Sunday - September 07, 2008
Children aged eight enlisted as council snoopers and report petty offences such as littering.
Yes I know my fellow Americans won’t understand and even then will not approve of this sort of thing.
But you simply don’t understand the joys and entitlements and thrill of the chase as these kids will no doubt be doing “their bit” to save the world from litter. And this little island will lead the way and bring India and China and wasteful Americans into the fold to save zeverld mine furher. Oh wait, different movie. hahahaha!
I can’t help it. Gotta laff. It really is twistedly funny. These folks are sooooooooooooooooooooooo serious about the globe getting warm and following eu dictates TO THE LETTER while the rest of europe ignores what isn’t convenient to them. But the Brits bless em do as they’re told by their masters in Brussels and by their lefty labour govt. And there’s a damn serious war going on here and it’s against waste and plastic bags and ppl not putting their trash bins the required distance from the kerb (that’s how it’s spelled here). Markets trying to limit the plastic bags they hand out to their customers and everyone wanting to be seen as Gween.
Used to be during the cold war, being seen as a commie wasn’t too cool for anyone outside the unions and labour party. Now it’s not cool to be seen as not green.
Maybe this isn’t so funny after all. Oh btw .. they’re called “enviro-crimes.” Sets the blood boiling that does. EnviroCrime!
Children aged eight enlisted as council snoopers
Children as young as eight have been recruited by councils to “snoop” on their neighbours and report petty offences such as littering, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.
By Martin Beckford, Sarah Graham and Betsy Mead
Last Updated: 1:00PM BST 06 Sep 2008
The youngsters are among almost 5,000 residents who in some cases are being offered £500 rewards if they provide evidence of minor infractions.
One in six councils contacted by the Telegraph said they had signed up teams of “environment volunteers” who are being encouraged to photograph or video neighbours guilty of dog fouling, littering or “bin crimes”.
The “covert human intelligence sources”, as some local authorities describe them, are also being asked to pass on the names of neighbours they believe to be responsible, or take down their number-plates.
Ealing Council in West London said: “There are hundreds of Junior Streetwatchers, aged 8-10 years old, who are trained to identify and report enviro-crime issues such as graffiti and fly-tipping.”
Harlow Council in Essex said: “We currently have 25 Street Scene Champions who work with the council. They are all aged between 11 to 14. They are encouraged to report the aftermath of enviro-crimes such as vandalism to bus shelters, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, fly-tipping etc. They do this via telephone or email direct to the council.”
Other local authorities recruit adult volunteers through advertisements in local newspapers, with at least 4,841 people already patrolling the streets in their spare time.
Some are assigned James Bond-style code numbers, which they use instead of their real names when they ring a special informer’s hotline.
This escalation in Britain’s growing surveillance state follows an outcry about the way councils are using powers originally designed to combat terrorism and organised crime to spy on residents. In one case, a family was followed by council staff for almost three weeks after being wrongly accused of breaking rules on school catchment areas.
It also emerged last month that around 1,400 security guards, car park attendants and town hall staff have been given police-style powers including the right to issue on-the-spot fines for littering, cycling on the pavement and other offences.
Matthew Sinclair, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, described the recruitment of children as “downright sinister”.
He said: “We are deeply troubled by these developments – they are straight out of the Stasi copybook. There is a combination of ever-stricter rules and ever more Draconian attempts to control people.
“Councils are using anti-terrorist legislation for the tiniest of things, like the people who put out their bins early, and the threats of fines and prosecutions combine to constitute fleecing the people the councils are meant to be serving.”
The increase in surveillance comes at a time when an estimated 169 councils have dropped weekly rubbish collections.
Some local authorities are refusing to collect bins which are placed too far from the kerb, while others are issuing £100 fines to people who fail to comply with recycling rules.
Critics have claimed that councils have stopped prosecuting people for flytipping in favour of pursuing easy targets such as fining people for dropping bits of food and cigarette butts.
In April, Hull council officials fined a young mother £75 for dropping a piece of sausage roll while trying to feed her four-year-old daughter. Sarah Davies, 20, refused to pay and the matter when to magistrates court where it was dismissed.
Doretta Cocks, founder of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, said the use of children by councils was “shocking”.
She said: “What sort of world are we bringing them up in? I think it’s dreadful for neighbour to spy upon neighbour in that way.”
The Daily Telegraph contacted more than 240 councils across England and Wales to ask if they had recruited environmental volunteers.
Of those, 36 or just under one in six, said they had. They included Luton, with 600 volunteers, the highest of any council; Southwark, south London (400) Birmingham (370) Blaenau Gwent (300) and Congleton in Cheshire (300).
Among the “environmental crimes” which the snoopers are asked to report, which vary from council to council, are failure to recycle rubbish, vandalism, graffiti, dog fouling, fly-tipping and abandoned vehicles.
Some councils merely ask recruits to keep an eye out for problems, while others are sent out on patrols. Several of the councils which do not yet use volunteers said they were considering doing so in future.
Many of the town halls said they did not encourage their volunteers to confront offenders or collect evidence, for their own safety.
But Bromley Council in Kent offers up to £500 for information that leads to a conviction.
Crawley Borough Council in West Sussex said its 150 Streetcare Champions were asked to “report on individuals if known”. Bolton Council said its Green Inspectors must “note any relevant information such as registration numbers” if they see criminal activity.
Others, including Fareham in Hampshire and Waltham Forest in east London encourage their volunteers to take photographs of rubbish to help investigations.
Liz Henthorn, 66, a retired nurse who is one of 120 “Street Hawk” volunteers in Enfield, north London, openly describes herself as a “curtain twitcher” but insists she is not snooping on anyone.
She said: “If there is a problem with fly-tipping, general bad behaviour, graffiti etcetera then I ring the Street Hawk person and when I do it is cleared. Enfield has become a lot cleaner because of us curtain twitchers having a look around.
“If you can you report an individual but nobody is going to give their name and address. If you know where that person lives you can say you know who it is but other than that you don’t.”
A spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents town halls across the country, insisted: “Environment volunteers are people who care passionately about their local area and want to protect it from vandals, graffitists and fly tippers.
“These residents are not snoopers. They will help councils cut crime and make places cleaner, greener and safer.”
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “In any civilised society the community will engage with the police but it would be plain wrong for young children to be recruited and trained for reward. People want to see the police and other appropriate agencies on our streets catching and deterring offenders.”
Councillor Sue Emment, Ealing Council’s cabinet member for environment and street services, said: “Ealing Council works with participating schools so Junior Streetwatchers can learn how to help our local environment, take pride in their community and have a sense of civic responsibility.
