[Biofuel] Exxon MTBE Lawsuit: New Hampshire Jury Finds Oil Giant Liable In Groundwater Contamination
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/exxon-mtbe-lawsuit-new-hampshire_n_3045663.html Exxon MTBE Lawsuit: New Hampshire Jury Finds Oil Giant Liable In Groundwater Contamination AP | By By LYNNE TUOHY Posted: 04/09/2013 12:40 pm EDT | Updated: 04/09/2013 1:29 pm EDT CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A jury in New Hampshire has ordered Exxon Mobil to pay $236 million in damages after finding the oil giant liable in a long-running lawsuit over groundwater contamination by the gasoline additive MTBE. Jurors sat through nearly three months of testimony in the longest state trial in New Hampshire history, but deliberated for only 90 minutes on Tuesday. The state sought $236 million to monitor and remediate groundwater contaminated by MTBE — which travels farther and faster in groundwater than gasoline without the additive. Lawyers for Exxon Mobil say the company used MTBE to meet federal Clean Air Act mandates to reduce air pollution and should not be held liable for sites contaminated by unnamed third parties, such as junk yard owners and independent gas station owners. Jurors had more than 400 exhibits to sift through, including memos and reports dating back decades. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] London's cooking waste to fuel power station
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/07/london-cooking-waste-power-station London's cooking waste to fuel power station James Meikle Sunday 7 April 2013 14.36 BST Cooking waste from thousands of London restaurants and food companies is to help run what is claimed to be the world's biggest fat-fuelled power station. The energy generated from the grease, oil and fat that clogs the capital's sewers will also be channelled to help run a major sewage works and a desalination plant, as well as supplying the National Grid, under plans announced by Thames Water and utility company 2OC. The prospect of easing the financial and logistical problems of pouring £1m a month into clearing the drains of 40,000 fat-caused blockages a year is being hailed by the companies as a win-win project. Thirty tonnes a day of waste will be collected from leftover cooking oil supplies at eateries and manufacturers, fat traps in kitchens and pinchpoints in the sewers – enough to provide more than half the fuel the power plant will need to run. The rest of its fuel will come from waste vegetable oil and tallow (animal fats). The deal, worth more than £200m over 20 years, has made possible the building of the £70m plant at Beckton, east London, which is financed by a consortium led by iCON Infrastructure. It is due to be operational in early 2015. No virgin oils from field or plantation crops will be used to power it, says 2OC. The plant will produce 130 Gigawatt hours (GWh) a year of renewable electricity – enough to run just under 40,000 average-sized homes, say the planners. Thames Water has agreed to buy 75GWh of this output to run Beckton sewage works, which serves 3.5 million people, and the nearby desalination plant, which is used in times of drought or other emergencies. Piers Clark, commercial director for Thames Water, said: This project is a win-win: renewable power, hedged from the price fluctuations of the non-renewable mainstream power markets, and helping tackle the ongoing operational problem of 'fatbergs' in sewers. Andrew Mercer, chief executive of 2OC, said: This is good for us, the environment, Thames Water and its customers. Our renewable power and heat from waste oils and fats is fully sustainable. When Thames doesn't need our output, it will be made available to the grid meaning that power will be sourced, generated and used in London by Londoners. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] common dreams
Hi, sorry, I haven't been posting from common dreams lately, and won't for two more weeks. am in the middle of exams. So anyone who sees anything intersting from there and feels like posting it, please go ahead. a href=http://www.commondreams.org/; class=newlyinsertedlinkhttp#58;#47;#47;www.commondreams.org#47;/a Thanks. Sadhbh. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Margaret Thatcher's Criminal Legacy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34556.htm Margaret Thatcher's Criminal Legacy By Finian Cunningham April 09, 2013 Information Clearing House - Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway. Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having saved Britain and for making the has-been colonial power great again. Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a special friend. Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of an historic world figure. Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism. Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times. So, here is a people's history of Thatcher's legacy. She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch's squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano, by a British submarine. By declaring war, rather than conducting political negotiations with Argentina over Britain's ongoing colonial possession of the Malvinas, Thatcher salvaged her waning public support in Britain, and the bloodletting helped catapult her into a second term of office in Downing Street. Her political greatness that so many Western leaders now eulogize was therefore paid in part by the lives of Argentine and British soldiers, and by bequeathing an ongoing source of conflict in the South Atlantic. It wasn't just foreigners that Thatcher declared war on. Armed with her snake-oil economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, unleashing finance capitalism, pump-priming the rich with tax awards subsidised by the ordinary working population, Thatcher declared war on the British people themselves. She famously proclaimed that there was no such thing as society and went on to oversee an explosion in the gap between rich and poor and the demolition of social conditions in Britain. That legacy has been amplified by both successive Conservative and Labour governments and is central to today's social meltdown in Britain - more than two decades after Thatcher resigned. Laughably, David Cameron, a protégé of Thatcher, claims that she saved Britain. The truth is Thatcher accelerated the sinking of British capitalism and society at large. What she ordered for the Belgrano has in a very real way come to be realised for British society at large. During