mutter 'impeachment' in 2006, the more it helps the GOP, because it just further entrenches the notion that the Dems are out of touch, partisan, and not serious about national security. But John Dean, who knows something about these matters, calls Bush the first President to admit to an impeachable offense. The American Civil Liberties Union threw more fat on the fire with a full-page ad in The New York Times on Thursday calling for a special counsel to look into the secret spy operations and urging Congress to get involved in considering the possible high crimes involved. And one of those thoroughly unscientific MSNBC online polls found about 88% backing the idea through late Wednesday. On Wednesday, Washington Post blogger/columnist Dan Froomkin, declaring that The 'I-word' is back, assembled an array of quotes on the subject. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), he pointed out, sent a letter this week to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense. Todd Gillman wrote in the Dallas Morning News: Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., suggested that Mr. Bush's actions could justify impeachment. And Froomkin cited Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law, saying 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors. When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the I question in his online chat, he said, We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls. Morin complained that he and other pollsters have been the target of a campaign organized by a Democratic Web site demanding that we ask a question about impeaching
[Biofuel] China to encourage energy efficient cars to lower oil consumption
http://www.sinodaily.com/2005/051222054043.u1kwd3fd.html CHINA.WIRE China to encourage energy efficient cars to lower oil consumption BEIJING (AFP) Dec 22, 2005 China is encouraging the production of low-emission, energy efficient cars in a bid to lower oil consumption in its fast-developing economy, state media reported Thursday. According to a document released by China's key economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), manufacturers of low-emission, energy efficient cars will enjoy preferential tax benefits, the Beijing Daily said. The NDRC and other relevant authorities are currently looking into policy measures to encourage and support the development of the consumption (of these cars), the report quoted Liu Zhi, a senior NDRC official, as saying. Some 80 Chinese cities, including Beijing, currently impose road restrictions on small cars, banning them from entering main roads and motorways in many places. The NDRC is looking into scrapping these restrictions across China, the report quoted Liu as saying. The number of privately-owned cars in China is expected to reach 17 million by the end of this year, up nearly three times from 6.25 million in 2000, according to official data quoted by Xinhua news agency. Due to soaring international oil prices, China has seen its refined oil price rise five times in 2005, Xinhua said. All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Devil's Game
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2005/12/dreyfuss.html Devil's Game News: A reporter tells the story of how U.S. policies in the Middle East spurred the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Robert Dreyfuss By Melanie Colburn November 10, 2005 Robert Dreyfuss' new book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, provides a thorough look at how the United States' strategy during the Cold War gave rise to the very radical Islamist and terrorist groups on whom it has recently declared war. Based on interviews with government and CIA officials, the book details the intelligence operations and policies that funded, armed, and then turned a blind eye to Islamic terrorist groups and their activities. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. often chose to partner with theocratic despots, royalist regimes, and groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood -- a strategy borrowed from European imperial powers that was calculated to suppress the nationalist and democratic impulses that threatened foreign control in the Middle East. Though the rest of world was shocked by the attacks of September 11, Dreyfuss argues that U.S. intelligence received numerous warning signs that the country's strategy in the Middle East was turning into a devil's game, even if they failed to interpret them. We didn't create this [radical Islamic] movement-it had a life of its own-but we seemed to see it was a convenient horse to get on and ride, says Dreyfuss. And we were wrong about that. Dreyfuss, a regular contributor to this magazine, recently spoke with Mother Jones about his new book. Mother Jones: Time and again, the CIA, the British, and even American allies in the Middle East like Anwar Sadat were taken by surprise when the Islamic radicals they had backed started disrupting the West's control of the region and striking out violently on their own. Why didn't they see this coming? Robert Dreyfuss: They were warned and didn't heed the warnings. Sometimes people think they can control the forces that they unleash and find out that, to their chagrin, they can't. It's the historical problem of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In Sadat's case, when he became President of Egypt he had no political base, and used the Muslim Brotherhood to help him combat and suppress the Nasserists and Egyptian left, encouraged them to combat left-wing students on Egyptian campuses during the 1970s, and I'm sure he felt that, because he was their patron, nothing bad would ever happen. In fact his wife, Jihan, warned him that something bad might happen. And it did, it happened on television for the whole world to see when these Islamist fanatics jumped out of their trucks and jeeps and machine-gunned him to death on Islamic television. MJ: There were warning signs that Islamic fundamentalism was spiraling out of control. Did the United States and Britain simply not understand these signs, or did they just think they could rein the radicals back in if necessary? RD: The basic problem is that American policy makers and intelligence people didn't ever really step back and look at the big picture. They saw it all on a country-by-country, year-to-year basis. They never really thought, Is this guy talking to that guy? Is this movement connected to that movement? The clearest, most glaring case of that is with Afghanistan. Here we were supporting a jihad in Afghanistan and recruiting Islamists from all over the world to go fight the communists, and at that exact moment, these same Islamists killed the President of Egypt, who was our main Arab ally. And it gave nobody pause. What about the Islamists who overthrew our chief Middle East ally, the Shah of Iran? They didn't realize that maybe this could all be connected together on some level. To ignore the fact that these moves were all multiply connected and [that the Islamists were] talking to each other, drawing on each other's successes and learning from each other's failures, is just absurd. In my research for the book I came across people who wrote some report for some intelligence agency saying We've got to start worrying about this Islamic thing. Yet they were always a kind of ignored minority. MJ: In part, the failure of US intelligence to predict the rise of radical Islam was due to a dearth of specialists who were studying Islamic countries. Is that still a problem? RD: Being an Arabist has never been popular in the American bureaucracy. In the last twenty years, it has been almost a curse. An entire industry has been created to attack Arabists and to smear them with all sorts of charges of being beholden to Saudi Arabian sheiks and so forth. In the last year and a half, since Porter Goss took over as CIA Director, there's been yet another purge of the CIA, which has fallen most heavily on its Near East division and on the CIA's Arabists, many of whom have quit in disgust. It's clear that since President Bush was
[Biofuel] The Anglo-American War of Terror
Michel Chossudovsky: The Anglo-American War of Terror The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. In the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the United States and its indefectible British ally have embarked upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of humanity. http://tinyurl.com/btj3v http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticlecode=CHO200 51221articleId=1576 The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview by Michel Chossudovsky December 21, 2005 GlobalResearch.ca Paper presented at the Perdana Global Peace Forum 2005 Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 14-17 December 2005 The debate regarding war and Militarization raises the broad issue of national sovereignty. I am particularly gratified as an economist to participate in this important event in the Nation's capital, in Malaysia, a country which at a critical moment in its history, namely at the height of the 1997 Asian crisis, took the courageous stance of confronting the Washington Consensus and the international financial establishment. Under the helm of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, carefully designed financial measures were taken to avoid the collapse of the ringgit, thereby foreclosing a scenario of economic dislocation, bankruptcy and impoverishment, as occurred in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. These 1997 measures forcefully confronted the mainstream neoliberal agenda. In retrospect, this was a momentous decision, which will go down in the Nation's history. It constitutes the basis for an understanding of what is best described as economic and financial warfare. Today we have come to understand that war and macro-economic manipulation are intertwined. Militarization supports economic warfare. Conversely, what is referred to euphemistically as economic reform supports a military and geopolitical agenda Introduction The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. In the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the United States and its indefectible British ally have embarked upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of humanity. An understanding of the underlying historical background is crucial. This war agenda is not the product of a distinct neo-conservative project. From the outset of the Cold War Era, there is a consistent thread, a continuum in US military doctrine, from the Truman doctrine to Bush's war on terrorism. Foreign Policy adviser George F. Kennan had outlined in a 1948 State Department brief what was later described as the 'Truman doctrine. What this 1948 document conveys is continuity in US foreign policy, from Containment to Pre-emptive War. In this regard, the Neo-conservative agenda under the Bush administration should be viewed as the culmination of a post World War II foreign policy framework. The latter has been marked by a succession of US sponsored wars and military interventions in all major regions of the World. From Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, to the CIA sponsored military coups in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the objective has been to ensure US military hegemony and global economic domination, as initially formulated under the Truman Doctrine at the outset of the Cold War. Despite significant policy differences, successive Democratic and Republican administrations, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have carried out this global military agenda. Moreover, Kennan's writings pointed to the formation of an Anglo-American alliance, which currently characterizes the close relationship between Washington and London. This alliance responds to powerful economic interests in the oil industry, defense and international banking. It is, in many regards, an Anglo-American extension of the British Empire, which was officially disbanded in the wake of the Second World War. The Truman doctrine also points to the inclusion of Canada in the Anglo-American military axis. Moreover, Kennan had also underscored the importance of preventing the development of a continental European power that could compete with the US. With regard to Asia, including China and India, Kennan hinted to the importance of articulating a military solution: The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better Weakening the United Nations From the outset of the Cold War, the objective was to undermine and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union. Washington was also intent upon weakening the United Nations as a genuine international body, an objective that has largely been achieved under the Bush administration: The initial build-up of the UN in U.S. public opinion was so tremendous that it is possibly true, as is frequently alleged, that we have no choice but to make it the cornerstone of our policy in this
[Biofuel] Blood and betrayal
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/12/16/fisk/index_np.html Salon.com Books | Blood and betrayal Blood and betrayal After four years of the badly botched war on terror, are we ready to hear the hard words of Robert Fisk -- a gutsy war correspondent who says the West has wronged the Middle East? By Gary Kamiya Dec. 16, 2005 | The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still burning when the British correspondent Robert Fisk weighed in with a piece titled The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People. [T]his is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days, Fisk wrote. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1966 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana a few days later and about a Lebanese militia -- paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally -- hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps. In the face of America's righteous rage, Fisk was one of the few commentators who dared to posit that America's policies had something to do with the attacks. And he did so with brutal honesty. There will be those swift to condemn any suggestion that we should look for real historical reasons for an act of violence on this world-war scale, Fisk wrote -- and he didn't know the half of it. He was immediately savaged. Critics called him an appeaser, a traitor, an American-hater, an ally of Saddam, an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite. This was nothing new for Fisk: For 30 years, the Beirut-based correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent has been an outspoken, even savage critic of America and Israel's Middle East policies, a stance that has made him public enemy No. 1 for conservatives and supporters of Israel. The neoconservative strategist Richard Perle called him execrable. Right-wing bloggers have spent so much time attacking Fisk that they actually named a verb after him: To fisk something is to tear it apart. Some of them would like to tear him apart. When he was almost killed by an enraged mob of Afghan refugees during the American invasion, Fisk wrote a column saying if he had been in their shoes he too would have attacked any Westerner he saw, which led some readers to send him Christmas cards expressing their disappointment that the Afghans hadn't finished the job. This sentiment was more or less echoed by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which ran an article bearing the subhead A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due. The right-wing columnist Mark Steyn wrote of Fisk's column, You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter. In the aftermath of 9/11, when large sections of the American intelligensia moved to the right -- proving the truth of the old adage about conservatives being liberals who had been mugged -- even some leftists parted company with Fisk. One editor who was against the war told me he thought Fisk had gone off the deep end -- his writings were too strident, tendentious and reflexively anti-U.S. Fisk is a legend, he has enormous experience and respect, one Middle East-based journalist told me recently. But it's like he sees the Iraq war through the perspective of his experiences in Lebanon, through the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. And that isn't really adequate to describe what's going on in Iraq. Now this polarizing figure has written an enormous book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, an attempt to do nothing less than combine 30 years of war reporting from conflicts all over the region with a historical analysis of the Middle East from World War I to the present and, for good measure, a personal narrative about his father. Fisk had already written an epic book Pity the Nation, a classic 1990 work about the Lebanese war. But his new work aims to go it one better. In its scope and sheer size -- it runs 1,107 pages -- The Great War for Civilisation is Fisk's magnum opus, the culmination of his professional career. Inevitably, this Herculean task falls short of complete success. There is simply no way that any writer can tie together the Armenian genocide, the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gulf War I, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the current Iraq war, and the Algerian civil war. Much of The Great War for Civilisation consists of more or less free-standing chapters of war reportage, often-brilliant work informed by Fisk's critical intelligence and keen historical sense, but nonetheless essentially on-the-spot dispatches. (Much of the book seems to consist of repurposed pieces, but Fisk has edited it smoothly enough that you don't notice.) What holds his book together is less a unifying historical narrative -- for no such narrative exists -- than his corrosive