“Organisations like the TaxPayers’ Alliance are fast becoming parodies of themselves and ought to find out about Council schemes before making comments. We feel it is sad that the valuable time these young people are spending on improving the community should be criticised in any way.”
A spokesman for Harlow Council said: “We need to encourage more people to care for their community. If we can encourage people at a young age to do this then they will grow up to respect the environment. Our Street Champions, which is an entirely voluntary scheme naturally, has the backing and support of parents for children to take part in the scheme. The scheme is highly regarded.
“The scheme isn’t just about them reporting environmental problems, they also take part in projects to help them learn new skills and in a wider context, about citizenship.”
Posted by Drew458
on 09/07/2008 at 12:45 PM
Filed Under: • Crime • Environment • Nanny State • UK •
• Comments (10)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Sunday - August 31, 2008
The ‘consensus’ on climate change is a catastrophe in itself .
The ‘consensus’ on climate change is a catastrophe in itself
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 31/08/2008As the estimated cost of measures proposed by politicians to “combat global warming” soars ever higher – such as the International Energy Council’s $45 trillion – “fighting climate change” has become the single most expensive item on the world’s political agenda.
As Senators Obama and McCain vie with the leaders of the European Union to promise 50, 60, even 80 per cent cuts in “carbon emissions”, it is clear that to realise even half their imaginary targets would necessitate a dramatic change in how we all live, and a drastic reduction in living standards.
All this makes it rather important to know just why our politicians have come to believe that global warming is the most serious challenge confronting mankind, and just how reliable is the evidence for the theory on which their policies are based.
By far the most influential player in putting climate change at the top of the global agenda has been the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988, not least on the initiative of the Thatcher government. (This was why the first chairman of its scientific working group was Sir John Houghton, then the head of the UK’s Meteorological Office.)
Through a succession of reports and international conferences, it was the IPCC which led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, soon to have an even more ambitious successor, to be agreed in Copenhagen next year.
The common view of the IPCC is that it consists of 2,500 of the world’s leading scientists who, after carefully weighing all the evidence, have arrived at a “consensus” that world temperatures are rising disastrously, and that the only plausible cause has been rising levels of CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases.
In fact, as has become ever more apparent over the past 20 years –not least thanks to the evidence of a succession of scientists who have participated in the IPCC itself – the reality of this curious body could scarcely be more different.
It is not so much a scientific as a political organisation. Its brief has never been to look dispassionately at all the evidence for man-made global warming: it has always taken this as an accepted fact.
Indeed only a comparatively small part of its reports are concerned with the science of climate change at all. The greater part must start by accepting the official line, and are concerned only with assessing the impact of warming and what should be done about it.
In reality the IPCC’s agenda has always been tightly controlled by the small group of officials at its head. As one recent study has shown, of the 53 contributors to the key Chapter 9 of the latest report dealing with the basic science (most of them British and American, and 10 of them associated with the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office), 37 belong to a closely related network of academics who are all active promoters of the official warming thesis.
It is on the projections of their computer models that all the IPCC’s predictions of future warming are based.
The final step in the process is that, before each report is published, a “Summary for Policymakers” is drafted by those at the top of the IPCC, to which governments can make input.
It is this which makes headlines in the media, and which all too frequently eliminates the more carefully qualified findings of contributors to the report itself.
The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific “consensus” is a complete fiction. A
gain and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious “hockey stick”.
Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today.
This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.
The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.
Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before.
Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.
This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record.
When its next report came along in 2001, Mann’s graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.
But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.
When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it.
Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.
By the time of its latest report, last year, the IPCC had an even greater problem. Far from continuing to rise in line with rising CO2, as its computer models predicted they should, global temperatures since the abnormally hot year of 1998 had flattened out at a lower level and were even falling – a trend confirmed by Nasa’s satellite readings over the past 18 months.
So pronounced has this been that even scientists supporting the warmist thesis now concede that, due to changes in ocean currents, we can expect a decade or more of “cooling”, before the “underlying warming trend” reappears.
The point is that none of this was predicted by the computer models on which the IPCC relies.
Among the ever-growing mountain of informed criticism of the IPCC’s methods, a detailed study by an Australian analyst John McLean (to find it, Google “Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings") shows just how incestuously linked are most of the core group of academics whose models underpin everything the IPCC wishes us to believe about global warming.
The significance of the past year is not just that the vaunted “consensus” on the forces driving our climate has been blown apart as never before, but that a new “counter-consensus” has been emerging among thousands of scientists across the world, given expression in last March’s Manhattan Declaration by the so-called Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.
This wholly repudiates the IPCC process, showing how its computer models are hopelessly biased, based on unreliable data and programmed to ignore many of the genuine drivers of climate change, from variations in solar activity to those cyclical shifts in ocean currents.
As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: “I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.
“In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defence of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself.”
Yet it is at just this moment, when the IPCC’s house of cards is crumbling, that the politicians of the Western world are using it to propose steps that can only damage our way of life beyond recognition.
It really is time for that “counter-consensus” to be taken seriously.
Posted by Drew458
on 08/31/2008 at 09:15 AM
Filed Under: • Environment • UK •
• Comments (0)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Monday - August 25, 2008
Prius Drivers: Big car drivers are ugly
Just in case you weren’t yet 648.2% percent certain that Greenies are also total Elitists ...
Every morning, as Lynn Schmidt walks out of her Long Island, N.Y., home, opens the door to her baby-blue Prius, waves to her grumbling neighbor and pulls out of the driveway, she has every reason to smile. It’s not just the 45 miles per gallon her gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle is getting. And it’s not only that she can go three weeks without a fill-up. It’s also because that through her choice of automobile, Lynn is doing what she considers her share of being ecologically reasonable.
“Everyone should be concerned about the level of emissions,” says Schmidt. “We all need to do our part and make changes for the better.”
She’s not alone. With skyrocketing oil prices, many owners of hybrid vehicles and practitioners of the “green” lifestyle are seeing their eco-friendly choices pay off. But that’s led to some grumblings from late adopters — and charges that the greener-than-thou are guilty of “eco-snobbery.”
The other day, she pulled up next to another Prius — and the two drivers exchanged a knowing smile of eco-camaraderie.
“There can be some smugness on the part of the Prius owners because it’s distinctive,” says Michael Omotoso of the automotive-marketing-data giant J.D. Power and Associates. “It’s ‘Hey, look at me, I’m driving a hybrid!’”