her second term of office in the mid-1980s, the Iron Lady declared war on the enemy within. She was referring to Britain's strongly unionised coal-mining industry. Imagine declaring war on your own population. That is a measure of her pathological intolerance towards others who did not happen to share her obnoxious ideological views - ideological views that have since become exposed as intellectually and morally bankrupt. For over a year around 1984, her Orwellian mindset and policies starved mining communities in the North of England into submission. Her use of paramilitary police violence also broke the resolve and legitimate rights of these communities. Miners' leader Arthur Scargill would later be vindicated in the eyes of ordinary people, if not in the eyes of the mainstream media. Britain's coalmines were systematically shut down, thousands of workers would be made unemployed, and entire communities were thrown on the social scrap heap. All this violence and misery was the price for Thatcher's ideological war against working people and their political rights. The class war that Thatcher unleashed in Britain is still raging. The rich have become richer, the poor decidedly more numerous and poorer. The decimation of workers' rights and the unfettered power given to finance capital were hallmarks of Thatcher's legacy and are to this day hallmarks of
[Biofuel] In This Nuclear Standoff, It's The US That's The Rogue State
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34563.htm In This Nuclear Standoff, It's The US That's The Rogue State The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations By Jonathan Steele April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Guardian - By coincidence two clashes over nuclear issues are hitting the headlines together. North Korea and Iran have both had sanctions imposed by foreign governments, and when they refuse to behave properly they are submitted to isolation and put in the corner until they are ready to say sorry and change their conduct. If not, corporal punishment will be administered, since they have been given fair warning by the enforcers that all options are on the table. It's a bizarre way to run international relations, one we continue to follow at our peril. For one thing, it is riddled with hypocrisy, and not just because states that have hundreds of nuclear weapons are bullying states that have few or none. The hypocrisy is worse than that. If it is offensive for North Korea to talk of launching a nuclear strike at the United States (a threat that is empty because the country has no system to deliver the few nuclear weapons that it has), how is it less offensive for the US to warn Iran that it will be bombed if it fails to stop its nuclear research? Both states would be resorting to force when dialogue is a long way from being exhausted. They would also be acting against international law. That is patently clear if North Korea ever managed to launch a nuclear strike against South Korea or the US, but the same is true of an altogether more feasible attack on Iran. There is no conceivable scenario under which the United Nations security council would authorise the United States, let alone Israel, to take military action, even if Iran were to tear up its long-standing statement that nuclear bombs are un-Islamic and produce one. So why does Washington go on with its illegal threats? The underlying cause of most international tension is the unwillingness of powerful states to recognise that we live in a multipolar world. The idea of hegemony, often sanitised as leadership, is unacceptable. In a post-colonial era there are multiple centres of authority, international influence and soft power, and we should rejoice when new or old states, individually or collectively, have the courage and ability to challenge another state's ambition to be a superpower. States will always make common cause or coalitions of the willing on specific issues, but interests fluctuate and priorities change -- and we should junk the cold war-style system of military alliances and ideological or sectarian camps. Let us go further and drop the figment of an international community, at least in its current western definition as the United States and its friends. By the same token, let's correct the myopia around isolation. When the leaders of 120 nations travelled to Tehran to ratify Iran's presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement last August, it was risible to hear US officials still talking of Iran being a rogue state. In Washington and Whitehall it may seem self-evident that the international community should arm the opposition to Syria's President Assad, but that is not the view of the world's largest democracy, India, or of the most democratic African and Latin American states, South Africa and Brazil. When their leaders convened with Russia and China (in the new Brics coalition) in Durban last month, they re-affirmed our opposition to any further militarisation of the conflict and called for a political settlement. Of course, the non-aligned and Brics summits were barely covered by the US media in its news or comment columns, the normal technique of reality suppression used by American opinion-formers and policy-makers. Rami Khouri, the distinguished US-trained Lebanese writer, calls it professionally criminal. After a month in the US recently, he found that coverage of Iran was based on assumptions, fears, concerns, accusations and expectations almost never supported by factual and credible evidence. In as much as these distortions build public support for a military attack on Iran, he finds it as culpable as the media's role in the runup to the attack on Iraq a decade ago. The alleged crises over North Korea and Iran are just not serious enough to warrant the classroom language of shunning and punishment. Dialogue and respect for other people's positions are the better course. Discuss everything as a package rather than dangle incentives one by one like sweets. Ironically, it was Iran at the recent talks with security council members that suggested a roadmap with a clear end state: the acceptance of Iran's right to enrich uranium like any other signatory of the non-proliferation treaty. In other words, the issue is primarily a matter of national dignity and
[Biofuel] What Christians Don't Know About Israel