[Biofuel] Bush's Snoopgate
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11343.htm Bush's Snoopgate The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times' eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper's editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn't just out of concern about national security. By Jonathan Alter 12/19/05 Newsweek -- -- Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate-he made it seem as if those who didn't agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda-but it will not work. We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president's desperation. The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists-in fact, all American Muslims, period-have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy. But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a shameful act, it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab. No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story-which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year-because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force. But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing all necessary force in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism. What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow-as the president seemed to claim in his press conference-or in any way required extra-constitutional action. This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974. In the meantime, it is unlikely that Bush will echo President Kennedy in 1961. After JFK managed to tone down a New York Times story by Tad Szulc on the Bay of Pigs invasion, he confided to Times editor Turner Catledge that he wished the paper had printed the whole story because it might have spared him such a stunning defeat in Cuba. This time, the president knew publication would cause him great embarrassment and trouble for the rest of his presidency. It was for that reason-and less out of genuine concern about national security-that George W. Bush tried so hard to kill the New York Times story. © 2005 Newsweek, Inc. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Spying and Torture: Don't Go There
http://www.alternet.org/rights/29814/ Spying and Torture: Don't Go There By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real. Posted December 20, 2005. If Bush wants to know where domestic spying leads, he should read some of the millions of files the East German Stasi compiled on its own citizens. There is something George W. Bush should understand, being that he's a dry drunk; one is too many and a thousand never enough. That little rule of thumb is doubly true of torture and spying on fellow Americans. Justifying one water-boarding becomes justification for the next, and the next until, before you know it, torture becomes not just another tool in the box, but the tool of choice. The same goes for spying on one another. Humans are born suspicious of one another. Just try handing a baby to a stranger and see what happens. Distrust is programmed right into our DNA, and it knows no bounds. Employers and employees share a mutual distrust of one another. Parents don't trust their own kids unless they're right under their noses. And we trust those we don't know anything about least of all. So, when the President of the United States gives the nation's most technologically intrusive spy agency, the NSA, the green light to snoop on U.S. citizens it's not just another legalistic nuance, it's a sea change, a very dangerous one. Why? Because there really is only about six degrees of separation between all of us. One monitored individual's phone calls, for example, inevitably leads to dozens of other suspects. Which leads to the next inevitable question: Who are they? And then: Are they part of it? (Whatever the it, real, feared or just imagined, may be.) If Bush wants to know where domestic spying leads a nation all he has to do is have one of his aides read aloud to him some of the millions of files the East German Stasi compiled on its own citizens. The Stasi's influence over almost every aspect of life in the German Democratic Republic cannot be overestimated. Until the mid-1980s, a civilian network of informants grew within both Germanys, East and West. By the East German collapse in 1989, it is estimated that the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants. This means approximately one in fifty East Germans collaborated with the Stasi, one of the highest penetrations of any society by an organizationThe Stasi monitored politically incorrect behavior among all citizens of East Germany. During the 1989 peaceful revolution, the Stasi offices were overrun by enraged citizens, but not before a huge amount of compromising material was destroyed by Stasi officers. The remaining files are available for review to all people who were reported upon, often revealing that friends, colleagues, husbands, wives, and other family members were regularly filing reports with the Stasi. An extreme example? Not at all. You can be certain that if we could get unfettered access to the intel files of Israel, Egypt, Libya, Russia, China and other nations with neither the scruples or constitutional limits on domestic spying, we'd find Stasi-like files there too. Domestic spying attracts folks that suffer from a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. Once they begin collecting information on fellow citizens, they can't stop themselves. All that's required is that you come to their attention. After that, they must know all they can about you: your finances, your habits, your thoughts, your friends, your family. It must all be observed, examined, categorized, kept and updated. The President contends that we must make an exception to the usual rules because the nation is at war -- a different kind of war. Our enemy this time is not a nation but terrorists. And who are these enemies? We can't be sure. They travel. Some come here. Some are here already. So who are the enemies within? After 9/11 it was just young Arab men. But then a young American, John Walker Lindh, was caught fighting in Afghanistan. And another American, Jose Padilla, was caught hanging with al Qaeda types. The enemy within suddenly had an American face. So, the Pentagon was given the green light to spy on Americans. And who did they catch? A group of Quaker anti-war activists. The Quaker peace activists were detailed in a Pentagon risk assessment list as a serious threat. How can a group that espouses non-violence be a serious threat to national security? Ideologically, of course. The Pentagon has a long memory and it has not forgotten how the peace moment of the '60s and '70s spread, causing the U.S. -- in Pentagon-think -- to lose the Vietnam War. So the Quakers had to be collected. That meant someone had to report on the Quaker group's meetings. Who? Someone the group considered one of them. Betrayal, Stasi style. That's where unhindered domestic spying always leads. Friends report on friends, neighbors on neighbors, teachers on students, students on teachers, even children on parents.
[Biofuel] Iran seeks to sign key oil deal with China by Jan
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNewsst oryID=2005-12-17T211230Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-228447-1.xml Business | Reuters.co.in Iran seeks to sign key oil deal with China by Jan Sat Dec 17, 2005 9:18 PM IST TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran hopes to sign a major oilfield deal with China's Sinopec by the end of January, Deputy Oil Minister Mohammad Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian told the oil ministry Web site on Saturday. If China does sign a deal, it could revive Iran's moribund oil industry that has been stagnant for nearly four months while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tussled with parliamentarians over his choices for oil minister. But the deal could draw fire from the United States. Washington has already penalised Chinese firms for working in Iran, which it accuses of seeking nuclear arms and funding anti-Israeli militia. Tehran denies the charges. Iran is looking to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China for some 30 years when its exports of the supercooled fuel hit world markets in 2009. The overall value of such a contract is estimated at more than $70 billion. In return, China would take a large upstream stake in the giant Yadavaran oilfield in southern Iran. Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding on such a deal in October 2004, but Nejad-Hosseinian said he hoped all the details of a proper contract could be finalised by January. Experts will present a report on Tuesday to high-level decision-makers, Nejad-Hosseinian said. A final contract could be finalised by the end of January 2006. He said one of the main negotiating areas would be the output expected from Yadavaran. Iran estimated the production capacity at 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) but the Chinese have pledged their readiness to extract 180,000 bpd, he said. Sinopec has said it could produce 300,000 bpd if well tests show that is possible after 180,000 bpd is reached. Other complications included the length of the concession of the oilfield and pricing. Signing big upstream investment deals is crucial for the world's fourth biggest crude producer as output capacity is dropping at an alarming rate. Previous oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said in July Iran's oilfields were depleting by up to 400,000 bpd each year. Iran is leaning towards favouring India and China in its energy investment deals, countries with booming energy demands that have proved far less politically prickly than the United States and Europe. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Nothing New About NSA Spying on Americans
http://www.counterpunch.com/hutchinson12202005.html December 19, 2005 From Antiwar Organizers to Civil Rights Leaders Nothing New About NSA Spying on Americans By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON The big puzzle is why anyone is shocked that President Bush eavesdropped on Americans. The National Security Agency for decades has routinely monitored the phone calls and telegrams of thousands of Americans. The rationale has always been the same, and Bush said it again in defending his spying, that it was done to protect Americans from foreign threat or attack. The named targets in the past have been Muslim extremists, Communists, peace activists, black radicals, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers. Even before President Harry Truman established the NSA in a Cold War era directive in 1952, government cryptologists jumped in the domestic spy hunt with Operation Shamrock. That was a super secret operation that forced private telegraphic companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government. The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers. The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying. But the agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The NSA claimed that disclosure would compromise national security. The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA's entrenched code of silence. There was a huge warning sign in 2002 that government agencies would jump deeper into the domestic spy business. President Bush scrapped the old 1970s guidelines that banned FBI spying on domestic organizations. The directive gave the FBI carte blanche authority to surveill, and plant agents in churches, mosques, and political groups, and ransack the Internet to hunt for potential subversives, without the need or requirement to show probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. The revised Bush administration spy guidelines, along with the anti-terrorist provisions of the Patriot Act, also gave local agents even wider discretion to determine what groups or individuals they can investigate and what tactics they can use to investigate them. The FBI wasted little time in flexing its new found intelligence muscle. It mounted a secret campaign to monitor and harass Iraq war protestors in Washington D.C. and San Francisco in October 2003. Another sign that government domestic spying was back in full swing came during Condoleezza Rice's finger point at the FBI in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004. Rice blamed the FBI for allegedly failing to follow up on its investigation of Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States U.S. prior to the September 11 terror attacks. That increased the clamor for an independent domestic spy agency. FBI Director Robert Mueller made an impassioned plea against a separate agency, and the reason was simple. Domestic spying was an established fact that the FBI, and the NSA had long been engaged in it. The September 11 terror attacks, and the heat Bush administration took for its towering intelligence lapses, gave Bush the excuse to plunge even deeper into domestic spying. But Bush also recognized that if word got out about NSA domestic spying, it would ignite a firestorm of protest. Fortunately it did. Despite Bush's weak, and self-serving national security excuse that it thwarted potential terrorist attacks, none of which is verifiable, the Supreme Court, the NSA's own mandate, and past executive orders explicitly bar domestic spying without court authorization. The exception is if there is a grave and imminent terror threat. That's the shaky legal dodge that Bush used to justify domestic spying. Bush, and his defenders, discount the monumental threat and damage that spying on Americans poses to civil liberties. But it can't and shouldn't be shrugged off. During the debate over the creation of a domestic spy agency in 2002, even proponents recognized the potential threat of such an agency to civil liberties. As a safeguard they recommended that the agency not have expanded wiretap and surveillance powers or law enforcement authority, and that the Senate and House intelligence committees have strict oversight over its activities. These supposed fail-safe measures were hardly ironclad safeguards against abuses, but they understood that domestic spying is a civil liberties nightmare minefield that has blown up and wreaked havoc on American's lives in the past. The FBI is the prime example. During the 1950s and
Re: [Biofuel] VW GOLF MK3 TURBO DIESEL CONVERSION
Check out http://www.tdiclub.com/tdifest/index.html for lots of info on VW's and some distributors of heaters for fuel filters, lines and tanks. I got to visit there festival last year where they have lots of help like this but there forum works well also, Hope this helps, Gary - Original Message - From: Tim Hadland [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 9:14 AM Subject: [Biofuel] VW GOLF MK3 TURBO DIESEL CONVERSION HI THERE! I WILL BE SOON STARTING MY FIRST BIO DIESEL PRODUCTION FOR MY CAR A MARK 3 GOLF TD. I AM INTERESTED IF ANYONE HAS THE SAME AND WHAT CONVERSIONS EG 'ELSBETT' ARE POSSIBLY WORTH GOING FOR. I WILL PROBABLY START USING SVO TO START WITH, MAKING BIODIESEL THE TRANSESTERIFICATION ROUTE WHEN I HAVE MADE MY PROCESSOR. JUST WONDERING IF ANYONE WOULD BE KIND ENOUGH TO OFFER ANY HINTS OR TIPS CHEERS TIM ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Cheney Defends Domestic Spying
