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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5398)	12/8/2006 4:30:16 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 10087

great swimmers

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5398)	12/15/2006 11:46:24 AM
From: one_less	Respond to of 10087

Bush urged to break US oil dependence By Carola Hoyos in London, Edward Luce in Washington and Krishna Guha in Beijing Published: December 13 2006 22:07 \| Last updated: December 13 2006 22:07 The Bush administration should act decisively to break America’s dependence on oil, said a group of leading US business executives and senior military officers in a report presented on Wednesday to the White House and Congress. The bipartisan group, which includes the chief executives of Fedex, UPS, Dow Chemicals and some of America’s best known retired generals, urged Washington to recognise that “pure market economics will never solve the problem” of US oil dependency. The report poured cold water on the Bush administration’s goal of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, rather than on oil in general. It urged Mr Bush and the new Democrat-controlled Congress to set up a plan to halve the American economy’s oil-intensity by 2030. George W. Bush has repeatedly identified “energy independence” and immigration reform as two of the issues most likely to attract bipartisan support following the Republican loss of control of Capitol Hill in mid-term elections last month. “Events affecting supply or demand anywhere will affect consumers everywhere,” said the report, brought out by the Energy Security Leadership Council, a think tank. “Exposure to price shocks is a function of how much oil a nation consumes and is not significantly affected by the ratio of “domestic oil” to so-called “foreign oil”. The report also warned Mr Bush, who is expected to announce new energy independence measures in his annual State of the Union address to Congress next month, that America’s oil dependence makes it acutely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. America’s transport system is 97 per cent dependent on oil. More than 90 per cent of world oil supply is controlled by foreign governments. “America must address this critical weakness.” Said P.X. Kelley, a retired Marine Corps general. “An oil supply interruption cannot be reasonably dismissed as improbable.” However, there is deep-seated scepticism about the willingness of the Bush administration, which has yet to endorse the theory of global warming, to take the tough steps most energy experts say are necessary to reduce America’s dependence on oil. Last January Mr Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil”. But Mr Bush’s announcement was not followed by any significant change in energy strategy. “There is very little reason to believe that the White House will take the tough measures necessary to make this happen,” said a Washington-based energy lobbyist. “There is no appetite, say, to impose a carbon tax or for putting a floor under the price of oil that would incentivise investors to put their money into alternative energy.” However, the US administration wants to step up co-operation with China on energy efficiency and the use of alternative fuels. Energy and the environment will be among the topics addressed in Friday’s final session of the US-China strategic economic dialogue involving top officials meeting in Beijing. The dialogue is the brainchild of Hank Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, who has a strong track record as an environmentalist and is treated with suspicion by some US conservatives as a result. Lack of binding targets for China and other big emerging market countries such as India to limit their greenhouse gas emissions was one of America’s principal reasons for refusing to ratify the Kyoto accord. ft.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5398)	1/9/2007 10:10:40 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Good Swimmers? Arizona Residents See Rats in Toilets TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Residents of a neighborhood next to the University of Arizona say small white rats have been swimming through sewer pipes and into their toilets. Laura Hagen Fairbanks, spokeswoman for the county's Wastewater Management Department, said she doesn't know where the rodents come from, however they are the kind that researchers use in labs. University representatives point out that the same type of white rats are sold in pet stores as food for snakes and other animals. George Humphrey, spokesman for the Arizona Health Sciences Center said university researchers follow strict guidelines for their lab specimens. Lab rats are euthanized, then double-bagged in red biowaste plastic bags before they are taken to Phoenix and cremated. "There would be no evidence that these are connected to us, and I wouldn't want that to become an urban myth," Humphrey said. In one sighting, Wastewater Management officials said a woman saw a rat in the toilet, left the toilet seat up and put down sticky trap paper in the bathroom. Then she closed the bathroom door so the rat couldn't get into the rest of the house. Once the rat got stuck on the paper, she threw it away. Hagen Fairbanks said no one knows why the rats are found in only one small area of town or why they show their faces only once or twice a year. Making it from the sewer up the lines into someone's toilet is a difficult trip, Hagen Fairbanks said. A four-inch pipe, called the house connection sewer, or HCS, runs from the house to a sewer main. And there's no "trap door" or other barrier in place, she said. But if the lines are running, the rats have to hold their breath and swim uphill in the pipes against the water current. "If the rat makes it through your HCS, that's a determined rat," she said. When calls come in, the department can dispose of the rat if the homeowner hasn't done so already. County workers then flush the sewer line as a precaution to keep any others from making their way up. The Pima County Health Department said it's best not to handle or touch a toilet-surfing rat, although the chance of getting rabies or plague - often associated with rats - is low in this situation. "Usually if an animal that small has rabies it dies before it can transmit the disease," said Patti Woodcock, a Health Department spokeswoman. And a live flea would be necessary to transmit the plague, she said.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5398)	5/22/2007 2:15:55 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Alternative Energy from garbage and waste--- What could be better than a power station that eats up dirty landfill and churns out clean electricity? One facility in Utashinai, Japan, has been doing just that since 2003, using plasma—an electrically induced stream of hot, charged particles—to process up to 220 tons of municipal solid waste a day. Now a bigger and better $425 million plant is scheduled for completion by 2009 in Saint Lucie County, Florida. The operator, Atlanta-based Geoplasma, expects it to generate 160 megawatts of electricity—enough to power 36,000 homes—from a daily diet of trash. At the plant, garbage will be superheated to more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit—about the temperature of the sun’s surface—by a NASA-developed plasma torch. Organic components will be gasifed by the heat; the inorganic remainder will be melted and removed. Syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, will be extracted from the gas output and used to drive turbines and generate electricity. Gases from the plant will be processed to remove dangerous compounds like dioxins, and the company pledges that emissions will be well under state and federal environmental limits. Heavy metals from the inorganic dross will be collected and sold as scrap. Geoplasma hopes to do better than the Japanese facility, which generates just enough power for internal consumption. Operators there say that a chronic shortage of trash and unfavorable electricity prices have hampered the plant’s operations. The Florida facility, however, will be built right next to a large landfill, which the company will dig into at a daily rate of 1,000 tons—along with 2,000 tons of brand-new trash to be trucked in. Geoplasma is negotiating contracts to sell three-quarters of the electricity generated by the plant to a utility company. “It provides a solution to two growing problems for communities: increased waste and the need for more energy,” says Geoplasma president, Hilburn O. Hillestad. “Garbage disposal problems and rising energy costs have driven the economics of a plasma arc solution beyond possible to necessary.”