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34560.htm What Christians Don't Know About Israel By Grace Halsell Note: This article was written in 1998 by the late Grace Halsell. Sadly it remains relevant today. April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? American Presidents as well as most members of Congress support Israel -- and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers. The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere -- among those who support Israel but don't really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel -- and Zionism -- often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood. I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday School and watched an instructor draw down window- type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a Good and Chosen people who fought against their Bad unChosen enemies. In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday School. And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about as a child. When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. Not write about politics? scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe in the Old Walled City. We eat politics, morning, noon and night! As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians. My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country. I say sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was free to print news impartially. 'It shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel.' In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify news depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture. Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn't it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn't know it was happening. On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I'd make them available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn't known: had it been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were lost at WETA. The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters. Terrific, he said of my material. The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit MacMillan's. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His
[Biofuel] Winner Takes All: The Super-priority Status of Derivatives
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34567.htm Why Derivatives Threaten Your Bank Account By Ellen Brown April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the new normal. Bail-in policies are appearing in multiple countries directing failing TBTF banks to convert the funds of unsecured creditors into capital; and those creditors, it turns out, include ordinary depositors. Even secured creditors, including state and local governments, may be at risk. Derivatives have super-priority status in bankruptcy, and Dodd Frank precludes further taxpayer bailouts. In a big derivatives bust, there may be no collateral left for the creditors who are next in line. Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to bail in two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A bail in is a quantum leap beyond a bail out. When governments are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to recapitalize themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the creditors include the depositors who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings. The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as detailed in my earlier articles here and here. Too big to fail now trumps all. Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks. Why Derivatives Threaten Your Bank Account The big risk behind all this is the massive $230 trillion derivatives boondoggle managed by US banks. Derivatives are sold as a kind of insurance for managing profits and risk; but as Satyajit Das points out in Extreme Money, they actually increase risk to the system as a whole. In the US after the Glass-Steagall Act was implemented in 1933, a bank could not gamble with depositor funds for its own account; but in 1999, that barrier was removed. Recent congressional investigations have revealed that in the biggest derivative banks, JPMorgan and Bank of America, massive commingling has occurred between their depository arms and their unregulated and highly vulnerable derivatives arms. Under both the Dodd Frank Act and the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, derivative claims have super-priority over all other claims, secured and unsecured, insured and uninsured. In a major derivatives fiasco, derivative claimants could well grab all the collateral, leaving other claimants, public and private, holding the bag. The tab for the 2008 bailout was $700 billion in taxpayer funds, and that was just to start. Another $700 billion disaster could easily wipe out all the money in the FDIC insurance fund, which has only about $25 billion in it. Both JPMorgan and Bank of America have over $1 trillion in deposits, and total deposits covered by FDIC insurance are about $9 trillion. According to an article on Bloomberg in November 2011, Bank of America's holding company then had almost $75 trillion in derivatives, and 71% were held in its depository arm; while J.P. Morgan had $79 trillion in derivatives, and 99% were in its depository arm. Those whole mega-sums are not actually at risk, but the cash calculated to be at risk from derivatives from all sources is at least $12 trillion; and JPM is the biggest player, with 30% of the market. It used to be that the government would backstop the FDIC if it ran out of money. But section 716 of the Dodd Frank Act now precludes the payment of further taxpayer funds to bail out a bank from a bad derivatives gamble. As summarized in a letter from Americans for Financial Reform quoted by Yves Smith: Section 716 bans taxpayer bailouts of a broad range of derivatives dealing and speculative derivatives activities. Section 716 does not in any way limit the swaps activities which banks or other financial institutions may engage in. It simply prohibits public support for such activities. There will be no more $700 billion taxpayer bailouts. So where will the banks get the money in the next crisis? It seems the plan has just been revealed in the new bail-in policies. All Depositors, Secured and Unsecured, May Be at Risk The bail-in policy for the US and UK is set forth in a document put out jointly by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Bank of England (BOE) in December 2012, titled Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions. In an April 4th article in Financial Sense, John Butler points out that the directive does not explicitly refer to depositors. It refers only to unsecured creditors. But the effective