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spy21dec21,1,5224 791.story?coll=la-headlines-nationctrack=1cset=true - Los Angeles Times - Cheney said that threats facing the country required that the president's authority under the Constitution be unimpaired. December 21, 2005 THE NATION Cheney Defends Domestic Spying * He says Bush's decision to sidestep the courts and allow surveillance was an organized effort to regain presidential powers lost in the 1970s. By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON - President Bush's decision to bypass court review and authorize domestic wiretapping by executive order was part of a concerted effort to rebuild presidential powers weakened in the 1970s as a result of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday. Returning from a trip to the Middle East, Cheney said that threats facing the country required that the president's authority under the Constitution be unimpaired. ADVERTISEMENT Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area, Cheney told reporters traveling with him on Air Force Two. Especially in the day and age we live in the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy. Cheney's remarks were recorded by reporters traveling with him and disseminated by the White House under an official pool arrangement. Cheney dismissed the idea that Americans were concerned about a potential abuse of power by the administration, saying that any backlash would probably punish the president's critics, not Bush. The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat, Cheney said, calculating that the vast majority of Americans supported the administration's surveillance policies. And so if there's a backlash pending, I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow we shouldn't take these steps in order to defend the country. On Capitol Hill, however, calls for a congressional investigation escalated, with a group of Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee asking to join hearings scheduled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said she had written to several constitutional scholars to ask whether Bush had committed an impeachable offense by ordering the National Security Agency in 2002 to engage in surveillance within the United States without a court order. Lawmakers continued to trade claims and accusations over whether they were informed about the spy program by the administration, whether they properly registered civil liberties objections, and whether their objections mattered. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday that he wrote Cheney after one briefing in 2003 and expressed concern about the surveillance. But Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that Rockefeller had misrepresented his own views about the program. For the nearly three years [Rockefeller] has served as vice chairman, I have heard no objection from him about this valuable program, Roberts said in a statement. Now, when it appears to be politically advantageous, Sen. Rockefeller has chosen to release his 2 1/2 -year-old letter. Forgive me if I find this to be inconsistent and a bit disingenuous. Rockefeller responded sharply. From the first day I learned of this program, I made my concerns known to the vice president and to others who were briefed, he said. The White House never addressed my concerns. The real question is whether the administration lived up to its statutory requirement to fully inform Congress and allow for adequate oversight and debate. The simple answer is no. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), one of the congressional leaders who was briefed about the program, asked the National Security Agency on Tuesday to declassify a letter she wrote several years ago expressing concern. White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that lawmakers had been informed of the program but declined to answer questions about whether members of Congress could act in any way on the information. We believe it's important to brief members of Congress, the relevant leaders, McClellan said, adding that Congress was an independent branch of government. Yes, they have oversight roles to play. When asked how lawmakers could have acted on the oversight, McClellan responded: You should ask members of Congress that question. Some congressional Republicans defended Bush but others said they had doubts. Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) joined three Democrats in a call for an
Re: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
Automotive industry surely hates motorcycles. Which cost less, burn less and require less maintenance. Similar study was published a month ago from a small university in Turkey. Very similar results. 1- 2 stroke bikes surely pollute more. But they are banned. Simple scooters from 100 cc and up are all 4 stroke. The researchers who test 2 stroke machines are wasting research money since they are disappearing anyway. 2- Bike take less space and do not cause traffic jams. My typical commute to work is almost 150 minute with car. I drive a 1.6 litre engine Nissan which gives me 7.5lt/100km. If I ride to work same commute takes 100 minutes. My Suzuki (1 litre engine with catalytic converter) gives me 5lt/100km. So everyday I am saving 4 litres. How is it possible to pollute more when burning less and I have catalytic converter on the bike as standart? 3- Small 4 stroke scooters all have catalytic converters and burn 3lt/100km. You can not out speed them. With less than 10hp it is useless. 4- You can drive the car same way, speeding and criss crosing the road. Or not having the engine well maintained. I am sure results would be much worse. The issue is to educte the driver/rider to behave on the road. 5- EU is putting strict limits to bikes. Hence most of the bikes have injection and catalytic converters today. Many bikes are not being produced because they can not meet the limits. As a biker for more than 10 years, this is not the first report with such results. I m not surprised. Of course you are consuming with a car. - Pay more for it (averaging 10.000EU more) - You burn more fuel, - You waste more time in city traffic, - You spend more for insurance, maintenance etc. So the person may end up consuming more and producing less. Now who would benefit out of that? I would like to ask that to Swiss scientist... And finally I hope they do not research how much is waisted in car races like formula-1, Lemans endurance etc... Those machines are loud and very very thirsty. Probabily one of them during 1 race pollutes more than a typical rider can manage whole year. Regards Burak -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Keith Addison Sent: Friday, December 23, 2005 10:40 AM To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution' http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1671722,00.html Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution' Ian Sample, science correspondent Wednesday December 21, 2005 The Guardian Motorbikes are churning out more pollution than cars, even though they make up only a small fraction of vehicles on the roads, according to a report. Tests on a selection of modern motorbikes and private cars revealed that rather than being more environmentally-friendly, motorbikes emit 16 times the amount of hydrocarbons, including greenhouse gases, three times the carbon monoxide and a disproportionately high amount of other pollutants, compared to cars. Ana-Marija Vasic at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, who led the research, said the need to legislate on emissions from motorbikes has been overlooked because there are so few on the roads. The oversight has lead to a paucity of research into ways of making their engines run more cleanly. In Britain, there are 1,060,000 motorbikes on the road but more than 25m private cars. Dr Vasic's tests showed that, especially in urban traffic, when motorcyclists frequently accelerated quickly, motorbike engines burned fuel inefficiently, giving a sharp peak in emissions. The yearly hydrocarbon emissions of the average two-wheeler in urban traffic measured up to 49 times higher than that of the average car, according to the study, due to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The importance of [motorbike] emissions has been underestimated in legislation, giving manufacturers little motivation to improve aftertreatment systems, said Dr Vasic. The tests were carried out on a variety of Yamaha, Piaggio and Honda 50cc scooters and Suzuki, Honda and BMW motorbikes with engine sizes ranging from 800cc to 1150cc. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
[Biofuel] Aid, Labor Groups Say WTO Deal Betrays Poor
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1219-11.htm Published on Monday, December 19, 2005 by Reuters Aid, Labor Groups Say WTO Deal Betrays Poor by Robert Evans Development aid, labor union and human rights groups on Monday blasted as betrayal and abuse of the poor a World Trade Organization (WTO) deal in Hong Kong to keep troubled open market talks afloat. And reacting to a deal that came only after a European Union promise to end agricultural export subsidies in six years, European farmers declared it one-sided and skewed against them -- and against extremely poor countries. The accord, reached earlier in the day after 100 hours of haggling and histrionics by trade ministers from the WTO's 149 member countries, sentences small farmers, workers and communities across the developing world to desperate poverty, said the British-based War on Want. http://www.waronwant.org/ The agreement, said aid group Oxfam International, is a betrayal of development promises by rich countries, whose interests have prevailed yet again. http://www.oxfam.org It will roll back the enjoyment of human rights around the world by putting stable food supplies and health services at risk for the poor, said a coalition of 50 rights groupings. In a statement issued from its Brussels headquarters, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) said the Hong Kong outcome is another blow to employment and sustainable development. http://www.icftu.org/ The conference final text, effectively doing little more than keeping open negotiations into next year for a new global trade pact in the WTO's Doha Round, ignores the urgent need to improve the lives of working people, the ICFTU said. SMOKE AND MIRRORS The text included a deadlock-breaking pledge from the EU to end farm export subsidies -- the top demand of developing countries -- by 2013. But development campaigners dismissed this as smoke and mirrors. The deal was cooked up by an unholy alliance of the United States, the European Union and WTO head Pascal Lamy, a former EU trade chief, said the Asia-based Focus on the Global South. http://www.focusweb.org/ But the grouping, head by Philippine economist Walden Bello, also attacked India and Brazil, leaders of the G20 developing country group that emerged at a failed WTO conference in 2003, for their role in Hong Kong. India and Brazil have led the developing countries down the garden path in exchange for some market access in agriculture for Brazil, and services outsourcing for India, said the grouping's spokesperson Aileen Kwa. This text is a recipe for disaster, and many developing countries will not be able to convince people back home that they have come back with a good deal, Bello said. Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and India's Trade Minister Kamal Nath -- who represented the G20 in talks with the EU and the United States before and during the conference -- were swapping compliments about what they had achieved to cover up the fact that they have agreed to a disaster, he said. The main European farmers' grouping, Brussels-based COPA-COGECA, whose political representatives were under heavy pressure to end subsidies, said they would fight on for a better deal for them and the most needy developing countries. This was another clear barb at India and Brazil, accused by some in the EU -- and echoed by the Global South's Bello -- of primarily pursuing their own interests as large, middle-income trading powers at the expense of really poor nations. Copyright © 2005 Reuters Ltd ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] On Tap at the WTO: Private Water
http://www.alternet.org/story/29639/ On Tap at the WTO: Private Water By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 15, 2005. The focus of the Hong Kong round for rich western nations is to squeeze every drop of money they can by privatizing public services. When it comes to water systems, that can be deadly. Hong Kong -- Activists gathered here say that no issue highlights the tension between the human values they advocate and the economic logic of the legion of corporate globalizers that have descended on this city more clearly than water. Water is viewed as one of the last profit centers by the international financial institutions and trade can impact whether it becomes a commodity or stays in public hands -- 90 percent of the world's water supplies remain in the public trust. Most notably water's on the table with the privatization of municipal water systems being aggressively pushed under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), a wide-ranging treaty that covers a host of services, both public and private. Vandana Shiva, the scientist and global justice activist, argued this week that we need to recognize that 90 percent of humanity lives on water as commons today. She lambasted a recent World Bank report urging poor countries to privatize their water systems, saying, It actually talks about one major threat to water markets being community rights to water, and says these must be dismantled. As if there's something wrong with the commons, as if it's a primitive stage of human existence. According to the United Nations, 1.3 billion people in the world lack access to clean water and worldwide demand is doubling every 20 years -- twice the rate of population growth. By the year 2025, demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip global supply by 56 percent. The issue gets scant attention, but analysts say that while the advanced nations are likely to wean themselves of their addiction to oil, water is the finite resource that will drive this century's wars just as fossil fuels did the last century's. Maude Barlowe is the Director of the Council of Canadians, an NGO deep in the fight. She told me the water privatizers are driven not only by profit, but also by a deeper ideology. There are those of us who believe that water is a public good and should be protected in legislation at all levels as something that must be kept out of the market system. And there are those who've gone to the other side, and that would include the World Bank, the regional development banks, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO and most of the big first world countries. And they say that the only way to avoid the global shortage of water that's already here for some places but coming for the whole world is to privatize water, commodify it, put it on the open market for sale to the highest bidder and have it guided by the same rules that govern the trade in running shoes. Pushing the agenda here in Hong Kong are a small number of multinationals that dominate the growing water market. Two French titans, Vivendi Universal and Suez, dominate the group. According to a report by the Canadian NGO Polaris Institute in conjunction with Barlowe's Council of Canadians, the two -- often called the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry -- control over 70 percent of the existing world market in water services. RWE, a German electricity and waste management company, may soon challenge their market share. After purchasing two key water companies, RWE has positioned itself to expand. The U.S. construction giant Bechtel, now notorious for its no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq, is also a growing player. Under the GATS treaty being pushed in Hong Kong, any government in the WTO would be required to give foreign investors like these mammoth water corporations equal treatment with domestic investors like local government-owned utilities. Governments would have to prove that any legislation or regulation related to public water service is necessary and the least trade restrictive of all possible measures. According to the NGOs, in effect, government regulations requiring high water quality standards for safety, accessible rates for poor communities, or specific improvements in pipe infrastructure could be declared unnecessary by a WTO tribunal. Through the WTO's coherence agreement with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the water behemoths get an additional wedge: they're able to secure loans and grants to finance much of their operations in the developing world. These institutions use water privatization as a conditionality for development aid. A 2000 review of IMF loans in 40 countries found that 12 had loan conditions requiring some form of water privatization. The NGOs point out that in general, it is African countries -- the smallest, poorest, and most debt ridden countries -- that experience these conditions.
