BP's Browne Sees Energy Prices Stabilizing and Even
Falling Long Term       Intelligence Press
Tuesday, November 29, 2005


  World energy demand will continue to grow, but new oil and natural
gas discoveries ramping up across the globe will likely lead to
stabilized prices and perhaps even a dip in the long term, the CEO
of BP plc said Tuesday.

John Browne spoke to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, to
tout BP Alternative Energy, a low-carbon power business that was
launched on Monday.
However, the BP chief touched on a lot of energy subjects at the
luncheon.

The energy industry needs to plan for the future, he said, but added
there remained plenty of new opportunities for exploration and
production, pointing to recently discovered oil and gas deposits in
the Caspian Sea, Angola, Russia and "here in the U.S. from the
deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico," he added.

"Across the industry, investment which has gone in over a period of
years is leading to new production. And beyond those projects which
are already under way there is more to come -- not least here in the
U.S the development of gas in the Rockies, where we announced a
$2 billion investment plan a few weeks ago, and the major long-term
development of the 35 Tcf of natural gas in Alaska, which will add a
whole new source of supply to the U.S. market. That's why despite
continued growth in world demand we see the prospect of prices
stabilizing and perhaps even falling back to a lower level."
Browne acknowledged that "things could happen. But the increase in
output from diverse sources of supply begins to restore the cushion
of capacity."
Today's high oil prices "are unlikely to be sustainable and should
drop to average $40/bbl in the medium term,"
and longer term, prices could return to a range of $20-25/bbl, he
said. Browne did not comment on gas prices, which traditionally have
traded at a 6:1 ratio with oil; however, he said recovery of shut in
Gulf production following the 3Q hurricanes is expected to pressure
prices lower, and "I wonder what will happen when it all comes on."
The CEO also updated the status of BP's deepwater semisubmersible
Thunder Horse platform, originally scheduled to ramp up this year.
The $1 billion platform, in which ExxonMobil Corp. holds a 25%
stake, will process up to about 250,000 boe/d, but a defective
ballast system caused it to begin listing after Hurricane Dennis
crossed the Gulf in July. The ramp up was delayed into 2006, and
production likely will begin next summer.
"Thunder Horse is fine," Browne told reporters following his
speech. "The problem is, of course, the weather has been so bad we
can't connect it up to the wells on the seabed...We do expect to do
this next year, and we expect it to be on stream in the second half
of next year, probably in the earlier part of the second half."
Copyright 2005 Intelligence Press Inc.

Hello Virginia,

> Immigration, which has been shown to reduce wages especially among
the already-poor in America, benefits employers. Like me.
>
> Immigration is hastening the polarization of society into rich and
poor.  This is not good for America, and I care because I am a
patriot.  Our strength is the middle class.  I do not like to see it
wither.

David: You are looking out for the interests of America, I am more
concerned about the whole world.  I am not a patriot in the
traditional sense because when viewing the world I see no nations.
When I look at people I see only humans.  Regarding the middle class,
I could care less about any person's money, job or possessions.

Regarding the problem of immigration: The New World would have saved
itself a lot of problems if it had an anti-immigration policy in
1492.  In the course of immigrating all over the globe, the Europeans
brought disease, violence, oppression, exploitation, slavery and
genocide.  Who then can judge the poor Mexicans for desperately
seeking income and opportunity in the United States of America?

The one thing that I love about the United States is its great
diversity of religions, races, nationalities and cultures.  The more
languages I hear the happier I become.

May the day come when humans outgrow nationalism, patiotism, racism
and capitalism.  Who will bring peace to the world?

Sincerely,

David Mathews

Hello Virginia,

> You seem to blame the U.S. for everything that has happened
bad to Mexico.  Don't you think they had any independent will, any
input into corruption, any input into their sky-high fertility rate
[were we in their bedrooms or churches?], any say about local
efforts to educate children, or any means for setting up legally
protective barriers to U.S. exploitation?

David: The United States is guilty of stealing land from Mexico by
aggressive warfare.  I blame the United States for this crime.  To
whatever extent the lands taken possessed a wealth of natural
resources, I blame the United States for enriching itself by
impoverishing Mexico.  To whatever extent immoral Americans exploit
and oppress Mexican immigrants (whether legal or illegally in this
country), I blame the Americans for their evil behavior.

Sincerely,

David Mathews

New Reports Underscore Link Between Humans and Global Warming
<http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2973>
November 30, 2005
Reporting by Roddy Scheer

Two new reports released last week show that concentrations of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing and sea levels are
rising more quickly than they have for thousands of years thanks to
increased development around the world during the 20th century.

One report in the journal Science by a Rutgers University team found
that sea levels have risen twice as fast in the last 150 years as in
the previous millennium. The Rutgers researchers believe that
although the planet is in a naturally occurring warmer phase, human
industrial and transportation activities have in essence doubled the
effect. "Half of the current rise was going on anyway. But that means
half of what's going on is not background.

It's human induced," said Kenneth Miller, a Rutgers geology professor
who spearheaded the 15-year study.

Meanwhile, another report released simultaneously in Science by
European researchers found that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are
rising 200 times faster than any previously recorded increase. "The
study does not directly address global warming. But what we provide
is an important new baseline for the climate models with which we
investigate global warming," says Thomas Stocker, a professor of
climate and environmental physics at the University of Bern in
Switzerland and lead author of the European report.

Source:
http://planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33645/newsDate/25-Nov-2005/story.\
htm
Oceans, Greenhouse Gases Rising Faster - Reports
USA: November 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - Ocean and so-called greenhouse gas levels are rising
faster than they have for thousands of years, according to two
reports published on Thursday that are likely to fuel debate on
global warming.

One study found the Earth's ocean levels have risen twice as fast in
the past 150 years, signaling the impact of human activity on
temperatures worldwide, researchers said in the journal Science.

Sea levels were rising by about 1 millimeter (0.04 inches) every year
about 200 years ago and as far back as 5,000 years, geologists found
from deep sediment samples from the New Jersey coastline. Since then,
levels have risen by about 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) a year.

While the planet has been in a warmer period, driving cars and other
activities that create carbon dioxide are having a clear impact, the
Rutgers University-led team said.

"Half of the current rise ... was going on anyway. But that means
half of what's going on is not background. It's human induced," said
Kenneth Miller, a geology professor at the New Jersey-based school
who led the 15-year effort.

Carbon dioxide emissions come mainly from burning coal and other
fossil fuels in power plants, factories and automobiles.

Miller and his colleagues analyzed five 500-meter (1,650-foot) deep
samples to look for fossils, sediment types and variations in
chemical composition, giving them data on the past 100 million years.

They also analyzed data from satellite, shoreline markers and by
gauging ocean tides, among other measures.

"It allows us to understand the mechanisms of sea level change before
humans intervened," Miller said in an interview.

His team did not determine whether the rate is accelerating.

The research, funded mostly by the National Science Foundation, also
found ocean levels were lower during the dinosaur era than previously
thought. They were about 100 meters (330 feet) higher than now, not
250 meters (820 feet) as many geologists had thought, Miller said.

SAMPLES FROM ANTARCTIC DEPTHS

Measurements also showed that, while many scientists had thought
polar ice caps did not exist before 15 million years ago, frozen
water at the poles did form periodically.

"We believe the ice sheet was not around all the time. It was only
around during cool snaps of the climate," Miller said.
In another report published in Science, European researchers using
three large samples of polar cap ice found carbon dioxide levels were
stable until 200 years ago.

"Today's rise is about 200 times faster than any rise recorded" in
the samples, study author Thomas Stocker said in an e-mail interview
with Reuters.

The historic data "put the present rise of the last 200 years into a
longer-term context," he added.

Trapped gas bubbles in the ice, drilled out from Antarctica depths of
about 3,000 meters (9,900 feet), provided scientists with information
on the Earth's air up to 650,000 years ago.

Researchers participating in The European Project for Ice Coring in
Antarctica measured levels of carbon dioxide as well as methane and
nitrous oxide -- two other gases known to affect the atmosphere's
protective ozone layer.

"The study does not directly address global warming. But what we
provide is an important new baseline for the climate models with
which we investigate global warming," said Stocker, a professor of
climate and environmental physics at the University of Bern in
Switzerland.

Story by Susan Heavey
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

WATER WORLD
A Changing Atlantic Current Might Puts The Chills On Western Europe
http://www.terradaily.com/news/oceans-05zd.html
By Richard Ingham
Paris (AFP) Nov 30, 2005

The Atlantic current that gives western Europe
its mild climate is dramatically slowing, and
Britain, Ireland and parts of the European
continent could be plunged into bitter winters a
decade or so from now, scientists say.

Their research provides the first backing for
fears that global warming may brake the conveyor
belt of ocean heat that allows northwestern
Europe to have a balmy, if wet, climate even
though it lies on the same latitude as
northeastern Canada.

The conveyor belt is a spur: it is the branch
line from a current system that circulates
clockwise around the central Atlantic.

The branch flows northeastwards towards Europe,
delivering its heat to the atmosphere as it goes
along.

Eventually, by the time the current reaches
Norway, its waters have cooled so much that they
start to sink. They are then conveyed southwards
again, along the coast of the western Atlantic,
and are brought back to the tropical system where
they are warmed again.

Researchers at the National Oceanography Centre
at Britain's University of Southampton monitored
the flow of the main circulatory system in the
central Atlantic.

They took a survey ship and travelled along 24
degrees latitude north, a line from the Bahamas
to tropical West Africa.

They halted every 50 kilometers (31 miles) to
lower instruments to gauge salinity and
temperature, which are key indicators to
determine ocean flow.

Previous research was conducted along the same
line, in 1957, 1981, 1992 and 1998.

What stunned the researchers was the discovery,
extrapolated from this data, that the northern
spur -- Europe's precious heat conveyor -- has
slumped by 30 percent in volume since 1998.

The suspected culprit: a massive inrush of
freshwater into the northern Atlantic, caused by
melting glaciers in Greenland and melting sea
ice, and higher flow into the Arctic from
Siberian rivers caused by greater rainfall.

All these events, well documented in previous
research, are attributable to global warming.

Freshwater is less dense than seawater because it
lacks salt. Its influx into the northern Atlantic
has been so huge that the overall density of
water there has decreased.

This means that the cooler water is less able to sink and return back south.

In other words, the brakes are being applied to the heat conveyor.

"If the conveyor belt continues to slow right
down, a drop of 4 C (7.2 F) in the average annual
temperature in northwestern Europe could happen,"
says Meric Srokosz, a science coordinator at
Britain's Natural Environment Research Council
(NERC), which oversaw the research.

"It won't be an instant thing, like in [the 2004
Hollywood movie] 'The Day After Tomorrow.' We're
talking about in a decade or so. And we're not
talking Ice Age, we are talking about more
regular, extreme colder weather in winter," he
said in an interview.

As a gauge of severity, Srokosz referred to a
notorious winter that gripped much of Europe in
1963, the so-called "Big Freeze."

He cautioned, though, that there were still many
unknowns. Britain, Ireland, northern France, the
Lowland countries and Scandinavia could be
affected, but it was possible for the chilling
effects to reach into Germany and beyond.

Also unclear is how long the braking effect on
the conveyor belt would last. Some computer
models suggests decades, while others, far more
pessimistic, say it could be permanent.

The idea that global warming may cause a big
chill may seem strange. On Tuesday, for instance,
the European Environment Agency (EAA) said the
continent faced higher temperatures and possible
desertification in parts of its most southerly
countries.

But scientists have long warned that an overall
rise in global temperature will mask localised
effects, creating hot spots that are higher than
the planetary norm and, conversely, cold spots
that are chillier than average because their
source of warmth is shut down. These local
phenomenona may take years to emerge.

The study, which appears in Nature, the British
weekly science journal, is lead-authored by Harry
Bryden.

It coincides with a meeting in Montreal on the
Kyoto Protocol, the UN's pact to combat man-made
global warming caused mainly by the unbridled
burning of oil, gas and coal.

These fuels contain carbon that has been buried
safely under the Earth for millions of years.
Burning releases the carbon into the atmosphere,
trapping the Sun's heat in a so-called greenhouse
effect and disrupting the globe's delicate
climate system.

All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse.
Sections of the information displayed on this
page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are
protected by intellectual property rights owned
by Agence France-Presse.

As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce,
modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way
commercially exploit any of the content of this
section without the prior written consent of
Agence France-Presse.

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Kyoto Climate Accord Becomes Operational
<http://www.terradaily.com/news/climate-05zzzzzzk.html>
Montreal (AFP) Nov 30, 2005

The controversial Kyoto protocol, aiming to cut
greenhouse gas emissions, became fully
operational on Wednesday after a UN climate
conference here adopted the final rules.

The 34 signatory countries -- which do not
include the United States -- passed the final
regulatory measures by consensus at the Montreal
conference.

Conference chairman Stephane Dion, Canada's
environment minister, said: "The Kyoto protocol
is now fully operational. This is an historic
step."

Under the protocol, the 34 agree to limit
emissions of gases that cause global warming
until 2012.

The Montreal conference is trying to set out
preliminary plans to cut emissions when the
accord ends.

The United States and Australia, which have
refused to ratify the protocol to the UN
framework convention on climate change, attended
Wednesday's session as observers.

Kyoto was negotiated in 1997 and formally entered
into force on February 16, 2005, but could not
come into operation until after the formal
adoption of the rulebook, which was drawn up over
the past four years.

The different countries have hammered out a
mechanism for trading pollution rights. The final
rules also eased pollution standards by allowing
countries to take into account carbon dioxide
produced by growing trees.

A separate system setting out sanctions for those
who breach the protocol should be adopted before
the 12-day conference ends on December 9.

Despite the troubles hounding efforts to restrict
pollution, the UN climate secretariat has hailed
the new step taken at the conference and the
launch of emissions trading.

Richard Kinley, acting head of the UN climate
change secretariat, said "Carbon now has a market
value. Under the clean development mechanism,
investing in projects that provide sustainable
development and reduce emissions makes sound
business sense."

Under the mechanism, developed countries can
invest in other developed countries, particularly
in central and eastern Europe, to earn carbon
allowances which they can use to meet their
emission reduction commitments.
Industrialised nations can also invest in
"sustainable development projects" in developing
countries to extra pollution allowances.

The United States on Tuesday opposed any talk of
extending Kyoto-style limits on greenhouse gas
emissions.
"The United States is opposed to any such
discussions," Harlan Watson, head of the US
delegation, said.

He said that Americans did not want an approach
including objectives or a timetable to reduce the
emissions.
The United States refused to ratify the Kyoto
agreement, which called for reductions by six
percent of emissions from their 1990 levels,
saying the reductions applied more stringently to
developed countries than to developing ones.

Washington has since 2002 embarked on a policy to
reduce its emissions by 18 percent without
harming the US economy, he said.

The United States, with five percent of the
world's population, emits 25 percent of the
world's greenhouse gases.
All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse.
Sections of the information displayed on this
page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are
protected by intellectual property rights owned
by Agence France-Presse.

