Growing Cooler — Sightline Institute

Growing Cooler — Sightline Institute: "...if sprawling development continues to fuel growth in driving, the projected 59 percent increase in the total miles driven between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels. Even if the most stringent fuel-efficiency proposals under consideration are enacted, notes co-author Steve Winkelman, “vehicle emissions still would be 40 percent above 1990 levels in 2030 – entirely off-track from reductions of 60-80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 required for climate protection.“"

Sustainable Urban Transport Project - Home

Sustainable Urban Transport Project :

"GTZ-SUTP announces the release of a new module titled “Transport and Climate Change'. The module summarises the challenges that climate change mitigation has to face in the transport sector and presents the major options and instruments to deal with them."

Time to Apologize to Plame/Wilson

Consortiumnews.com:

"Since Plame, the mother of young twins, had been assigned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in recent years, Toensing argued that Plame didn’t qualify under the law and thus wasn’t “covert.”

However, a reading of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and new information revealed in Plame’s memoir, Fair Game, show just how wrong Toensing, the Post’s editors and many other Washington pundits have been."

The certainty of uncertainty - Nature

RealClimate � The certainty of uncertainty:

"The bottom line is that climate sensitivity is uncertain, but we can pretty much rule out low values that would imply there is nothing to worry about. The possibility of high values will be much harder to rule out. This is something policy makers should recognize and confront."

Home Page - Working Life

Working Life NAFTA was written by corporate interests and insiders in all three countries, and it has served them well.

"Aside from the Iraq war, nothing is more important in this election than where the next president will stand on how the rules will be set in the economy, particularly when it comes to trade. There is no greater threat to average Americans--a greater threat than the budget deficit, or the admittedly awful sub-prime mortgage scandal--than the imposition of so-called 'free trade' regimes on our workers and workers around the world."

NASA won't disclose air safety survey - Yahoo! News

NASA won't disclose air safety survey - Yahoo! News:

"Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized."

One more reason not to fly the friendly skies

God's on our side so it's okay to lie

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News - Explosive charge blows up in US's face:

"The record also shows that the US command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had received the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah, rather than Iran.

The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale for the present aggressive US stance toward Iran. Although the George W Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are responsible for arms that are killing US troops. "

AlterNet: How Bad Will the Next Recession Be?

AlterNet: How Bad Will the Next Recession Be?:

"If our government really is a corporation and Bush is its CEO, we're all likely to be self-employed contractors out of a job."

Here is one huge example of what our spend thrift Decider-President has done for us!

Much of US Could See a Water Shortage

Much of US Could See a Water Shortage:

Californians use nearly 23 trillion gallons of water a year, much of it coming from Sierra Nevada snowmelt. But climate change is producing less snowpack and causing it to melt prematurely, jeopardizing future supplies.

Experts also say the Colorado River, which provides freshwater to seven Western states, will probably provide less water in coming years as global warming shrinks its flow.

IOL: Grim UN report highlights climate issues

IOL: Grim UN report highlights climate issues:

"The 570-page report - which caps a year that saw climate change dominate the news - says world leaders must propel the environment 'to the core of decision-making' to tackle a daily worsening crisis

'The need couldn't be more urgent and the time couldn't be more opportune, with our enhanced understanding of the challenges we face, to act now to safeguard our own survival and that of future generations,' GEO-4 said."

Earth has experienced five mass extinctions in 450 million years, the latest of which occurred 65 million years ago, says GEO-4.

"A sixth major extinction is under way, this time caused by human behaviour," it says.

Over the past two decades, growing prosperity has tremendously strengthened the capacity to understand and confront the environmental challenges ahead.

Despite this, the global response has been "woefully inadequate", the report said.

Biofuel Backfire - oh ya' think?

TomPaine.com - Biofuel Backfire: "

With Congress still wrestling behind closed doors over energy legislation, people are starting to take a closer look at the issue. And what they're seeing isn't pretty.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, has stalled formal Senate and House negotiations on energy in part out of concern than more ethanol use could further drive up animal feed prices. She's far from the only one concerned. The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that more use of biofuels could drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020.

Direct payments to farmers for conservation and set asides were a better idea then and still are. Too bad Daschle is not in the Senate to show the way. Remember KBH is from an oil state that also feeds large numbers of cattle. I am very wary of her true intentions.

Panel Urges Global Shift on Sources of Energy - New York Times

Panel Urges Global Shift on Sources of Energy - New York Times:

"Energy experts convened by the world’s scientific academies yesterday urged nations to shift swiftly away from coal and other fuels that are the main source of climate-warming greenhouse gases"

Comment is free: Gridlock on Capitol Hill

Comment is free: Gridlock on Capitol Hill

The next president and new Congress will be left the challenge of solving the nation's most pressing and vexing problems.

Tomgram: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?

Tomgram: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?:

In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.


Sometimes, it's just a matter of refocusing to see the documents, the statements, the acts for what they are. Such is the case with the torture memos that continue to emerge. Never has an administration -- and hardly has a torturing regime anywhere -- had so many of its secret documents aired while it was still in the act. Seldom has a ruling group made such an open case for its own crimes.

Bleak U.S. report card finds warming Arctic | Environment | Reuters

Bleak U.S. report card finds warming Arctic | Environment | Reuters:

"Mike Gill of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program noted that Arctic biodiversity has a global impact, since hundreds of bird species and several marine mammal species migrate from the Arctic to all parts of the Earth except the interior of Antarctica."

Global warming hits Cereal production hard

Global warming hits Cereal production hard: "

According to the first study on the impact of climate change on global food production from 1981 to 2002, fields of wheat, corn and barley throughout the world have produced a combined 40 million tonne less a year because of the increase in temperatures caused by human activities.

Scientist: Emissions levels accelerating - Yahoo! News

Scientist: Emissions levels accelerating :

Tim Flannery told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that an upcoming report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will contain new data showing that the level of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere has already reached critical levels. Flannery is not a member of the IPCC, but said he based his comments on a thorough review of the technical data included in the panel's three working group reports published earlier this year. The IPCC is due to release its final report synthesizing the data in November.

"It's a worldwide issue. We've had growing economies everywhere, we're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels," he said. "The metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course clearly with the metabolism of our planet."

Thomas Homer-dixon: Arctic melt is just part of a vicious climate circle

Thomas Homer-dixon: Arctic melt is just part of a vicious climate circle

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice's total area a little more, and each winter the ice's recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn't disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

Climate change disaster is upon us, warns UN | Environment | The Guardian

Climate change disaster is upon us, warns UN | Environment | The Guardian:

"A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change 'mega disaster', the United Nation's emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes, has warned. Sir John, a British diplomat who is also known as the UN's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true."

Hydropower Doesn't Count as Clean Energy

AlterNet: Hydropower Doesn't Count as Clean Energy

"Whether you are a conservative Brazilian like Rosa, or a more aggressive Brazilian like Fearnside, we are looking at a significant amount of methane that currently is not being factored into global models for atmospheric methane and global [climate] change," says Cullenward, who believes that more data are sorely needed."