Tax credits for Hybrids…
From a review of two models of a new Toyota Highlander vehicle in the Times:
Once a big part of the Hybrid’s higher cost could have been eased with a $2,600 tax credit available under the 2005 Energy Act. But Congress phased out the credit for automakers that have sold 60,000 hybrids, penalizing Toyota and Honda, which have offered more hybrids than the domestic automakers. Now there are no tax credits for any Toyota hybrid, and those for Honda are reduced. This follows the governmental theme that no good deed goes unpunished if it involves a foreign automaker.
Toll Discounts for Going Green
Article in Auto section of NYTimes about hybrid cars getting more breaks…
Why oil prices are stubbornly high
Why oil prices are stubbornly high
Drivers have been paying about 10 cents more for a gallon of gas since Dec. 31.
By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor | from the January 10, 2008 editionAn explanation why the price of oil is staying too high…
Will the World’s Oceans Be Our Next Drinking Tap?
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2008.
But who are we protecting the planet from, when it comes to water scarcity? The answer, as always, is ourselves. But how to do that is the subject of great debate and controversy, especially as permanent droughts take hold in Australia, America and beyond, causing shortages, famines, social unrest and more. With declining rainfall and snowpack because of global warming, many countries have turned to desalination of the oceans for their water supplies. The process seems simple enough: Over 70 percent of the planet is covered in oceans, so take the salt out of the water and watch the tanks fill up.
In other words, the entire world is gearing up for greater desalination plant construction in the years to come, but it’s not just because everyone is getting very thirsty. Rather, it is because there are buckets of money to be made. But whether progress and salvation follows is another question entirely.
Regulatory Games and the Polar Bear
An editorial in the NYTimes today pits the Polar Bear against Dick Cheney…
Although Congress and the courts have largely frustrated the Bush administration’s efforts to open up Alaska to oil and gas drilling, Vice President Dick Cheney and his industry friends remain determined to lock up as many oil and gas leases as they can before the door hits them on the way out. They are certainly not going to let the struggling polar bear stand in their way.
“Citizen’s Guide to Carbon Capping”
As Congress begins to seriously address climate change, a clearly-written guide to carbon capping has been released for free Internet distribution.
“This guide ushers in the next stage of the climate debate,” says noted author Bill McKibben in a Foreword. “In the first stage, we discussed the problem. In this stage, we must choose solutions. This guide demystifies the leading solution — carbon capping — so that citizens can understand and shape it.”
Written by Working Assets co-founder Peter Barnes, the 22-page guide describes three different ways to cap carbon: cap-and-giveaway, cap-and-auction, and cap-and-rebate. It explains how, “if done right, a descending economy-wide carbon cap is the single best tool to fight climate change.” But it warns that, “if done wrong, a cap won’t reduce emissions sufficiently and will transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from families to corporate polluters.”
The guide has been released with a Creative Commons license, which means it can be freely reproduced and circulated.
It can be downloaded for free here.
The guide is published by Tomales Bay Institute, a network of thinkers and doers who promote public understanding of commons such as the atmosphere.
In poultry slaughtering, what goes around comes around
In poultry slaughtering, what goes around comes around
FROM: Burlington Free Press |January 10, 2008 | by Ed Shamy
A brief history of poultry slaughtering in Vermont:
Circa 900 A.D.: Elderly woman, about 27 years of age, clad in deerskin crouches in bushes watching lone grouse scratch at forest floor. Woman bursts from cover, chases grouse down rocky slope, dives atop bird and snaps its neck with flick of her wrist. Tears feathers from grouse breast, dines.
Circa 1950: Farmer tells farm wife he has a taste for that roasted chicken she makes from time to time. Farm wife finishes wringing laundry, hangs last pair of overalls on outdoor line, walks out to farm yard. Farm wife finds stump. Finds axe. Grabs ornery chicken that gives her a hard time every morning while collecting eggs, puts head on stump, drops axe. Plucks. Rinses. Stokes oven with wood. Cooks.