As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce,
modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way
commercially exploit any of the content of this
section without the prior written consent of
Agence France-Presse.

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Yes Virginia,
The Drunk Texan is also the sherif of Texas, and he would rather pay off the
Chinese bartender with monoply money, than go to debtor prison, and since he
is the law, your scenario is very credible. The Texan's buddy is the banker
and the banker will print the money that the drunk wants: namely the Fed
will be used to do the dirty work, as it is serving the drunk (Washington
power elite) very nicely, thank you, while screwing the middle class who had
savings and the foreigners who don't know they are being handed Chinese
money ( oops I mean monopoly mony).

Bud


On 11/30/05, Abernethy, Virginia Deane <virginia.abernethy@...>
wrote:
>
> One way to take care of the bartender is for the drunk to have the U.S.
> Treasury print greenbacks [a function that the Constitution gives the
> Treasury] and use these greenbacks to pay off the bartender [China and
> others].  That would save the drunk the whole interest tab formerly paid
> to the bartender.
>
> While at it, disenfranchise the Federal Reserve Bank [which is largely
> owned by foreign bankers] and forbid them from printing any more notes
> to give that bartender.  In other words, roll back the Federal Reserve
> to where it was in early 1913, i.e. non-existent.
> Virginia
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:energyresources@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Roger Baker
> Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 1:21 PM
> To: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [energyresources] US debt springs eternal
>
>
> A good way to understand the current US debt situation is to think of
> a big-shot drunk (the USA) from Texas is running up a big bar tab.
>
> The new but hardworking bartender named China always fronts him money
> for his bar tab.
>
> Meanwhile this loud-talking ex-marine drunk from Texas is the
> bartender's reliable main customer. And so the bartender learns how
> to be really really good at bar tending and serving the best drinks
> at the lowest cost.
>
> The drunk gets fat and lazy and loses his job, and even has to shut
> down all his car factories but he still keeps coming back to drink,
> and he always promises to pay next week.
>
> Finally the bartender has his own bills and calls for immediate
> payment of the tab, and so the drunk finally realizes the situation
> is hopeless. So the cops come and tell him he's going to jail if he
> doesn't pay up.
>
> But meanwhile, the hard-working bartender has gotten so good that
> responsible customers have started to come from all across town to
> get served, and so the bartender lives happily ever after. At least
> until he runs out of, uh, -- lubrication.
>
> But about the drunk that was going to hauled off to jail? It seems
> that he's one of those mean drunks who loves to fight, but thats
> another story.  -- Roger, Tx
>
>
>                        ************************************
>
> From SF Chronicle
>
> Nation's spending out of line
> - David Lazarus
> Sunday, November 27, 2005
>
> I wrote Friday about consumers living beyond their means as the
> holiday season kicks into high gear. But let's not overlook our
> friends in Washington.
>
> Last month, the national debt reached yet another miserable
> milestone, passing the $8 trillion mark for the first time. As of
> last week, the United States was $8,084,858,891,735.31 in the hole,
> according to the Treasury Department.
>
> And it'll only get worse. Brian Riedl, chief budget analyst at the
> conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Bush administration is
> expected to return to Congress within the next few months to ask
> lawmakers -- once again -- to raise the nation's debt ceiling so we
> can borrow even more.
> "A debt of $8 trillion is certainly a daunting number," Riedl told
> me. "I'm not sure we'll ever pay it off."
> You heard right. The top number cruncher at the Washington think tank
> that's arguably friendliest to the Bush administration has come to
> the conclusion that our debt has gotten so out of hand, it may never
> go away.
>
> At best, Riedl said, the national debt will be held to "a manageable
> level" as a percentage of the overall economy and thus won't
> completely ruin us.
>
> But that too might be wishful thinking.
>
> The federal budget deficit is now $319 billion. In other words, we
> had to borrow an additional $319 billion this year just to make ends
> meet, which is why the total amount owed by the government is higher
> than ever.
>
> Riedl estimates that the annual budget shortfall will reach $873
> billion 10 years from now. Two years after that, he predicts, the
> annual deficit will hit $1 trillion.
>
> By the time that happens, Riedl's calculations show the national debt
> doubling to about $16 trillion, or a staggering 74 percent of the
> country's projected gross domestic product of $21.5 trillion. "And it
> continues to worsen after that," Riedl said as he scrutinized
> his spreadsheet. "After 2017, we'll be looking at deficits of $2
> trillion a year."
>
> Imagine if your family carried a credit card balance from month to
> month and let it get bigger and bigger. That's what our government is
> doing.
>
> "Long term, the deficit and debt projections are completely
> unsustainable," Riedl said. "Eventually, taxes will have to go
> through the roof or spending will be cut."
>
> There's the rub. The fiscal recklessness of the Republican-controlled
> White House and Congress can't go on forever. At some point, the
> credit card bill comes due. And when that happens, we'll have to find
> some way to pay for this mess.
>
> So what's President Bush doing (aside from, perversely, cutting
> taxes)? According to Treasury Department figures, the Bush
> administration has been aggressively passing out IOUs to foreign
> interests.
>
> In fact, Bush has borrowed more money -- $1.05 trillion -- from
> foreign governments and banks since taking office than all other
> presidents combined.
>
> From 1776 to 2000, the nation's first 42 presidents borrowed a
> combined $1.01 trillion from foreign interests, official statistics
> show. In just five years, Bush has out-borrowed them all.
>
> A Treasury spokeswoman confirmed that the numbers are indeed correct.
> She declined to comment on the ramifications of the administration's
> overseas borrowing.
>
> "It's a big red flag," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the
> Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget watchdog group. "We're turning
> to the rest of the world to finance us on a massive scale."
> The danger, of course, is that if foreign governments and banks
> decide that they're tired of holding our IOUs, interest rates would
> skyrocket as the nation is forced to beg for high-priced handouts
> elsewhere.
>
> "We're creating a huge vulnerability," Bixby said. "It's mortgaging
> our future to someone else."
> This has become a core issue for the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of
> 35 economically conservative Democrats who form a voting bloc in
> Congress.
>
> "The seriousness of this rapid and increasing financial vulnerability
> of our country can hardly be overstated," Tennessee Rep. John Tanner,
> a Blue Dog leader and member of the House Ways and Means Committee,
> said in a statement.
>
> "The financial mismanagement of our country by the Bush
> administration should be of concern to all Americans, regardless of
> political persuasion," he said.
>
> The Bush administration, which has not vetoed a single spending bill
> (or any other bill) since taking power, has repeatedly countered such
> criticism by blaming Congress for unchecked spending.
> "Our problem with the deficit is not that we're under-taxed,"
> Treasury Secretary John Snow told an interviewer earlier this year.
> "Our problem is we spend too much. And the focus has to be on
> controlling spending and getting the spending growth under control.
>
> "We're going to continue to be tight and disciplined on spending, and
> we're going to continue to keep the American economy going the right
> way," he said. "So the revenue side, the government's revenues,
> continues to grow."
>
> When Bush took office, the debt ceiling for federal borrowing was
> less than $6 trillion and hadn't been raised since 1997.
>
> Last year, Bush signed into a law an $800 billion increase in the
> debt ceiling to $8.2 trillion -- the third time in as many years that
> a higher credit limit has been required by the free-spending
> administration.
>
> A senior administration official told reporters in September that
> $8.2 trillion soon won't be enough either.
>
> "We think the first quarter next year is when we expect to hit the
> existing debt limit," Treasury Undersecretary Randal Quarles said.
>
> He quickly added: "The administration remains committed to reducing
> the deficit."
> All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
>
>
> David Lazarus' column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Send
> tips or feedback to dlazarus@....
>
>
>
>
>
> Your message didn't show up on the list? Complaints or compliments? Drop
> me (Tom Robertson) a note at t1r@...
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Your message didn't show up on the list? Complaints or compliments?
> Drop me (Tom Robertson) a note at t1r@...
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8398
18:00 30 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Fred Pearce

The ocean current that gives western Europe its
relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising
fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the
continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean
circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a
30% reduction in the warm currents that carry
water north from the Gulf Stream.

The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a
possible consequence of global warming, will give
renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in
Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the
Kyoto Protocol.

Harry Bryden at the Southampton Oceanography
Centre in the UK, whose group carried out the
analysis, says he is not yet sure if the change
is temporary or signals a long-term trend. "We
don't want to say the circulation will shut
down," he told New Scientist. "But we are nervous
about our findings. They have come as quite a
surprise."

No one-off

The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf
Stream - currents that bring warm water north
from the tropics. At around 40° north - the
latitude of Portugal and New York - the current
divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface
current known as the subtropical gyre, while the
rest continues north, leading to warming winds
that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C.

But when Bryden's team measured north-south heat
flow last year, using a set of instruments strung
across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to
the Bahamas, they found that the division of the
waters appeared to have changed since previous
surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount
of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow
southwards at depth, they calculate that the
quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen
by around 30%.

When Bryden added previously unanalysed data -
collected in the same region by the US
government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration - he found a similar pattern. This
suggests that his 2004 measurements are not a
one-off, and that most of the slow-down happened
between 1992 and 1998.

The changes are too big to be explained by
chance, co-author Stuart Cunningham told New
Scientist from a research ship off the Canary
Islands, where he is collecting more data. "We
think the findings are robust."

Hot and cold

But Richard Wood, chief oceanographer at the UK
Met Office's Hadley Centre for climate research
in Exeter, says the Southampton team's findings
leave a lot unexplained. The changes are so big
they should have cut oceanic heating of Europe by
about one-fifth - enough to cool the British
Isles by 1°C and Scandinavia by 2°C. "We haven't
seen it yet," he points out.

Though unseasonably cold weather last month
briefly blanketed parts of the UK in snow,
average European temperatures have been rising,
Wood says. Measurements of surface temperatures
in the North Atlantic indicate a strong warming
trend during the 1990s, which seems now to have
halted.

Bryden speculates that the warming may have been
part of a global temperature increase brought
about by man-made greenhouse warming, and that
this is now being counteracted by a decrease in
the northward flow of warm water.

After warming Europe, this flow comes to a halt
in the waters off Greenland, sinks to the ocean
floor and returns south. The water arriving from
the south is already more saline and so more
dense than Arctic seas, and is made more so as
ice forms.

Predicted shutdown

But Bryden's study has revealed that while one
area of sinking water, on the Canadian side of
Greenland, still seems to be functioning as
normal, a second area on the European side has
partially shut down and is sending only half as
much deep water south as before. The two
southward flows can be distinguished because they
travel at different depths.

Nobody is clear on what has gone wrong.
Suggestions for blame include the melting of sea
ice or increased flow from Siberian rivers into
the Arctic. Both would load fresh water into the
surface ocean, making it less dense and so
preventing it from sinking, which in turn would
slow the flow of tropical water from the south.
And either could be triggered by man-made climate
change. Some climate models predict that global
warming could lead to such a shutdown later this
century.

The last shutdown, which prompted a temperature
drop of 5°C to 10°C in western Europe, was
probably at the end of the last ice age, 12,000
years ago. There may also have been a slowing of
Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age,
which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850
and created temperatures low enough to freeze the
River Thames in London.

Journal reference: Nature (vol 655, p 438).

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Hello Everyone,

The scale of human violence reached some sort of peak in the 20th
century with global warfare and industrial scale genocide.
Prospects for peace, justice and equality in the 21st century and
later appear dim because human nature hasn't changed while the tools
of human violence have only become more powerful and are now widely
distributed to unstable nations and potentially are available to
terrorists organizations.  As if these manifestly evils are not
enough, there are several Westerners whose proposed solutions for
the overpopulation and resource-depletion problems border on
genocide.

In particular I am speaking about William Stanton, author of an
article on "Oil and People" published in the ASPO newsletter in
July, 2005.  (http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588)  Below are
several excerpts from the article and there will follow several
comments:

"Recent articles in the ASPO Newsletter have agreed that the
explosion of world population from about 0.6 billion in 1750 to 6.4
billion today was initiated and sustained by the shift from
renewable energy to fossil fuel energy in the Industrial Revolution.
There is agreement that the progressive exhaustion of fossil fuel
reserves will reverse the process, though there is uncertainty as to
what a sustainable global population would be. ...

"If, in this article, I discuss ways in which a global population
reduction of some 6 billion people is likely to take place during
the 21st Century, precedent suggests that nearly everyone will
ignore me. "He must be mad", media reviewers concluded when they
read my first probes into the subject two years ago and effectively
blacklisted the book (Stanton 2003). ...

"In Third World nations, without oil, that can neither buy food nor
grow it in adequate quantity without mechanised agriculture, a
Darwinian struggle for shrinking resources of all kinds will be in
full swing. Tribe against tribe, religion against religion, family
against family, the imperative to survive will be driving strong
groups to take what they want from weak ones. The concept of human
rights will be irrelevant: "How can the weak have rights to food,
when there is not enough even for the strong"?

"It may well be that, in the West, the same argument will affect the
thinking of militarily powerful nations. "If billions must die, and
we have the technology to ensure that they are others, not us, why
should we hold back"? Instantaneous nuclear elimination of
population centres might even be considered merciful, compared to
starvation and massacres prolonged over decades. ...

"That is the do-nothing, let Nature take its course, scenario,
involving more than a century of immeasurable human suffering. What
alternatives are there? They have to be scenarios in which
enlightened governments and their peoples, with astonishing
foresight and determination, take positive action to reverse
population growth by new, Draconian, laws. China has pioneered such
an approach, by its one child per family policy. ...

"Probably the greatest obstacle to the scenario with the best chance
of success (in my opinion) is the Western world's unintelligent
devotion to political correctness, human rights and the sanctity of
human life. In the Darwinian world that preceded and will follow the
fossil fuel era, these concepts were and will be meaningless.
Survival in a Darwinian resource-poor world depends on the ruthless
elimination of rivals, not the acquisition of moral kudos by
cherishing them when they are weak. In fact, human civilization in
the fossil fuel era has been totally anomalous, fuelled by the
unthinking exploitation and exhaustion of all the world's resources,
not just fossil fuels. Sir Fred Hoyle pointed out, decades ago, that
Western civilization was a "one-shot affair", for this reason
(Duncan 1997).

"So the population reduction scenario with the best chance of
success has to be Darwinian in all its aspects, with none of the
sentimentality that shrouded the second half of the 20th Century in
a dense fog of political correctness (Stanton 2003 page 193). It is
best examined at the nation-state scale. The United Kingdom will
serve as the model.

To those sentimentalists who cannot understand the need to reduce UK
population from 60 million to about 2 million over 150 years, and
who are outraged at the proposed replacement of human rights by cold
logic, I would say "You have had your day, in which your woolly
thinking has messed up not just the Western world but the whole
planet, which could, if Homo sapiens had been truly intelligent,
have supported a small population enjoying a wonderful quality of
life almost for ever. You have thrown away that opportunity."