Studies conducted by J.D. Power show that the typical hybrid purchaser is better educated and wealthier than the average car buyer. Furthering the exclusivity is the fact that available hybrids are hard to find.
And how much would you like to bet that at least 80% of the typical hybrid purchasers are lefties?
“I think that we Prius owners need a dating/whatever program, to hook us up with other Prius owners,” says one poster on Priuschat.com. He admits it’s half a joke, but says it “stems from my inability to look at people with gas-burning cars as attractive.”
It’s clear that hybrid buyers want to appear environmentally conscious, observes Aaron Bragman, a Detroit-based research analyst with the Global Insight economic-forecasting company.
“A big component [of hybrid ownership] is the social aspect,” he says, adding that if a consumer just wanted to save money on gas, he or she could buy a new subcompact for $11,000 instead of forking out a minimum of $22,000 for a hybrid.
Peiper sends me newspaper clippings from England. There are always car ads in there. I don’t know how putt-putt the little cars sold over there are, or even really how little they actually are, but the MPG numbers all the Pius owners are so high on actually suck. Quite a number of cars in the UK get 15 - 20 mpg better “extra urban” (ie highway) mileage than this thing does. They also have less of a “carbon footprint” too I think.
Posted by Drew458
on 08/25/2008 at 10:33 AM
Filed Under: • Environment • Typical White People: Stupid, Evil, Willfully Blind •
• Comments (4)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Sunday - August 24, 2008
STAND BY FOR AMERICA’S LIGHTS TO GO OUT. (NO, IT ISN’T AN ANTI-USA RANT)
This guy is really good. He writes every week on this subject. He lectures about the falshood re. gorebal warming.
I’ve been light on the posting this wkend for which I always feel guilty. Working on something and not even certain if I’ll end up blogging it. Although I think I might.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/08/2008
From The Sunday TelegraphCorrection: things are worse than I thought.
Last week I reported on the dangerous unreality overtaking US energy policy, as television commercials for both presidential candidates focus on the need to build more wind turbines. To highlight its absurdity I said that the 10,000 US turbines already built generate only 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, little more than one big coal-fired power station.The reality, it turns out, is even worse.
The notional “capacity” of America’s turbines is 19GW, but their actual output, as shown by an Amherst University study, is less than 17 per cent of that - even less than that of a large coal-fired plant.
So the two men vying for the White House are centring their policy on an energy source that currently provides barely 1 per cent of America’s electricity. Some 50 per cent of it comes from coal.
Yet such is the power of the “green” lobby that of 151 new coal-fired power stations proposed last year, 59 were vetoed by state governments, while the rest face court challenges. Whether it is McCain or Obama, stand by for America’s lights to go out.
Now this part of the same column in Sunday Telegraph, shows ya just one tiny example of a country tossing away it’s sovereignty and how it impacts on England. The EU declares and the UK says yes, oh yes. Screw me again! And they do. Crude I guess but it sure does seem that way these days. Here,read it for yourself.
Lords produce waste paper on waste policy
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/08/2008There was a time when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong.
But when 12 peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands.
In fact the headlines about the disintegration of Britain’s system of waste disposal - from householders being fined for putting rubbish in the wrong bin to the epidemic of flytipping - reflect only a small part of the disaster.
Even more outrageous is the fact that, wherever one looks at it, our waste handling system is in breakdown, so that, for instance, millions of tons of rubbish supposedly collected for recycling must be shipped out to China or the Third World because we no longer have any way to deal with it.
The reason why this has happened - and why it was ignored by those 12 dutiful little apparatchiks from the House of Lords - is that we have handed over direction of our waste policy to Brussels, which requires us to implement a strategy wholly inappropriate to our needs.
Until recently we still had a waste system as efficient as any in Europe. We had a fast-growing recycling industry, mainly reliant on private enterprise. But we also used much more of our rubbish than other countries for the ultimately beneficial purpose of reclaiming otherwise unproductive land by landfill.
What has thrown all this into chaos has been the imposition of a wholly different EU policy which seeks to eliminate landfilling (originally because some countries, such as Holland and Denmark were running out of land to fill). The EU puts recycling at the top of its priority list, followed by incineration. Only then can what remains be buried.
To conform with the Euro-model, we have therefore been required to discourage landfilling by closing down our rubbish tips and imposing ever higher “landfill taxes”, to build hugely expensive incinerators and to collect far more waste for “recycling” than we can actually recycle.
Instead of all this being admitted, it has become shrouded in propagandist humbug.
We are repeatedly told we are “running out of sites for landfill”, when every year we quarry out 110 million cubic metres of soil and rock, more than the refuse we produce. We are told that incineration is cheaper than landfill, when in fact it can cost as much as £190 a ton, as opposed to a maximum landfill cost of only £62.
To please the EU we claim to be collecting millions of tons of rubbish for recycling which is then either shipped abroad or just landfilled regardless.
We have created a shambles of a system which is failing in every way - so that we still face the prospect of massive fines from Brussels for failing to conform - while the once-friendly relations between binmen and the public are reduced to open war.
And what is the response of those noble lords? They babble on about the need for “waste prevention to be integrated into sustainable business models”. They “welcome the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement”.
They suggest the Government should lower VAT rates to “promote the development of sustainable products”. They don’t even seem to know that VAT rates cannot be lowered without permission from our real government in Brussels - the one which set all this disaster in train in the first place.
Posted by Drew458
on 08/24/2008 at 10:37 AM
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Editorials • Environment • UK •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Sunday - August 17, 2008
US gets ready to blow its economy away . Christopher Booker, reaction to his visit to USA.
Doesn’t need any comments from me. He already has it nailed.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about “global warming”, I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates.
Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical “green” credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.
After years when America was vilified for not taking “global warming’ seriously, it was a shock to find how “environmentalism” is now threatening to transform what is still the largest and richest economy in the world.
Both candidates favour a version of the proposed “cap and trade” scheme to slash US greenhouse gas emissions to 63 per cent below 2005 levels, at an estimated cost by 2030 of more than $600 billion a year - representing a cumulative loss to the US economy, within 22 years, of $4.8 trillion.
Although America is still dependent on coal for around half its electricity, with reserves estimated as likely to last 200 years, state after state is proposing to ban new coal-fired power stations.
Environmental groups, with powerful political support, are now lobbying equally fiercely against natural gas or any new nuclear power plants.
Most dramatic of all are the implications of a Supreme Court judgment in the case of Massachussets v the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which ruled by a single vote that the EPA must treat any greenhouse gases as “pollution”, to be regulated under America’s Clean Air Act.
