GLOBAL WARMING or CLIMATE CHANGE - The Financial, Human and Natural Factors

The World Acording to Monsanto

2008-04-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

If you use "Roundup" or any chemical herbicide (weed killers), STOP!!! Especially if you have children or plan to have some. Also stop using GMO foods. Read your label. With food riots going on world wide, how safe is the food that we do have?

Seeds of Suicide
http://www.navdanya.org/publications/seeds-of-suicide.htm

The World According to Monsanto (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMRd8rzkl2k

The World According to Monsanto (2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXFI9lpyQgw&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKdewcfI3qE&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62er_PN4ocg&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taM0thJA1oA&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (6)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLFXpdBp6j8&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (7)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLFXpdBp6j8&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (8)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TILtWq7mpZ0&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_93vbe_BUM&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZGT2kpTn3k&feature=related

The World According to Monsanto (11)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Ujajoy0kg&feature=related

New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
September 8, 2006
http://www.mitra.biz/blog/archives/2006/09/new_evidence_es.html

Songhai Centre

2008-04-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is is a demonstration of what can be done in the world to sustain this planet for future generations.

The biofuel factor in rising food prices

2008-04-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

April 15, 2008 10:42 AM PDT

What's causing the global rise in food prices? Everything.

Growing demand for food in emerging nations, wheat crop failures, currency fluctuation, speculation in the commodities market, hastily conceived government policies, and the growing demand for biofuels have all--among other factors--converged to drive up the price of food, experts say.

"Those who say it's all the fault of biofuels are wrong and those that say that none of the fault belongs to biofuels are wrong," said Walter Falcon, a professor emeritus of international agricultural policy at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy. "There is no doubt biofuels have added to the problem, but biofuels are not causing the demand for meat and soybeans for feed in China...There are a half a dozen things going on and it's hard to sort out who gets the blame."

The severity of the problem has been highlighted by recent violent food riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti, and other emerging nations.

The World Bank also issued a report Monday saying that the surge in prices could push 100 million people into deep poverty. The International Monetary Fund has asked developed nations to put forth solutions to avert

Due to puccinia striiformis, a form of wheat
rust, crop losses of 40 percent are common
and total crop failure can occur. Rust and
drought severely impacted the wheat crop
last year.(Credit: USDA )

even larger shortages.
Meanwhile, several analysts have asserted that demand for biodiesel is prompting speculators in Malaysia and other tropical nations to cut down forests to plant soybeans and other oil crops. The deforestation in turn creates greenhouse gases that can displace a lot of the benefits of burning cleaner fuels.

While biofuels often tend to get mentioned as a cause of skyrocketing food prices, the complexity of the situation is mind-boggling. As a result, fixing it in a relatively straightforward manner doesn't seem likely. (Other experts painted a similar, dour picture for CNET News.com during interviews at the Clean Edge conference earlier this year.)

Steady pressure on food prices has been building for several years because of consumption in emerging nations, said Roz Naylor, a senior fellow at Stanford studying the correlation of food prices and biofuels. That accelerated after outbreaks of wheat rust in India and Pakistan and droughts in Ukraine and Australia.

"I would say that the trigger factor last year was the drought that caused the wheat to go down," she said

Exchange rates have also contributed. Because the shrinking dollar makes U.S. food cheap, other nations can and do buy more food grown here.

Biofuel programs, particularly in the U.S., have also prompted speculators to drive up prices. Biofuels, she added, "are a contributing factor, but they aren't the only one."

Then there are policy triggers, Falcon said. India has imposed bans on the export of non-fragrant rice. That will likely cause rice prices to spike this year.

You can even add rising oil prices to the mix, Falcon added. Pesticides and fertilizer depend on fossil fuel products. Shipping prices are also on the rise: grain transporters have to compete for space on cargo vessels with other bulk products coming to and from China.

This chart shows domestic corn consumption and use. It's going up faster than available cropland. (Credit: USDA )

Corn is probably the commodity most directly impacted by biofuels. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes to ethanol, said Ken Cassman, a professor of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (Worldwide, ethanol accounts for around 5 percent of grain production, according to statistics from the Earth Policy Institute.)

"That amount of demand has come out of nowhere," he said. "Three years ago, the amount of corn used for ethanol was rather small and no one predicted this."

The spike in corn prices began with the Energy Security Act of 2005, which increased the goal for ethanol use in the U.S., and Hurricane Katrina. Replacing the gas additive MTBE also contributed.

Still, it's not a completely clear picture. Increasing meat consumption in China has driven up the price of feed. Meat consumption isn't nearly as large in India, but there is growing demand for milk and cheese, and cows need feed to provide that.

In 2007, farmers shifted acres of soybeans over to corn production. While that partly ameliorated corn prices, it caused soy prices to rise. In turn, that has contributed to the rise in meat prices because soy is a feedstock.

Interestingly, in 2008, farmers are expected to convert a lot of those corn acres back to soy.

"When you shift out of corn, other crops become more valuable," Cassman said.

Cellulosic ethanol, produced from wood chips, and algal biodiesel could begin to lessen the demand for grains and beans in the fuel industry. Both industries, though, are in the experimental phases.

Article from c/net News .com: http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9918741-54.html

Other articles on the subject at: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&pwst=1&resnum=0&q=Biofuels+and+rising+food+prices&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title

The rise of the new energy world order

2008-04-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

By Michael T Klare

Oil at US$110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live - trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all - along with its "First World" allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former "Third World" countries - China and India in particular - have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrializing their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption - a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the US Department of Energy (DoE).

An increase of this sort would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world's primary energy suppliers were capable of producing the needed additional fuels. Instead, we face a frightening reality: a marked slowdown in the expansion of global energy supplies just as demand rises precipitously. These supplies are not exactly disappearing - though that will occur sooner or later - but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring global demand.

The combination of rising demand, the emergence of powerful new energy consumers, and the contraction of the global energy supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world we are familiar with and creating in its place a new world order. Think of it as rising powers/shrinking planet.

This new world order will be characterized by fierce international competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, as well as by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states like China, Japan and the United States to energy-surplus states like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the process, the lives of everyone will be affected in one way or another - with poor and middle-class consumers in the energy-deficit states experiencing the harshest effects. That's most of us and our children, in case you hadn't quite taken it in.

Here, in a nutshell, are five key forces in this new world order which will change our planet:

Intense competition between older and newer economic powers for available supplies of energy. Until very recently, the mature industrial powers of Europe, Asia and North America consumed the lion's share of energy and left the dregs for the developing world. As recently as 1990, the members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of the world's richest nations, consumed approximately 57% of world energy; the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact bloc, 14%; and only 29% was left to the developing world. But that ratio is changing: with strong economic growth in the developing countries, a greater proportion of the world's energy is being consumed by them. By 2010, the developing world's share of energy use is expected to reach 40% and, if current trends persist, 47% by 2030.

China plays a critical role in all this. The Chinese alone are projected to consume 17% of world energy by 2015, and 20% by 2025 - by which time, if trend lines continue, it will have overtaken the United States as the world's leading energy consumer. India, which, in 2004, accounted for 3.4% of world energy use, is projected to reach 4.4% by 2025, while consumption in other rapidly industrializing nations like Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey is expected to grow as well.

These rising economic dynamos will have to compete with the mature economic powers for access to remaining untapped reserves of exportable energy - in many cases, bought up long ago by the private energy firms of the mature powers like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Total of France and Royal Dutch Shell. Of necessity, the new contenders have developed a potent strategy for competing with the Western "majors": they've created state-owned companies of their own and fashioned strategic alliances with the national oil companies that now control oil and gas reserves in many of the major energy-producing nations.

China's Sinopec, for example, has established a strategic alliance with Saudi Aramco, the nationalized giant once owned by Chevron and Exxon Mobil, to explore for natural gas in Saudi Arabia and market Saudi crude oil in China. Likewise, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will collaborate with Gazprom, the massive state-controlled Russian natural gas monopoly, to build pipelines and deliver Russian gas to China. Several of these state-owned firms, including CNPC and India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, are now set to collaborate with Petroleos de Venezuela SA in developing the extra-heavy crude of the Orinoco belt once controlled by Chevron. In this new stage of energy competition, the advantages long enjoyed by Western energy majors has been eroded by vigorous, state-backed upstarts from the developing world.

The insufficiency of primary energy supplies. The capacity of the global energy industry to satisfy demand is shrinking. By all accounts, the global supply of oil will expand for perhaps another half decade before reaching a peak and beginning to decline, while supplies of natural gas, coal and uranium will probably grow for another decade or two before peaking and commencing their own inevitable declines. In the meantime, global supplies of these existing fuels will prove incapable of reaching the elevated levels demanded.