"The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction
scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state.
Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously
inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead
of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative,
letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.

"The scenario is: Immigration is banned. Unauthorised arrives are
treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy
child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but
entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if
the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection
weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an
individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his
or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and
made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for
lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater. ...

"UK military forces should be maintained strong and alert, given
that other nations working to different scenarios, or to none, would
certainly attempt Darwinian piracy on UK trade routes, or mount mass
immigration invasions of UK coasts. Collaboration with other nations
practising the same population reduction scenario would be of great
mutual advantage.

"Initially the greatest threats to UK security would come from rogue
nations unwilling to curb traditionally high birth rates but lacking
the means to feed the ever-growing numbers of new mouths. In the
past, these were the poverty-stricken nations that repeatedly
received humanitarian aid and famine relief, which did nothing to
reduce the birth rate. In a Darwinian world, Nature would take its
course. In consequence, their populations would reduce particularly
fast and their threat would fade away.

"After four or five decades the populations of the UK and other
nations following the same scenario would probably be halved. In the
rest of the world, where Nature was doing the reduction in an
ambience of massacres and destruction, the proportionate fall would
be greater and the pain would have been terrible. In the UK, in
contrast, where orderly population shrinkage would have outpaced
resource shrinkage, a relatively comfortable quality of life would
have been enjoyed throughout the period. There would have been no
loss of technological expertise, but it would no longer be employed
in grandiose energy-wasteful projects. Instead, there would be
intensive research into cost-effective methods of renewable energy
recovery.

"A particular problem could arise from the fact that the world's
greatest oil reserves are controlled by the nations surrounding the
Gulf. They have dizzyingly high birth rates which, for cultural
reasons, they might not want to lower. Their populations exploded
following the discovery of oil, and if the explosion continues, even
a very high oil price will not provide enough national income to
prevent general poverty. Indeed, the demand for Gulf oil might
occasionally fall, if for example alternative sources were still
available to nations practising orderly population reduction, and
there was minimal demand from the chaotic rest of the world. After a
decade or two of unrestricted population growth, with limited income
from oil and terrible shortages, especially of water, Nature will
begin to reverse population growth around the Gulf.

"Of course, in a Darwinian world, a militarily powerful nation might
try to take oil by force anywhere on the planet. World War Two
provided recent examples: oil supply being critical to Germany and
Japan.

"Another problem is likely to be the residual opposition to
population reduction from sentimentalists and/or religious
extremists unable to understand that the days of plenty, when
criminals and the weak could be cherished at public expense, are
over. Acts of violent protest, such as are carried out today by
animal rights activists and anti-abortionists, would, in the
Darwinian world, attract capital
punishment. Population reduction must be single-minded to succeed."


***

Comments to follow in the next post, titled "Darwinian Solutions to
the Oil Crisis, Part II."

Sincerely,

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1

MARKET WATCH
Energy prices tumble again
<http://ogj.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?article_id=242615>
Sam Fletcher
Senior Writer

HOUSTON, Nov. 30 -- Crude prices continued to
tumble Nov. 29 as traders ignored earlier
blizzard conditions in the Midwest US and
concentrated on prevailing warm weather in the
Northeast, the world's biggest market for heating
oil.

A slow-moving cold front with rain and wind was
expected to slide through New England on Nov. 30.
Light snow was spreading across the Plains and
Upper Midwest but not like the magnitude of the
blizzard that earlier closed hundreds of miles of
highways in that area.

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season ended Nov. 30
with Tropical Storm Epsilon-the record 26th named
storm this year-churning harmlessly in the
mid-Atlantic. Its predecessor, Delta, weakened
below tropical storm status after sweeping over
Spain's Canary Islands on Nov. 29. However,
meteorologists said December storms are still
possible if the ocean water remains warm.

Supplies reduced

Some traders still worry that there may not be
enough energy supplies, especially natural gas,
to meet a sudden spike in demand this winter
after the disruption to oil and gas production in
the Gulf of Mexico and to Gulf Coast refineries
and gas processing plants by earlier tropical
storms and hurricanes this year.

The US Minerals Management Service said Nov. 29
that crews still have not returned to 1 drilling
rig and 132 production platforms in the gulf that
were evacuated ahead of earlier storms. As a
result, production of 564,229 b/d of crude and
nearly 3 bcfd of natural gas remain shut in.
That's 37.6% of normal daily oil production and
29.9% of daily gas production from federal leases
in the Gulf of Mexico. Cumulative production lost
from federal leases in the gulf since Aug. 26 now
total 95.3 million bbl of crude and 492.4 bcf of
natural gas.

On Nov. 30, the Energy Information Administration
reported commercial US crude inventories fell by
4.2 million bbl to 317.6 million bbl in the week
ended Nov. 25. Gasoline stocks dipped by 500,000
bbl to 199.9 million bbl, near the lower end of
the average range for that time of year.
Distillate fuel inventories jumped by 3.4 million
bbl to 127.9 million bbl, with increases in both
heating oil and diesel, but remained in the lower
half of the average range.

Imports of crude into the US declined by 526,000
b/d to 9.7 million b/d in that same period.
Gasoline imports fell to 584,000 b/d, the lowest
weekly average since Jan. 14, EIA said.

Crude input into US refineries increased by
239,000 b/d to 15.1 million b/d last week, with
refineries operating at 89.3% of capacity.
Gasoline production fell slightly to 9 million
b/d, while distillate fuel production rose
substantially to 4.2 million b/d.

Energy prices

The January contract for benchmark US light,
sweet crudes fell by 86¢ to $56.50/bbl Nov. 29 on
the New York Mercantile Exchange. The February
contract lost 70¢ to $57.29/bbl. On the US spot
market, West Texas Intermediate at Cushing,
Okla., was down by 86¢ to $56.51/bbl. Heating oil
for December delivery dropped 2.59¢ to $1.61/gal
on NYMEX. Gasoline for the same month declined by
2.31¢ to $1.40/gal.

However, the new front-month January natural gas
contract increased by 10.2¢ to $11.74/MMbtu on
NYMEX, "in a mix of short-covering [of excess
open sales contracts] after Monday's 4% sell-off
and little prospect for sustained cold weather
into December," said analysts at Enerfax Daily.

In London, the January contract for North Sea
Brent crude retreated by 56¢ to $54.32/bbl on the
International Petroleum Exchange. But gas oil for
December delivery gained $2.50 to $496.75/tonne.

The average price for the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries' basket of 11
benchmark crudes slipped by 26¢ to $49.78/bbl on
Nov. 29.

Contact Sam Fletcher at samf@....

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Hello All,

My previous post contained excerpts from William Stanton's proposed
solutions to the population
(http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588).  In response, I will make
the following comments:

1. William Stanton's approach to the human problem appears
disturbingly compatible with fascism and genocide.  Germany turned
to Adolf Hitler durings its economic crisis of the 1930's, will the
UK follow a similar path?

2. The supposed goal of William Stanton's seemingly genocidal
prescription is " a relatively comfortable quality of life" for the
remaining citizens of the UK.  Such a goal appears exceptionally
foolish: Why should the English enjoy a high quality of life while
the rest of the world is dying?

3. Regarding the importance of ending immigration: There is no need
for a law forbidding immigration to England.  Once the North Sea is
depleted and people begin to freeze during the cold English winter
no one in their right mind would choose to immigrate to Britain.

4. The impoverished people of the Third World are allowed to
suffer.  What sort of injustice is it for the wealthy to steal the
natural resources of the poor, burn it all up in SUVs, and then
preserve whatever remains of their economy by standing aside while
the poor are allowed to die?

5. If the people of the UK decide that desperate times justify
either passive or active genocide they might begin to worry because
some of the poor do have militaries and access to WMDs.  Should
London or Washington, D.C. behave badly these cities might suffer a
most unfortunate fate.

6. Seizing the oil fields of the Middle East might appeal to
desperate oil-dependent nations of the West.  Does anyone really
believe that the Muslims would allow the UK and USA to take control
of all of their oil while their citizens are starving and dying?  If
so, you are suffering from some sort of delusion.  If the Muslims
began losing a war for oil they would certainly find a way to
destroy their oil.  The Soviets employed a similar strategy with
their resources while the Nazis were advancing and it was extremely
effective.

William Stanton's solution to the population problem is more
terrible than the problem.  Undoubtedly he would plunge the whole
world into global warfare and anarchy in an attempt to preserve some
small percentage of the UK's population.  Rather than preserve a
remnant of humankind his method will hasten the extinction of the
species.

***

The Bible spoke of Tribulation and Armageddon.  William Stanton's
predictions would fulfill those dismal prophecies.  If that is the
case, Peak Oil advocates might want to beg God that the Rapture
precede the Tribulation.

Sincerely,

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1

I listened to three professors at Stanford speak on Oil last night. Only one
had credible analysis applicable to the current situation: Dr. Amos Nur. He
dis a good review of Hubbert's work and added an unusual extension that was
new to me, saying that Hubbert focused on the societal affects of the peak
of oil production. Nur pointed out that we now are in conflict between
producer and and consumer in Iraq, but that the next stage would be between
consumers, and that would be biger conflict. He specifically pointed at
China and in private conversation after mused about China invading the
'Stans to get to the Caspian oil.

His best chart was a per capita oil usage against per capita GDP. The
correlation is strong, with the US at the top and China and India at the
bottom. The question of cause and effect is not confirmed in the chart, but
the implication that there is not enough oil for world development was
clear.

The audience was younger and more attentive, but did not seem stirred. A
counter position offered by Dr. Steven Gorlick had the useful assertion that
conservation could decrease demand as viewed through the decrease in oil per
GDP. His other errors made his other assertions not credible.

Bud


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/solviva

Solviva: How to Grow $500,000 on One Acre & Peace on Earth
Anna Edey

This book is about one woman’s vision and commitment to learning to live
sustainably and in harmony with life on Earth. Since 1976 Anna Edey has made one
astonishing discovery after another, developing methods of sustainable living
under the name Solviva Solar-Dynamic, Bio-Benign Design. The results of her
experiments and methods have again and again exceeded highest hopes and
expectations.

Solviva describes the exciting trials and triumphs of her journey and offers
convincing proof that we can, with today’s technology and knowledge, live in
ways that reduce pollution and depletion of resources by 80 percent or more, and
at the same time reduce the cost of living and improve the quality of life in
urban and rural locations. Solviva contains 155 color illustrations and detailed
instructions and recommendations to help others along their own journeys toward
living sustainably.

About the Author

Anna Edey’s work has been featured on television and radio, and in newspapers
and magazines around the world. She has lectured and consulted widely in the
United States and has received awards from the United Nations Environment
Program, Renew America, Amway Corporation, Massachusetts Department of Food and
Agriculture, and Aveda Corporation. For more information on Solviva please visit
www.solviva.com

--------------------

http://www.simpleliving.net/news/resource.asp?sku=ESV

...

Excerpts

From The Introduction:

This is a book of Great Good News. I will demonstrate that we now, today, have
the technology and know-how to reduce pollution and depletion of resources by 80
percent or more, and I will show how this can be done in ways that can reduce
our cost of living and improve the quality of our life.

Since 1977 I have accumulated evidence through direct experience on my farm on
the island of Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. Here I have
been seeking to find ever more harmonious ways to live on Earth. The more I
looked at the problems caused by our modern ways of living, the more I realized
how profoundly these problems are all interconnected. My focus has therefore
been broad and comprehensive, to design more sustainable and economical ways to
provide for the basic necessities of our lives, including heating, cooling,
electricity, food, transportation, and management of wastewater and solid
wastes.

It was in the late 70s that I began to develop my own versions of what I call
solar-dynamic, bio-benign living design, and I have been continuing this work
ever since. These ongoing experiments have provided results that proved far more
successful than I had ever imagined possible. For instance, who could have
predicted that sewage can be filtered through leaves and wood chips and in five
minutes be transformed into odor-free water containing 90 percent less nitrogen?
I would never have thought it possible - until I did it. Who could have
predicted that tomato plants could grow 30 feet long and live four years right
in the kitchen, without any pesticides or normal fertilizers, producing
superb-quality tomatoes continuously, even in the middle of winter? I certainly
did not think this would be possible - until I did it.

Based on my experiences and knowledge I conclude that with today's technologies
the following is possible:

    1. We can manage our wastewater, from homes, schools, business and industry,
in ways that eliminate water pollution, thereby protecting our drinking water,
fishing industry, wildlife, ponds and harbors - and this can be done in ways
that save money, as well as irrigate and fertilize our landscapes and forests.

    2. We can recycle 90 percent of our solid wastes in ways that save time and
money, energy and resources, and that greatly reduce pollution - while creating
more jobs.

    3. We can produce high yields of high-quality organic foods year-round in any
climate, in urban and rural locations, without heating fuels or cooling fans,
without toxic chemicals, and with far less irrigation water. Thus we can greatly
reduce the depletion and pollution of soil, water, oil and other resources, as
well as avoid the health hazards caused by conventional food production methods.

    4. We can use solar power to provide most of the energy to heat and cool our
homes, schools and other buildings, with renewable plant-derived fuels as
backup. This can create more jobs and reduce by 80 percent or more the cost,
pollution and depletion caused by conventional methods that rely on oil, gas,
and coal.

    5. We can greatly reduce our consumption of electricity with various
efficiency technologies, and most of the remaining requirements can be satisfied
with small-scale solar, wind and water power sources, thereby reducing by over
80 percent the current use of oil, coal, gas, and large-scale hydro - and
eliminating nuclear power.

    6. We can greatly improve public transportation, and both private and public
transportation can be provided with electric vehicles with batteries powered
primarily by the sun, supplemented with methanol and other plant-derived fuels.
This can reduce consumption of gasoline by 80 percent or more.

# # #

UK - Institute of Physics

The Role of Physics in Renewable Energy RD&D
<http://industry.iop.org/IOP%20Renewables%20Report%20Final.pdf>
A report produced for the Institute of Physics by Future Energy
Solutions
October 2005
(36 pages... 1.4 megabytes)

<http://tinyurl.com/a3u64>

provided by
j2997
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fuelcell-energy/>

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Zeroing Out the Messenger
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/29/AR2005112901288\
.html>
Idaho Senator Eliminates Funds for Center on Salmon Survival
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 30, 2005; A21

PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a surgical strike from
Capitol Hill, Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) has
eliminated a little-known agency that counts
endangered fish in the Columbia River.

The Fish Passage Center, with just 12 employees
and a budget of $1.3 million, has been killed
because it did not count fish in a way that
suited Craig.

"Data cloaked in advocacy create confusion,"
Craig said on the Senate floor this month, after
successfully inserting language in an energy and
water appropriations bill that bans all future
funding for the Fish Passage Center. "False
science leads people to false choices."

Here in Portland, Michele DeHart, a fish
biologist who is the longtime manager of the
center, said she is not mad at Craig.
"What's the point?" asked DeHart, 55, who for
nearly 20 years has run the agency that keeps
score on the survival of endangered salmon as
they negotiate federal dams in the Columbia and
Snake rivers.