The EPA is thus mandated to impose drastic new limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from pretty well any source, not just industry and transport but schools, hospitals, even lawn mowers.
The implications are so immense for almost every sector of the US economy that government departments -commerce, agriculture, energy and others - have been queuing up to protest, arguing that the effects of such regulation would be so damaging that it should be regarded as unthinkable.
But politicians of both parties, led by the two men vying for the presidency, are so carried away in the rush to appear “green” that it seems there is no longer any national voice powerful enough to question the sanity of such measures.
All the fashionable talk is of how fossil-fuels must be replaced by massively subsidised sources of “renewable” energy, such as vast arrays of solar panels, even though a recent study showed that a kilowatt hour of solar-generated electricity costs between 25 and 30 cents, compared with 6 cents for power generated from coal and 9 cents for that produced by natural gas.
What is terrifying is the extent to which America’s leading politicians seem oblivious to the economic realities of what they are proposing. The readiness of Messrs McCain and Obama to posture in front of pictures of virtually useless wind turbines symbolises that attitude perfectly.
Here, in the EU we are only too sadly familiar with politicians floating off into cloudcuckooland over our future energy policy, with the virtual certainty that before many years this may leave us with a colossal shortfall in our electricity supplies.
But “the lights going out all over Europe” is one thing: if they go out in the richest economy in the world - while China cheerfully continues to build one new coal-fired power station a week - we may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen
Posted by Drew458
on 08/17/2008 at 11:29 AM
Filed Under: • Environment •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - August 07, 2008
A Semi-Solution
I got an email this morning from a friend ...
I just signed my name onto a petition asking Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, to support the creation of a Do Not Mail Registry in the United States.
Please consider adding your name to the list of supporters calling for the creation of a national Do Not Mail Registry.
Junk mail is more than just an annoyance; it’s an environmental crisis. Every year, junk mail production destroys 100 million trees, creating as much global warming emissions equivalent to the emissions of 3.7 million cars.
We deserve the right to protect our privacy and our time. We deserve clean air and forest protection. Sign our petition today and take back your mailbox:
Thank You!
This sounds great at first. I hate junk mail. My guess is that 85% of what shows up in my mailbox is garbage. Without junk mail I’d get about 20 envelopes a month. That suits me just fine. I really don’t need two catalogs a week from Lands End, Cabela’s, or MidwayUSA. Or the pool supply place I bought one thing from 8 years ago. Or the candy shop in California I ordered from once. It’s a real pain in the ass, just another one of life’s little hassles we have to deal with every single day.
The link takes you to the Forest Ethics page, where you see the petition. It reads
Dear Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid:
Five years after the national Do Not Call Registry became the most popular consumer rights bill in history, citizens still face a different form of harassment: junk mail. Every year, Americans receive about 105 billion pieces of junk mail like credit card offers, coupons, and catalogs—that’s 848 pieces of junk mail per household. Even though 44% of that mail goes to the landfill unopened, we still spend eight months of our lives dealing with it all.
Junk mail is more than just an annoyance; it’s an environmental crisis. Every year, junk mail production destroys 100 million trees, creating global warming emissions equivalent to the emissions from 3.7 million cars.
We deserve the right to protect our privacy and our time. We deserve clean air and forest protection. We, the undersigned, support the creation of a national Do Not Mail Registry to provide a simple and comprehensive way for us to say no to junk mail.
This itself is not a bad idea. The national Do Not Call thing pretty much killed telemarketing, and that’s a good thing. If such a bill becomes law it might cut down on junk mail by a huge amount. And sure, that’s a whole lot less paper being used and trees being felled because of it. But I think this is only a partial solution.
I think the entire problem begins and ends with the Post Office. Junk mail exists solely because of their Bulk Mail discount rate, and it’s a tremendous discount. You and I are paying 42¢ to mail a letter, but the junk mailers pay less than 11¢. In theory this is because they do a large part of the pre-sorting work themselves, and supposedly drop the mail off at the local POs. Well, if that’s the case, then I should be able to mail a local letter for the same 11¢. One letter by itself is as pre-sorted as it can be, and if it’s local it doesn’t need to be shipped anywhere. It can be delivered by the carriers working out of that building. So where is my discount? HA!!! And no, I don’t believe quantity discounts should apply here. The stamp buys you the service of hand delivery. It’s the same service for each piece, whether you mail one letter or ten million.
The Post Office is failing because of junk mail. It amounts to 70% of the number of letters processed, but brings in less than a third of the revenue. That’s why the price of stamps goes up just about every year. Get rid of the Bulk Rate discount and the PO would make a fortune. Or they could reduce the price of stamps down to a quarter. Not only would it save a huge bunch of trees, it would allow them to trim their staff by a large amount. Carrying around less than half as much mail would save loads of fuel, and would be kind to the aching backs of the few carriers who actually schlep a bag around by foot. And it might make for a happier work environment too, so we’d have fewer episodes of people “going postal”.
The US Government should not be in the advertising business. Equal Rights, Equal Treatment Under The Law ... one rate for everyone.
Posted by Drew458
on 08/07/2008 at 11:18 AM
Filed Under: • Big Business • Environment • Government •
• Comments (2)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Monday - August 04, 2008
GLOBAL WARMING and GUESS WHO THE COPS ARE?
<
scroll down a bit for stories on this linkb>Energy firm recruits children as ‘climate cops’
Last week’s Sunday Times carried a large advertisement for the German-owned energy company npower, inviting children to “save the planet this summer” by becoming “climate cops”. A picture showed a sleeping dad, with a notice on his head warning in a childish scrawl that he had been found guilty of “climate crime” by “falling asleep with the tv still on”.
For more “interactive games and fun downloads”, readers were invited to contact npower’s Climate Cops website. This explains in comicbook format how children can spy on their parents, relatives and neighbours to catch them out in seven “climate crimes”, such as leaving the TV on standby, putting hot food in a fridge or freezer (as is recommended by hygiene experts) or failing to use low-energy light bulbs.
Children could record these offences in a “climate crime case file”, while teachers are offered a full “learning resource” pack for use in schools, including a PowerPoint presentation and posters for classroom walls.
When my colleague Richard North asked the Advertising Standards Authority how they squared this with their rules prohibiting “marketing communications” which “undermine parental authority”, they replied (as he records on his EU Referendum blog) that they had “considered you (sic) objections but do not feel it have (sic) breached our Codes on the basis you suggest”.
My own advice to children tempted to become “climate cops” is that they might begin by looking at npower’s own record as operators of 13 fossil fuel power stations.