Take oil. The US DoE claims that world oil demand, expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day in 2030, will be matched by a supply that - miracle of miracles - will hit exactly 117.7 million barrels (including petroleum liquids derived from allied substances like natural gas and Canadian tar sands) at the same time. Most energy professionals, however, consider this estimate highly unrealistic. "One hundred million barrels is now in my view an optimistic case," the chief executive officer of Total, Christophe de Margerie, typically told a London oil conference in October 2007. "It is not my view; it is the industry view, or the view of those who like to speak clearly, honestly, and [are] not just trying to please people."

Similarly, the authors of the Medium-Term Oil Market Report, published in July 2007 by the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded that world oil output might hit 96 million barrels per day by 2012, but was unlikely to go much beyond that as a dearth of new discoveries made future growth impossible.

Daily business-page headlines point to a vortex of clashing trends: worldwide demand will continue to grow as hundred of millions of newly-affluent Chinese and Indian consumers line up to purchase their first automobile (some selling for as little as $2,500); key older "elephant" oil fields like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia and Canterell in Mexico are already in decline or expected to be so soon; and the rate of new oil-field discoveries plunges year after year. So expect global energy shortages and high prices to be a constant source of hardship.

The painfully slow development of energy alternatives. It has long been evident to policymakers that new sources of energy are desperately needed to compensate for the eventual disappearance of existing fuels as well as to slow the buildup of climate-changing "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere. In fact, wind and solar power have gained significant footholds in some parts of the world. A number of other innovative energy solutions have already been developed and even tested out in university and corporate laboratories. But these alternatives, which now contribute only a tiny percentage of the world's net fuel supply, are simply not being developed fast enough to avert the multifaceted global energy catastrophe that lies ahead.

According to the DoE, renewable fuels, including wind, solar and hydropower (along with "traditional" fuels like firewood and dung), supplied but 7.4% of global energy in 2004; biofuels added another 0.3%. Meanwhile, fossil fuels - oil, coal and natural gas - supplied 86% of world energy, nuclear power another 6%. Based on current rates of development and investment, the DoE offers the following dismal projection: In 2030, fossil fuels will still account for exactly the same share of world energy as in 2004. The expected increase in renewables and biofuels is so slight - a mere 8.1% - as to be virtually meaningless.

In global warming terms, the implications are nothing short of catastrophic: Rising reliance on coal (especially in China, India and the United States) means that global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to rise by 59% over the next quarter-century, from 26.9 billion metric tons to 42.9 billion tons. The meaning of this is simple. If these figures hold, there is no hope of averting the worst effects of climate change.

When it comes to global energy supplies, the implications are nearly as dire. To meet soaring energy demand, we would need a massive influx of alternative fuels, which would mean equally massive investment - in the trillions of dollars - to ensure that the newest possibilities move rapidly from laboratory to full-scale commercial production; but that, sad to say, is not in the cards.

Instead, the major energy firms (backed by lavish US government subsidies and tax breaks) are putting their mega-windfall profits from rising energy prices into vastly expensive (and environmentally questionable) schemes to extract oil and gas from Alaska and the Arctic, or to drill in the deep and difficult waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. The result? A few more barrels of oil or cubic feet of natural gas at exorbitant prices (with accompanying ecological damage), while non-petroleum alternatives limp along pitifully.

A steady migration of power and wealth from energy-deficit to energy-surplus nations:
There are few countries - perhaps a dozen altogether - with enough oil, gas, coal and uranium (or some combination thereof) to meet their own energy needs and provide significant surpluses for export. Not surprisingly, such states will be able to extract increasingly beneficial terms from the much wider pool of energy-deficit nations dependent on them for vital supplies of energy. These terms, primarily of a financial nature, will result in growing mountains of petrodollars being accumulated by the leading oil producers, but will also include political and military concessions.

In the case of oil and natural gas, the major energy-surplus states can be counted on two hands. Ten oil-rich states possess 82.2% of the world's proven reserves. In order of importance, they are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. The possession of natural gas is even more concentrated. Three countries - Russia, Iran and Qatar - harbor an astonishing 55.8% of the world supply. All of these countries are in an enviable position to cash in on the dramatic rise in global energy prices and to extract from potential customers whatever political concessions they deem important.

The transfer of wealth alone is already mind-boggling. The oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from the importing countries in 2006, and the take for 2007, when finally calculated, is expected to be far higher. A substantial fraction of these dollars, yen and euros have been deposited in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), giant investment accounts owned by the oil states and deployed for the acquisition of valuable assets around the world.

In recent months, the Persian Gulf SWFs have been taking advantage of the financial crisis in the United States to purchase large stakes in strategic sectors of its economy. In November 2007, for example, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) acquired a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup, America's largest bank holding company; in January, Citigroup sold an even larger share, worth $12.5 billion, to the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and several other Middle Eastern investors, including Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The managers of ADIA and KIA insist that they do not intend to use their newly-acquired stakes in Citigroup and other US banks and corporations to influence US economic or foreign policy, but it is hard to imagine that a financial shift of this magnitude, which can only gain momentum in the decades ahead, will not translate into some form of political leverage.

In the case of Russia, which has risen from the ashes of the Soviet Union as the world's first energy superpower, it already has. Russia is now the world's leading supplier of natural gas, the second largest supplier of oil and a major producer of coal and uranium. Though many of these assets were briefly privatized during the reign of Boris Yeltsin, President Vladimir Putin has brought most of them back under state control - in some cases by exceedingly questionable legal means.

He then used these assets in campaigns to bribe or coerce former Soviet republics on Russia's periphery reliant on it for the bulk of their oil and gas supplies. European Union countries have sometimes expressed dismay at Putin's tactics, but they, too, are dependent on Russian energy supplies, and so have learned to mute their protests to accommodate growing Russian power in Eurasia. Consider Russia a model for the new energy world order.

A growing risk of conflict. Throughout history, major shifts in power have normally been accompanied by violence - in some cases, protracted violent upheavals. Either states at the pinnacle of power have struggled to prevent the loss of their privileged status, or challengers have fought to topple those at the top of the heap. Will that happen now? Will energy-deficit states launch campaigns to wrest the oil and gas reserves of surplus states from their control - the George W Bush administration's war in Iraq might already be thought of as one such attempt or to eliminate competitors among their deficit-state rivals?

The high costs and risks of modern warfare are well known and there is a widespread perception that energy problems can best be solved through economic means, not military ones. Nevertheless, the major powers are employing military means in their efforts to gain advantage in the global struggle for energy, and no one should be deluded on the subject. These endeavors could easily enough lead to unintended escalation and conflict.

One conspicuous use of military means in the pursuit of energy is obviously the regular transfer of arms and military-support services by the major energy-importing states to their principal suppliers. Both the United States and China, for example, have stepped up their deliveries of arms and equipment to oil-producing states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan in Africa and, in the Caspian Sea basin, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The United States has placed particular emphasis on suppressing the armed insurgency in the vital Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where most of the country's oil is produced; Beijing has emphasized arms aid to Sudan, where Chinese-led oil operations are threatened by insurgencies in both the South and Darfur.

Russia is also using arms transfers as an instrument in its efforts to gain influence in the major oil- and gas-producing regions of the Caspian Sea basin and the Persian Gulf. Its urge is not to procure energy for its own use, but to dominate the flow of energy to others. In particular, Moscow seeks a monopoly on the transportation of Central Asian gas to Europe via Gazprom's vast pipeline network; it also wants to tap into Iran's mammoth gas fields, further cementing Russia's control over the trade in natural gas.

The danger, of course, is that such endeavors, multiplied over time, will provoke regional arms races, exacerbate regional tensions and increase the danger of great-power involvement in any local conflicts that erupt. History has all too many examples of such miscalculations leading to wars that spiral out of control. Think of the years leading up to World War I. In fact, Central Asia and the Caspian today, with their multiple ethnic disorders and great-power rivalries, bear more than a glancing resemblance to the Balkans in the years leading up to 1914.

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you've known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

In this new world order, energy will govern our lives in new ways and on a daily basis. It will determine when, and for what purposes, we use our cars; how high (or low) we turn our thermostats; when, where, or even if, we travel; increasingly, what foods we eat (given that the price of producing and distributing many meats and vegetables is profoundly affected by the cost of oil or the allure of growing corn for ethanol); for some of us, where to live; for others, what businesses we engage in; for all of us, when and under what circumstances we go to war or avoid foreign entanglements that could end in war.