Circa 1975: Hippie from Lower East Side of Manhattan, recently relocated to Vermont commune, tires of diet of nuts, berries, LSD. Daydreams of turkey smothered in gravy. Unsuccessfully chases neighbor’s turkey. Neighbor’s turkey outwits hippie, escapes. Hippie moves back to New York.
Circa 2003: Poultry farmers find themselves buried beneath a glut of regulations governing slaughtering operations and a shortage of qualified, properly licensed slaughterhouses. Commercial poultry farms in Vermont roughly as common as commercial diamond mines in Lamoille County.
Circa 2007: Poultry eaters in Vermont eat birds most likely raised and processed in Alabama or Arkansas, though the plumpest specimens come from the Carolinas and Delaware. It’s a rare bird, indeed, that has ever set live foot on Vermont soil.
2008: The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, flush with cash set aside by the Legislature, begins its search for a private manufacturer willing and able to design and build a mobile slaughterhouse.
As envisioned, the mobile unit will be a trailer that can be hauled around the state to private farms where poultry can be dispatched, dressed and chilled in compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture sanitary regulations and U.S. Department of Transportation safety regulations.
The mobile slaughterhouse is envisioned as — no pun intended — a gooseneck trailer that can be towed behind a truck. It will have separate rooms for killing and for cleaning and will have built-in facilities for draining (you-know-what) and storing waste (yeah, that) and scalding (don’t ask).
This will cost in the vicinity of $75,000 and will be operated possibly as soon as April under agreement with a private processor.
Think in terms of a bookmobile, but instead of books, it will be chickens. And instead of borrowing them, poultry farmers will be paying to have their birds offed, dressed and prepared for sale under the scrutiny of meat inspectors.
Come to think of it, disregard the bookmobile comparison. It’s nothing like a bookmobile.
A solitary mobile slaughterhouse reconnoitering the back roads of rural Vermont will not solve all of the problems facing small producers or dramatically increase the likelihood that you will be eating a Vermont-raised meal this time next year.
Maybe we’ve strayed too far from the best solution.
Circa 2009: Desperate to eat locally produced food, a Vermont woman clad in Lycra crouches in bushes watching a lone grouse scratch at the forest floor.
Ed Shamy’s column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 660-1862 or eshamy@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
Of Two Minds on Polar Bears
An editorial in the NYTimes today points out that two agencies in the Department of the Interior are nearing significant yet contradictory decisions that will affect the fate of one of America’s iconic animal species, the polar bear.
Because it is short, here it is – well worth reading…Two agencies in the Department of the Interior are nearing significant yet contradictory decisions that will affect the fate of one of America’s iconic animal species, the polar bear.
As early as this week , the Fish and Wildlife Service could list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the result of severe habitat loss caused by global warming and the melting of Arctic sea ice. About the same time, the Minerals Management Service will announce its final decision to sell oil leases covering nearly 30 million acres of polar bear habitat in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast.
Listing the polar bear would trigger a series of protections, including, in time, identifying habitat critical to the bears’ survival. It would also impose obligations on all federal agencies to avoid actions that could hurt the bears’ prospects. But the minerals service, where the wishes of the oil and gas industry carry great weight, has a history of doing as it pleases. Environmental groups and members of the House and Senate are thus asking Dirk Kempthorne, the interior secretary, to declare a timeout, postponing Chukchi Sea lease sales for three years pending further scientific study.
The polar bears’ plight raises larger issues, including the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels, which produce the greenhouse gases that are destroying the bears’ habitat. It also calls into question the Bush administration’s unsustainable strategy of trying to drill its way to energy independence. Congress has finally recognized the pointlessness of that by passing an energy bill giving greater emphasis to conservation and alternative fuels.
The urgent and immediate question, though, is the future of the polar bear, which is bleak enough without further stresses. Everyone agrees that the overwhelming threat is the loss of sea ice, where the bears hunt for food and nurture their young. Yet there is also wide recognition among federal scientists, even in the minerals service, that the many activities associated with oil drilling — the seismic tests, the vast increase in ship traffic, the noise, the potential spills — can only weaken the bear’s resilience.
Mr. Kempthorne should intervene, get his agencies on the same page and make clear that his first priority is to protect the environment and the polar bear.