[Biofuel] UN Highlights Desperate Plight of World's Invisible Children
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1215-07.htm Published on Thursday, December 15, 2005 by the Agence France Presse UN Highlights Desperate Plight of World's Invisible Children The United Nations said that hundreds of millions of children across the globe were suffering exploitation and abuse, invisible to the eyes of the rest of the world. In its flagship annual report on the state of the world's youth, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said such children live in dire circumstances and the picture painted by its report was staggering and not a pretty one. The report takes you into the lives of hundreds of millions of children who are hidden from view, lost to statistics, programs and budgets and growing up beyond our reach, said UNICEF executive director Ann Veneman at its London launch on Wednesday. They are the world's most vulnerable children, trapped in circumstances that push them to the margins and shadows of society. They are children who are not registered at birth and grow up without an identity. They are children who suffer the death of one or both parents. They are children forced into adult roles when they should be at school or at play. And they are children who are exploited in the commercial sex industry or the worst forms of child labor or even as soldiers in adult conflicts. Two teenage girls, one each from India and Romania recounted their personal stories of exclusion and exploitation. Veneman said they had grown up in a world yet to fulfill the promises of a brighter future for children where families, communities and governments rise to their responsibilities. We have not given up hope of realizing this future. We have to begin by addressing the underlying causes of exclusion and abuse, she insisted. The UN's ambition to slash extreme poverty can still become reality if real action is taken to reach such children, Veneman added. Set out by world leaders at a UN summit five years ago, and renewed in September, the Millennium Development Goals begin with a pledge to reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015. Veneman said meeting the goals depended on reaching vulnerable youngsters throughout the developing world. There cannot be lasting progress if we continue to overlook the children most in need. Other targets include reducing the mortality rate among children under five years of age by two-thirds, ensuring primary schooling for all boys and girls, and a halt to the spread of AIDS and incidence of malaria. In its opening pages, the UNICEF report argued for a much stronger focus on ... children currently excluded from essential services and denied protection and participation. Unless many more of these children are reached, several of the Millennium Development Goals -- particularly the goal on universal primary education -- will simply not be met on time or in full, it said. UNICEF appealed for a massive push to boost access to essential services for children and their families, starting with quick-impact initiatives that can kick-start development and reduce poverty. Longer term, it proposed a stepping-up of initiatives rooted in a human rights-based approach to development to ensure that quick-impact policies lead to sustainable results. Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Half-A-Gift On CEO Pay
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051222/halfagift_on_ceo_pay.php Half-A-Gift On CEO Pay Lee Drutman December 22, 2005 Lee Drutman is the author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy. Despite growing frustration over the last few years by institutional investors, shareholders, and the general public, pay ratios remain desperately out of whack. At the 367 biggest companies last year, average CEO take-home pay was $11.8 million. Average worker pay, meanwhile, was a mere $27,460. And earlier this month, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox was out promising that come 2006, his agency was going to do something about runaway CEO pay. So, is this a generous holiday season gift to those who have for years been clamoring that CEOs are getting paid too much? Or is it merely one of those presents that is useless without the appropriate matching gifts-kind of like getting an Xbox game cartridge without the Xbox system that you need to play the cartridge? Cox said the SEC is going to start requiring companies to be clear and upfront about what they are actually paying their CEOs, instead of hiding a thousand and one different perks in a thousand and one different places-a corporate jet here, a country club membership there, a ridiculous retirement Shangri-la there. Today's regulatory regime permits obfuscation or worse when it comes to executive compensation, Cox told Bloomberg News. The notorious abuses, such as never-before-disclosed exit payments, are the byproduct of this leaky regime. Additionally, Cox told the Los Angeles Times : It is absolutely a top priority for early '06It's important to get clear information-both to investors and to the directors that represent them. Cox says he wants to give shareholders comparable executive-to-executive and company-to-company numbers so they can discipline corporate boards who approve mammoth compensation. No doubt, adequate disclosure of pay packages is sorely lacking at many companies and thus an obvious first step. But a bigger question remains: even if they have that information, how exactly will shareholders go about disciplining corporate boards? I ask, because at almost all U.S. companies, shareholders have about zero say into who sits on the board of directors and how executive pay is set. The directors are typically nominated by management, and shareholders are given one and only one slate of directors to choose from-a Soviet-style election that guarantees that managers always get their trusted friends on the board of directors. This actually goes a long way to explaining why executive pay packages continue to defy the laws of gravity (and common sense). After all, what's a few million among friends? Unfortunately, Cox has demonstrated no interest in injecting even a modicum of accountability into the process by making it easier for minority shareholders to nominate candidates to the board of directors, something his predecessor, William Donaldson, unsuccessfully pushed for. (The Chamber of Commerce and other business groups vehemently opposed any suggestion of this proxy access reform, effectively killing the proposal.) The problem here is that without giving shareholders some means of holding directors directly accountable, it's not clear how else to bring pay packages under control. Shame clearly hasn't worked. And somehow, it doesn't strike me as convincing that if only directors had better information, they would be more diligent about pay packages (it's not clear that there are many directors out there who are being kept in the dark about these things against their will). Yet, there is some reason for hope. We may finally be reaching a critical mass of big institutional investors who are legitimately concerned about runaway CEO pay-perhaps enough to effect some change. After all, bemoaning runaway executive pay is not just for cranky Grinches anymore. It's also for Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who just last week announced that he was sick of outrageous executive compensation and undemocratic proxy voting and that Florida's state pension fund was going to start using its $116 billion in assets to push for better corporate governance. The one that angers me the most is the lack of tying of executive compensation to results, Gov. Bush said. I think the shareholders and the retirees that rely on the pension are equally outraged as I am and it's appropriate for us to vote our shares and for us to say we want pay be tied to results. It's just that simple. Recently, the largest U.S. manager of retirement funds, for university and college employees with $360 billion in assets, TIAA-CREF, also denounced high CEO pay. `There's a burden on the board of directors to justify its compensation choices and explain them, so that shareholders can be confident that these are the right decisions,'' said John Wilcox, TIAA-CREF's senior vice president. Even a whopping
[Biofuel] New Surveys Show That Big Business Has a P.R. Problem
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/business/09backlash.html?ex=11354004 00en=f01b995ec80a430cei=5070 New Surveys Show That Big Business Has a P.R. Problem By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH Published: December 9, 2005 More than ever, Americans do not trust business or the people who run it. Pollsters, researchers, even many corporate chiefs themselves say that business is under attack by a majority of the public, which believes that executives are bent on destroying the environment, cooking the books and lining their own pockets. Even as corporate scandals like Tyco's recede, fresh complaints - over high energy costs and soaring oil company profits, planned layoffs in the auto industry, bribery and conflicts of interest in military contracting - fuel the antipathy. And every report of high-dollar executive compensation - Philip Purcell's $113 million payout to leave Morgan Stanley, James M. Kilts's $165 million for selling Gillette to Procter Gamble - strengthens the feeling that business funnels money from the workers to the elite. The trial of Enron's former top executives, which begins in January, is likely to renew anger about the scandal that touched off this wave of distrust. There is a sense that business is a zero-sum game, that if companies are making a lot of money, it must be coming out of someone else's pocket, said Michael Hammer, a management consultant who writes frequently about business. Executives ruefully agree with his assessment. This is a challenging time for big corporations, said John D. Hofmeister, who runs the United States operations of Shell Oil Company. The modern feeling, he said, is big is bad. It is not clear whether such views will bring significant change, but it is clear that the disaffection is spreading. In a Roper poll conducted from July 28 to Aug. 10, 72 percent of respondents felt that wrongdoing was widespread in industry; last year, 66 percent felt that was the case. Only 2 percent checked off very trustworthy to describe the chief executives of very large companies, down from 3 percent last year. And only 9 percent said they had full trust in financial services institutions, down from 14 percent last year. Nor do Americans expect much help from Washington: 90 percent of respondents to a Harris poll, conducted Nov. 8-13, said big companies had too much influence on government, up from 83 percent last year. Business is certainly not the only big institution viewed with suspicion. Recent surveys by the Pew Research Center show that a growing number of Americans believe that government is inefficient. And 68 percent of the respondents to the Harris Poll said the news media were too powerful, while 43 percent said unions were too strong. About 35 percent felt even religious leaders had too much power. But animosity toward executives as a class, not just the institutions they work for, seems to be rising to a new level. Society has come to believe that the term 'crooked C.E.O.' is redundant, said Robert S. Miller, the chief executive of Delphi, the bankrupt auto parts company. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some politicians are picking up the antibusiness scent. Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, recently introduced a bill to require shareholders to approve executive compensation and force companies to take back bonuses that were based on faulty accounting. Income distribution in America is seriously out of whack, and there is zero correlation between C.E.O. pay and C.E.O. performance, Mr. Frank said. He conceded that the bill's chances of passage were bleak but said he hoped it would become a factor in the 2006 elections. Even Republicans have joined the attacks. At a recent Congressional hearing, senators from both parties demanded that oil executives defend their record profits. And now some Senate Democrats, unsatisfied with what they heard, are clamoring for the oil executives to be called back again, this time to testify under oath. Many executives, while acknowledging the public antipathy, adamantly dispute the criticism. They note that some companies were more helpful than government in the wake of the tsunami in Asia and the Gulf Coast hurricanes. They argue that they are disclosing more financial information, and have cracked down on unethical behavior. James R. Houghton, chairman of Corning, said he felt little animosity in Corning, N.Y., even though his company had cut thousands of jobs there. Maybe I'm in an ivory tower, but I think society realizes that 98 percent of businesses are doing the right thing, he said. The press doesn't write that, because it's the world's most boring story, and because business does a really lousy job of promoting itself. Business is trying to rectify that. Commercials for Wal-Mart show its employees lauding their benefits and career opportunities. The American Chemistry Council has earmarked $20 million for an education campaign to stress the
[Biofuel] Little Success for Corporate Water Lobbyists at World Trade Talks