This leads to a final observation: the most pressing decision facing the next president and Congress may be how best to accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to a system based on climate-friendly energy alternatives.

Michael T Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil. Consider this essay a preview of his newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, which has just been published by Metropolitan Books.

Article from Asia Times: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD17Dj04.html

Exclusive: Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups

2008-04-14T05:41:00.000-07:00

By James Ridgeway Additional reporting by David Corn, Jennifer Wedekind, Daniel Schulman, and Nick Baumann
April 11, 2008

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in "intelligence collection" for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided "protective services" for the National Rifle Association; it handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted "surveillance," and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

BBI, which was headquartered in Easton, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, worked extensively, according to billing records, for public-relations companies, including Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time, these PR outfits were servicing corporate clients fighting environmental organizations opposed to their products or actions. Ketchum, for example, was working for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods; Nichols-Dezenhall, according to BBI records, was working with Condea Vista, a chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to 47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

Like other firms specializing in snooping, Beckett Brown turned to garbage swiping as a key tactic. BBI officials and contractors routinely conducted what the firm referred to as "D-line" operations, in which its operatives would seek access to the trash of a target, with the hope of finding useful documents. One midnight raid targeted Greenpeace. One BBI document lists the addresses of several other environmental groups as "possible sites" for operations: the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Media Services, the Environmental Working Group, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization run by Lois Gibbs, famous for exposing the toxic dangers of New York's Love Canal. For its rubbish-rifling operations, BBI employed a police officer in the District of Columbia and a former member of the Maryland state police.

Beckett Brown's efforts to penetrate environmental groups and other targets came to an end when the business essentially dissolved in 2001 amid infighting between the principals. But the firm's officials went on to work in other security firms that remain active today.

Beckett Brown International began when John C. Dodd III met Richard Beckett at a bar in Easton in 1994. Dodd had recently become a millionaire after his father had sold an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship on Maryland's eastern shore. Beckett ran a local executive recruiting and consulting business. Soon after they met, according to Dodd, Beckett introduced him to Paul Rakowski, a recently retired Secret Service agent, who had put in two decades protecting presidents and foreign heads of state and had become regional manager of the agency's financial crimes division. Rakowski told Dodd he had an idea for a new security business.

Dodd subsequently received a fax of a business plan for the new company. The sender's address at the top of the fax, according to Dodd, read: "11/02/94 USSS Financial Crimes Division/Forgery"—which suggested it had come from a Secret Service office. But Dodd was reluctant to put in the start-up money for the enterprise, because he didn't know who all the partners were. To impress him, Dodd says, Rakowski and his former Secret Service colleagues began taking him and his friends on special tours of the White House. "This wasn't a White House tour conducted by tour guides," he says. "They would take us…to areas that said 'Do not pass this line.'"

At one point, Dodd says, a senior Secret Service agent named Joseph Masonis arranged for him to tour a Secret Service facility. "To encourage me to invest in this company," Dodd notes, "they all said 'why not go up to technical security headquarters [of the Secret Service] and you will get an exclusive tour.'…They showed me everything....They were worried about someone flying way up high in a plane, miles from the White House, jumping out of a plane, skydiving, popping the chute and getting on the White House grounds without anybody knowing it. They were working on the technology to pick that up." Dodd says he was blown away by what he saw. (Masonis says, "I have never taken Mr. Dodd to any facility in D.C.") And at a waterfront party, Dodd says, he was introduced to and deeply impressed by George Ferris, another Secret Service officer and an expert in demolitions.

Eventually, Dodd says, he agreed to be the sole investor of the new firm, and he put up $170,000, the first of what would be several loans at 15 percent interest. (His investment in the firm, Dodd estimates, would grow to a total of $700,000.) The company was officially launched in August 1995, named after Beckett and Sam Brown, a lawyer who helped get it started.

Rakowski, Masonis, and Ferris were officials in the firm.

Business was good. In early 1997, Beckett Brown provided security services for Bill Clinton's second inauguration, landing a contract worth nearly $300,000. Early clients also included Phillip Morris, Mary Kay, Browning-Ferris Industries, and Nichols-Dezenhall, a Washington-based firm founded in 1987 by Nick Nichols and Eric Dezenhall that specialized in crisis communications, particularly for corporations involved in biotechnology, product safety, and environmental controversies. BBI provided protection for retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, Dodd says, and there was talk it might also get a job to guard the Rolling Stones.

NEXT PAGE: "Alley is locked by iron gates. 7 dumpsters in alley—take your pick."

By 1998, BBI had 22 employees working in five different divisions, along with subcontractors that it hired as operatives. The company also looked abroad for new opportunities and recruited more law enforcement and intelligence veterans. David Bresett, a former chief of the Secret Service's foreign intelligence branch, joined the firm as a vice president. (A company biography noted that Bresett, while detailed to the CIA, had directed the investigation that identified the terrorists who blew up Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.) The firm retained Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and earlier one of the government officials responsible for overseeing U.S. support of the Nicaraguan contras, as a consultant at $75,000 a year. "I did due diligence on a couple of customers," Cannistraro recalls. On the advice of Cannistraro and Bresett, BBI turned down a $1 million job with the Church of Scientology, according to Dodd. (Bresett did not respond to a message asking for comment.) At one point, an employee named Tim Ward, who had been a sergeant in the Maryland state police, traveled to Saudi Arabia for the company, according to Dodd.

Phil Giraldi, a former CIA officer, was also on the payroll. According to Giraldi, there was not a lot of work for him and Cannistraro. "We would go to a company like Enron and see if they had any issues if they were looking to acquire a company," he recalled. "See if the [company to be acquired] is connected to the Russia mob. That's what we were selling. We were not very successful." Giraldi left the firm in 1999. By then, he had become aware of the firm's more unconventional activities: "Scooping garbage, trying to get penetrations of companies and environmental groups. I didn't know a lot of the details." But, he says, he knew BBI was "working on Greenpeace."

In 2000, the firm—which had changed its name to S2i after Richard Beckett left the company—was targeting a group of activist organizations opposed to genetically engineered food that had formed a coalition called GE Food Alert. In the fall of 2000, with these groups poised to assail Taco Bell, S2i operatives got on the case.

Their thoughts soon turned to garbage.

On September 26, Jay Bly, a former Secret Service agent working for S2i, sent an email to Tim Ward, the former Maryland state trooper on the payroll:
Received a call from Ketchum yesterday afternoon re three sites in DC. It seems Taco Bell turned out some product made from bioengineered corn. The chemicals used on the corn have not been approved for human consumption. Hence Taco Bell produced potential glow-in-the-dark tacos. Taco Bell is owned by Kraft. The Ketchum Office, New York, has the ball. They suspect the initiative is being generated from one of three places:

1.Center for Food Safety, 7th & Penn SE

2.Friends of the Earth, 1025 Vermont Ave (Between K & L Streets)

3.GE Food Alert, 1200 18th St NW (18th & M)

#1 is located on 3rd floor. Main entrance is key card. Alley is locked by iron gates. 7 dempsters [sic] in alley—take your pick.

#2 is in the same building as Chile Embassy. Armed guard in lobby & cameras everywhere. There is a dumpster in the alley behind the building. Don't know if it is tied to bldg. or a neighborhood property. Cameras everywhere.

#3 is doable but behind locked iron gates at rear of bldg.

In this email, Bly explained the urgency and the goal: "Apparently there is an article or press release due out next week and [Ketchum] would like some pre release information." He then turned practical: "I want to send Sarah [another BBI employee] to site #1 for a job inquiry. She can see how big the offices are and get the lay of the land. Maybe this will narrow the field. If they have a job opening could she work there for two or three days to find out what's going on?" The Friends of the Earth site, he noted, would be tougher to penetrate. As for the garbage of GE Food Alert, Bly had a plan: "if we can get some help from our friends who ride the truck. The alley is tight. I think the truck can drive down the alley but the container probably is rolled out and dumped. Looks like one dumpster for the building. I'm sitting on the building at 4:00 am tomorrow morning (if Ketchum gives us a budget)." And Bly noted that there were other possible opportunities: "we have found some other affiliates with the above groups. We are looking for their locations in [Washington, D.C.] and hopefully a more S2i friendly site."

The following day, Bly emailed Ward about his early morning surveillance:

Re: Dumpster Dive.