"I have never met the man," she said. "Never
talked to him. No one from his office ever
contacted us. I guess I am flabbergasted. We are
biologists and computer scientists, and what we
do is just math. Math can't hurt you."

But the mathematics of protecting salmon swimming
in the nation's largest hydroelectric system can
hurt your pocketbook -- particularly in the
Northwest, where dams supply power to four out of
five homes, more than anywhere in the country.

Salmon math has clearly riled up Craig, who in
his last election campaign in 2002 received more
money from electric utilities than from any other
industry and who has been named "legislator of
the year" by the National Hydropower Association.

The Fish Passage Center has documented, in
excruciating statistical detail, how the
Columbia-Snake hydroelectric system kills salmon.
Its analyses of fish survival data also suggest
that one way to increase salmon survival is to
spill more water over dams, rather than feed it
through electrical turbines.

This suggestion, though, is anathema to utilities
-- and to Craig -- because water poured over dams
means millions of dollars in lost electricity
generation.

Last summer, a federal judge in Portland, using
data and analysis from the Fish Passage Center,
infuriated the utilities. He ordered that water
be spilled over federal dams in the Snake River
to increase salmon survival. Shortly after Judge
James A. Redden issued his order, Craig began
pushing to cut all funding for the Fish Passage
Center.

"Idaho's water should not be flushed away on
experimental policies based on cloudy, inexact
assumption," Craig said in a news release.

On the Senate floor this month, he justified
elimination of the Fish Passage Center on the
grounds that "many questions have arisen
regarding the reliability of the technical data"
it publishes. Craig quoted from the report of an
independent scientific advisory board that in
2003 reviewed work done by the Fish Passage
Center.

But one of the report's authors, Charles C.
Coutant, a fishery ecologist who retired this
year from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said
Craig neglected to mention that the board found
the work of the center to be "of high technical
quality."

"Craig was very selective in reflecting just the
critical part of a quotation from the report,"
said Coutant, who has worked on Columbia River
salmon issues for 16 years. "It did give a
misleading impression about our board's view of
the Fish Passage Center."

Craig also said on the Senate floor that "other
institutions" in the Northwest now do "most" of
the data collection work done by center. He said
getting rid of the center would reduce redundancy
and increase the efficiency of regional fish
programs.

But according to another recent independent
scientific assessment of the work of the center,
there was little duplication of data collection
between the center and other organizations; it
recommended that the center continue to receive
funding to meet a substantial need in the
Northwest for information on salmon survival.

Fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington and
Idaho, Indian tribes with fishing rights on the
river and the governors of Oregon and Washington
have all said that eliminating the Fish Passage
Center is a bad idea that would reduce the
quality of information on endangered salmon.

Echoing a number of regional experts on salmon
recovery, Jeffrey P. Koenings, director of the
Washington Fish and Wildlife Department, said in
a letter to the regional congressional delegation
that it makes no economic sense to kill the
center. "Eliminating or reducing funding for the
Fish Passage Center will actually increase salmon
recovery costs, as the states and tribes will
need additional staff to replace the lost
functions," he wrote.

Money for the center has come from the Bonneville
Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency that
sells power from federal dams. In 1980, Congress
passed a law ordering that salmon in the Columbia
hydro-system receive "equitable treatment," along
with electricity generation, irrigation and barge
transport. BPA was compelled to fund the Fish
Passage Center in 1984 as part of the effort to
ensure equitable treatment for fish.

Craig blocked this funding mechanism by inserting
a sentence in an energy and water spending bill
that says, "The Bonneville Power Administration
may make no new obligations in support of the
Fish Passage Center."

Here in Portland, DeHart said she did not want to
speculate about Craig's motives. "I guess it is
just that old cliche about killing the
messenger," said DeHart, whose office will close
in March.

Other prominent players in the region's
decades-old salmon vs. power debate are less
reticent.

Don Chapman, an Idaho fisheries biologist who has
worked for regional utilities, state agencies and
environmental groups, wrote Craig a letter
accusing him of bad faith. "I state flatly that
your attempt to dismantle the Fish Passage Center
is wrongheaded and vindictive," he wrote.

Asked about these charges, Craig's spokesman, Dan
Whiting, responded by e-mail: "This is about
improving the program, taking advocacy out of
science and ensuring we have dams and salmon in
the Northwest. It is not about vindictiveness or
retribution by Sen. Craig -- that is not his
style."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

BP to double investment in greener energy
<http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx?type=ousiv&storyID=2005-11-2\
8T180337Z_01_MOL849083_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESSPRO-ENERGY-BP-DC.XML>
<http://tinyurl.com/98kfy>
Mon Nov 28, 2005 1:03 PM ET
By David Cullen and Tom Bergin

LONDON (Reuters) - BP Plc (BP.L: Quote, Profile,
Research) plans to double its investment in
greener energy sources over the next three years,
in reaction to soaring demand for low carbon
energy, the world's second-largest listed oil
firm by market value said on Monday.

BP may invest up to $8 billion in wind, solar,
hydrogen and high efficiency gas-fired power
generation projects over the next 10 years amid
growing concern over global warming.

Technological improvements, government incentives
and higher energy prices mean that wind, hydrogen
and solar energy projects are more economical
than in the past.

"We are now at a point where we have sufficient
new technologies and sound commercial
opportunities within our reach to build a
significant and sustainable business in
alternative and renewable energy," BP Chief
Executive John Browne said.

Demand for solar systems is rising 30 percent per year, BP said.

In the past, some environmentalists have
criticized BP's renewables activities as a sop
aimed at greening the firm's oily image.

But BP dismissed the suggestion the move was
aimed at this or at deflecting criticism from
politicians that oil firms have failed to invest
enough of their bumper profits, earned from
record oil prices, in new energy sources.

"It is good business...The economy of the future
will be a low carbon economy," Vivienne Cox,
chief executive of BP's gas, power and renewables
division, told reporters at a briefing.

However, the vast majority of BP's around $15
billion annual investment budget will remain
focused on oil and gas projects, which offer much
higher returns.

NEW UNIT

The London-based oil giant will form a new unit
called BP Alternative Energy to manage a fleet of
projects that BP said had the potential to
deliver sales around $6 billion a year within a
decade.

An initial $1.8 billion would be invested over
the next three years, spread in broadly equal
proportions between solar, wind, hydrogen and
combined cycle gas turbines. Cox said the larger
part of this would be invested in the United
States.

Browne added that within seven years the division
would be expected to offer the same returns
demanded of other customer-facing sections of the
firm, such as fuel marketing. This is around 15
percent through the business cycle.

The exact level of investment in the new unit
depends on the nature of opportunities and
government support for renewables and for
alternative energy technology such as carbon
capture.

Wind operators are experiencing growing problems
in finding turbine sites which are suitable and
unopposed by residents and environmental groups.

BP hopes to avoid this problem by erecting
turbines on its own industrial sites. It has
identified some U.S. sites which are in high wind
zones away from residential areas.

It also hopes to build two hydrogen-fired power
plants whose carbon emissions would be stored in
depleted oil fields. One, at Peterhead in
Scotland, will derive hydrogen from North Sea
gas, although its development hinges on
government incentives.

The other unidentified project would be in the
United States and would burn hydrogen derived
from low value refinery by-products.

CO2 sequestration can also have the advantage of
extending the life of oil fields, by keeping up
reservoir pressure.

BP's move is at odds with the views of some in
the oil industry, including the world's largest
private oil and gas firm, Exxon Mobil (XOM.N:
Quote, Profile, Research), which argues
renewables are a poor use of investors' funds.
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

DEMOCRACY, BY GOD
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_ID=2036\
6#
    The Bush administration recently appointed Paul Bonicelli to be
    deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development
    (USAID), where he will oversee programs that promote democracy and
    good governance internationally. Bonicelli's last job was dean of
    academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, a Christian
    fundamentalist institution that requires students to sign a 10-part
    "statement of faith" declaring, among other things, that
    non-Christians will be condemned to hell, "confined in conscious
    torment for eternity." "What's wrong with this picture is that the
    USAID programs Bonicelli will run are important weapons in the
    arsenal of Bush's new public diplomacy czarina, White House
    confidante Karen Hughes," writes William Fisher, who has worked for
    USAID and the U.S. State Department. "These programs are intended to
    play a central role in boosting Bush's efforts to foster democracy
    and freedom in Iraq and throughout the broader Middle East."

SOURCE: The Daily Star (Lebanon), November 29, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4232


By God, another awful Bush appointment
<http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_ID=203\
66#>
By William Fisher
Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Washington is a town where the best and the brightest usually coexist
with well-connected political hacks. However, the Bush administration
has taken promotion of the latter to embarrassing extremes, selecting
unqualified people for posts because of their political loyalty and
ideological persuasion. The most recent example of this was the
appointment of Paul Bonicelli to be deputy director of the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is in
charge of all programs to promote democracy and good governance
overseas.

One would have thought the administration had learned its lesson. In
the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the director of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, was forced to resign
because of his incompetence in dealing with the consequences of the
storm. Soon afterward, President George W. Bush named While House
counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Her lack of
qualifications, and a Republican revolt against the nomination,
forced her to withdraw.

Like Brown and Miers, Bonicelli has little experience in the field he
has been tapped to supervise. The closest he comes to
democracy-promotion or good governance is having worked as a staffer
for the Republican Party in the International Relations Committee of
the House of Representatives.

More significant to the administration, perhaps, is the fact that
Bonicelli is dean of academic affairs at tiny Patrick Henry College
in rural Virginia. The fundamentalist institution's motto is "For
Christ and Liberty." It requires that all of its 300 students sign a
10-part "statement of faith" declaring, among other things, that they
believe "Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh;"
that "Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead"; and that
hell is a place where "all who die outside of Christ shall be
confined in conscious torment for eternity."

Faculty members, too, must sign a pledge stating they share a
generally literalist belief in the Bible. Revealingly, only biology
and theology teachers are required to hold a literal view
specifically of the Bible's six-day creation story. Bonicelli has
stated, "I think the most important thing is our academic excellence,
[and the fact that we] combine it with a serious statement about our
faith and values ... I believe in six literal days, but I remain open
to someone persuading me otherwise."

Patrick Henry was founded in 2000 for home-schooled students. Among
the fundamentalist community, home-schooling is seen as a way to
promote Christian values as an alternative to what is regarded as an
increasingly secular and irreligious culture prevalent in public
schools. The college says it aims to "prepare Christian men and women
who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical
values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding." It seeks
"to aid in the transformation of American society by training
Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for
righteousness, justice and mercy, through careers of public service
and cultural influence."

Though Bonicelli has scant credentials for his new post, he and his
institution enjoy close ties to the Bush administration and to
fundamentalist religious groups that form such a critical part of the
president's base. Many Patrick Henry students have been chosen to
serve as interns working for White House political adviser Karl Rove,
for the White House Office of Public Liaison, and for Republican
members of the House and Senate. "Most students' values don't link up
with [those of] the Democrats," Bonicelli says.

In 2002, Bush appointed Bonicelli, along with former Vatican adviser
John Klink and Janice Crouse of the ultra-conservative Concerned
Women for America, to an American delegation attending a United
Nations children's conference, where they sought to promote biblical
values in U.S. foreign policy. This sparked angry protests from
groups advocating women's rights and the separation of church and
state.

What's wrong with this picture is that the USAID programs Bonicelli
will run are important weapons in the arsenal of Bush's new public
diplomacy czarina, White House confidante Karen Hughes. These
programs are intended to play a central role in boosting Bush's
efforts to foster democracy and freedom in Iraq and throughout the
broader Middle East.

One can only wonder how Muslims, the target audience for these USAID
programs, will react to the view that
"all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment
for eternity."

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the
Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia for the U.S. State
Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He
wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/
iraq_national_strategy_20051130.pdf>

In the National Security Council's new strategy for Iraq "Victory in
Iraq" released by the Bush administration today, page 24, there is
the following interesting future Iraq oil production goal, described
as a challenge:

   "...CONTINUED CHALLENGES IN THE ECONOMIC SPHERE
   Even with this progress, Iraq continues to face multiple challenges
in the economic sphere, including:
   • Facilitating investment in Iraq’s oil sector to increase
production from the current 2.1 million barrels per day to more than
5 million per day; ..."

First step toward making "little sun" as limitless energy source reported
<http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051123_fusionfrm.htm>
Nov. 25, 2005
Special to World Science

Scientists say they have taken a first step towards making a sort of
miniature sun that could serve as a virtually limitless energy source.

The project, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California,
would involve squeezing atoms until they merge, releasing energy in
the process. This process, called nuclear fusion, is what makes the
Sun shine.

In nuclear fusion as it occurs on the Sun, an atom of deuterium and
an atom of hydrogen are forced together by high pressure into one
atom, which then quickly releases a neutron. During the process, a
small part of the mass of the original particles is converted into
energy. (Image courtesy U.S. Heavy-Ion Fusion program)

Scientists have been working for decades to harness nuclear fusion
because it's thought that this would provide a clean, safe
alternative to existing nuclear power plants. But technical hurdles
and at least one widely publicized false claim of success have beset
the research.

The Livermore project would use the world's most powerful laser,
called the National Ignition Facility and which is currently under
construction, to heat a small, enclosed space.

In that space, scientists would place a container holding a frozen
sample of a type of hydrogen. The heat would expand the container,
forcing its contents into a smaller and smaller space until the atoms
merge.

Livermore scientists reported in a new paper that in a test run
without the container of hydrogen, the enclosed space generated
enough energy in the form of X-rays to produce the necessary heating
to make the project work.

The heat wasn't sufficient for fusion, as only four laser beams were
used of the 192 that would eventually come into play, researchers
said. But the amount of energy generated matched computer simulations
developed for the project, showing the work was on track, they added.

The findings were published in the Nov. 18 issue of the research
journal Physical Review Letters.

It could take decades of additional work to convert this promising
start into working power plants, said the laboratory's Eduard Dewald.
Fusion will be achieved "hopefully in 2010," he said; further
research will involve making the process efficient and quickly
repeatable enough to generate power on a mass scale.

Existing nuclear power plants extract energy from atoms by splitting
them up, a process called fission. The new research, by contrast,
does it by forcing them together, a process known as fusion.

The reason these opposite processes can achieve the same result is
that the types of atoms are different. Some types release energy when
they're forced together, others do so when they're split up. Fusion
energy research employs variants of hydrogen atoms called deuterium
and tritium.

Another line of research toward harnessing fusion energy involves
using magnetic fields rather than laser heating to confine the atoms.
Last summer, an international group of scientists and politicians
agreed to build an experimental fusion reactor in Cadarache, France,
using that strategy.

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

~~~~~~~ EnergyResources Moderator Comment ~~~~~~~~

Anybody ever heard of the concept of net energy. The fusion folks cal a
simpleminded version of it, "break even." The is when the energy driving the
laser ingnites fusion, but it does not look into the infrastructure of the thing
and a whole lot more.