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1220-02.htm Published on Tuesday, December 20, 2005 by OneWorld.net Little Success for Corporate Water Lobbyists at World Trade Talks by Niko Kyriakou and Jeffrey Allen SAN FRANCISCO - While trade justice advocates are declaring that the world's poorer countries were betrayed at pivotal trade talks that concluded in Hong Kong Sunday, negotiators managed to resist pressure from the European Union and others to open their public services--including water--to competition from private companies. The international aid group Oxfam called the final agreement profoundly disappointing and a betrayal of development promises by rich countries, whose interests have prevailed yet again. The high-profile issue at last week's negotiations was agriculture, particularly the subsidies industrialized countries pay to their farmers that encourage overproduction. In a process many call dumping, the excess is often sold at below-market prices in developing countries, thus driving down prices and decreasing earnings for already impoverished farmers in those countries. While the final trade agreement includes a pledge by industrialized countries to end export subsidies by 2013, it does not include any prohibition of domestic subsidies, which cause dumping, says Oxfam. According to the group, export subsidies account for less than five percent of the European Union's overall agricultural support. The Christian relief and development group Tearfund also called the final trade deal a betrayal of developing country interests, while Friends of the Earth, a global network of campaigning groups, said the agreement fails the environment and the world's poorest. But while agricultural issues grabbed most of the headlines, behind closed doors negotiations raged fiercely over issues some say have the potential the be even more salient, determining the fate of millions of people. Perhaps most significantly, negotiations ended with continued resistance by developing countries to shift public services, like water and transportation, from public to private hands. For years, industrialized countries, including the U.S. and those in the European Union, have pushed developing countries to open their public services to global competition from private companies. This year's WTO meeting was no different. Led by the EU, industrialized countries introduced an amendment to Annex C of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which would have increased the number of services countries must agree to liberalize. Under GATS, one of over 20 trade agreements governed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), all 148 WTO member countries must reduce trade barriers on services like communications, education, transportation, banking, and water. Of the 163 services recognized by the WTO, the proposed amendment, which is expected to resurface in future talks, would have required 72 developing countries to open more than half to private corporations. One of the most critical services that could be affected is water. Globally, 90 percent of the world's water supplies are still controlled publicly, but as water increasingly becomes the most coveted finite resource of the 21st century, companies and financial institutions are scrambling to make water delivery and wastewater management private business. A coalition of hundreds of grassroots activists formed in Hong Kong Friday to oppose the privatization of water services under GATS, or any other international trade agreement. The coalition, made up of various groups including farmers and fisherfolk from across Asia, says that private control of water services would hurt millions of people worldwide because companies--unlike public institutions--put profits before the public good. They pollute, they don't conserve water--you cannot make money conserving the product you sell, obviously, so it's not in their interest to reclaim water, to set up good infrastructure, says Maude Barlowe, Director of the Council of Canadians, an NGO rallying against water privatization. In the end companies have to cut corners somewhere in order to make enough money for investors--there's just no other way. The public sector doesn't have to turn a profit and the private sector does. So in the end, somewhere, something's got to give, either the quality of the product or the safety of the water coming into people's homes or the ability of poor people to access it or all three, Barlowe said Thursday, in an interview in Hong Kong. In dozens of locations around the world, including Bolivia and South Africa, water privatization has gone wrong, resulting in price increases, cut-offs, environmental disasters from sewage spills, poor maintenance of water systems, corruption, and broken contracts. Under the proposed changes to GATS, developing countries that privatize their water system would have to open the bidding process
[Biofuel] US Senate ok's spending-cut bill; Cheney breaks tie
http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews; storyID=2005-12-21T155231Z_01_N21196255_RTRIDST_0_CONGRESS-BUDGET-PASS AGE-UPDATE-1.XML US Senate ok's spending-cut bill; Cheney breaks tie Wed Dec 21, 2005 10:52 AM ET WASHINGTON, Dec 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed a bill to trim nearly $40 billion from federal spending over five years, including cuts to social welfare programs such as health care for the elderly and poor. Vice President Dick Cheney, in his role as president of the Senate, broke a 50-50 tie when he voted in favor of the spending cuts. The House of Representatives approved the measure on Monday. But during debate in the Senate, Democrats forced a minor change to the bill, requiring the House to act again, probably on Thursday. Cheney rarely takes the chair of the Senate to help out the Republican majority, which holds 55 of the 100 seats. The last time he broke a tie was in May 2003. Republicans in the U.S. Congress have been trying to craft a spending-cut bill for a year to show they are serious about slowing the growth in federal spending that has resulted in huge budget deficits. But Democrats have pointed out that any spending cuts would be more than offset by pending Republican tax cuts. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] More US Aid Flows Through Pentagon
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1216-07.htm Published on Friday, December 16, 2005 by Inter Press Service More US Aid Flows Through Pentagon by Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - U.S. aid in Latin America is becoming increasingly militarised, according to a new report, which warns that both the U.S. Congress and the State Department are losing control over Washington's assistance to the region as more of it is channeled through the Pentagon. The report, Erasing the Lines, is the latest in an annual series on trends in U.S. military programs in Latin America published since 1997 by three Washington-based human-rights and foreign-policy groups -- the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF), and the Center for International Policy (CIP). It identifies 10 specific trends that it says are effectively reducing civilian control -- both here and in Latin America -- over the region's military and security forces, and that have intensified over the past year. The proposed fund is part of a larger trend that is strengthening the Pentagon's control over the design and distribution of military assistance programs in Latin America. Fifty-seven percent of all U.S. military training for the region was funded through the Pentagon already last year. The Defense Department is expanding its control over foreign military training programs that were once the exclusive province of the Department of State, lessening congressional oversight, and weakening the relationship between military assistance and foreign policy goals, according to the report. And, because more aid is being channeled directly through the Pentagon, a growing number of economic and social trends -- including the rise of populism throughout much of the region -- are being interpreted as security threats, according to one of the co-authors, Adam Isacson of CIP. If the main tool you have is a very big hammer, then every problem starts looking like a nail, he said. Of particular concern, according to the report, is pending legislation -- the so-called Inhofe Amendment, after right-wing Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe -- that would give the Pentagon up to 750 million dollars to train and equip foreign military and police forces with minimal Congressional and State Department oversight. While most of that money would be targeted at areas, such as the Middle East and Asia, that are considered more strategic than Latin America, it would offer a major new, general-purpose pool of funding -- in addition to counter-terrorism and counter-drug assistance -- for Latin American security forces that would not be tied to a specific purpose or justification. This is a precedent, said WOLA director Joy Olson. We think this will have lasting foreign policy implications, and not only in Latin America. The proposed fund is part of a larger trend that is strengthening the Pentagon's control over the design and distribution of military assistance programs in Latin America. Fifty-seven percent of all U.S. military training for the region was funded through the Pentagon already last year. Unlike the Cold War period, when Washington provided significantly more social and economic aid than military assistance to Latin America, it has supplied roughly equal amounts of the two kinds of assistance -- a total of about two billion dollars a year -- since the late 1990s, when military aid to the region skyrocketed due to the launch of the largely U.S.-financed Plan Colombia. While aid levels have since remained more or less the same, the proportion of military aid controlled by the State Department -- and hence subject to human rights and other conditions prescribed by Congress in the annual foreign aid bill -- has declined steadily. There are changes taking place, with no public debate, that are removing the State Department from the foreign-security assistance program and making 40 years worth of human rights and democracy legislation irrelevant, according to Olson. This trend -- and Congress' and the State Department's acquiescence to it -- has not only alarmed rights-oriented groups here and in the region, but also other Latin America experts concerned about growing populist pressures and anti-U.S. sentiment, as well as prospects for the control of civilian-led elected governments over their armed forces. One does indeed wonder if the State Department is abdicating its role, Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a hemispheric think tank chaired by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, told IPS. It's hard for (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice to talk about her commitment to democracy, when all that money is going through the Pentagon, and the most visible cabinet official in the region is (Secretary of Defence Donald) Rumsfeld. That is a real problem, especially given the growing anti-Americanism in the region. Equally worrisome is
[Biofuel] Tiny Tim v. Scrooge
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1221-30.htm Published on Wednesday, December 21, 2005 by TomPaine.com Tiny Tim v. Scrooge by Karen Dolan House Republicans are home now decrying the War on Christmas, their houses festooned with lights and pretty red bows. It's hard not to wonder if their Christmas spirit is blunted at all by the big lump of coal they recently gave America's poor and working families. Republicans have wished the nation's least privileged citizens a Merry Christmas by whacking our already anemic social safety net system. Eager to return home for the holidays, GOP leaders in the House and their counterparts in the Senate rushed out a budget agreement that's stingy enough to put the Grinch to shame. They agreed on a budget that doles out $39.7 billion in cuts over five years, including spending reductions for Medicaid and Medicare, child support enforcement, foster care, welfare system benefits and student loans. The changes to the welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), are particularly offensive because the House Republicans sneaked them into the bill. Normally, changes to welfare rules are debated and voted on as separate bills, and the changes snuck into this bill have been defeated four years in a row. These changes include stricter requirements forced on states to increase participation in welfare-to-work programs without adequate federal funding to do so. They require a steep hike in work, training and community service hour requirements The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the cost to states of meeting the proposed work requirements is at least $8.4 billion over the next five years. Struggling single mothers will need to spend more time away from their children, even though lawmakers neglected to adequately increase funding for the childcare needed to support this. The CBO has estimated states need $12 billion over the next five years to meet the new work requirements and ensure that the funding keeps pace with inflation. Yet the bill before the Senate currently allows for only $1 billion in childcare funding. The National Women's Law Center calculates that 330,000 children in low-income working families that are not on welfare would lose their childcare assistance by 2010. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, the number of children in deep poverty is likely to rise. That's because states will try to cope with the federal mandates by reducing the number of families who get help by imposing new obstacles to needy families seeking help. The Senate passed its own version of a budget-cutting bill earlier in November and it decried the cuts that now face it in this budget-cutting bill. The Senate had cut only Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, disabled and low-income seniors. Importantly, those cuts were exacted from insurance and pharmaceutical industries rather than from the needy beneficiaries of the program. In contrast, the new bill includes close to $5 billion cuts to Medicaid that come from an increase in co-payments and premiums paid by beneficiaries and increased eligibility requirements. Medicaid premiums for beneficiaries are raised. Student loan programs are cut by almost $13 billion. Heartless slashing of the food stamp program, originally included in the budget legislation, was left out of the final version that awaits the Senate's vote. Aside from the nearly $70 billion in tax cuts to the rich that House Republicans passed earlier this month, the elimination of Food Stamps cuts is the only ornament on this weedy Christmas Tree. The Senate is currently debating this bill and a vote is expected as soon as today. It's going to be extremely close, possibly a 50-50 split between yeas and neas. Vice President Dick Cheney has been recalled early from his trip overseas in anticipation of casting the tie-breaking favorable vote. His hasty return may be in vain because some more of the Republican moderates may not simply hold their noses and vote yes, but will instead either put the vote off until after Christmas, or vote no and send it back to the House to try again. If the Republicans get their way, a significant, indeed growing, portion of this country's population will have to face a new year of increased hardship. Karen Dolan is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and Research Director of its project, Cities for Progress. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] The Global War on Civil Liberties