I got hold of Jim Daron [a Washington police officer working for BBI] yesterday. He was supposed to do Vermont Ave and Penn Ave SE last night. I have not heard from him today—what's new. I did 18th St. Weard [sic] set up—the dumpster is behind locked gates. The truck drives down the alley and rings for the night guard to open the gate. The guard comes out, unlocks and goes back into the building (probably pissed off because they woke him up), the guys walk the bags out to the truck one at a time. When they finish they locked the gate behind them. There was so much trash they had to compact the truck two times while they were there. I did not find anything from the 5th floor, but the good news is it's doable.

On September 28,Ward responded:

Good news! Think that once Jim [Daron] calls you back we will know where we stand. If he can't get in with the shield, it will be difficult at sight #1. I think #2 we can do regardless. The issue is a hot one in general. I've been following it from here. Don't forget our GP [Greenpeace] boy in Baltimore has been handling the work for GP. It may be worth a check in the city. Maybe one of our BPD [Baltimore Police Department] guys can hit that one. When you talk with the client push the fact that their client (the cheese people)…should put together a trend tracking program for the future. The anti's now have found an exposed corporate target and they will be back for more blood.

This email appears to suggests that the Beckett Brown operatives were considering using a Washington police officer's badge to gain access to the garbage of the Center for Food Safety. And Ward was apparently hoping that Beckett Brown could persuade Ketchum to hire the company to monitor the ongoing activity of the activists opposed to genetically-engineered food.
These emails do not indicate whether Beckett Brown succeeded in scooping valuable intelligence from the garbage at these three sites. But Beckett Brown had already managed to penetrate the anti-GE food network. In a 1999 report to Ketchum—entitled "Intelligence Analysis for Dow Global Trends Tracking Team" —BBI described in detail a strategy session held by 35 representatives of various environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, US PIRG, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The report noted the targets the coalition was considering (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, the Grocery Manufacturers of America) and listed various tactics the group had discussed. Such strategy meetings of this coalition were confidential, according to Dale Wiehoff of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Neither Bly nor Ward would discuss this series of emails or any of the work they did for Beckett Brown or S2i. "Legally, I can't tell you anything about what the company did," Ward says. He accuses Dodd of trying to "besmirch the names of the people involved" in the company.

Rakowski, Daron, and Beckett did not reply to requests for comments. Nor did Ketchum. A spokesman for Kraft says, "After a review of our historical procurement files, we have no record of work on or about Sept. 26, 2000, with either Ketchum, Beckett Brown International or S2i. In the late '90s, Ketchum provided some PR services to Kraft for one of our coffee brands. However, Ketchum does not currently provide PR services to Kraft and has not done so for many years."

Time and again, according to Beckett Brown records, the firm looked to trash for intelligence. These trash runs at one point did raise concern within the company. In 1998, David Queen, a senior vice president, sent Rakowski a memo about "dumpster diving." Queen, a former deputy assistant secretary of the treasury and once a U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, noted that in certain instances searching trash could raise "some troublesome issues," including possible violation of state trespass laws and "possible violation of trade secrets laws." He concluded, "If BBI expects to use this method of information gathering, it would be prudent to get the opinion of outside counsel which could be relied upon by BBI should there be future litigation directed against BBI."

Whether or not BBI sought counsel, the dumpster diving continued. In November 1999, according to company documents, Jay Bly traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, to meet with a private detective. He told the investigator that BBI wanted to obtain garbage from the offices of Whetstone Chocolates, a locally based candy manufacturer. (According to BBI billing records, BBI at the time was working for Nichols-Dezenhall on a "Nestle Project-Florida." At press time, Nestle had not responded to a request for comment.) This private investigator and another local gumshoe then tracked the garbage men who made pick-ups at Whetstone and tried to persuade one of the drivers to turn over the trash from Whetstone. The trash collectors wouldn't cooperate. A month later, another private investigator apparently attempted to grab the garbage himself. He sent Bly a fax reporting, "We made a pickup run on December 23,1999 as requested. We were unable to enter the area where the dumpster is located as there appeared to [be] a company party taking place in the break area located in front of the dumpster. We remained in the area for a short time, however, the party continued and we departed the area." A December 1, 1999, BBI briefing paper on a "Nichols-Dezenhall/St. Augustine Project" reported on activities within Whetstone and said that "BBI now has operative in place."

Eric Dezenhall says that he cannot identify clients or vendors with which his firm worked. But he notes in an email that he never saw the briefing paper referring to a BBI operative and Whetstone and that "we would not have been involved in any infiltration operation." He adds, "Nichols-Dezenhall Communications never authorized, directed, or was informed of unethical or illegal activities by forensic investigators employed on any project we have worked on. With regard to our work on matters in which we were teamed with investigators, we are aware only of information-gathering through public records checks and other legitimate means." Dezenhall says that "any use of an 'operative' to infiltrate a company…would be counter to our business interests and any information gathered in that manner would be unusable in court." (In 2003, Dezenhall bought out Nichols and renamed the company Dezenhall Resources. "Our client base and employees from the 1990s have turned over almost entirely," Dezenhall says. According to a source familiar with the firm's current operations, the company has moved away from handling corporations involved in environmental controversies.) Another target of BBI's trash men was Fenton Communications, the liberal PR firm headed by David Fenton that for years has assisted environmental causes. On December 8, 1999, a BBI operative, according to an internal report, "sat surveillance" at Fenton's Washington home, beginning at 2:50 am. In the report, the operative noted the time of the morning garbage pick-up and that he returned to the office to "sort material" and "analyze." BBI ran background checks on both Fenton and his then-wife. The company's files contained photographs of their house as well as client lists, billing information, and personnel information from Fenton Communications. Between July 1998 and February 2001, Fenton says, his firm experienced several break-ins, during which boxes of files and two laptops were stolen. The culprits were never caught.

NEXT PAGE: "It was Mission Impossible-like."

Greenpeace was the target of one of BBI's more elaborate—and cinematic—intelligence-gathering efforts, according to company documents and an interview with an eyewitness. Jennifer Trapnell, who was dating Ward in the late 1990s, recalls an evening when she accompanied Ward on a job in Washington D.C. "He said they were trying to get some stuff on Greenpeace," she says. Ward wore black clothes and had told her to dress all in black, too: "It was Mission Impossible-like." In Washington, Ward parked his truck in an alley, she remembers, and told her to stay in the truck and keep a lookout. In the alley, he met a couple of other men, whose faces Trapnell did not see clearly. Ward was talking on a walkie-talkie with others, and they all walked off. About an hour later, the men came back and placed two trash bags in Ward's car. Trapnell says she didn't know what they did with the bags—and Ward never explained. In addition to Ward's work, on several occasions in 2000, Jim Daron, the Washington cop who also worked for BBI, submitted reports to BBI for surveillance of Greenpeace's offices.

BBI gathered numerous internal Greenpeace documents, including financial reports. It also obtained the instructions for using the security system at Greenpeace's offices. And the Greenpeace files at BBI included a handwritten document that appears to record attempts to crack the security codes on entry doors with notations such as "codes do not match" and "open."
BBI prepared reports on Greenpeace—based on "confidential sources"—for Ketchum. In at least one case, according to Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace (who reviewed these reports at Mother Jones' request), a BBI report written for Ketchum contained information tightly held within the group about planned upcoming events. And a December 2, 1999 BBI report (which does not mention Ketchum) noted that Greenpeace had chosen Kellogg's, Kraft, and Quaker as "their main targets in the GE campaign," that it was developing a campaign tactic called "Food-Aid Expose" (which would highlight the export of genetically-modified foods to other countries), and that it was helping a Wall Street Journal reporter track food companies involved in the debate over genetically-engineered foods.

Over the years, Greenpeace has repeatedly been the target of public relations firms working for industry, and the group has experienced burglaries and caught would-be spies posing as students seeking employment. But Greenpeace officials say they did not know that their organization was under surveillance during that period of time.

In the late 1990s, Greenpeace was working with environmental groups in the stretch of Louisiana dubbed "Cancer Alley," organizing against various forms of industry pollution. Its work there and that of its Louisiana partners became another target for BBI. In 1998, according to BBI emails, correspondence, and records, BBI retained Mary Lou Sapone, a self-described "research consultant," who recruited a paid operative in Louisiana to infiltrate an environmental group called CLEAN. Sapone had something of a talent for infiltrating activist groups. In the late 1980s, working for a security firm called Perceptions International, which was, in turn, working for the U.S. Surgical Corporation, she penetrated a Connecticut-based animal-rights group, gathering evidence on an activist who would later serve jail time for planting a pipe bomb near the parking space of the company's CEO. The activist would eventually accused Sapone of coaxing her into the plot.