Its coal-fired Aberthaw power station in Wales, for instance, emits more CO2 in two months than is notionally saved in a year by all the 2,000 wind turbines now disfiguring Britain’s countryside. If merely going to sleep in front of the TV is a “climate crime”, why haven’t the directors of npower put themselves behind bars long ago?
Just a drop in the frozen ocean
Increasingly desperate to sustain their scare, as the evidence suggests otherwise, the global warmists have recently been focussing more and more on that vanishing Arctic ice.
The Independent recently cleared its front page to warn: “it seems unthinkable, but for the first time in history ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year”. The latest horror story is the breaking up of two huge chunks of ice measuring “seven square miles”.
Oddly enough, however, the latest Just a drop in the frozen ocean satellite pictures (see the Watts Up With That website) show the North Pole still surrounded by six million square kilometres of ice, a million more than this time last year.
It is true that, back in May, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre said it was “quite possible” that all Arctic sea ice might vanish this year. Now they are only predicting that the Arctic may be ice-free “by 2030”.
It’s really frustrating how that “end of the world” we were promised keeps on having to be postponed.
Posted by Drew458
on 08/04/2008 at 10:48 AM
Filed Under: • Environment •
• Comments (2)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Wednesday - July 30, 2008
Moonbat Pelosi, Plantetary Savior
The Democrat leadership once again shows their priorities: you can go screw; caribou, sea lions, and lobsters are more important.
Congressional Republicans are stepping up attacks on Democrats who are blocking votes on oil drilling legislation, homing in on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was quoted saying that she wants “to save the planet.”
Pelosi, in an interview published Tuesday in Politico.com, defended her efforts to stall spending bills, saying as speaker she decides which bills will make it to the House floor.
“I’m trying to save the planet. ... I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy,” Pelosi said. “When you win the election, you win the majority, and what is the power of the speaker? To set the agenda, the power of recognition, and I am not giving the gavel away to anyone.”
Nancy is in charge, thank you. She has the power! But that also means she has the responsibility ... and this bunch hasn’t accomplished a damn thing in 2 solid years. And since Nancy is in charge and setting the agenda and deciding what gets recognized, therefore she is completely to blame. It’s a good thing we don’t have Sharia Law, because the right response is that of the Red Queen.
Ahead of a Republican press conference Tuesday focusing on stalled energy priorities, House Minority Leader John Boehner responded ...
“She’s got time to go out and promote her new book tour and her new book, but she doesn’t have time to schedule a vote on the floor of the House and let the American people have their will expressed?”
Boehner blamed Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama for preventing relief.
“For 25 years, Democrats have blocked more American-made oil and gas. That’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in,” said Boehner, R-Ohio. Voters want Congress “to vote on more American made oil and gas. We want to do that. She, Harry Reid, Barack Obama are standing in the way.”
House and Senate Democrats are using their control of Congress to avoid voting on opening up the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration, which they say is unnecessary because oil companies already have leases to millions of acres of federal land.
While this is slightly “truthy”, just because the oil companies have leases doesn’t actually mean they are permitted to put a drill bit into the ground. Nor does the existence of a lease mean that oil or gas has been located. On the other hand, we know where lots of oil and gas are, right offshore. Just ask the Chinese, who are busy drilling for it right off the coast of Florida.
“American families and businesses are struggling with skyrocketing gas prices at the pump, but President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress continue to stand in the way of real relief,” Pelosi said in the statement. “Instead, the Bush-Cheney policy, an energy plan crafted by two oilmen in the White House, revolves around the best interests of Big Oil – from protecting tax breaks to expanding domestic oil and gas drilling.”
Because, you know, I’m going to go take my shovel and dig an oil well out front here in the parking lot. Let’s blame big business for the gas price crisis, and make special taxes to gouge the oil companies because prices are high, and at the same time prevent them from harvesting new sources of the resources ... and then blame them even more when the lack of supply causes the demand to skyrocket. These people are morons. You can’t revoke the Law of Supply and Demand Nancy. And since every other nation on earth with a bit of coastline is out there drilling already as fast as they can, your “save the planet” is a bunch of crap. All it means is “screw the Americans”. That’s not an attitude I want represented in Washington.
Boehner suggested Obama is among Democrats who he says are influenced by a “radical group of environmentalists” pushing higher gas prices.
“If you listen to Barack Obama during the primaries, you know, he didn’t think $5 gas was all that bad. He was just upset it got there so quickly. And what you’ve got, you’ve got a bunch of radical environmentalists who think that we ought to have higher gasoline prices so Americans will drive less,” Boehner said.
Americans are already driving less. But there is a lower limit. Public transportation just isn’t a complete solution for the rural and suburban areas. Carpooling really only works for shift workers who all live in the same neighborhood. And while Detroit is turning to smaller more efficient vehicles again, an awful lot of people can’t afford to go out and buy a new one right now. So most of us have already done about as much as we can; the lower limit has nearly been reached.
With four legislative weeks left before the November elections, after which Congress is likely to punt big issues until the next administration takes office, little time is left to find a means to reduce oil costs, which is blamed for driving up inflation and slowing down the economy.
“They’re trying to run out the clock,” Boehner said.
No kidding. I’ve got a better idea: let’s run them out of office. Both parties, but especially the Dems.
PS - note how Nancy makes a fist in the above picture. Isn’t that an obscene gesture in Latin America?
Posted by Drew458
on 07/30/2008 at 10:55 AM
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Environment • Inflation and High Prices • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices • Politics •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Wednesday - July 23, 2008
Greenies are annoying us because that’s what they do
If you are old enough, you might remember when soda and other things to drink came in glass bottles. Nice heavy duty ones. You drank the contents, cleaned them out, and brought them back to store. The store sent them back to the vendor or the local bottling plant, and they got filled again. That’s how recycling used to be. Then came the plastic bottle, which either went back to the deposit machine, or went into regular recycling. We were all told that this was an even better way of recycling, and used less energy than either recasting the glass bottles, or cleaning and sterilizing them. See, it was better to shred the plastic and remelt it to make lawn furniture then it was to spend all the money on moving, storing, and processing all that glass.
Well now the Greenies have changed their story. Now that everyone everywhere recycles the plastic. And the aluminum. And the newspaper. And the cardboard. And the steel ... Heck, “co-mingle” is a regular part of the lexicon these days.
There was a time when brands like Evian and Perrier conjured up images of purity and luxury. That was before bottlers everywhere got their feet wet, and drinking bottled water became a very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed.