http://www.counterpunch.org/marqusee12192005.html December 19, 2005 Meanwhile, Back in Britain... The Global War on Civil Liberties By MIKE MARQUSEE Two pieces of legislation currently wending their way through Britain's Parliament illustrate how the war on terror is being used to dismantle the very freedoms it's supposed to secure. Both criminalise the expression of ideas and neither is likely to deal effectively with the problem it purports to address. They are opportunistic gambits, characteristic of a government whose moralistic bombast is in inverse proportion to the morality of its behaviour. In the wake of the July 7th London bombings, the Labour government introduced yet another anti-terror bill (its third in five years). So extreme were its provisions that even normally supine backbench Labour MPs rebelled. A proposal to allow police to detain terrorist suspects without charge for up to 90 days was defeated though the compromise measure allowing 28 days detention still represented a doubling of the existing limit. Even in its amended form, the bill contains an insidious clause creating a new offence of encouragement of terrorism which will outlaw any statement that glorifies terrorism. Speeches, books, films, DVDs, CDs, websites, images as well as words, will all be subject to the new ban, which will apply to the glorification of either specific terrorrist acts or acts of terrorism in general, whether in the past, in the future or generally, and whether or not the glorification was intentional or inadvertent. Those who publish or disseminate offensive statements are as liable as those who make them. Given the government's murky definition of terrorism (the use or threat of violence for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, whether in the UK or abroad), the range of statements that could theoretically fall foul of the new law is alarming. Verbal support for the Iraqi resistance or for the Palestinian intifada. Any laudatory account of the Zionist bombing campaign against the British in the 1940s or of Nelson Mandela's courtroom defence of his right to use violence against the apartheid regime in the 1960s. A poster of Malcolm X with his slogan by any means necessary. A Che Guevara tee-shirt. Celebrations of Bhagat Singh [Indian national hero hanged as a terrorist by the British], whose hundredth birth anniversary falls in 2007. A film, song or work of fiction that offers a sympathetic portrait of a suicide bomber. In reality, the most likely targets of the legislation are Muslim extremists, the preachers of hate highlighted by the British media. The rhetoric deployed by these people is loathsome, but it has as much right to protection as other offensive, irresponsible or idiotic discourses. If the law is passed and clerics who praise suicide bombers are arrested, Muslims will rightly ask why it is that those who encourage or glorify the slaughter of their co-religionists in Iraq and Palestine are not likewise charged. The new clause will add nothing useful to the police's armory. It is already a criminal offence to incite terrorism (incitement, unlike glorification, is an established and relatively well-defined legal concept). In fact, the bill is likely to feed the extremists, who will be able to portray themselves as martyrs to Western double-standards. The government knows all this but could care less. It is desperate to deny or obfuscate the connection between Britain's participation in the Iraq war and the targeting of London. As is clear from the comments made by the bombers and people in their circle, the perpetrators were moved to mass murder not by anything they heard in a mosque but by what they saw on mainstream television. While the government takes with one hand, it gives with the other, or so it would like the Muslim community to believe. In an attempt to stop the haemorrhage of Muslim voters alienated by war and attacks on civil liberties, New Labour is pushing, concurrently with its anti-terrorism package, a bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred. Under this proposal, it will be an offence to utter or publish threatening, abusive or insulting statements (in any media) likely to stir up religious hatred. The offence would be committed regardless of the intent of the alleged perpetrator so long as it could be shown that religious hatred was likely in all the circumstances to be stirred up. While no one has the right to threaten or abuse individuals because of their religious affiliation, people do have the right to to criticise, even to mock or insult, any and all belief-systems. The proposed law fails to make that critical distinction. Under its provisions, it would be possible to make a case for the prosecution of a disturbingly wide array of books or films, from Tom Paine's Age of Reason to Monty Python's Life of Brian to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses to the
[Biofuel] Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
http://www.mezomorf.com/emailed/news-17247.html http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/na tional/19give.htmlOP=45378b3cQ2F([EMAIL PROTECTED](Q27j!bQ5Djj4z(zTT_(Uz(UQ2A(Q3FV4 SjQ3FVm([EMAIL PROTECTED] The New York Times Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous Author: DAVID CAY JOHNSTON Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows. The least generous of all working-age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous - the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million - and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million. The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets while the other group had on average $2.4 million of investment assets. On average these two groups made charitable gifts equal to 0.4 percent of their assets, while people the same age who made $50,000 to $100,000 gave gifts equal to more than 2.5 percent of their investment assets, six times that of their far wealthier peers. Investment assets measures the value of stocks, bonds and other investments assets held in the tax system. Excluded from this are retirement accounts, which are generally held outside the tax system, personal property like furniture and art and equity in homes. The I.R.S. data was analyzed by the NewTithing Group, a San Francisco-based philanthropic research organization that since 1998 has been encouraging the most prosperous Americans to give more. The full report was posted last night at www.newtithing.org. Tim D. Stone, the president of New Tithing, said that taxpayers who itemize took $148.4 billion in deductions for charitable gifts in 2003. The American Association of Fundraising Counsel, an organization of companies that advise charities on seeking donations, estimates giving by all Americans, including those who file simple tax returns, was $180.6 billion. The study used unpublished I.R.S. data from 180,000 tax returns to analyze giving by income, assets, gender, marital status and age. It found that disparities in giving by income class declined once taxpayers reach age 65, but it also found that as Americans grew older their giving as a share of their investment assets also generally declined. Among those 35 and younger, those making under $200,000 made gifts equal to 1.87 percent of their assets, a figure that fell to 0.5 percent for the 189,000 taxpayers making $200,000 to $10 million and to 0.4 percent for the 285 taxpayers making more than $10 million. Americans age 36 to 50 making under $200,000 gave less. Those making $50,000 to $100,000 made gifts equal to nearly 2 percent of their investment assets, compared with less than 1 percent for those making $200,000 to $10 million. But those with income greater than $10 million, whose investments averaged $81 million, made gifts equal to 1.54 percent of their assets. This makes these middle-aged givers more than three times as generous as their wealthier and younger peers, who gave at a rate of 0.4 percent. Americans ages 51 to 64 gave in an almost identical pattern to those 36 to 50. But among those 65 and older, the pattern changed. The superrich, with incomes of $10 million or more and average assets of $214 million, made gifts equal to 1.5 percent of their assets. But all the income groups below them gave at a rate of less than 1 percent. For those making $50,000 to $100,000, gifts average 0.8 percent, down sharply from the giving rates of younger people with the same income. The study also found that single men, generally, are more generous than single women. Among the wealthiest singles, men gave 1.5 percent of assets compared with 1.1 percent for women. Wealth does not explain the disparity. Single men in the top income group, $10 million or more, had average investment assets of $124.7 million; the women averaged $244 million. Even though the wealthiest women gave at a lower rate than the wealthiest men, in dollar terms the women, who were far wealthier, gave more. The 247 women gave an average of $2.68 million each compared with $1.95 million for the 655 wealthiest men. © 2005 New York Times. All rights reserved. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Grinch Giving
See also, among an embarrassment of riches, so to speak: http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/top100.html Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade by Russell Mokhiber Introduction Top 100 Corporate Criminals -- Brief List Top 100 Corporate Criminals -- Annotated Version For Richer, by Paul Krugman (8,100-word NYT article, good read) http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/ForRicher.html - http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051219/grinch_giving.php Grinch Giving One of the most common justifications that's trotted out every time someone in Congress proposes a tax cut for rich Americans is trickle-down economics . http://www.investorwords.com/4825/supply_side_economics.html This supposed economic phenomena, around since the Reagan area, posits that when the tiny percentage of very rich Americans receive tax breaks, the tend to use the money for things like investing, charitable giving and opening businesses-all of which produce benefits that trickle down and help middle- and lower-income citizens. But a new study on charitable gifts throws more than a trickle of cold water onto this theory. The study, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19give.html which was based on IRS data and was the first of its kind, found that middle-class Americans are much more generous with their charitable contributions than the super rich. Folks earning $50,000 to $100,000 annually give two to six times as much to charity than those Americans making more than $10 million. And taxpayers in the $200,000 to $10 million income range were less generous than middle-class people as well. That kinda puts a wrench into the idea that everyone benefits when really rich people get a tax cut. And the study results are particularly relevant now, in the midst of a drawn-out battle in the House and Senate over cuts to social programs like Medicare and student loans to balance out tax cuts for the super rich. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005 121900159.html The study also pokes holes in the religious right's oft-cited post-Katrina argument that charitable groups (those associated with churches, in their plans) can help those in need more effectively than the government. While the generosity of millions of Americans in the wake of Katrina shouldn't be disparaged, it turns out it was probably the middle-class folks who carried the charitable burden-not the rich people who could most easily afford it. Bottom line? The super rich don't need another tax cut. But regular Americans do need the proven programs that keep our country running: Medicare, food stamps, student loans, heating assistance and the rest. --Laura Donnelly | Monday ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] And precisely how hot do you like your tea?
I hope you are posting from an anonymous address ;-) Here's an amazng piece: http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_20_05_EJD.html MH wrote: Bush is taken to task on spying on American citizens to ensure that Republicans maintain power in the United States through spying, rigged elections, thuggery in Congress, intimidation, threats, blackmail, outing CIA operatives, character assassination, torture... Hey, is Stalin or Brezhnev running our country? Sounds like it. Osama just needs to sit back and watch Bush destory America. Al-Qaeda doesn't need to lift a finger. Bush is doing their work for them. -- BuzzFlash.com ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] And precisely how hot do you like your tea?
From EJ Dionne: Remarkably -- but, alas, not surprisingly -- Bush not only attacked Reid, but acted as if the old rhetoric from four years ago would work again. ``The terrorists want to strike America again,'' Bush said on Monday. ``And they hope to inflict even greater damage than they did on September the 11th. Congress has a responsibility to give our law enforcement and intelligence officials the tools they need to protect the American people. The senators who are filibustering the Patriot Act must stop their delaying tactics and the Senate must vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act.'' Such scare tactics once petrified Democrats. This time, they are protected by the defensive line of Sununu, Craig, Murkowski and Hagel. MH wrote: Bush is taken to task on spying on American citizens to ensure that Republicans maintain power in the United States through spying, rigged elections, thuggery in Congress, intimidation, threats, blackmail, outing CIA operatives, character assassination, torture... Hey, is Stalin or Brezhnev running our country? Sounds like it. Osama just needs to sit back and watch Bush destory America. Al-Qaeda doesn't need to lift a finger. Bush is doing their work for them. -- BuzzFlash.com ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] inline fuel heater?