Sapone's operative in Louisiana relayed to her information on what the local enviros were planning, provided gossip on the internal rivalries, and identified the scientists aiding the groups. She passed the intelligence to BBI. In an August 20, 1998 "client briefing," BBI boasted that "our operative is being nominated to the citizen action panels for local industries" and it asked which local industry Condea Vista, the chemical manufacturing firm, would prefer the operative to focus on. (The previous year, Condea Vista had lost a lawsuit brought by the residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, against the company for the 1994 ethylene dichloride leak and had been slapped with a $7 million judgment.) Another BBI document noted, "The operative has been trained to be inquiring, but not participatory. Operatives are not allowed to offer suggestions or `help' targets in any way. They are trained to seek documents, ID friends and foe legislators and regulators, follow money trails, ID informants, discover future targets."

BBI produced detailed confidential reports for Ketchum on the environmental activism underway in Louisiana. And BBI records indicate that the firm worked for Nichols-Dezenhall on a "Condea Vista Project." Citing "strict confidentiality agreements," Dezenhall will not say whether his firm worked with Condea Vista (or any other company), but he notes in an email, "It would be extremely damaging and wrong…to interpret or portray the term 'operative,' a generic term often used by investigators and former law enforcement types to mean an individual, as implying someone necessarily engaged in illicit actions such as corporate espionage." (Sapone did not respond to a message requesting comment.)

Penetrating a citizens group was not a new endeavor for BBI. In 1996 and 1997 in northern California, where Browning-Ferris Industries was engaged in a battle over the future of a garbage dump, BBI conducted what its records labeled "covert monitoring" and "intelligence gathering" on the North Valley Coalition, a citizens group opposed to the Browning-Ferris project. In September 1997, BBI received a payment of $198,881.05 from BFI.
NEXT PAGE: The firm's Obama connection.

BBI fell apart in 2001 amid arguments over the company's finances. "It was not a happy company," says Phil Giraldi, the ex-CIA man who had worked there, adding, "I have worked for a number of security companies. Some are ethical, some are not. Beckett Brown was not especially so." When the company was collapsing, Dodd says, he heard that document shredding was underway in its offices, and one weekend he went to the offices and carted off scores of cartons stuffed with records.

BBI's demise led to a lawsuit. Dodd sued Rakowski, Ward, Bly and two others, claiming they had engaged in fraud. In a pretrial statement, Dodd accused them of having "dipped into the Company's coffers for generous salaries, commissions, bonuses, loans, benefits and unsupported expense reimbursements, all the while presenting false and misleading financial information" to Dodd. In 2005, after a month-long trial in Maryland's Talbot County Circuit Court, Dodd lost. He now was out the $700,000 he had invested in the company. By his own estimate, he had spent over a million dollars in legal fees. And he was mad. He claims that he only learned of the firm's sleazier actions after the company imploded and that his lawyers encouraged him not to raise that issue as part of his lawsuit. But after the trial was done, Dodd began contacting some of BBI's targets and shared its records with them. "I wanted the facts to come out," he says. "I feel terrible that my money was used to screw these people over."

Today, boxes and boxes of BBI records sit in warehouse space Dodd rents. Dodd has not gone through all of the material. (The records include internal and confidential financial reports of a local bank that had been the subject of a takeover.) Much of what BBI did remains a mystery to Dodd. A law firm representing the Mars candy corporation pored over all the records, according to Dodd and his lawyer, apparently in search of evidence that Mars had been the target of corporate espionage. (The files contain records indicating that BBI obtained information on the phone calls made by a PR man working with Mars.) Then Dodd heard nothing further from this law firm. Dodd says he would be delighted to testify before Congress about BBI—but no one has invited him to do so.

As for BBI's principals, they are still operating. Tim Ward now runs a security firm called Chesapeake Strategies, which bills itself as "a multinational security and investigative firm comprised of professionals with extensive security experience." Jay Bly works there. Its website boasts that it maintains affiliated offices in Paris, Beijng, Tokyo, Qatar, and Kuwait and that "many team members continue to hold Secret and Top Secret government security clearances."

The firm has been active in protecting research facilities from animal-rights activists. In 2002, it won a contract from the General Services Administration "for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products." It was listed on a 2005 line-up of Defense Department contractors. "I don't have any comment about what I am currently doing or what I plan to do," Ward says.

Joseph Masonis works for the Annapolis Group, a security firm. Its website notes that the company's managing directors "have over forty-five years of combined experience with the United States Secret Service." Paul Rakowski married Amy DiGeso, who was CEO of Mary Kay when BBI worked for the cosmetics firm. (Currently, she is a top executive at Estee Lauder.) Rakowski's current occupation—if he has one—is not publicly known.

Richard Beckett is now CEO of Maryland-based Global Security Services, which, according to its website, offers clients a "suite of business solutions" that includes "intelligence services," "disaster management," "information systems security," and "paramilitary operations." Last year, his firm provided bodyguards to Senator Barack Obama.

James Ridgeway is Mother Jones' Senior Washington Correspondent.

Article from Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/04/firm-spied-on-environmental-groups.html

Air Pollution Killing The Fragrance of Flowers

2008-04-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 11:52:28 AM PDT

Air pollution from our power plants and cars is destroying the fragrance of flowers. This may sound like a silly, liberal "tree-hugging" complaint about the evils of air pollution. But, think about the ecological impact: Our lovely little bees use the scent of flowers like a roadmap to the source in order to pollinate flowers for our bouquets as well as our flowering plants for our food supply.

A new University of Virginia study indicates that air pollution destroys the fragrance of flowers, which inhibits the ability of pollinating insects to follow the trail of the flower's scent to the flower:

The scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment, such as in the 1800s, could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,200 meters; but in today's polluted environment downwind of major cites, they may travel only 200 to 300 meters,

Essentially certain pollutants chemically alter the flower's scent molecules, destroying the fragrance:

To investigate this, they created a mathematical model of how the scents of flowers travel with the wind. The scent molecules produced by flowers are very volatile and they quickly bond with pollutants such as ozone, hydroxyl and nitrate radicals, which destroy the aromas they produce. This means that instead of traveling intact for long distances with the wind, the scents are chemically altered and the flowers, in a sense, no longer smell like flowers. This forces pollinators to search farther and longer and possibly to rely more on sight and less on smell.

The study found that "air pollution destroys the aroma of flowers, by as much as 90 percent from periods before automobiles and heavy industry."

If the pollinating insect can not pick up the flower's scent, then it is harder to find the flower. If the bee can not find the flower, it can not pollinate the flower. If flowers are not pollinated, this affects the ability of the plant to "proliferate and diversify." As an organic gardener, I rely on this pollination so my plants produce lovely yummies to eat.

The result, potentially, is a vicious cycle where pollinators struggle to find enough food to sustain their populations, and populations of flowering plants, in turn, do not get pollinated sufficiently to proliferate and diversify.

This side effect of air pollution may also "partially explain why wild populations of some pollinators, particularly bees -- which need nectar for food -- are declining in several areas of the world, including California and the Netherlands."

Other studies, as well as the actual experience of farmers, have shown that populations of bees, particularly bumblebees, and butterflies have declined greatly in recent years. Fuentes and his team of U.Va. researchers ... believe that air pollution, especially during the peak period of summer, may be a factor.

We know air pollution is sickening and killing people, yet we don't seem to really care...at least not enough to rank air pollution as one of the highest issues to be addressed by Congress. Instead, the public generally ranks environmental issues at the bottom. We need to realize that environmental issues are now public health and security issues as well.

Story at "Daily KOS": http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/11/144923/888

Instant Expert: Climate Change

2008-04-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

15:53 01 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Fred Pearce

Climate Change - Learn more in our continually updated special report.

Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves.

Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores. These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years - a period when natural influences on global temperatures, such as solar cycles and volcanoes should have cooled us down. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.

Climatologists reporting for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say we are seeing global warming caused by human activities and there are growing fears of feedbacks that will accelerate this warming.

Global greenhouse
People are causing the change by burning nature's vast stores of coal, oil and natural gas. This releases billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year, although the changes may actually have started with the dawn of agriculture, say some scientists.

The physics of the "greenhouse effect" has been a matter of scientific fact for a century. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps the Sun's radiation within the troposphere, the lower atmosphere. It has accumulated along with other man-made greenhouse gases, such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

If current trends continue, we will raise atmospheric CO2 concentrations to double pre-industrial levels during this century. That will probably be enough to raise global temperatures by around 2°C to 5°C. Some warming is certain, but the degree will be determined by feedbacks involving melting ice, the oceans, water vapour, clouds and changes to vegetation.