~~~~~ EnergyResources Moderator Tom Robertson ~~~~~~

> Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 02:48:13 -0000
> From: "dmathew1" <dmathew1@...>
> Subject: Re: Consumption: America's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
>
> Hello A,
> > Meanwhile, let's keep our priorities straight.
> > Number One is to keep the spics, the slants, and the wetbacks OUT!
> > Resources must be carefully conserved so that rich white
> > Republicans can buy 93,000-square-foot homes at low interest rates.
>
> David: Democrats and liberals are just as guilty of excess
> consumption as the Republicans.

But of course. It's just that Republicans EPITOMIZE the genre, in
their shameless rapacity. They are incapable of even the
pretension of decency and moral conduct. DemocRATS are a close
second, natch.

Republicans are delightfully free from such pretentions, which is
why they should be leading the country. Dubya is the
perfectly-appropriate "President" for this (clusterfuck) "nation".
Rush Limbaugh would be even better, but hey, let's not waste time
gabbing about utopia.

A

_____________________________________________________________________

From the NY Times, November 30, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/science/30cnd-climate.html?
hp&ex=1133413200&en=df309b75a3ec3a8e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Study Shows Weakening of Atlantic Currents

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Atlantic Ocean currents that make northern Europe warmer than it
would otherwise be have weakened by about a third over the last 50
years, British oceanographers are reporting.

The scientists, from Britain's National Oceanography Center, said
the measured change meshes with what computer climate simulations
project should happen as heat-trapping emissions from human
activities warm the global climate.

Warming, in theory, could stall salty, sun-heated, north-flowing
currents by causing fresher water to build up in high-latitude seas
as ice melts and more precipitation falls.

Some climate models have projected that if this process continued,
gradual global warming could eventually trigger fairly abrupt
European cooling.

The researchers, writing in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature,
said that while they had measurements from only 5 years out of the
last 50, the pattern of change seen at various ocean depths
supported the idea that the shift was a significant trend and not
random variability.

They also pointed to independent measurements of a long-term drop in
the flows of water between some Arctic seas and the North Atlantic
as supporting evidence that a slowing of the overall Atlantic
circulation was under way.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Detlef Quadfasel of the
University of Hamburg, who was not involved with the British study,
said it provides "worrying support for computer models that predict
just such an effect in a world made warmer by greenhouse gas
emissions."

The British team, headed by Harry L. Bryden, detected the shift by
measuring currents, temperature and other factors at various depths
and spots along a line stretching from the Bahamas to the bulge of
Africa in 2004 and comparing them to readings taken at the same
latitude in 1998, 1992, 1981, and 1957.

Many currents, like the Gulf Stream, are driven mainly by winds, but
in the region where the Atlantic meets Arctic waters, changes in the
density and temperature of water drive ocean circulation, as well.

As heat is lost to the cold air, northward-flowing waters, already
salty and now made even denser, sink. In the depths, that water then
flows south and disperses around the world's oceans, creating what
has been called an oceanic conveyer belt.

The question now is whether that circulation is already slowing
down.

The new measurements showed that the Gulf Stream itself has not
changed much, but currents have shifted in ways that prevented more
of that warm water from getting into the far northern Atlantic, said
the study authors.

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said one
reason for caution was that the size of the estimated decline in
ocean circulation was sufficient that it should have produced a
perceptible dip in temperatures at the surface - and none has been
measured yet.

Given the complexity and variability of the seas, much more data
would have to be collected to determine conclusively if a slowdown
was already under way, said Robert Dickson of the British Center for
Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.

"However much statistical rigor is brought to bear, five trans-ocean
sections is still a small number on which to depend," Dr. Dickson
said.

How Europe is choking itself - and the world
<http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article330224.ece>
Revealed: environmental cost of continent's consumption
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
Published: 30 November 2005

Europe's claim to the moral high ground over the
environment has been comprehensively challenged
in a devastating report on its failings in the
battle against global warming and pollution. It
says Europe is devouring the world's natural
resources at twice the global rate.

>>>>>>The European Environment
State and Outlook 2005
<http://reports.eea.eu.int/state_of_environment_report_2005_1/en/SOER2005_all.pd\
f>
59 Megabytes<<<<<<<

Climate change on a scale unseen on the European
continent for 5,000 years is now under way,
according to the report, which warned yesterday
that at current rates three quarters of
Switzerland's glaciers will have melted by 2050.

Urban areas of Europe will double in size in just
over a century, as life expectancy rises and more
live alone. Increasing urban sprawl means that in
10 years, an open space in Europe three times the
size of Luxembourg has been built on. Air travel
is likely to double by 2030 and marine
ecosystems, water resources and air quality are
all threatened.

Though the European Environment Agency assessment
praises many environmental initiatives, it makes
it clear that much more needs to be done if a
crisis is to be avoided.

Britain, while doing well in some areas, was
criticised for the increase in the generation of
municipal waste, just 14.5 per cent of which is
recycled or composted as opposed to a target of
25 per cent.

But the document, a five-year assessment across
32 countries, concentrates on the threat from
climate change. It points out that the four
hottest years on record were 1998, 2002, 2003 and
2004, and that 10 per cent of Alpine glaciers
disappeared during summer 2003 alone.

Jacqueline McGlade, the agency's executive
director, said: "Without effective action over
several decades, global warming will see ice
sheets melting in the north and the spread of
deserts from the south. The continent's
population could become concentrated in the
centre."

She said the spread of tar and cement across
former greenbelt areas was recreating many of the
mistakes that led to the devastation caused by
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where wetlands
were built over. "Even if we constrain global
warming to the EU target of a 2C increase, we
will be living in atmospheric conditions that
human beings have never experienced. Deeper cuts
in emissions are needed."

The report's authors believe that individual
behaviour needs to change and urged reform of the
taxation systems to ensure that polluters pay
more.

The document highlights Europe's "ecological
footprint", the estimated land area required to
produce the resources each person consumes and to
absorb the waste they produce. At five global
hectares per person, the figure for the 25 EU
member states is half of that for the US but
larger than Japan and more than double the
average for countries such as Brazil, China or
India.

Tony Long, director of WWF's European policy
office, said this illustrated the extent to which
Europeans used more than their fair share of
global resources. He argued: "Europe needs to
learn to consume less, pollute less and tread
more lightly on the planet. Perpetuating the
inequality of living at the expense of some of
the poorest countries in the world makes European
environmental standards nothing to be proud
about. This makes the EU's sustainable
development strategy even more timely to get
Europe back on track to sustainability."

The report points out that Europe's average
temperature rose by 0.95C during the last
century, higher than the global average of 0.7C.
That continuing trend is expected to deliver a
rise of between 2 and 6C this century.
Though the document says that in the short term
the EU is "broadly on track to meet its Kyoto
targets" to curb CO2, "its mid-term goal for 2020
- a 15 to 30 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions from 1990 levels - will be more
difficult to achieve".

That message was echoed by the European
environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who last
week described progress on Kyoto in the EU as
good but " not enough".

The recommendation for more use of the tax system
to discourage waste provoked a political row last
night. The agency report called for a "a gradual
shift of the tax base away from taxing 'good
resources' such as investment and labour, towards
taxing 'bad resources', such as pollution and
inefficient use".

The European Commission vice-president, Margot
Wallstrom, played down the prospects of an
EU-wide initiative, arguing that one would be
unlikely to win the backing of member states.

John Hontelez, secretary general of the European
Environmental Bureau (EEB), a federation of
European environmental organisations, said: "The
commissioner's answer is unacceptable. The EEA
report clearly shows that environmental tax
reform is necessary to create realistic market
price signals, triggering innovation with
much-needed environmental benefits.

Refusing to launch a major initiative to boost
environmental fiscal reforms inside the EU is
refusing leadership in environmental policies.
This commission risks going into the record books
as the worst one ever for the protection of
public health, biodiversity and the planet."

UK
Britain remains off target on renewable energy,
which accounts for only 3.6% of electricity
needs, against the 10% promised by 2010. A
mounting rubbish disposal problem is underlined
by a 15 per cent hike in waste production in the
past ?ve years. Britain's butterflies such as the
Wood White and the Grayling could soon join the
large Tortoiseshell in becoming extinct. Loss of
habitat means 45 per cent of Europe's butterflies
are endangered.

France
Nuclear power has lowered emissions but the
transport sector keeps pumping out greenhouse
gases. France has to tackle mounting energy
consumption and poor waste management.

Germany
Climate change in Europe is predicted to cause
more extreme weather, such as heavy rain leading
to an increased risk of flooding. The densely
populated flood plains of central Europe - in
particular Germany - are especially vulnerable to
flooding.

Spain
Spain and Portugal suffered one of the worst
droughts on record this year, with far-reaching
economic consequences. The three hottest years on
record in Europe were the past three - 2002, 2003
and 2004.

Finland
Despite its wealth and investment in renewable
energy, sparsely populated Finland is among
Europe's worst offenders on greenhouse gases, up
nearly 10 per cent since 1990.

Switzerland
Global warming is melting the snow caps. Ten per
cent of Alpine glaciers disappeared during the
summer of 2003 and at current rates,
three-quarters of Swiss glaciers will have melted
by 2050.

Italy
Like much of southern Europe, Italy's coming
crisis is drought. Recent summers highlight the
urgent need to improve irrigation in agriculture,
to reduce the demand on the water supply.

'Green-friendly' US cuts a lonely figure at UN summit

The Bush administration - widely condemned for
its refusal to support the Kyoto treaty - has
claimed it is doing more than most nations to
protect the Earth's atmosphere.

At the UN Climate Control Conference in Montreal,
US officials claimed that emissions of greenhouse
gases have been cut by 0.8 per cent since George
Bush came to office in 2001.*** "With regard to
what the US is doing on climate change, the
actions we have taken are next to none in the
world," said Harlan Watson, senior climate
negotiator for the US Department of State.

He said the US spends more than US$5bn (£3bn) a
year on climate change research and technology,
and that President Bush had committed to cutting
greenhouses gases by 18 per cent by the year 2012.

Environmentalists said the US was simply trying
undermine the conference. Bill Hare of Greenpeace
International said the lack of US commitment to
mandatory greenhouse gas reductions was the
biggest complaint among conference delegates.
"When you walk around the conference hall here,
delegates are saying there are lots of issues on
the agenda, but there's only one real problem,
and that's the United States," he said.

Andrew Buncombe

Posted by Tim
AustinTex

***Note:
Financial Times reported
US greenhouse gas output falls
<http://news.ft.com/cms/s/dbf71502-5b8d-11da-b221-0000779e2340.html>
November 22 2005
(excerpt)
"Emissions of greenhouse gases from the US fell for the first time in
more than a decade between 2000 and 2003 following a shift in heavy
manufacturing away from US shores to cheaper locations such as China.
[...]
Mr Connaughton hailed the "stabilisation" of greenhouse gas output as
a victory for the US policy of avoiding mandatory targets and
concentrating on new technologies, such as methane capture and "clean
coal". But he admitted that alongside these "good reasons" for the
drop, there were also "bad reasons", such as the offshoring of
manufacturing and commodity chemicals and agricultural fertiliser
industries."

Clean coal was not a factor a factor in reducing AGHG. The fact
is that heavy industry was shifted to countries to countries where
pollution is horribly less restrained than it is in the US. Worldwide
pollution and emissions INCREASED as heavy industry moved
out of the US.

For Harlon Watson to claim credit for this is just plain hooey.
Watson is mostly misleading as to the proactive role the US
is playing in attenuating AGHG emissions. Even when the Bush
administration gets the science it hides it.
(citation)
From the infamous Inhofe's Senate Committee hearing:
Hon. David Sandalow
Director, Environment and Energy Project
The Brookings Institution
<http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=246770>
(excerpt)
"a. The suppression or distortion of scientific conclusions from
federal environmental agencies. In 2003, for example, the White
report. Because its scientists considered the proposed changes
scientifically indefensible, EPA eliminated the discussion of
climate change from its overall report. Similarly, the New York
Times reported recently on extensive edits to an EPA document
concerning the science of climate change by a White House
political aide."

Not one single country on Earth can point to technical innovations
that have reduced overall CO2 - greenhouse gas emissions at this
time.

Tim
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Mr Patterson wrote:

>On the other hand one could favor business as usual.

No. It's not binary. It's not black and white - it's not like that. The
next few paragraphs run according to your straw man argument, but I'll
comment on a few points:

> The population is still increasing, the rain forest is still being
destroyed,
> lakes and rivers are still being polluted, topsoil is still being
blown
> away and animal species are still going extinct. We are literally
> destroying the biosphere.

And even if we were all teletransported instantly to some Star Trek
Fantasy land never to return to the earth, these species would continue
dying off and the biosphere would still be a sinking wreck. It would
return to an equilibrium faster without us, but we're still talking
many thousands of years.

>We could hope to delay the peak, and the collapse until around 2040 or
2050.

Well, if Deffeyes is correct, the peak is already here. I don't think
delaying the peak is interesting. I don't find the binary logic behind
the argument useful. What IS interesting is how we are going to manage
the transition to other fuels and gracefully depopulate the planet.

I think we can all agree that Peak Oil is a fact, and an inevitability.
However: imagine something totally extra-ordinary happens: they come up
with something like cold-fusion that's cheap and easy to do. Then oil
could peak and no one would really notice...

It's not the transition itself that's in question or doubt - it's more
the character of said transition. While I am usually loathe to agree
with the likes of Lomborg on anything, he does have a specific insight
when he says "You don't buy gasoline, you buy transportation". If cars
no longer ran on gas, you would still have to buy traonsportation, but
gas wouldn't be part of the equation.

This doesn't solve te ecological problem, but that's another issue. I'm
simply demonstrating that the reduction in oil production doesn't *by
necessity* require a die off. It CAN, and if things don't change, and
quickly, probability reduces to certainty, but presuming certainty I
feel is illegitimate as I discuss below.


>Peak oil in this decade would be terrible.

I tink it's already here - we're just cruising on the glutted plateau.

>But peak oil forty years from now would be far, far worse.

I see - I see - you're conflating the demand/production curve crossings
in the economics of petroleum production with some kind of instant
die-off.

Well: it looks like you now have a test case. If we are around in 30
years, you're wrong. If we're not, you're right, but it doesn't matter.
Now how is that a useful position?

>I find hoping for a much-delayed peak absolutely morally and ethically
repugnant.

I think it's a non-issue. The peak is upon us - it's just a question of
how it is managed, and the character of the transition to other energy
sources takes on.

>And anyone who thinks the earth can support such a population
indefinite for half
>a century without destroying what little flora and fauna is left upon
this earth simply
>has not a clue as to what is happening to the earth.

I agree - it looks bleak. But not impossible.

>If we had a choice, now or later, it would not be a choice between
>good and evil. It would be a choice between evil and a much greater
>evil.

So we should all vote CHTHULU for president? After all, why settle for
the lesser evil?