But now there is a growing backlash against bottled water. Thanks to a growing green movement, phasing out water bottles — seen as the ultimate symbol of conspicuous consumption — has become the latest fad.
Sales of reusable eco-friendly bottles like Sigg or Voss Water have surged. Green-minded Web sites list locations of municipal water fill-up stations. And cities like Chicago have added an extra tax to bottled water to discourage its purchase.
WTF? “eco-friendly reusable bottles”? You mean, like glass? Heavy duty plastic? The kind of bottles that were verboten for the past 30 years because they were “environmentally wasteful”? And how is it that they’re reusable? Sure, you take them home and fill them up again. But eventually you’ll have to clean that bottle. Horrors!!
And Chicago, that bastion of freedom and tolerance, has now stuck an extra tax on? Baaah-studs.
Actually, I’ve been waiting 28 years for this backlash. I spotted designer bottled water as a con way back when. Spring water ... sure, one or two of them taste good. Poland Spring in the clear plastic gallon bottles is about the best. But the generic store brand spring water we sold at the Grand Union when I was a stock clerk back in the late ‘70s was nearly as good. Bottled by the Wissahickon Spring water company, and the cheapest thing on the market. That name always stuck in my memory.
Some critics of bottled water cite concerns over the environmental waste of discarded bottles; others point out that municipal water systems were delivering excellent water long before plastic became all the rage.
...
There’s no question that bottled water tastes good, and it’s good for you. The problem is that 8 out of 10 of those water bottles wind up in landfills instead of recycling bins, and it can take 700 years before they begin to decompose. And given how much water we drink, that’s a lot of bottles.The key, says Lauria, is to recycle. ’’If you recycle, all guilt is erased, ‘’ he said. ‘’Recycling solves the problem. If it‘s recycled, it‘s ecologically safe.”
But Americans aren’t recycling enough, and that has become the rallying cry for groups who want to see bottles banned altogether.
Oh horseshit. Is there an office cafeteria that doesn’t have a recycling bin? Is there a neighborhood anywhere that doesn’t have the trucks come around once a week, or, failing that, is there a town that doesn’t have a recycling drop off center? Give me a friggin break. It’s everywhere. Everyone recycles, or at least has the opportunity to. Lots of towns even have the Garbage Police these days, with hefty fines if you get caught hiding the beer cans under the coffee grounds. But the greenies are pulling the old “8 out of 10” crap again, and the old “700 years” blither? Sorry, that requires a willing suspension of disbelief to accept. We’ve all gone green, or green enough. Shut the hell up, get back in your Prius and drive away annoyingly slow if there’s traffic behind you.
But concerns over the environment aren’t the only reason why there is a push to remove bottles. Some say bottled water erodes the demand for the municipal water supply.
Corporate Accountability International says bottled water is subject to less rigorous testing than city tap water, adding that the high cost of energy to make the bottles isn’t worth the cost of a product that may not be any better than local water.
It has launched a campaign called “Think Outside the Bottle’’ to promote, protect and ensure public funding for public water systems by getting people to choose tap water over bottled water. Supporters include actor Martin Sheen.
So they use Media Tactic #1: spread the fear. How ... original. Yawn.
“I’m a big believer in bottled water,’’ said Don Robart, mayor of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, who did not support the resolution against bottled water at the mayors’ meeting in June. ‘’From a health standpoint alone, I think we should be encouraging it.”
Robart says it’s a ’’bunch of baloney’’ that bottled water erodes support for tap water. He also notes how important it is to have bottled water on hand in case of emergency.
Hmm ... maybe this is just manufactured “bottled” news? Is that better or worse than real news? Gak.
Oh, and here is some Hollywood smut. Very cold showers at the beach this summer
Posted by Drew458
on 07/23/2008 at 09:24 PM
Filed Under: • Environment •
• Comments (2)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Saturday - July 12, 2008
Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less - sorry, not allowed
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge David Lawson overturned a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service to give Savoy Energy of Traverse City a permit to drill an exploratory well near the AuSable River’s south branch.
Rep. Matthew Gillard, D-Alpena, said Friday he was ecstatic regarding the judge’s ruling to overturn a 2005 decision that allowed oil and gas drilling near the Mason Tract.
“I hope this will be the final word,” Gillard said. “On behalf of my constituents and residents throughout Michigan who care about protecting our most precious natural assets, I have long been concerned about this drilling plan.”
According to the Associated Press, Lawson ruled the agency had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” by giving Savoy the permit in 2005.
The proposed wellhead would be located in the Huron-Manistee National Forest about three-tenths of a mile from the Mason Tract. Federal assessments had found the drilling would have no significant environmental impact. The Sierra Club and Anglers of the AuSable sued the government to halt the drilling.
In 2005 Savoy had plans to build at least three wells in the Mason Tract if results from exploratory tests turned out to be positive. The lifespan of the wells was estimated to be from 20-25 years.
Savoy Energy obtained a permit from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in 2003 to construct an 11,000-feet exploratory well in the Huron-Manistee National Forest and then “slant” drill to search for gas deposits under the Mason Tract.
Gillard said it’s irresponsible for people to be drilling in roadless and natural wild lands.
“As a state lawmaker, I believe one of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Michigan’s outdoor gifts - its lakes, forests, rivers and streams - for the pleasure of future generations,” he said.
This drilling would have been a little bit outside the famous Mason Tract area ( please read this short paper to understand what was planned to be built! ) by the Huron National Forest. The Mason Tract surrounds part of the south branch of the Au Sable river, world famous for being one of those fly fishing trout meccas. Although the area is open to fishermen, hunters, hikers, and perhaps off road vehicles, it is a relatively pristine wilderness.
I have no idea if oil or gas has been found in the nearby area, but the well under discussion here would have taken less than 4 acres of land, which is not very much at all. If gas was found, the wellhead would be more than 2 miles away from the river itself.
Leaders of the environmental groups urged the company and the government to look for other places to explore for oil and gas.
“We’ve said from the beginning we didn’t want to stop them from drilling,” said Marvin Roberson, a forest policy specialist with the Sierra Club. “We want them to drill from a place that won’t be harmful to the old-growth forest or the recreational experience.”
Although the Mason Tract is state property, the federal government owns rights to minerals beneath it and leased production rights to Savoy. In 2003, the company filed for a permit to drill into one of its lease holdings.
The plan was to clear about 3.5 acres of forest for a well site on federal land, then drill beneath the Mason Tract at an angle. If enough gas or oil was found, the company intended to install a pipeline and build a production facility about a mile east of the well.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved the project shortly after the Forest Service granted the permit. But it has been on hold since Lawson issued an order in December 2005 blocking the company from clearing land to get started.