Warming is bringing other unpredictable changes. Melting glaciers and precipitation are causing some rivers to overflow, while evaporation is emptying others. Diseases are spreading. Some crops grow faster while others see yields slashed by disease and drought. Strong hurricanes are becoming more frequent and destructive. Arctic sea ice is melting faster every year, and there are growing fears of a shutdown of the ocean currents that keep Europe warm for its latitude. Clashes over dwindling water resources may cause conflicts in many regions.

As natural ecosystems - such as coral reefs - are disrupted, biodiversity is reduced. Most species cannot migrate fast enough to keep up, though others are already evolving in response to warming.

Thermal expansion of the oceans, combined with melting ice on land, is also raising sea levels. In this century, human activity could trigger an irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic glaciers. This would condemn the world to a rise in sea level of six metres - enough to flood land occupied by billions of people.

The global warming would be more pronounced if it were not for sulphur particles and other pollutants that shade us, and because forests and oceans absorb around half of the CO2 we produce. But the accumulation rate of atmospheric CO2 has increased since 2001, suggesting that nature's ability to absorb the gas could now be stretched to the limit. Recent research suggests that natural CO2 "sinks", like peat bogs and forests, are actually starting to release CO2.

Deeper cuts

At the Earth Summit in 1992, the world agreed to prevent "dangerous" climate change. The first step was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which finally came into force during 2005. It will bring modest emission reductions from industrialised countries. But many observers say deeper cuts are needed and developing nations, which have large and growing populations, will one day have to join in.

Some, including the US Bush administration, say the scientific uncertainty over the pace of climate change is grounds for delaying action. The US and Australia have reneged on Kyoto. During 2005 these countries, and others, suggested "clean fuel" technologies as an alternative to emissions cuts.

In any case, according to the IPCC, the world needs to quickly improve the efficiency of its energy usage and develop renewable non-carbon fuels like: wind, solar, tidal, wave and perhaps nuclear power. It also means developing new methods of converting this clean energy into motive power, like hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Trading in Kyoto carbon permits may help.

Other less conventional solutions include ideas to stave off warming by "mega-engineering" the planet with giant mirrors to deflect the Sun's rays, seeding the oceans with iron to generate algal blooms, or burying greenhouse gases below the sea.

The bottom line is that we will need to cut CO2 emissions by 70% to 80% simply to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations - and thus temperatures. The quicker we do that, the less unbearably hot our future world will be.

Report From "NewScientist Environment: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn9903

Protecting Health From Climate Change: Who Experts Call For Health Systems To Play A Greater Role

2008-04-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

08 Apr 2008

Directly and indirectly, climate change profoundly affects health, leading to a substantial burden on health systems. No country will be spared. Over 1000 extreme weather events hit the WHO European Region in the last three decades. Climate change increases the frequency and severity of these events. According to the latest projections, the future effects of heat-waves, floods and droughts, worsening air pollution and changes in vectors and plant distribution are likely to harm the health of millions of people, if global warming is unconstrained.

A number of factors will determine how much people's health will be affected. Geography, health-system preparedness, health status, age, social class and support systems affect people's vulnerability. The rural poor, people who are very young, elderly and/or infirm, and workers exposed to extreme weather events will be most at risk. Climate change can significantly worsen health inequities and put additional stress on poorer groups.

Health systems can play a pivotal role in protecting health from climate change. While climate change has largely been framed in terms of environmental and economic concerns, experts are calling for a greater role for health systems in dealing with its immediate and future health consequences.

Recognizing this, in celebrating World Health Day on 7 April, WHO will urge countries to give their health systems an important, new and proactive role in protecting health from the adverse effects of climate change. "Climate change puts our health at risk and, if current trends continue, future generations will have to bear the consequences," says Dr Marc Danzon, WHO Regional Director for Europe. "Through stronger health systems, the global community will be better prepared to cope with climate-related health challenges".

Health systems' role in protecting health from climate change

Climate-related health effects put additional pressure on health systems, which will require substantial strengthening to address the extra burden of disease. While their capacity varies greatly across the Region, all systems can take a number of common actions to reinforce the response: put health concerns high on the climate-change agenda, implement strategies to limit health effects, advocate action by other sectors that will benefit health and lead by example.

Many of the projected health effects can be controlled through well-known health-system interventions, including disease surveillance, disaster preparedness and primary health care. Health professionals are at the front line in protecting health from climate change; they should receive appropriate training and skill development, so that they are prepared to cope with, for example, new patterns of infectious diseases, and the symptoms and treatments of heat-related diseases. The provision of accurate and timely information would help decision-makers and citizens to take proper action.

Health systems are best placed to act as advocates with sectors where reducing emissions can lead to co-benefits for health. For example, promoting a shift towards walking and cycling as means of transport can lower emissions of carbon, air pollutants and noise, while providing immediate opportunities to increase physical activity and reduce traffic-related injuries. Finally, health systems can set an example by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases from their activities and facilities."

There are numerous good examples throughout the Region of health systems helping to tackle climate-related health problems. This year, World Health Day provides an opportunity to share best practices and to place these important issues at the heart of local, national and international dialogue, policies and actions," concludes Dr Nata Menabde, Deputy Regional Director, WHO Regional Office for Europe. "While there is no doubt of the reality of climate change, health systems can do a lot to reduce the magnitude of its health consequences."

ld Health Day 2008 in the WHO European Region

On World Health Day, the WHO Regional Office for Europe will release a new publication to draw decision-makers' attention to convincing evidence of climate-related health threats and why and how they should be urgently addressed. Protecting health in Europe from climate change describes current and projected health effects and the challenges they present to health systems in the European Region. It provides practical guidance on action by individuals and countries.

In addition, high-level events will take place in many countries in the WHO European Region on 7 April. These include a policy briefing on protecting health from climate change, given by the Regional Office in collaboration with the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, in Brussels, Belgium, and a special session on World Health Day at the State Duma (parliament) of the Russian Federation. These and other events will help maximize public awareness of and action to protect health from the adverse effects of climate change.

Further information on World Health Day 2008 is available on the web sites of WHO headquarters (http://www.who.int/world-health-day) and the Regional Office (http://www.euro.who.int/World-Health-Day-2008)

World Health Organization Regional Office For Europe

Fact sheet

Taking Action To Protect Health In Europe From Climate ChangeMan-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly from the burning of fossil fuels, are warming the earth. GHGs have increased by 70% over the last four decades, trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere. Globally, the largest increases in emissions have come from the energy-supply sector. In the WHO European Region, transport-related emissions have played an equally large role; such emissions in the European Union (EU) are projected to increase by about 50% between 2000 and 2030.

The global average surface temperature has increased by approximately 0.74 °C over the last 100 years. The projected increase for Europe between the ends of the 20th and 21st centuries varies from 2.3 °C to 6 °C, depending on the scenario. Populations in the Region are exposed to climate change directly through changing weather patterns and indirectly through changes in water, air, food quality and quantity, ecosystems, agriculture, livelihoods and infrastructure. These exposures profoundly influence health and well-being.

Heat-waves

An increase in the frequency and intensity of heat-waves is one of the most certain consequences of climate change. Thermal stress and death rates are directly related. In EU countries, mortality is estimated to increase by 1-4% for each one-degree rise in temperature. Over 70 000 excess deaths were reported from 12 European countries following the heat-wave in summer 2003. In the EU, 86 000 extra deaths are projected every year, with a global mean temperature increase of 3 °C, in 2071-2100. The elderly are most at risk of death from heat-stroke and cardiovascular, renal, respiratory and metabolic disorders.

Heat-related illness and death are largely preventable. Ensuring health systems' preparedness and ability to respond, reducing individual and community exposure to heat and providing early warning systems and advice to citizens can help to reduce mortality. Since 2003, many countries have developed and implemented heat health action plans.

Cold weather and cold waves

Although cold waves are projected to decrease as a consequence of global warming, they will still affect a major part of the European Region, especially in northern latitudes. Most European countries suffer from 5-30% excess winter mortality. Inadequate indoor thermal temperatures are one of the main conditions causing health effects, including cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. Deaths and diseases related to cold waves will disproportionately affect poorer households that cannot afford to pay for fuel, as in the recent cold spell in Tajikistan. Additional health risks may arise from the use of polluting solid fuels to cope with the cold, which is reported from at least 14 countries in the Region. The use of solid fossil fuels is linked to 13 000 deaths in children yearly.

Protecting health from cold requires better shielding of indoor environments from outdoor conditions. Important factors include energy efficiency and thermal performance in built environments, as well as individual behaviour. Tariff and social-support policies are particularly needed to protect the poorer segments of society. In addition, action by health systems in this area must include considering location and thermal protection when planning their own facilities.