I saw an advert on the tube last night for a gadget that is supposed to heat windshield washer fluid as it flows to the spray nozzles on your car. I immediately thought about the potential as a fuel heater. It hooks up to the electrical system and I guess turns on with the washer pump. I have been considering such an idea along the lines of building something by wrapping a peice of tubing with the right amount of nichrome wire for instantaneous heating. If this gadget is suitable it would save a lot of work. Perhaps the tube diameter is too small (I expect ) but you never know. Anybody ever seen one of these things? Joe ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] The Global War on Civil Liberties
"They are opportunistic gambits, characteristic of a government whose moralistic bombast is in inverse proportion to the morality of its behaviour."I was so impressed that I read this part twice. Excellent representation of the state of governmentsaligned with the US.coalition of the willing = axis powers of the 21st centuryMike "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law." - Martin Luther King Jr. Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.counterpunch.org/marqusee12192005.htmlDecember 19, 2005Meanwhile, Back in Britain...The Global War on Civil LibertiesBy MIKE MARQUSEE[snip]___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
For a second, I thought the subject said:"Study Shows the Superreich Are Not the Most Generous"That seems to work too.MikeKeith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.mezomorf.com/emailed/news-17247.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/na tional/19give.htmlOP=45378b3cQ2F([EMAIL PROTECTED](Q27j!bQ5Djj4z(zTT_(Uz(UQ2A(Q3FV4 SjQ3FVm([EMAIL PROTECTED]The New York TimesStudy Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most GenerousAuthor: DAVID CAY JOHNSTONWorking-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.[snip]___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Iraq: Game Over
This may me too "radical" for some to accept as a legitimate argument but, I think the Iraqi people are expressinga consensus which is the culmination ofmistreatment by their former government andcurrent paternal handlers.Thisalso reflects (IMO) a similar path in theUS.The existence of a radical religious culture which has permeated the highest levels of government, thesuccessful conversion fromapatriotic nation to a patriarchal nation and a resurgence of racism and contempt for anything perceived as "weak" or "soft" (what others call tolerant and considerate) willcause a similar outcome ifpublic consensus in and out of the country does notbecome significantly more prevalent.MikeKeith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051222/iraq_game_over.phpIraq: Game OverRobert DreyfussDecember 22, 2005Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.[snip]___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] inline fuel heater?
Crappy Canadian Tire has those windshield wash fluid heaters on sale right now. Not much info on the box, but they only seem to heat the fluid for a few seconds. I don't know if this could be bypassed, but I'd be worried the plastic would melt if you figured out how to keep it on all the time. On the other hand, I thought about splitting the fuel line, so that some goes to this heater and gets heated, and the rest keeps going. This would raise the temp a little, but I don't know if it would be worth the $49.94 CAD. Kenji PS. WHen are you on Vancouver Island, Joe? On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Joe Street wrote: I saw an advert on the tube last night for a gadget that is supposed to heat windshield washer fluid as it flows to the spray nozzles on your car. I immediately thought about the potential as a fuel heater. It hooks up to the electrical system and I guess turns on with the washer pump. I have been considering such an idea along the lines of building something by wrapping a peice of tubing with the right amount of nichrome wire for instantaneous heating. If this gadget is suitable it would save a lot of work. Perhaps the tube diameter is too small (I expect ) but you never know. Anybody ever seen one of these things? Joe ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
Burak_l wrote: And finally I hope they do not research how much is waisted in car races like formula-1, Lemans endurance etc... Those machines are loud and very very thirsty. Probabily one of them during 1 race pollutes more than a typical rider can manage whole year. With regard to racing, it isn't that black and white. First, you seem to be conflating wasting resources (eg burning lots of fuel) with the amount of pollution produced. They aren't necessarily the same thing. You can burn 10 liters dirtily or you can burn 100 liters cleanly - they are different issues. Second, even if a single team in a single race uses more fuel or pollutes more that a single private individual in an entire year, you're still comparing (for F1) 10 teams (2 cars each) by 19 races to millions of riders/drivers every day over the course of a year. You're talking about a drop in the bucket. On the plus side, racing drives innovation. Consider the FSI engine technology Audi developed for the their R8 LMP (LeMans Prototype) car. Now you can buy lean burning FSI powered cars at Audi dealers. Likewise, the brand new Audi R10 LMP has a V12 TDI powerplant that gets over a 100 hp per liter. That kind of performance out of reliable diesel is amazing. An I expect those advances in diesel technology will show up in VW and Audi dealerships within 5 or 6 years. Racing also has the ability to prove to people that renewables aren't just some crunchy granola lefty tree-hugger pipedream. Demonstrating that renewables can perform is critical in the PR battle with the oil lobby. For example, the IndyRacingLeague - and thus by default, the Indy500 - is switching from methanol to renewable ethanol for the 2007 season. That's a huge win for renewables. As mentioned above, the Audi factory team is running a diesel powered LMP in ALMS this year, although I suspect Audi will be using petrodiesel, at least to start. However, that won't be the only diesel in ALMS this season - D1 Oils plc is sponsoring a biodiesel powered Lola LMP that will run b5, b20 and b50 blends. But yes, on the negative side, racing does waste resources. According to formula1.com, During a typical season a Formula One team will use over 200,000 litres of fuel for testing and racing. That's a lotta fuel. And don't get me started about the the fact that NASCAR still uses leaded gasoline. Still, I think you're throwing the baby out with the bath water and having an emotional reaction to a study you don't like. Small displacement motorcycles don't burn cleanly and pollute a lot. Acknowledge that fact and move on with your life. Don't try to justify it by pointing fingers at someone else. That's just childish. jh ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
"Small displacement motorcycles don't burn cleanly and pollute a lot. Acknowledge that fact and move on with your life. Don't try to justify it by pointing fingers at someone else. That's just childish." Yes. Let's move on. When peoplereport on the pollutantsfrom motorcycles being XX times worse thanthe amount from carsthey (IMO) have an obligation toaddress the lack of public priorities as the reason for that difference. One of the biggest demographics sought after bythe motorcycle industry are those primarily interested in speed. This puts efficiency in the background. Despitecar companies like Volvo abandoning the two stroke engine cycle (for example), it remains in many new motorcycles - especially recreational vehicles. I'm sure this is all carefully articulated in the report.The important part to remember is that in general, cars and motorcycles both use the same engine technology (i,e. Carnot or Diesel cycle).The huge difference in thepower/weight ratio give motorcycles a promising future in conservation - even if regenerative breaking is incorporated into all modes of transportation and the energy of acceleration/deceleration becomes less wasteful.Engine efficiency for motorcycles is not something that needs to be developed. It just needs tobe transferred from automotive technology and there has to be a public interest in doing so.MikeJohn Hayes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Burak_l wrote: And finally I hope they do not research how much is waisted in car races like formula-1, Lemans endurance etc... Those machines are loud and very very thirsty. Probabily one of them during 1 race pollutes more than a typical rider can manage whole year.With regard to racing, it isn't that black and white.First, you seem to be conflating wasting resources (eg burning lots of fuel) with the amount of pollution produced. They aren't necessarily the same thing. You can burn 10 liters dirtily or you can burn 100 liters cleanly - they are different issues.Second, even if a single team in a single race uses more fuel or pollutes more that a single private individual in an entire year, you're still comparing (for F1) 10 teams (2 cars each) by 19 races to millions of riders/drivers every day over the course of a year. You're talking about a drop in the bucket.On the plus side, racing drives innovation. Consider the FSI engine technology Audi developed for the their R8 LMP (LeMans Prototype) car. Now you can buy lean burning FSI powered cars at Audi dealers.Likewise, the brand new Audi R10 LMP has a V12 TDI powerplant that gets over a 100 hp per liter. That kind of performance out of reliable diesel is amazing. An I expect those advances in diesel technology will show up in VW and Audi dealerships within 5 or 6 years.Racing also has the ability to prove to people that renewables aren't just some crunchy granola lefty tree-hugger pipedream. Demonstrating that renewables can perform is critical in the PR battle with the oil lobby.For example, the IndyRacingLeague - and thus by default, the Indy500 - is switching from methanol to renewable ethanol for the 2007 season. That's a huge win for renewables.As mentioned above, the Audi factory team is running a diesel powered LMP in ALMS this year, although I suspect Audi will be using petrodiesel, at least to start. However, that won't be the only diesel in ALMS this season - D1 Oils plc is sponsoring a biodiesel powered Lola LMP that will run b5, b20 and b50 blends.But yes, on the negative side, racing does waste resources. According to formula1.com, "During a typical season a Formula One team will use over 200,000 litres of fuel for testing and racing." That's a lotta fuel.And don't get me started about the the fact that NASCAR still uses leaded gasoline.Still, I think you're throwing the baby out with the bath water and having an emotional reaction to a study you don't like.Small displacement motorcycles don't burn cleanly and pollute a lot. Acknowledge that fact and move on with your life. Don't try to justify it by pointing fingers at someone else. That's just childish.jh___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] inline fuel heater?
Hi Kenji; Yes it was a crappy tire ad I saw. If you want to build a inline heater it is not that difficult. I can work with you on it. I was considering doing it on the short metal lines that run from the injector pump to each injector. This would help when I decide to run WVO. We just basically need to determine how many watts are needed for the temperature rise required and considering the available voltage pick the appropriate size wire and number of turns. Weatherproofing the affair is the biggest challenge. We use a lot of salt here in the winter. For you out in lotus land it is not much of a concern. I'm not sure when I am coming out. Basically my buddy who is in Ucluelet was supposed to meet me in Mexico in January and the bum backed out at the last second so he offered to buy me a ticket to come see him on the next seat sale. Who can argue with an offer like that? I have a feathercraft folding kayak that I'll be bringing out so if you are into that we can do some paddling when I come out. It will probably be in the spring some time. I like nothing better than paddling with a local who knows the tidal currents. If not well just hang out and talk biofuel over a pint or something like that :) I'll tell you about my dreams to live sustainably up near Coal Harbour. Best regards. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all on this list. My keeper is letting me out of th cage nowyippee Joe Kenji James Fuse wrote: Crappy Canadian Tire has those windshield wash fluid heaters on sale right now. Not much info on the box, but they only seem to heat the fluid for a few seconds. I don't know if this could be bypassed, but I'd be worried the plastic would melt if you figured out how to keep it on all the time. On the other hand, I thought about splitting the fuel line, so that some goes to this heater and gets heated, and the rest keeps going. This would raise the temp a little, but I don't know if it would be worth the $49.94 CAD. Kenji PS. WHen are you on Vancouver Island, Joe? On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Joe Street wrote: I saw an advert on the tube last night for a gadget that is supposed to heat windshield washer fluid as it flows to the spray nozzles on your car. I immediately thought about the potential as a fuel heater. It hooks up to the electrical system and I guess turns on with the washer pump. I have been considering such an idea along the lines of building something by wrapping a peice of tubing with the right amount of nichrome wire for instantaneous heating. If this gadget is suitable it would save a lot of work. Perhaps the tube diameter is too small (I expect ) but you never know. Anybody ever seen one of these things? Joe ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] inline fuel heater?
Joe Street wrote: Anybody ever seen one of these things? They're available at Canadian Tire. Why not go and have a look at them? For me, it seems like a great way to crack a windshield. Besides, if the washer fluid between the device and the emitters gets frozen solid (as it sometimes does around here), what good would it do to push hot fluid behind it? As for a WVO heater, what's wrong with Veggie Therm? robert luis rabello The Edge of Justice Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ranger Supercharger Project Page http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] And precisely how hot do you like your tea?