So this looks to me like a case of NIMBY on the one part, and a case of judicial activism on the other. The state owns the land, but the fed owns the mineral rights underneath. Huh? Odd, but I can accept that part. Fine. So the Savoy company leased the rights from the fed, and the state issued them a permit 5 years ago to drill. Then when the Forest Department gave them the go-ahead to actually clear a bit of land and get to work, this judge steps in and stops them. Because, don’t you just effing know it, there’s this little birdie who might be upset by the noise, and Savoy didn’t spend enough time trying to understand the birdy’s feeeelings.
But the judge ruled the Forest Service didn’t consider how degrading the area could harm tourism, and said the agency did a “woefully inadequate” job of evaluating how the drilling might affect the Kirtland’s warbler, an endangered songbird that nests in the area.
Kirtland’s Warbler has evolved itself into a corner, so to speak. It winters solely in the Bahamas, and nests only in a few counties in central Michigan in habitat that must contain jack pine not less than 10 feet tall or greater than 20 feet tall. I wonder what the taxpayers would say if they knew how many millions of their dollars have been spent over the years to maintain the proper habitat for this finicky little bird?
learn more about Kirtland’s Warbler after the jump. And about the millions of tax dollars that have been spent to save this fussy species.
Posted by Drew458
on 07/12/2008 at 01:16 PM
Filed Under: • Environment • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •
• Comments (3)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - July 10, 2008
Our leaders are in carbon-cloud cuckoo land.
leaders are in carbon-cloud cuckoo land. Leaders? What leaders? We don’t got no stinkin’ leaders. oops. wrong movie.
I read this guy in The Telegraph a lot. He writes on this subject quite a bit and naturally takes bricksNbats due to his anti gorebal warming opinions.
And as well all know, only the tree huggers and gorebals have a right to opinions.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/07/2008For a perfect example of what is meant by “gesture politics” - an empty pledge given solely for effect, which the politician has no hope of honouring - one could not do better than this week’s commitment by the G8 leaders on how they want us to fight climate change.
Sitting on their cloud-wreathed Japanese mountain top, they solemnly agreed that, to halt global warming, their countries would aim by 2050 to halve their emissions of carbon dioxide.
A tiny indication of the fact that they didn’t really have a clue what they were talking about was a slip by Japan’s prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, when he had to be corrected for announcing that the CO2 cut would be measured from “1990 levels”.
Even when he amended this to “present-day levels”, he was merely spouting empty words into the oriental air.
Three things make this aspiration by the leaders of the world’s “eight richest countries” not just vainglorious grandstanding, but positively dangerous.
The first is that, as well as having no idea how they could achieve such an absurdly ambitious target, they may inflict immeasurable damage on their economies just by trying to do so.
One after another, it is becoming clear that all the costly measures so far proposed to cut carbon emissions are pie-in-the-sky.
The drive for “renewable” sources of energy, such as building thousands of wind turbines, is turning out to be little more than self-deception (the combined output of all the 2,000 wind turbines so far built in Britain is less than that of a single, medium-sized, gas-fired power station).
Even the environmentalists have realised that biofuels are a farce, needing more CO2 to produce than they save. The EU’s much-vaunted “emissions trading scheme”, so far costing us all an estimated £40 billion, has not resulted in any reductions of CO2 emissions whatever.
If the G8’s leaders genuinely wanted to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent over the next 40 years, this would mean taking steps they haven’t even begun to contemplate. It would require such a drastic cut in our energy use and standard of living that their peoples would have risen up in mass revolt long before the target was reached.
And nothing better shows up the unreality of all this - as President Bush tried to point out in the summit’s only flash of honesty - than the fact that China (not represented at the G8, although it now has the world’s fourth largest economy) is already putting out more CO2 than anyone else.
As it builds two new coal-fired power stations a week, China has no more intention than India of joining the Western economic suicide club.
The second reason why this infatuation with cutting carbon emissions is beginning to look extraordinarily reckless is that the whole scientific theory on which it is based now appears distinctly questionable.
The orthodox global-warming thesis, accepted by pretty well every politician in the Western world, but not by a growing number of scientists, is that, as CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise, so too should global temperatures. Unless we can drastically reduce those CO2 levels, the world is thus threatened with catastrophe.
In the past year or two, however, evidence has been piling up to suggest that there may be a fundamental flaw in this theory. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise to levels not seen since the distant geological past, temperatures have not been following suit.
After 2000 the global temperature curve flattened out at a level significantly lower than the freak year 1998, and in recent months temperatures have dropped to levels not seen since the early 1980s.
Despite the best efforts of the global-warming lobby to keep the scare going, the northern hemisphere enjoyed its coldest winter for decades, and this summer has shown the curve sinking even lower.
Even the warmists are having to find excuses for the fact that their theory doesn’t exactly seem to be holding up, conceding that the next 10 years may see a period of global cooling, before the “underlying warming trend” returns worse than ever.
Other scientists point out that, rather than look to CO2 for an explanation of global temperatures, a much more convincing link can be seen in the activity of the sun, with current sunspot levels having dramatically fallen to levels associated with historic periods of global cooling recorded in the past.
Yet just when such huge question marks are being raised over the “CO2 equals warming” theory, our politicians have swallowed it whole, as an act of blind faith - using it to justify such massive costs to our economy that our whole way of life seems destined to change significantly for the worse.
The third respect in which all this is becoming seriously dangerous applies specifically to us here in Britain. While Gordon Brown prattles about wind turbines, and plays silly games for the cameras with electric cars, Britain within a few years is facing the near certainty of a massive shortfall in our electricity supplies.
By 2015, thanks to the obsolescence of our nuclear power plants and the forced closure of nine of our major coal and oil-fired power stations under EU anti-pollution rules, we are due to lose 40 per cent of our current generating capacity - and Mr Brown hasn’t the slightest practical idea of how to fill the gap.
Forget the nonsense about a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050. Our Government has already committed Britain to go even further, by imposing a statutory cut of 60 per cent through its Climate Change Bill.
But long before that, unless those who rule us come down out of cloud cuckoo land very fast, our lights will go out, our computers will shut down, our economy will judder to a halt and we shall face a national catastrophe. We may well be meeting that 60 per cent target sooner than we think - but not for reasons that reflect well on our politicians, of any party.