Floods

Flooding is the most frequent adverse weather-related event in the European Region. Projected climate-related increases in precipitation are likely to make floods more frequent and severe. Winter floods are projected to rise in north-western countries and flash floods, throughout the Region. Coastal flooding is likely to threaten up to 1.6 million more people every year in the EU.

Direct health effects are caused by flood waters, and include drowning, heart attacks and injuries. Indirect health effects follow damage to infrastructure, and include infectious diseases, rodent-borne diseases, poisoning and post-traumatic stress disorder (sleeplessness, difficulties in concentration and psychosocial disturbances).

Recent floods in the Region have shown the need to shift the focus of action from disaster response to long-term risk management. The approach should include assessing the health effects of structural measures, developing regulations and insurance policies for building in flood-prone areas, creating early warning systems and planning for flood preparedness, with special attention to hospitals, ambulance stations, retirement homes and schools. Campaigns to raise awareness before floods occur are critical for prevention and control.

Malnutrition and food safety

With climate change, food productivity is projected to decrease in the Mediterranean area, south-eastern Europe and central Asia, where food security is at risk. Crop yields could decrease up to 30% in central Asia by the middle of the 21st century and threaten food security. This may lead to a worsening of malnutrition, especially in the rural poor, whose family income is closely linked to food production.

Climate change also raises the issue of food safety. Higher temperatures favour the growth of bacteria in food. Infections with Salmonella spp. rise by 5-10% for each one-degree increase in weekly temperature, at ambient temperatures above 5 °C. Hot weather can also favour refrigeration failure and the emergence of flies and other pests.

Nutrition and food-safety control are big challenges that will grow with climate change. This is why the Second WHO European Action Plan on Food and Nutrition Policy, setting goals and targets to reduce the health burden associated with food and nutrition, should also result in action relevant to climate change. This includes strengthening surveillance and monitoring systems to detect changes and analyse trends in foodborne and nutrition-related diseases, and educating consumers on healthy diets and food-safety practices.

Vector- and rodent-borne diseases

Shifts in the distribution and behaviour of insect and bird species are early signs that biological systems are already responding to climate change. This is leading to significant changes in infectious disease transmission by vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks. The movement of people and goods plays a role, as in the case of the introduction of Chikungunya virus to Italy in 2007, where the presence of a suitable vector allowed sustained local transmission.

Temperatures and precipitation favourable to malaria persist in some areas of Europe and central Asia, where they keep the risk of transmission a challenge. At present, six countries in the Region (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan) report malaria cases. Southern Europe is also threatened, but health services' capacity for early detection and treatment minimizes the probability of the spread of malaria. Lyme disease is showing a tendency to shift to higher latitudes and altitudes. Leishmaniasis, a disease transmitted by sand flies, is also travelling northwards.

Health systems' preparedness is key to identifying and promptly responding to potential disease outbreaks. In risk areas, health systems should reinforce preventive measures - such as vaccination, vector surveillance and control, rapid diagnosis and raising awareness of protective behaviour - in collaboration with veterinary services. The International Health Regulations, which recently entered into force, provide a common global platform for early detection of and response to climate-related events.

Waterborne diseases

Water stress is projected to increase over central and southern Europe and central Asia, affecting 16-44 million additional people by 2080. Reductions in summer water flows of up to 80% will result in the loss of fresh water and increased potential for contamination. The quality of coastal water is endangered, putting bathers and seafood eaters at risk of infection. Access to safe water and sanitation, which is unequal in the Region, may worsen. In central Asia, around 70% of the total population has access to a water supply, but only 25% of the rural population. This disparity contributes to the diarrhoea-related deaths of 13 500 children every year. Even in countries where access is good, the water supplied does not consistently meet WHO's microbial and chemical standards.

Ensuring water safety is essential for adaptation to climate change. The implementation of international instruments, such as the Protocol on Water and Health, would help increase access to safe drinking-water and sanitation and reduce the burden of related deaths and diseases. Measures include disease surveillance and outbreak detection, vaccination, and water treatment and supply. Many suppliers in the Region already use WHO-recommended water-safety plans, which ensure safe drinking-water from resource to tap.

Respiratory diseases

Respiratory diseases are affected by climate change through changes in air quality, more frequent heat-waves and earlier onset of the spring pollen season in the northern hemisphere. Climate change may affect the concentrations and dispersion of air pollutants. Changes in wind patterns favour long-range transport of air pollutants. Heat-waves' health effects are stronger when air pollution is high. Ozone and particulate matter (PM) are the air pollutants of greatest health concern. Ozone causes 20 000 premature deaths and 200 million person-days of acute respiratory symptoms per year in the EU while high levels of man-made PM shorten each EU citizen's life expectancy by over 8 months on average. Future climate change may increase regional ozone pollution, owing to higher temperatures and weaker atmospheric circulation.

Reducing climate-sensitive respiratory diseases means reducing people's exposure to hazardous air pollutants, anticipating potential events and preparing health services. Air quality standards, in line with the WHO air quality guidelines, need to be enforced to reduce exposure to air pollution and climate-change-related effects. Regulatory instruments, such as national emissions ceilings, can address the emission of pollutants into the atmosphere. Long-term solutions would include energy efficiency and reduced motorized transport. In the short term, people can help protect themselves by avoiding outdoor exercise when ozone levels are high and roads are polluted.

Vulnerable groups and inequalities

Climate change will affect everybody, but everyone in the European Region will not be equally vulnerable. Geography, health-system preparedness, health status, age, social class and support systems will make a difference.

Populations differ in vulnerability. As developing organisms exposed over a long period, children are most at risk from the effects of climate change. Heat primarily affects old people: chronic diseases and drugs can decrease their ability to cope with extremely hot weather. Workers are at risk, too: providers of emergency services and labourers in outdoor environments are particularly affected by extreme weather events. Geographically, the populations most at risk are the rural poor and those living in big cities and mountainous, water-stressed and coastal areas.

Climate change will also have adverse effects on economic growth. Already, more than 60 million people in the eastern part of the Region live in absolute poverty. Climate change can significantly worsen health inequities within and among countries and put additional stress on poorer groups. The global cost of climate change is estimated to be up to 5% of the gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of this century. Thus, climate change threatens to undermine progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals: poverty cannot be eliminated while environmental degradation exacerbates malnutrition, disease and injury.

Knowledge of the groups or geographical areas most vulnerable to the health effects of climate change allows health systems to target their interventions appropriately, in collaboration with other sectors. Public health services need to be strengthened, especially in eastern countries, where, following health-system reform in the 1990s, there is still a need to provide universal access to basic health services such as child vaccination.

Health systems' role in protecting health in Europe from climate change

Traditionally, the response to climate change has focused on environmental, economic and security concerns. Today the evidence of climate-related health effects has stimulated the need for rapid strengthening of health systems' capacities to assess, plan for and respond to current and projected threats. These capacities vary greatly across the Region, reflecting historical processes and resource constraints. Nevertheless, all health systems can take a number of common actions to strengthen their preparedness and capacity to respond, such as:

1. informing health services and professionals of ways to identify problems, the most vulnerable populations and needs for training, communication and supplies (of vaccines, medicine and diagnostic tools);

2. reinforcing their interventions to adapt to climate change, such as ensuring clean water and sanitation, safe and adequate food, immunization, disease surveillance and response, vector control and disaster preparedness;

3. training health professionals on climate-related health issues, such as new transmission patterns for vector-, water- and foodborne diseases and the symptoms and treatments of diseases linked to extreme weather events;

4. delivering accurate and timely information to decision-makers, the general public and other stakeholders for proper protective action;

5. strengthening health services and facilitating collaboration between countries to respond to climate-related health crises, particularly when health security calls for the enforcement of the International Health Regulations;

6. advocating action in sectors where the reduction of emissions can also benefit health (energy, transport, housing, land use and water management), and promoting active travel, healthy local food and contact with green spaces, which can help reduce obesity, respiratory and heart diseases, cancer, road injuries and noise-related illnesses, and save costs; and

7. setting the example in tackling the root causes of climate change, by taking action to reduce health systems' own carbon footprint.

WHO's support to countries in the European Region

The WHO Regional Office for Europe builds on decades of experience in strengthening countries' health systems to protect health from climate change. In particular, its activities include support to programmes to prevent the consequences of heat and floods, combat infectious disease, improve water and sanitation services, respond to natural disasters and provide information to the public on how to avoid risks. The Regional Office also coordinates the review of the scientific evidence on the links between climate and health. Climate change is the new cross-cutting issue on the agenda of the fifth ministerial conference on environment and health, planned to be held in Italy in 2009.