I'm too cynical to believe in nihilism, and I find the doomsaying in
the peak oil debate has its uses as a goad when it is understood in an
if/then context. But if it is presented as a certainty, then there is:

a: no point in discussing the issue
b: there is no point to this forum, except as a form of black humour
c: no point in even trying to survive the catastrophe, as those who do
will be living lives of a Hobbesian sort, and who wants to live like
that?

As a consequence, the nihilist position can be seen as a parasitic
middle class luxury. If there are things needing change, the proper
thing to do is to change them and to form communities of people to help
change them. What needs to be done can be scaled according to need at
point. In the USA getting people out of their cars and getting them to
turn the damn lights off when they go to bed would be a good "start."
Getting people to grow food instead of lawns would be a really good
idea as well. Developing neighbourhood windmill energy projects would
also help. But, most of all: GETTING PEOPLE TO STOP HAVING SO MANY DAMN
KIDS would be the best thing of all.

The list is long, and there is much to be done. I find the nihilist
position disuseful and unconvincing outside of an if/then context.
Within such a context, it is EXTREMELY useful and actually, necessary.
But outside of such a context, *at this present time* it has no value.
Given the stakes involved, the extreme nihilist position outside of the
if/then context, is therefore immoral. Russia had nihilists first, in
the 1880s, 1890s. Once the nihilists were discredited/jailed/killed
off, they had a proper revolution. That the revolution resulted in a
disaster of an empire is not relevent - the point is nihilism goes
nowhere, and is just as much of a detriment to free and creative
thinking as the cornicopian neocon fascists presently running the show.


The only thing that results from nihilism is a cult. Nihilism won't
keep the hospitals open, won't make the discoveries we need, or even
reduce the population - after all - if it doesn't matter, then it
doesn't matter- have a jillion kids - their lives are their problem,
not yours, and besides - it doesn't matter.

You can't forge a new society from doom. People need someplace to go
and have fun. If it's dancing in some over lit discotheque in Las Vegas
with a buffet of meatballs and oysters, or dancing in front of a camp
fire by some rawhide tents cooking up a chunk of buffalo - it's still
fun. People are social primates. As such they need to be led. Pointing
a direction into an abyss is not leading. Pointing a direction into a
foggy area that seems to go down around the abyss will have to do-
travelling down that foggy bottom is all we really have.

So, hold hands, stay close, keep walking, and sing!

S2



__________________________________
Yahoo! Music Unlimited
Access over 1 million songs. Try it free.
http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/

A TOMB FOR GREENHOUSE GASES
<http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,387390,00.html>
<http://tinyurl.com/dn6te>
New Technologies Take Center Stage at Montreal Summit
November 28, 2005
By Gerald Traufetter

At the World Climate Summit in Montreal,
politicians and environmentalists are discussing
technical solutions for dealing with global
warming. In initial pilot projects, engineers are
attempting to capture the carbon dioxide emitted
by power plants and burying it in rock beneath
the surface or depositing it on the ocean floor.

In a classified document, climate protection
experts were proposing "politically sensitive"
measures to the British government.

One of the measures the authors of the report
proposed was to impose stricter penalties for
speeding in order to force those 15 million
Britons who exceed the country's 70 mph (113
km/h) speed limit each year to drive more slowly.
Emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide
jump exponentially when cars travel at speeds of
more than 100 kilometers per hour -- and that is
exactly what the authors so urgently want to
curtail. "We must achieve 75 percent more savings
in half the time," say the authors of the report,
which was eventually released to the public in
mid-November, in justifying their draconian
recommendations.

Major industry (in Germany's Ruhr region): The
earth gave us the carbon, and the earth should
take it back again
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,547595,00.jpg
DDP

Great Britain is not the only country likely to
fall short of its self-imposed climate
objectives. Despite pledging to reduce its
emissions by 6 percent under the Kyoto Protocol,
Canada is currently 24.2 percent above 1990
levels. And the main reason Germany has managed
to reduce its emissions by 18.5 percent is that
industry has declined in the former East Germany.

"To our great concern, we are now seeing a rising
tendency in CO2 emissions after years of
stagnation," warns Richard Kinley, director of
the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat in
Bonn.

In this gloomy atmosphere, about 10,000
participants traveled to Montreal this week to
attend the United Nations' World Climate Summit.
For the first time since the Kyoto Protocol came
into effect in February, the delegates in
Montreal will discuss whether its failure can be
averted. Is a follow-up agreement for the period
after 2012 even feasible at this point?

New focus on innovative methods

For the first time, the conference will focus on
technical methods of capturing the dangerous
greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and placing it in
permanent storage sites. The debate was triggered
primarily by the fact that the United States,
together with India, China, Australia, Japan and
South Korea, formed a separate alliance this
summer with the objective of coming up with
technical innovations to make emitted greenhouse
gas harmless. The success of such innovations
would downplay the importance of conserving
energy.

Because efforts to reduce emissions have been so
unsuccessful, an approach orthodox
environmentalists had previously shunned has
suddenly become acceptable: disposing of CO2
instead of avoiding it. In fact, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
recently had nothing but praise for the concept
of CO2 storage. According to an October report,
the final storage of CO2 could supply up to 55
percent of the reduction experts say is needed to
stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere
by 2100.

Of course, capturing the CO2 emitted by aircraft,
cars and home heating systems would be too
costly. But wherever large amounts of carbon
dioxide are produced, scientists and engineers
are developing systems to isolate the substance
from exhaust gas and process it so that it is
more easily stored (see graphic).

Various more or less sophisticated solutions
exist for coal power plants which, with CO2
emissions of 250 million tons in Germany alone,
are the main culprit in pumping the greenhouse
gas into the atmosphere. The Vattenfall Group,
for example, has taken an ambitious approach. The
energy utility plans to open a pilot zero-CO2
emissions power plant at Niederlausitz near
Berlin in 2008. The plant will employ a process
called Oxyfuel, which will make it the first
power plant of its kind worldwide.

"The trick is to make sure that the exhaust gas
contains an extremely high concentration of
carbon dioxide, so that it's actually worth
capturing the gas," explains Markus Sauthoff, who
heads the Vattenfall project. Engineers achieve
this by burning brown coal with pure oxygen and
the plant's flue gases, instead of air. "This
gives us a concentration of more than 90 percent
CO2," explains Sauthoff. Hazardous substances and
water are then extracted from the exhaust gas.

The plant will then compress the carbon dioxide
to convert it to liquid form, which will allow it
to be removed in tanker trucks or through
pipelines. Like the two other methods, processing
consumes energy and reduces power plant
efficiency. In the case of Oxyfuel, Sauthoff
expects efficiency reductions on the order of
about 8 percent. Instead of deriving a 50 percent
electricity yield from coal, a level that will be
possible in 20 years, the zero-CO2 plant would
achieve an efficiency level of only 42 percent,
which corresponds to today's state-of-the-art
plants. This means that one ton of captured
carbon dioxide will cost about ¤20-25.

However, this amount already includes the costs
of storing the greenhouse gas. Biologists,
geologists, physicists and chemists have come up
with a number of ways, some rather curious, to
bury the gases:
	 * Metal oxides in waste water could
react with carbon dioxide to form harmless
carbonates.
	 *
	 *
	 * CO2 dissolved in water could be
pumped through pipes into porous rock deep
beneath the earth's surface, where the carbon
dioxide would be combined with hydrogen and
genetically modified bacteria would convert the
mixture into methane -- which could then be
burned.
	 *
	 *
	 * Tankers could dump entire
shiploads of the climate-changing gas into the
deep ocean, where it would dissolve into water or
sink and form deposits in troughs on the ocean
floor.
	 *
	 *
	 * In Dutch greenhouses, carbon
dioxide brought in through a pipeline from a
Rotterdam refinery is already being used as a
growth accelerator for useful plants. The method
can spur roses, for example, to bloom two weeks
earlier.
But geologists see the most promising carbon
dioxide burial ground in the rock formations
where coal, oil and natural gas deposits are
found. The IPCC estimates that these geological
formations could store up to 2,000 gigatons of
waste material -- more than 70 times the amount
of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere
each year as a result of human activity. These
rock formations occur everywhere and are located
within no more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) of
almost every power plant on earth.

Graphic: Possibilities for storing carbon dioxide
<http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,548106,00.jpg>
DER SPIEGEL

The easiest solution from a technical standpoint
would be to pump the CO2 into empty natural gas
deposits -- as the Norwegian Statoil Group has
demonstrated in its Sleipner oil field. The
GeoResearch Center in Potsdam, Germany also began
operating a pilot project recently. In the town
of Ketzin, not far from Berlin, the center is
preparing an experiment in which carbon dioxide
will be pumped into an old natural gas storage
facility 700 meters (2,297 feet) beneath the
surface. "The gas will accumulate there, while
the layers of clay and loam above the site will
prevent the gas from escaping," says geological
engineer Guenter Borm.

Four truckloads a day, or a total of 100 tons of
CO2, will be buried at the site over a two-year
period. Borm calculates that the average car
pumps 1.6 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each
year. If the Ketzin experiment is successful, the
site could theoretically be used to store carbon
dioxide from the nearby Vattenfall power plant.

The Potsdam team plans to use a network of
measuring devices to make sure that the gas
doesn't just end up escaping back into the
atmosphere. In the highly unlikely event that the
waste gas does in fact emerge at the surface,
this would present the worst possible scenario.

Even if the CO2 were to escape gradually from the
Ketzin site, it would mean that scientists had
failed to achieve their goal of permanently
keeping the greenhouse gas out of the earth's
atmosphere. "Later commercial use will only be
feasible once we know exactly how the gas behaves
down there," says Borm.

Oil giant BP's plans for storing CO2 near
Aberdeen, Scotland could be even more
economically efficient. The carbon dioxide that
will be captured from a zero-CO2 power plant,
which is currently under construction and is
code-named DF-1, will be pumped into current
petroleum reserves 240 kilometers (149 miles) off
the North Sea coast of Scotland. The plan would
kill two birds with one stone: first, it would
provide storage for as much carbon dioxide each
year as is emitted by 300,000 cars; second, the
resulting gas pressure would force an additional
40 million barrels of oil out of the rock.

Shell is taking a similar approach in the context
of a European Union research project called
RECOPOL, which calls for CO2 storage in coal
seams that contain large amounts of methane
trapped in tiny pores. The project's researchers
have already injected hundreds of tons of CO2
into thin coal seams deemed no longer profitable
in a mine near the southern Polish city of
Katowice. At a pressure of 240 hectopascal (240
millibars), the carbon dioxide forces the methane
from the pores, which then reaches the surface
through a second bore hole. "The gas could be
used to fuel surrounding households," says Henk
Pagnier, a Dutch geologist involved in the
project.

Critic: technology still 20 years off

The principle sounds tempting: pumping carbon
that originally came from the earth back into the
earth. But climate experts have voiced doubts
over whether the method will quickly become
widespread. "It creates a false impression,
saying that the technology will be widely
available," criticizes Manfred Fischedick of the
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and
Energy. Fischedick doesn't expect the new
technology to become available for at least
another 20 years.

"We already have effective ways of reducing
greenhouse gases today," says Fischedick,
pointing out regenerative energies, building
insulation and electricity conservation as
examples. He has noted with great concern how
some countries, most of all the United States,
have shifted their focus entirely to technical
solutions. According to Fischedick, "this could
detract from the truly important issues in
Montreal."

Germany's Environment Ministry, under the new
leadership of Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel,
stands behind Fischedick's criticisms. "It's
noticeable that the countries that have offered
the least support for mandatory climate goals are
the ones campaigning the most vocally for the
technology of the day after tomorrow," says
ministry spokesman Michael Schroeren.

But the most vehement champion of carbon dioxide
storage is the energy industry itself, which also
combines commercial interests with CO2
sequestration technology. Since the EU introduced
its new system of trading in so-called emission
rights this spring, each ton of carbon dioxide
saved is like cash in the bank for companies. For
each ton of CO2 they emit per year, companies
receive a certificate. These allocations can
gradually be reduced to encourage companies to
invest in climate-protective technology.

The certificates are already being traded on the
stock market, at prices of about ¤25 per ton of
CO2. If an energy company saves carbon dioxide
with a zero-CO2 power plant, for example, it can
sell a number of certificates corresponding to
its reduction in CO2 emissions.

For the foreseeable future, however, it will
likely be more economically attractive to
companies to increase power plant efficiency in
developing countries -- an activity for which the
Kyoto Protocol provides financial incentives.
Reducing CO2 emissions in this way is more
cost-efficient than the costly practice of
burying greenhouse gases in caverns. Indeed, in
Montreal representatives of industry will also be
calling for the worldwide expansion of the system
of trading in emissions credits.

"The techniques of carbon dioxide storage will
still be too expensive in the coming decades,"
says Fischedick, "and that's why I do not expect
implementation on a large scale." Fischedick
believes that the main reason corporations are
involved in the pilot projects is to ensure that
they won't be technologically outpaced by the
competition in the future.

Meanwhile, investment in climate protection in
developing countries is just getting underway. UN
climate protection official Kinley will announce
in Montreal that the first two projects,
including one involving the construction of
hydroelectric power plants in Honduras, have been
approved. "Applications have been submitted for
more than 450 projects," says Kinley.

One is the construction of a modern garbage dump
in rural Brazil, which is turning into a gold
mine in the international emissions trade. The
project, funded by the Dutch government, involves
burning off the methane produced by garbage at
the dump.

It's good for the earth's atmosphere, but not for
the poor residents near the facility. Now that
their local garbage is a covered and closed
facility, they can no longer rummage through it
for usable items.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

© DER SPIEGEL 48/2005
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Thanks to the new energy bill, companies are gearing up to build the
first nuclear reactors in over 30 years. Below are two official press
releases from AREVA and Constellation Energy. AREVA  has just formed a
joint venture with Constellation Energy The new company is called
UniStar Nuclear and is marketing its Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR)
as the future of U.S. energy supply.

AREVA [http://www.areva.com] is the largest nuclear supplier in the
U.S. AREVA is a French company, 80% owned by the French government's
Nuclear Energy Commission.

Constellation Energy [http://www.constellation.com/] is one of the
largest electricity wholesalers in the U.S. with over 100 power plants
and 12,000 MW of generating capacity.

UniStar Nuclear [http://www.unistarnuclear.com/index.html]


We have to give credit where credit is due: the Bush Admin's new
energy act is a key driver:

"With the recent passage of the Energy Policy Act, we now believe the
time is right to build nuclear power plants in America," said Michael
J. Wallace, executive vice president of Constellation Energy,
president of Constellation Generation and co-chief executive officer
of UniStar Nuclear. UniStar Nuclear is pioneering a new path that will
help bring a new generation of nuclear power plants a major step
closer to reality....
"The foresight and actions taken by the Bush Administration and
Congress with the passage of the Energy Policy Act, have paved the way
for today's announcement. By supporting nuclear power at a critical
time, President Bush and Congress have helped secure America's energy
future," Wallace added.