Posted by Drew458
on 07/10/2008 at 01:11 PM
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Environment • International • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •
• Comments (0)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Tuesday - June 24, 2008
The Greenies Win One, Thanks To “Little Maverick” FL Governor Crist
At a news conference Tuesday, scheduled for 10:30 a.m. near the imperiled “River of Grass”, Governor Crist is expected to announce a $1.75 billion deal to essentially buy the U.S. Sugar Corporation, including 187,000 acres of farmland that once sat in the northern Everglades. If the deal goes through (and though the announcement will be taking place, the deal isn’t set in stone), it will extinguish a powerful 77-year-old company with 1,700 employees and deep roots in South Florida’s coal-black organic soil. It will also resurrect and reconfigure a moribund 8-year-old Everglades replumbing effort that is supposed to be the most ambitious ecosystem restoration project in the history of the planet.
The purchase would give the state control of nearly half the 400,000 acres of sugar fields in the Everglades Agricultural Area below Lake Okeechobee, although sources said U.S. Sugar would lease back its land for several years. Environmentalists hope that eventually, the area will become storage reservoirs, treatment marshes and perhaps even a flowway reconnecting the lake to the Glades. This could help recreate the original north-to-south movement of the “River of Grass”, and eliminate damaging pulses of excess water into coastal estuaries. That would be good news for panthers and gators, dolphins and herons, ghost orchids and royal palms.
Crist has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Senator John McCain, and they both took a lot of flak in Florida last week when they dropped their opposition to offshore drilling. But Crist has been true to his pledge to be “the Everglades governor,” replacing many of Jeb Bush’s industry-friendly aides with eco-friendly appointees, blocking the Legislature’s efforts to eliminate funding for restoration, and stopping the sugar industry from pumping polluted runoff into the lake. In a recent interview with TIME, he hinted that he was planning some “breathtaking changes” for the Everglades. “Putting your heart and soul into it really makes a difference,” he said.
Sugar has been on of my pet peeves for years. Sugar costs more in the United States than anywhere else in the world. It has tremendous price supports and protective legislation, to the point where actual sugar is hardly used at all in any of the packaged food products we buy. No, we get corn syrup instead. Not even beet sugar. The entire sugar fix thing went in around the time that Hawaii was set to become a state, and it’s a nasty sham that costs us billions every year. I feel we should get our sugar from all the little islands in the Caribbean instead. This would pump lots of money into their tiny economies, bring many of them up out of turd-world status, and utterly cement them to the US economy. Plus, eliminating the sugar price support would mean lower prices for our consumers and a whole lot less of that damn corn syrup with all the possible health complications it has.
Is it a good idea for a state to become an owner of an agribusiness industry? Usually not. In this case? I don’t know. But this instance does show that some Republicans can make a big effort in the environmental arena.
Posted by Drew458
on 06/24/2008 at 12:41 PM
Filed Under: • Big Business • Environment •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Saturday - June 07, 2008
Great Game For The Kiddies
via IMAO:
No, this is not a parody. This is for reals. Go on, take the test. Just see if you can ”deserve to live” to a decent age by acting anything close to a normal person and not some Turd World Aborigine. Because we all have the same “share” of the earth’s resources you know. Money, effort, technology have nothign to do with it. Um, I noticed there wasn’t anything in there about burning wood, coal, camel dung, etc., for all kinds of heat and cooking. Because, you know, most of those heat resources are free. No, they just want to know how much you spend, you eeeevil capitalist. And there isn’t anything in there about burning down the rain forest, or increasing the world’s deserts because of you and your damn crop destroying goats either. No questions about how many dozen children you and your wives churn out either. Biased much against the west?
Posted by Drew458
on 06/07/2008 at 04:07 PM
Filed Under: • Education • Environment •
• Comments (13)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Sunday - June 01, 2008
My Friend Mr. Sun
Explanation: Ten Earths could easily fit in the “claw” of this seemingly solar monster. The monster, though, visible on the lower left, is a huge eruptive prominence seen moving out from our Sun. The above dramatic image taken early in the year 2000 by the Sun-orbiting SOHO satellite. This large prominence, though, is significant not only for its size, but its shape. The twisted figure eight shape indicates that a complex magnetic field threads through the emerging solar particles. Differential rotation inside the Sun might help account for the surface explosion. Although large prominences and energetic Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, they are occurred more frequently near Solar Maximum, the time of peak sunspot and solar activity in the eleven-year solar cycle.
This is not the Sun as it is right now. This is:
I’m sure you notice the difference. And if you were wondering about sunspots, we’re still pretty much at ZERO:
The Maunder Minimum Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the “Little Ice Age” when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.
Which could have just a little to do with the recent Gorebot’s whine that Glowball Worming is still with us, but might be taking a 10 year break. But, um, wouldn’t that break be considered Glowball Cooling?
Still, if you’re out in it working, wear a hat and some sunblock. Or else.
Posted by Drew458
on 06/01/2008 at 09:21 AM
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Environment •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Five Most Recent Trackbacks:
Once Again, The One And Only Post
(4 total trackbacks)
Tracked at iHaan.org
Thｅ advantage to having a guide with you is thɑt an expert will haѵe very first hand experience dealing and navigating the river with гegional wildlife. Tһomas, there are great…
On: 07/28/23 10:37
The Brownshirts: Partie Deux; These aare the Muscle We've Been Waiting For
(3 total trackbacks)
Tracked at head to the Momarms site
The Brownshirts: Partie Deux; These aare the Muscle We’ve Been Waiting For
On: 03/14/23 11:20
Vietnam Homecoming
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at 广告专题配音 专业从事中文配音跟外文配音制造，北京名传天下配音公司
专业从事中文配音和外文配音制作，北京名传天下配音公司 北京名传天下专业配音公司成破于2006年12月，是专业从事中 中文配音 文配音跟外文配音的音频制造公司，幻想飞腾配音网领 配音制作 有海内外优良专业配音职员已达500多位，可供给一流的外语配音，长年服务于国内中心级各大媒体、各省市电台电视台，能满意不同客户的各种需要。电话：010-83265555 北京名传天下专业配音公司…
On: 03/20/21 07:00
meaningless marching orders for a thousand travellers ... strife ahead ..
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Casual Blog
[...] RTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPL [...]
On: 07/17/17 04:28
a small explanation
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at yerba mate gourd
Find here top quality how to prepare yerba mate without a gourd that's available in addition at the best price. Get it now!
On: 07/09/17 03:07
DISCLAIMER
THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.
Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.
- Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
- Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
- Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
- Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere
THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.
Copyright © 2004-2015 Domain Owner
Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
RSS 2.0 
Atom 
.jpg&dir=85&p=5368&pic=large){kind=link}