Mike, will the GOP be after me with guns or roses ? ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] commercial processors
What processors are the commercial producers using? I need to find a sorce for one for a feasability study. Brent ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
I'm marginally confused about the tone of this discussion, but I'd like to add my two cents. I have a 1984 suzuki kz440, dual carb. My average mpg is somewhere around 50-60 mpg, and the bike does have sub-8 second-to-60 times. My car got about 32mpg in my last test, but I kept my turns under 2500 for basically the whole tank. My bike only weighs about 400 lbs, the car about 2200. So I guess theoretically the car is more effecient based on weight and passenger/cargo capacity. I have idled my bike for well over an hour with just the gas in the line and carbs, having shut off the tank. I shut it down, it did not run out of gas. I've got a friend w/ a 2003 250 ninja, which I tease him about relentlessly, and he reports closer to 65-70mpg, of course it's injected and 20 years newer than mine.BUT, there is one glaring inconsistency in this discussion, and it's something I've thought about VERY often. Passenger cars are called passenger cars for a reason. If your driving even a small 4 seater w/ 1 person in it, and someone else is driving, say, my bike w/ 1 person on it, the car driver is the wasteful one. Take into account differences in oil consumption, development materials, tires, tune ups, effect of the vehicle on the road superstructure itself, etc. So, anyway, I think you can SAY bikes are less effecient, and perhaps on some scale they are. However, just like those people who drive Excursions and Hummers to the grocery store by themselves, driving around a 4-5 passenger vehicle by ones self (even if you're getting 30+ mpg) seems awfully wasteful to me. When I drive my bike, which is as often as I possibly can, I tend to get places quicker and take up less space once I get there. Seems good to me. Now, here's something else I noticed the other day. My town has 1 road thats got a 45mph speed limit on one end and a 25mph limit on the other, the roads probably about 8 miles long. In the 45 mph zone there are 5 stoplights. In the 25mph zone there are 4 more. I pull up to these lights, and I don't know if most people don't think when they drive, or if they don't KNOW to think, or whatever, but 9 times out of 10, the people around me feel like they need to be back at that 45mph+ AS FAST AS THEY CAN. To make it worse, one of the lights is at the base of a hill. I'd be interested to find out just how many MORE emissions are generated at this stop light compared to if there was no lightthere's only one there so that cars can merge safely onto the road, which could have been accomplished w/ a turning lane. Sorry to ramble. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution'
I wonder if that is per gallon of fuel used or per mile driven.Depending on which one it is, it can make a big difference. Greg H. - Original Message - From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Friday, December 23, 2005 1:40 Subject: [Biofuel] Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution' http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1671722,00.html Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Motorbikes '16 times worse than cars for pollution' Ian Sample, science correspondent Wednesday December 21, 2005 The Guardian Motorbikes are churning out more pollution than cars, even though they make up only a small fraction of vehicles on the roads, according to a report. Tests on a selection of modern motorbikes and private cars revealed that rather than being more environmentally-friendly, motorbikes emit 16 times the amount of hydrocarbons, including greenhouse gases, three times the carbon monoxide and a disproportionately high amount of other pollutants, compared to cars. Ana-Marija Vasic at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, who led the research, said the need to legislate on emissions from motorbikes has been overlooked because there are so few on the roads. The oversight has lead to a paucity of research into ways of making their engines run more cleanly. In Britain, there are 1,060,000 motorbikes on the road but more than 25m private cars. Dr Vasic's tests showed that, especially in urban traffic, when motorcyclists frequently accelerated quickly, motorbike engines burned fuel inefficiently, giving a sharp peak in emissions. The yearly hydrocarbon emissions of the average two-wheeler in urban traffic measured up to 49 times higher than that of the average car, according to the study, due to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The importance of [motorbike] emissions has been underestimated in legislation, giving manufacturers little motivation to improve aftertreatment systems, said Dr Vasic. The tests were carried out on a variety of Yamaha, Piaggio and Honda 50cc scooters and Suzuki, Honda and BMW motorbikes with engine sizes ranging from 800cc to 1150cc. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] free inline fuel heater?
Hi Rob ; Joe, have you ever tried to take the works from a Mr coffee machine and hook them up to DC? Probably not enough power to heat quickly. Resistance = Voltage squared/power. Assuming you are discussing a 120V appliance, and if we simplify and say the resistance is constant with changing temperature, we have : Resistance = 120 * 120 / 850 = 17 ohms. Connected to 12V this would produce 8.5 watts of heating. I think too small to heat fuel effectively. Best Regards, Peter G. Thailand __ Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year. http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] NaOH vs. KOH - Start to end
Everyone seems to use more NaOh in the process. At this point I plan on using KOH even though I must use more. I can purchase 90% KOH for .725/lb and NaOH beads for 51/lb. The time savings and ease in mixing KOH is worth the extra cost. Later in the entire process am I missing something that would make using KOH more complicated? I would be left with Pot Ash. Is there more value to glycerine than pot ash? I have used NaOH so far, but want to switch when my account is finalized. I have been reading the archives but 58,000 messages may take a while to get through. Currently designing my system to do 175 gallons of WVO per batch, 35 gallons Methanol ($2.89 gl). I have access to good supply of stainless cone bottom tank for all tanks. John Frey ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Diesel Exhaust Chokes Human Arteries
And gasoline exhaust? And what of comparative studies with biodiesel exhaust, starting with B-100 and working down to B-20? Unfortunately, people like Sierra Club's Dismal Daniel Becker will eventually use the information to but one end - certainly not in the direction of greater biodiesel use. Words like especially tough without comparative data is all too misleading. Todd Swearingen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://health.yahoo.com/news/142160 Diesel Exhaust Chokes Human Arteries December 20, 2005 08:41:13 PM PST By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter TUESDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Fumes belched from 18-wheelers and other diesel-powered vehicles and engines may be especially tough on the human cardiovascular system, new research reveals. In a carefully controlled study, the arteries of healthy volunteers exposed to diesel exhaust lost part of their ability to expand, while their blood became more likely to clot. The bad news about the cardiovascular harm that polluted air can inflict doesn't end there. In a study reported in the Dec. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, New York University researchers found that mice exposed to air as polluted as what floats around New York City showed that the effects can be particularly damaging, especially when coupled with a high-fat diet. The human study answers a question scientists have posed for years, one expert noted. People have wondered for a long time whether diesels were harmful, and if so, how, said Dr. Russell V. Luepker, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. This study is a building block. It shows that when you look hard for mechanisms, you find them. Luepker was not involved in the study, which was conducted by Scottish researchers at the University of Edinburgh and published in the Dec. 20 issue of Circulation. The research relied on a specially built exposure chamber at the university's Center for Cardiovascular Science. In two one-hour sessions, 30 healthy young men were exposed either to filtered air or to exhaust from an idling diesel engine. The researchers then injected vasodilators -- drugs that cause the arteries to expand -- and took blood samples to measure clotting levels. Response to the vasodilators was reduced significantly after the diesel exposure, and levels of an enzyme that helps keep clots from forming were reduced, the researchers reported. The findings have potentially important implications for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently sponsoring a voluntary program to outfit diesel-powered vehicles with devices that trap fine particles in exhaust fumes. Diesel exhaust consists of a complex mixture of particles and gases, said study author Dr. Nick Mills, a clinical research fellow at the Edinburgh center. Before we can advocate the widespread use of particle traps in diesel engines, we need to verify that combustion-derived particles are the responsible component. A number of real-world studies have linked diesel fume exposure to heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, Mills noted. However, observational studies cannot prove causality, he said. In human exposure studies, we can control for all potential confounding factors and assess the direct effect of particulates on the cardiovascular system. Our findings provide further support for the observational studies and a plausible mechanism to explain association between particles and acute cardiovascular events. It's not clear whether the findings apply to gasoline-powered engines, Mills said, because their emissions are very different from those of diesel-powered engines. In particular, diesel exhaust generates 100 times more pollutant particles, he said. Because the study was so carefully controlled, Luepker labeled the results interesting initial data. But he added that the controlled study in the laboratory is not totally dissimilar to what people out on the street can be exposed to. If this study were done in mice, I would say, 'very interesting,' Luepker said. A study done in healthy humans gets my attention more. In the mouse study from JAMA, the scientists found that mice breathing polluted air developed far more plaque than those breathing filtered air. Rodents that were exposed to polluted air and a high-fat diet had arteries that were 41.5 percent obstructed with plaque, while the mice exposed to a high-fat diet and filtered air only experienced 26.2 percent blockage in their arteries. The mice on normal diets also revealed differences in plaque levels, with the mice exposed to polluted air showing 19.2 percent blockage while those exposed to filtered air showing only 13.2 percent blockage. All the mice were genetically prone to develop heart disease. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
[Biofuel] Diesel Exhaust Chokes Human Arteries
http://health.yahoo.com/news/142160 Diesel Exhaust Chokes Human Arteries December 20, 2005 08:41:13 PM PST By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter TUESDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Fumes belched from 18-wheelers and other diesel-powered vehicles and engines may be especially tough on the human cardiovascular system, new research reveals. In a carefully controlled study, the arteries of healthy volunteers exposed to diesel exhaust lost part of their ability to expand, while their blood became more likely to clot. The bad news about the cardiovascular harm that polluted air can inflict doesn't end there. In a study reported in the Dec. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, New York University researchers found that mice exposed to air as polluted as what floats around New York City showed that the effects can be particularly damaging, especially when coupled with a high-fat diet. The human study answers a question scientists have posed for years, one expert noted. People have wondered for a long time whether diesels were harmful, and if so, how, said Dr. Russell V. Luepker, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. This study is a building block. It shows that when you look hard for mechanisms, you find them. Luepker was not involved in the study, which was conducted by Scottish researchers at the University of Edinburgh and published in the Dec. 20 issue of Circulation. The research relied on a specially built exposure chamber at the university's Center for Cardiovascular Science. In two one-hour sessions, 30 healthy young men were exposed either to filtered air or to exhaust from an idling diesel engine. The researchers then injected vasodilators -- drugs that cause the arteries to expand -- and took blood samples to measure clotting levels. Response to the vasodilators was reduced significantly after the diesel exposure, and levels of an enzyme that helps keep clots from forming were reduced, the researchers reported. The findings have potentially important implications for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently sponsoring a voluntary program to outfit diesel-powered vehicles with devices that trap fine particles in exhaust fumes. Diesel exhaust consists of a complex mixture of particles and gases, said study author Dr. Nick Mills, a clinical research fellow at the Edinburgh center. Before we can advocate the widespread use of particle traps in diesel engines, we need to verify that combustion-derived particles are the responsible component. A number of real-world studies have linked diesel fume exposure to heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, Mills noted. However, observational studies cannot prove causality, he said. In human exposure studies, we can control for all potential confounding factors and assess the direct effect of particulates on the cardiovascular system. Our findings provide further support for the observational studies and a plausible mechanism to explain association between particles and acute cardiovascular events. It's not clear whether the findings apply to gasoline-powered engines, Mills said, because their emissions are very different from those of diesel-powered engines. In particular, diesel exhaust generates 100 times more pollutant particles, he said. Because the study was so carefully controlled, Luepker labeled the results interesting initial data. But he added that the controlled study in the laboratory is not totally dissimilar to what people out on the street can be exposed to. If this study were done in mice, I would say, 'very interesting,' Luepker said. A study done in healthy humans gets my attention more. In the mouse study from JAMA, the scientists found that mice breathing polluted air developed far more plaque than those breathing filtered air. Rodents that were exposed to polluted air and a high-fat diet had arteries that were 41.5 percent obstructed with plaque, while the mice exposed to a high-fat diet and filtered air only experienced 26.2 percent blockage in their arteries. The mice on normal diets also revealed differences in plaque levels, with the mice exposed to polluted air showing 19.2 percent blockage while those exposed to filtered air showing only 13.2 percent blockage. All the mice were genetically prone to develop heart disease. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