I have included 2 press releases, one from AREVA, one from
Constellation. The full text of both is included in this post.

http://www.areva.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=arevagroup_en%2FAroundUs%2FA\
roundUsFullTemplate&cid=1132051537255
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=CEG&script=416&layout=0&i\
tem_id=757029

---------------------------

AREVA RELEASE:


Constellation Energy announces plans to submit for combined
construction and operating License - November 15, 2005


Constellation Energy announced its intent to file with the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a combined construction and
operating license (COL). This step in the multiphased regulatory
process could lead to the development and deployment of a U.S. nuclear
power plant - which could be one of the first in more than 30 years.

In September, Constellation Energy and AREVA Inc. announced the
formation of UniStar Nuclear. "UniStar is a joint enterprise that
provides the business framework through which the first fleet of
AREVA-designed reactors could be developed and deployed in North
America," said Michael J, Wallace, co-chief executive of UniStar
Nuclear and executive vice president of Constellation Energy.

UniStar Nuclear brings together in one team an experienced nuclear
fleet operator and owner and a preeminent nuclear reactor vendor.
Wallace said that the U.S. EPR, a 1,600 megawatt evolutionary power
reactor, will be the technology of choice for all UniStar plants.

"The fleet approach that UniStar Nuclear is taking will generate
significant cost savings," said Thomas A. Christopher, co-chief
executive officer of UniStar Nuclear and CEO of AREVA Inc.
"Standardized plants also create an unprecedented degree of certainty
in operations and allow operators career growth opportunities to move
from plant to plant" he said.

AREVA Inc., as prime contractor to any potential new nuclear project
under the UniStar Nuclear fleet business model, would provide the
nuclear reactor and all support systems, instrumentation and control
system and the initial load of nuclear fuel. As locations are firmed
up, it is envisioned that Constellation Energy would operate the
proposed fleet of U.S. EPRs and hold the plant's operating licenses.

In a separate announcement, Constellation Energy also identified its
Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Southern Maryland and Nine Mile
Point Nuclear Station in upstate New York as the likely sites to be
considered for the COL. Final site selection is expected early next year.

More about...


  UniStar Nuclear is headquartered in Annapolis, Md.

  Constellation Energy, a FORTUNE 200 company based in Baltimore, is
the nation's largest competitive supplier of electricity to large
commercial and industrial customers and the nation's largest wholesale
power seller. Constellation Energy also manages fuels and energy
services on behalf of energy intensive industries and energy
companies. It owns a diversified fleet of more than 100 generating
units located throughout the United States, totaling approximately
12,000 megawatts of generating capacity. The company delivers
electricity and natural gas through the Baltimore Gas and Electric
Company (BGE), its regulated utility in Central Maryland. In 2004, the
combined revenues of the integrated energy company totaled $12.5 billion.

  As the leading U.S. nuclear supplier and a key player in the
electricity transmission and distribution sector, AREVA's 6000
American employees are commited to serve the nation and pave the way
for the future of the electricity market. The company's commitment to
America is reflected in its initial investment of $200 million in the
U.S. EPR. With 40 locations across the nation and about $2 billion in
revenues in 2004, AREVA in the U.S. combines homegrown leadership,
access to worldwide expertise and a proven track record of performance
through its U.S. subsidiary UniStar. In the U.S. and in over 100
countries around the world, AREVA is engaged in the 21st century's
greatest challenges: making energy available to all, protecting the
planet and acting responsibly towards future generations. AREVA Inc.
is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.

----------------------------

CONSTELLATION RELEASE:

Constellation Energy Group, Inc. (ticker: CEG, exchange: New York
Stock Exchange (.N)) News Release - September 15, 2005

Constellation Energy and AREVA Join Forces to Introduce New and Unique
Business Model for the Future of American Nuclear Power

           Newly Formed Venture Introduces Unprecedented Platform for
                             Nuclear Power Industry
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Constellation Energy (NYSE: CEG)
and AREVA Inc., today announced the formation of UniStar Nuclear, a
joint enterprise that provides the business framework through which
the first fleet of advanced nuclear power plants in America in nearly
three decades could be developed and deployed.

The UniStar Nuclear model brings together in one complete package, a
preeminent nuclear reactor vendor and a deeply experienced nuclear
fleet licensee, operator and owner. Specifically, UniStar Nuclear will
offer the business framework that could enable the development of
joint ventures with Constellation Energy, other energy companies and
interested parties. Those joint ventures, in turn, would license,
construct, own and operate nuclear power plants as part of a
standardized fleet.

"With the recent passage of the Energy Policy Act, we now believe the
time is right to build nuclear power plants in America," said Michael
J. Wallace, executive vice president of Constellation Energy,
president of Constellation Generation and co-chief executive officer
of UniStar Nuclear. UniStar Nuclear is pioneering a new path that will
help bring a new generation of nuclear power plants a major step
closer to reality.

"We are taking a disciplined value-driven approach to creating and
managing this new enterprise, which provides a new and unique business
model for the nuclear power industry. By serving as a one-stop shop
approach to design, build, license and operate a fleet of nuclear
power plants, the UniStar approach provides an unprecedented level of
certainty for energy companies and others contemplating new nuclear
power plants," Wallace said.

UniStar Nuclear will market a standard advanced design called the U.S.
Evolutionary Power Reactor (U.S. EPR), a 1,600-megawatt evolutionary
power reactor designed for America by AREVA Inc.

"The U.S. EPR is the nuclear plant for America's future," said Thomas
A. Christopher, chief executive officer of AREVA Inc., and co-chief
executive officer of UniStar Nuclear. "Its basic design is mature, and
the detailed design is now being completed. The design will be
licensed and ready to deploy in America to help companies meet their
demand forecasts for new power on the grid by 2015."

More than 200 engineers are now working in support of the U.S. EPR
design certification, which ensures development of a design that will
allow energy companies to economically deploy advanced nuclear power
plants that set a new standard for safety, efficiency and performance.
AREVA has previously announced its plans for obtaining design
certification for the U.S. EPR as a standard plant from the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"Our U.S. EPR nuclear power plants will be made in America by
Americans for Americans -- American engineering, American construction
and many American components," said Christopher.

The U.S. EPR is based on AREVA's advanced nuclear power plant. Two
reactors are to be built and operated in Europe with one already under
construction in Finland. This ongoing plant construction experience
provides a strong foundation for the U.S. EPR with real experience in
constructing an advanced nuclear power plant. The design incorporates
more than 40 years of nuclear power plant operating experience.

The U.S. EPR also represents a new standard in nuclear plant safety,
with four separate safety systems, each of which is capable of
performing the entire safety function for the reactor. AREVA, as prime
contractor to any potential new nuclear project under the UniStar
model, would provide the nuclear reactor and all support systems,
instrumentation and control system and initial load of nuclear fuel.

The first fleet of four or more U.S. EPRs that could be developed and
deployed under the UniStar approach would efficiently deliver the
cost- effective, emissions-free power that is the foundation of
America's economy and high standard of living. Energy companies,
investors and consumers will benefit from their high-quality design
and the operating efficiencies inherent in this fleet of standardized
plants.

As currently envisioned, Constellation Energy would operate the
proposed fleet of nuclear power plants and expects to hold the plant
operating licenses. The company also would form joint ventures for
each nuclear power plant. However, prior to identifying specific
projects or committing to ordering new nuclear power plants,
Constellation Energy's financial commitment will be limited to the
formation of the business platform and business development activities.

AREVA and Constellation Energy also announced that Bechtel Power
Corporation will support the project with its expertise as an
architect- engineer and constructor.

"The combination of Constellation Energy, AREVA and Bechtel is the
right team at the right time with the right technology," said Wallace.
"We believe that the UniStar Nuclear approach will present such a
strong value proposition for the energy industry that it will become a
catalyst for a new generation of nuclear power in America. We look
forward to sharing both our unique business model and the benefits of
the U.S. EPR with our industry colleagues in the days and weeks ahead.

"The foresight and actions taken by the Bush Administration and
Congress with the passage of the Energy Policy Act, have paved the way
for today's announcement. By supporting nuclear power at a critical
time, President Bush and Congress have helped secure America's energy
future," Wallace added.

Today's announcement regarding the formation of the UniStar Nuclear
venture also provides a unique and complementary path to the combined
construction and operating license process efforts undertaken by the
NuStart consortium, of which Constellation Energy is a founding member.

"Our new enterprise complements NuStart's verification of the
capability of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's combined
Construction and Operating License (COL) process," added Wallace.
"Although Constellation Energy has selected the U.S. EPR as its
technology of choice, the company fully expects to continue to work
within, support and learn from NuStart as it moves forward to refine
the COL process.

"With the selection of the U.S. EPR as our technology of choice,
Constellation Energy's Calvert Cliffs and Nine Mile Point Nuclear
Power Plants are viable sites for possible future development through
the UniStar Nuclear model, however, they are no longer appropriate for
consideration as NuStart sites."

UniStar Nuclear (http://www.unistarnuclear.com) is headquartered in
Annapolis, Md.

Constellation Energy (http://www.constellation.com), a FORTUNE 200
company based in Baltimore, is the nation's largest competitive
supplier of electricity to large commercial and industrial customers
and the nation's largest wholesale power seller. Constellation Energy
also manages fuels and energy services on behalf of energy intensive
industries and energy companies. It owns a diversified fleet of more
than 100 generating units located throughout the United States,
totaling approximately 12,000 megawatts of generating capacity. The
company delivers electricity and natural gas through the Baltimore Gas
and Electric Company (BGE), its regulated utility in Central Maryland.
In 2004, the combined revenues of the integrated energy company
totaled $12.5 billion.

As the leading U.S. nuclear supplier and a key player in the
electricity transmission and distribution sector, AREVA's 8,000
American employees are committed to serve the nation and pave the way
for the future of the electricity market. The company's commitment to
America is reflected in its initial investment of $200 million in the
U.S. EPR. With 40 locations across the nation and more than $2 billion
in revenues in 2004, AREVA combines homegrown leadership, access to
worldwide expertise and a proven track record of performance through
its U.S. subsidiary, UniStar. In the U.S. and in over 100 countries
around the world, AREVA is engaged in the 21st century's greatest
challenges making energy available to all, protecting the planet and
acting responsibly towards future generations. AREVA Inc. is
headquartered in Bethesda, Md. Visit us at http://www.us.areva.com

Bechtel Power Corporation is a global engineering, construction and
project management company that builds fossil and nuclear power
plants. Bechtel has worked on more than 150 nuclear plants around the
globe and has provided engineering and/or construction services to
more than 50 percent of the 103 operating U.S. nuclear power plants.
Bechtel has been rated the #1 overall contractor in the United States
and the #1 power contractor by Engineering News Record magazine each
year for the past seven years. Privately owned with headquarters in
San Francisco, Bechtel has 40 offices around the world and 40,000
employees. The company had revenues of $17.4 billion in 2004. It has
been the No. 1 ranked U.S. contractor seven years running.

SOURCE  Constellation Energy; AREVA Inc.
     -0-                             09/15/2005
     /CONTACT:  Penny Phelps of AREVA, +1-301-841-1600; or Robert L.
Gould of
Constellation Energy, +1-410-234-7433/
     /Web site: http://www.us.areva.com
                http://www.constellation.com
                http://www.unistarnuclear.com /
     (CEG)

CO:  Constellation Energy; AREVA Inc.; Bechtel Power Corporation; UniStar
      Nuclear
ST:  District of Columbia
IN:  OIL UTI
SU:  JVN

RJ-MB
-- DCTH005 --
3004 09/15/2005 10:00 EDT http://www.prnewswire.com

That's a keeper!  Just the other day it dawned on me, with a shudder, that
it won't be long before all of the cornucopians (i.e. economists) start
saying things like: "Well, our blind faith in unregulated free market
economics and our total denial of the consequences of exponential growth on
a finite planet wasn't the problem, after all we were right for over 200
years, and it would have worked for another 200 if given the chance.  No,
the real reason everything has gone to hell is this, that, and the other
thing..."

Cheers,
Jerry


----- Original Message -----
From: <er@...>
To: <energyresources@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 4:23 PM
Subject: [energyresources] America: A Brief Parable


> Comment: You could of course substitute "energy" for "America."
>
> This Modern World
> by Tom Tomorrow
> 11/29/05
>
> America: A Brief Parable
>
> http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19945
>

One way to take care of the bartender is for the drunk to have the U.S.
Treasury print greenbacks [a function that the Constitution gives the
Treasury] and use these greenbacks to pay off the bartender [China and
others].  That would save the drunk the whole interest tab formerly paid
to the bartender.

While at it, disenfranchise the Federal Reserve Bank [which is largely
owned by foreign bankers] and forbid them from printing any more notes
to give that bartender.  In other words, roll back the Federal Reserve
to where it was in early 1913, i.e. non-existent.
Virginia



-----Original Message-----
From: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:energyresources@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Roger Baker
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 1:21 PM
To: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [energyresources] US debt springs eternal


A good way to understand the current US debt situation is to think of
a big-shot drunk (the USA) from Texas is running up a big bar tab.

The new but hardworking bartender named China always fronts him money
for his bar tab.

Meanwhile this loud-talking ex-marine drunk from Texas is the
bartender's reliable main customer. And so the bartender learns how
to be really really good at bar tending and serving the best drinks
at the lowest cost.

The drunk gets fat and lazy and loses his job, and even has to shut
down all his car factories but he still keeps coming back to drink,
and he always promises to pay next week.

Finally the bartender has his own bills and calls for immediate
payment of the tab, and so the drunk finally realizes the situation
is hopeless. So the cops come and tell him he's going to jail if he
doesn't pay up.

But meanwhile, the hard-working bartender has gotten so good that
responsible customers have started to come from all across town to
get served, and so the bartender lives happily ever after. At least
until he runs out of, uh, -- lubrication.

But about the drunk that was going to hauled off to jail? It seems
that he's one of those mean drunks who loves to fight, but thats
another story.  -- Roger, Tx


                         ************************************

  From SF Chronicle

Nation's spending out of line
- David Lazarus
Sunday, November 27, 2005

I wrote Friday about consumers living beyond their means as the
holiday season kicks into high gear. But let's not overlook our
friends in Washington.

Last month, the national debt reached yet another miserable
milestone, passing the $8 trillion mark for the first time. As of
last week, the United States was $8,084,858,891,735.31 in the hole,
according to the Treasury Department.

And it'll only get worse. Brian Riedl, chief budget analyst at the
conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Bush administration is
expected to return to Congress within the next few months to ask
lawmakers -- once again -- to raise the nation's debt ceiling so we
can borrow even more.
"A debt of $8 trillion is certainly a daunting number," Riedl told
me. "I'm not sure we'll ever pay it off."
You heard right. The top number cruncher at the Washington think tank
that's arguably friendliest to the Bush administration has come to
the conclusion that our debt has gotten so out of hand, it may never
go away.

At best, Riedl said, the national debt will be held to "a manageable
level" as a percentage of the overall economy and thus won't
completely ruin us.

But that too might be wishful thinking.

The federal budget deficit is now $319 billion. In other words, we
had to borrow an additional $319 billion this year just to make ends
meet, which is why the total amount owed by the government is higher
than ever.

Riedl estimates that the annual budget shortfall will reach $873
billion 10 years from now. Two years after that, he predicts, the
annual deficit will hit $1 trillion.

By the time that happens, Riedl's calculations show the national debt
doubling to about $16 trillion, or a staggering 74 percent of the
country's projected gross domestic product of $21.5 trillion. "And it
continues to worsen after that," Riedl said as he scrutinized
his spreadsheet. "After 2017, we'll be looking at deficits of $2
trillion a year."

Imagine if your family carried a credit card balance from month to
month and let it get bigger and bigger. That's what our government is
doing.

"Long term, the deficit and debt projections are completely
unsustainable," Riedl said. "Eventually, taxes will have to go
through the roof or spending will be cut."

There's the rub. The fiscal recklessness of the Republican-controlled
White House and Congress can't go on forever. At some point, the
credit card bill comes due. And when that happens, we'll have to find
some way to pay for this mess.

So what's President Bush doing (aside from, perversely, cutting
taxes)? According to Treasury Department figures, the Bush
administration has been aggressively passing out IOUs to foreign
interests.

In fact, Bush has borrowed more money -- $1.05 trillion -- from
foreign governments and banks since taking office than all other
presidents combined.

  From 1776 to 2000, the nation's first 42 presidents borrowed a
combined $1.01 trillion from foreign interests, official statistics
show. In just five years, Bush has out-borrowed them all.

A Treasury spokeswoman confirmed that the numbers are indeed correct.
She declined to comment on the ramifications of the administration's
overseas borrowing.

"It's a big red flag," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the
Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget watchdog group. "We're turning
to the rest of the world to finance us on a massive scale."
The danger, of course, is that if foreign governments and banks
decide that they're tired of holding our IOUs, interest rates would
skyrocket as the nation is forced to beg for high-priced handouts
elsewhere.

"We're creating a huge vulnerability," Bixby said. "It's mortgaging
our future to someone else."
This has become a core issue for the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of
35 economically conservative Democrats who form a voting bloc in
Congress.

"The seriousness of this rapid and increasing financial vulnerability
of our country can hardly be overstated," Tennessee Rep. John Tanner,
a Blue Dog leader and member of the House Ways and Means Committee,
said in a statement.

"The financial mismanagement of our country by the Bush
administration should be of concern to all Americans, regardless of
political persuasion," he said.

The Bush administration, which has not vetoed a single spending bill
(or any other bill) since taking power, has repeatedly countered such
criticism by blaming Congress for unchecked spending.
"Our problem with the deficit is not that we're under-taxed,"
Treasury Secretary John Snow told an interviewer earlier this year.
"Our problem is we spend too much. And the focus has to be on
controlling spending and getting the spending growth under control.

"We're going to continue to be tight and disciplined on spending, and
we're going to continue to keep the American economy going the right
way," he said. "So the revenue side, the government's revenues,
continues to grow."

When Bush took office, the debt ceiling for federal borrowing was
less than $6 trillion and hadn't been raised since 1997.

Last year, Bush signed into a law an $800 billion increase in the
debt ceiling to $8.2 trillion -- the third time in as many years that
a higher credit limit has been required by the free-spending
administration.

A senior administration official told reporters in September that
$8.2 trillion soon won't be enough either.

"We think the first quarter next year is when we expect to hit the
existing debt limit," Treasury Undersecretary Randal Quarles said.

He quickly added: "The administration remains committed to reducing
the deficit."
All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.


David Lazarus' column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Send
tips or feedback to dlazarus@....





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Why does this stupid message keep cropping up?
Richard,
Richmond Hill, ON

--- In energyresources@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Drake"
<brianriab@g...> wrote:
>
> A Google search for:
>
> "The petroleum industry itself has announced that global oil
> production will" peak "in less than ten years!"
>
> suggests that the statement is based on "private documents".
>
> --- In energyresources@yahoogroups.com, "brianriab"
<brianriab@g...>
> wrote:
> > "The petroleum industry itself has announced that global oil
> > production will "peak" in less than ten years!"
> >
> > http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
>

THE WORLD'S TOXIC WASTE DUMP
<http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,387392,00.html>
<http://tinyurl.com/8qbua>
Choking on Chemicals in China
November 28, 2005
By Andreas Lorenz

The chemical plant catastrophe on the Songhua
River reveals the flipside of China's economic
miracle. Most of the country's air and waterways
are hopelessly polluted and the government has
done little to address the problem. Instead,
officials prefer to lie.

Yellow smoke rising from the chemical plant in
Jilin immediately following the Nov. 13 explosion.
<http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,grossbild-548217-3\
87392,00.html>
AP

On Friendship Street in the northeast Chinese
city of Harbin, hundreds of people carrying white
canisters, red buckets, plastic bowls and cooking
pots wait for a tanker truck. They have been
waiting here in the bitter cold since early
morning -- though the water delivery isn't
scheduled until 11 am. Two police officers and
three women from the neighborhood committee keep
an eye on the crowd. Their job is to ensure that
the water is fairly distributed when it arrives
-- at about five liters per person.

Other Harbin residents have lined in front of the
Century Buddha Restaurant on Yilan Street. Twice
a day, for an hour and a half at a time, the
owner dispenses free water from his private well.
Meanwhile, customers at a local supermarket make
off with entire pallets of sparkling water and
juice. "We are now frugal with water," says a
woman in a red woolen cap. "First we use it to
clean vegetables, then to wash our hands and
finally to flush the toilet."

The water emergency in Harbin, an industrial city
of 3.8 million, comes on the heels of an
environmental catastrophe with as yet
unforeseeable consequences. About 100 tons of
toxic chemicals have been floating down the
Songhua River ever since an explosion in Jilin,
located 400 kilometers (248 miles) upstream from
Harbin, released highly toxic benzene compounds.
At least five people were killed and dozens
injured in the Nov. 13 accident in Chemical
Factory 101, and the slick, slowly traveling down
river toward Russia, threatens the drinking water
supply for more than 10 million people between
the northeast Chinese city of Harbin and
Khabarovsk in Siberia.

True to form, the Chinese Communist Party
attempted to twist the disaster into a propaganda
victory, sending convoys of water trucks
decorated with red banners ("Love the people --
deliver water") from other cities and ordering
soldiers to drill for new wells. But try as it
might, the People's Republic cannot obscure the
sheer magnitude of this environmental
catastrophe. Never before has a city as large as
Harbin had to shut off the taps to avoid
poisoning its residents.

The Songhua River disaster. (Map)
<http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,grossbild-548084-3\
87392,00.html>
DER SPIEGEL

The world's toxic waste dump

Even if water began flowing once again to the
city's residents on Tuesday, the horrific
environmental catastrophe reveals the flipside of
the socialist economic miracle. Secretiveness and
sluggish crisis management highlight the price
the Chinese are paying for their boom. And even
as westerners envy the half-communist,
half-capitalist country for its impressive growth
figures and endless backyard market, China is no
longer merely the world's factory. It is also the
world's toxic waste dump.

China's rise as a global power, achieved with
high economic growth rates, is reminiscent of the
conditions in the era of early capitalism.
Everything that drives production is good, and
everything that slows it down -- safety
technology, for example, that prevents industrial
accidents from leading to massive factory
explosions -- is harmful. The result is exploding
tanks, burning factories, collapsing mine pits
and all manner of toxic leaks. According to
official statistics, 350 Chinese die each day in
industrial accidents, but the unofficial figure
is likely to be much higher. "Occupational safety
is a serious problem, because the number of
accidents and deaths remains high," said Wang
Dexue, Deputy Director of the State Office of
Occupational Safety, commenting on the horrifying
figures from the country's manufacturing
industries.

Adding to the problems are economic reforms that
have made many businessmen greedy. China's
laissez-faire brand of socialism doesn't prevent
executives from spending their money on cars and
villas instead of investing it in worker safety
and environmental protection. Although the
government is constantly vowing to monitor
manufacturers more closely, local officials and
party leaders are often in bed with the captains
of industry in China. This Mafia-like alliance
between the politically and economically
ambitious is known as "local protectionism."

Chen Bangzhu, an environmental expert on
Beijing's Parliamentary Council, says he
recognizes an "irrational development" in his
country. In an interview earlier this year, Pan
Yue, the deputy minister of government
environmental agency SEPA, predicted a bitter end
to the economic miracle. "This boom will soon
come to an end," he said in an interview with
SPIEGEL,  "because the environment isn't
cooperating anymore."

Swimming or suicide in the Yangtze

The negative consequences of the boom are
devastating. Five of the world's 10 most polluted
cities are in China. More than two-thirds of all
Chinese rivers and lakes are turning into sewers
-- even before the recent accident, the Songhua
River was hardly a model of cleanliness -- and
more than 360 million people have no access to
clean drinking water. A toxic soup splashes
through the country's waterways, while people
living along the banks die from cancer at
above-average rates. Nowadays, the then
72-year-old former party chairman Mao Zedong's
legendary swimming outing in the Yangtze River in
1966 would no longer be seen as evidence of his
strength, but more as a suicide attempt.

The Chinese capital itself is suffocating in its
own filth and pollution. On many days of the
year, Beijing is covered by a dome of pollution
made up of the exhaust gases from more than 2
million cars, as well as the dust from
construction sites and cement plants. "The
government doesn't want to talk about it before
the 2008 Olympic Games, but the level of exhaust
gases in Beijing's air is dangerously high,"
warns a high-ranking government official.
Satellite measurements have revealed that Beijing
is covered by a blanket of nitrogen dioxide of
previously unheard-of proportions.

And there is no improvement in sight. To meet its
rapidly growing demand for energy, the government
is building coal power plants, with more than 500
planned for the next few years. Although China
has its fair share of windmills and Beijing
promotes renewable energies, well over two-thirds
of the country's electricity requirements are met
by burning coal.

"Because energy is so scarce, the Chinese are now
burning anything that looks like coal," complains
a German environmental expert. And because
filters are not in compliance with international
standards, emissions of sulfur and nitrogen
oxides are "a dimension higher" than in other
industrialized nations. "Half of all coal power
plants," admits a SEPA official, "violate
environmental regulations."

$250 billion of pollution

The People's Republic, which could soon surpass
the United States as the world's largest producer
of greenhouse gases, has lost its ecological
balance and is paying a heavy price as a result.
About 400,000 people die prematurely each year
because of the polluted air they breathe. Experts
estimate the annual loss at 8 to 15 percent of
the gross domestic product -- or up to $250
billion -- a figure that does not include the
costs of treating cancer, skin conditions and
bronchitis.

The Chinese leadership has become increasingly
concerned about the possibility that
environmental damage could jeopardize China's
industrial ascent. After the Harbin incident,
even Prime Minister Wen Jiabao admitted that the
environmental situation is "bleak" and called for
"sustainable growth." But many other party
leaders see this kind of talk as nothing but
Western social nonsense. They prefer to follow
the lead of Mao, who summed up his take on the
environment in 1958 when he said: "Make the high
mountain bow its head; make the river yield its
way." Today's comrades, profiting handsomely from
industrial growth, believe it is cheaper to clean
up in the distant future than to invest in
protecting the environment today.

Besides, the system promotes environmental dramas
such as the one playing out in Harbin now. The
careers of party functionaries are tied to
economic success figures, not to fresh air and
clean water. "The only thing that counts, when it
comes to keeping their jobs or getting a
promotion, is what they're doing to increase the
gross domestic product," says Sze Pang-cheung of
Greenpeace China in Hong Kong. Chinese courts,
says Pang-cheung, are notorious for disallowing
environmental suits or failing to execute
sentences against polluters. Besides, it is
usually cheaper for factories to pay fines than
to install filters or treatment systems.

Lining up for water in Harbin, China. Water was flowing again on Tuesday.
<http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,grossbild-548217-3\
87392,00.html>
AP

Whenever catastrophes do occur, the communist
party responds using the same old Stalinist
approach. In Harbin, as with the SARS crisis two
years ago, authorities initially tried to conceal
or at least downplay the true scope of the
disaster. At first, the managers of the Jilin
PetroChemical Company claimed that the accident
posed no danger whatsoever to the Songhua River.
State-owned television followed suit and
announced that the "accident caused no serious
environmental damage." And when the Harbin city
administration announced its plans to shut off
the water supply, it first offered the
transparent excuse that the pipes needed
"maintenance work." No one believed that the
city's entire system of pipes was shut down for
maintenance at -10°C (14°F), and the icy city was
soon filled with rumors of terrorist attacks or a
predicted earthquake.

"Unjustifiable lies"

Anyone with money fled the city by train or air.
Those who stayed cleared the shelves in the food
sections of places like Wal-Mart and Metro. The
Beijing youth newspaper called the PR gaffe
"unjustifiable lies."

Bit by bit -- and fully ten days after
environmental officials had detected the toxic
spill -- the government began revealing the
facts. "They should have told us the truth from
the very beginning," complains Zhao, a retiree
doing his morning calisthenics in a blue winter
coat and blue cap. Once again, he says, the
poorest are the worst off. "I must now depend on
expensive bottled water. And if I fall ill
because of the poisons in the Songhua River, I'll
have to pay the medical bills myself."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Posted by Tim
AustinTex
--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>

Immigration, which has been shown to reduce wages especially among the
already-poor in America, benefits employers. Like me.

Immigration is hastening the polarization of society into rich and poor.
This is not good for America, and I care because I am a patriot.  Our
strength is the middle class.  I do not like to see it wither.
Virginia Abernethy
Board member, Carrying Capacity Network
www.carryingcapacity.org

....................................................................
-----Original Message-----
From: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:energyresources@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of papp20032000
Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2005 10:16 AM
To: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [energyresources] Re: The Psychology Of McMansions - Washington
Post


Virginia Abernethy wrote:

Just remember you all who don't like American consumerism. These 9000
square foot starter castles would not be built if cheap illegal alien
maids were unavailable. No woman I know wants to dust and clean all
that space, or scrub out 5 bathrooms.

Just the realist in me talking. Now on with the debate.

:::::::::::::

Aha, now I understand. Shouldn't it have been for the slaves brought
from Africa to the States, Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'hara wouldn't
have constructed the brick mansion Tara, that went with the wind. No
poor housewive like Scarlett would want to dust and clean all that
space. Conclusion: building Mc Mansions beyond 9,000 sq. foot, is the
fault of these bloody bastards of the black slaves, who forced poor
Scarlett and her poor white neighbours to build such a big and
unnecessary mansion under threat. Consumerism is the fault of the
Kunta Kinte's. Or perhaps not, because they were not illegal aliens,
after all. They were sold legally in the free market.

And the lady who arrived to this conclusion is a famous doctor...poor
United States!

Pedro from Madrid








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