The Regional Office web site offers further information on its work on: climate change and health (http://www.euro.who.int/globalchange), the fifth ministerial conference (http://www.euro.who.int/eehc/conferences/20080306_1) and other activities to protect health and the environment (http://www.euro.who.int/envhealth).

http://www.euro.who.int

US Food Riots Much Closer Than You Think

2008-04-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

From Robert FelixReprinted With Permission
IceAgeNow.com
10-23-7

Recently, I said "we'll be fighting in the streets for food long before we're buried in ice."
I say the same thing in my book Not by Fire but by Ice.

I just received an email from a reader that sums it up better than I did...

"I spent about thirty years working in commercial agribusiness. My main job was to purchase ingredients, mainly grain, for flour mills and animal feed mills. As a part of my job, I was forced to understand the US food supply system, its strengths and weaknesses. Over the years, I became aware of some things that nearly all Americans are completely unaware of. I am going to make a list of statements and then you will see where I'm going.

-- 1% of the US population grows all of the food for all Americans.

-- Nearly all Americans know essentially nothing about where the food they eat every day comes from. How it gets from the ground to them. And they don't want to know about it. It's cheap, as close as their local store, and of high quality. So no worries.

-- The bulk of the food we eat comes from grain. Although they raise a lot of fruits and vegetables in California, Arizona, Florida, Oregon and Washington, those things don't compose the main part of the average diet. Half of what a meat animal is raised on is grain so when you eat meat you are really eating grain. And, of course, we eat grain directly as bread, bagels, doughnuts, pasta, etc. Milk (and milk products like cheese) comes from cows that eat grain. A lot of grain. And the grain they eat is not produced where the cows are located.

-- The lion's share of grain produced in the US is done in a concentrated part of the US Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri is the center of this area). The grain is moved to the coasts (where 70% of the population live) by only TWO (2) railroads.

-- Nothing is stored for very long in a supermarket. One day grain travels (by rail) from Kansas to Seattle to a flour mill. The next day the flour mill makes the flour and sends it to a bakery. The next day the bakery makes it into bread (and other baked things) and the next day it is at the store where it is purchased that day. Nobody stores anything. The grain is produced and stored in the Midwest and shipped daily in a single railroad pipeline to the rest of America where the people live.

-- Up until the 1980s there was a system that stored a lot of grain in elevators around the country. At one time, a whole year's harvest of grain was stored that way. But since taxpayers were paying to store it, certain urban politicians engineered the movement of that money from providing a safety net or backup for their own food supply in order to give the money to various other social welfare things. So now, nothing is stored. We produce what we consume each year and store practically none of it. There is no contingency plan.

Now for my take on what this means for us and what it has to do with the topic you are publicizing.

-- If a drought such as has lingered over other parts of the US where little grain is grown were to move over the grain-producing states in the Midwest where few people live, it
would seriously damage the food supply of the country and the apples of Washington, the lettuce of California, the grapefruit of Florida and the peanuts of Georgia won't make up the difference because grain is the staff of life and most of it is grown in the Midwest.

-- Americans are armed to the teeth. In LA people burned down their own neighborhoods to protest a court case.

-- In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and floods also. It takes two or three months to raise grain, yet people have to eat usually at least once a day, usually more than that.

--So, basically, we have in place a recipe for a disaster that will dwarf any other localized disasters imaginable. The important thing to note is that there is no solution for this event. There is no contingency plan for this. People living in certain parts of the US will fare better than others (which is another story) but those who live in big cities, where most of the US population live, are done for.

Anyway, I have no agenda of my own concerning this. I just thought I'd share it with someone who appears to have an idea of what might likely cause this scenario to occur. The only people who know about this are those who are involved in the production and distribution of the food supply and there are very, very few of them number-wise. And most of them haven't put two and two together yet, either.

* * *

When I asked the reader for permission to publish this,
I received this reply:

I'm not interested in notoriety about this. It's just something I know about.

It's likely too late for the government to do anything to prepare for such an event, so it probably won't do any good to try to lobby them for a solution. I guess if they hopped right on it they could store up enough grain to be ready but they won't. They're more concerned with urban political issues and helping (or invading -ed) other countries than they are about preserving the security of their own food supply. I guess the people who could make it happen have bunkers or something they can hide in when the 's' hits the fan.

Story from Rense.com: http://www.rense.com/general78/riots.htm

World Wide Food Riots

2008-04-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

Egyptian boy dies from wounds sustained in Mahalla food riotsInternational Herald Tribune, France - 2 hours agoThe gritty industrial city has been the scene of two days of violent clashes between police and residents angered over rising food prices. ...Egyptian teen dead in Nile Delta riots AFPEgyptian Workers Riot Over Rising Prices The Associated PressClashes break out in Egypt town MWC News

Fear of rice riots as surge in demand hits nations across the Far EastTimes Online, UK - 16 hours ago... to becalm rioting domestic populations, and the UN International Fund for Agriculture has previously said that food riots will become commonplace. ...Rice Crisis Africa: 'Let Them Eat Subsidies?'AllAfrica.com, Washington - 16 hours agoThe recent spate of food riots and demonstrations in West Africa may signal a new phase in the protest cycle, he said. Many analysts agree. ...Food prices rise beyond means of poorest in Africa Times Online Hike in world prices sparks deadly riots in Africa AFP Hungry Crowds Spell Trouble for World Leaders The Epoch Times Ireland or Reality Check? CNBC

VIDEO: Deadly food riots in HaitiReuters - Apr 7, 2008Officials in southern Haiti report at least four deaths after demonstrations against rising food prices turned into riots. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ...

Warning over food price 'time bomb'The Press Association - 2 hours ago"The security implications (of food crisis) should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe," he said. ...

Haitians Killed in Riot Over Food PricesThe Associated Press - Apr 4, 2008PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — At least three Haitians were killed and 25 others injured amid food riots and clashes with UN peacekeepers on Friday, ...

Food riots fear after rice price hits a highThe Observer, UK - Apr 5, 2008... of Investigation has been called in to raid traders suspected of hoarding rice to push up the prices, activists have warned of the risk of food riots. ...Is India facing a food crisis? BBC News

Food Riots Kill At Least Four, Dozens Injured In HaitiAllheadlines - Apr 5, 2008Port-au-Prince, Haiti (AHN) - At least four Haitians were killed and around 25 others wounded in demonstrations-turned-riots in southern Haiti with UN ...

3 killed in Haiti amid food riots, clashesLos Angeles Times, CA - Apr 5, 2008From AP PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- At least three people were killed and 25 injured in food riots and clashes with UN peacekeepers Friday, ...

The Environmental Right to Know and The EPA

2008-04-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

The public has a right to know (RTK) about human health and environmental issues that affect it; it should never have to demonstrate a need to know information. Environmental right-to-know encompasses a number of issues dealing with environmental information initiatives and laws, and RTK language appears in many of these. The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a database of chemical releases and some chemical uses, is one of the most well known depositories for environmental toxics information, although EPA maintains a number of other databases. OMB Watch monitors access that the government provides to environmental information, as well as how it disseminates and uses such information.

Background on Environmental Right to Know
OriginsEnvironmental right to know (RTK) is a movement that advocates for public disclosure of environmental information on the premise that citizens have a right to know about what happens in their communities and workplaces. The 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India underscored the importance of understanding and working to minimize environmental risks in our communities before the worst happens. A smaller-scale chemical accident in West Virginia that occurred soon after Bhopal prompted the U.S. to act and pass legislation that uses right to know to help prevent such disasters.

Even before federal legislation passed, some companies implemented voluntary reporting systems to inform the public about their chemical facilities. State governments also took measures to ensure that people were informed and protected. By 1986, 25 states had emergency-response requirements and 41 states had right-to-know provisions.

LegislationIn 1986 Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-know Act (EPCRA) to help local communities protect public health, safety and the environment from chemical hazards. This law mandated several RTK provisions including the development of emergency plans for communities in case of a chemical accidents, and an emission reporting system called the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). TRI has become the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) flagship RTK program. The inventory allows the public to track the releases of chemicals to water, land and air. Facilities covered by the program submit data on a yearly basis which EPA and other organizations make available online. (For more on TRI see our TRI section.)

RTK has been furthered by passage of other federal laws, as well as state and local laws. In 1996, Congress passed amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act that require water utility companies provide customers with water quality reports about community water systems. The 1990 amendments of the Clean Air Act required all facilities using or storing large quantities of dangerous chemicals to file Risk Management Plans (RMPs), which evaluate risks and establish emergency plans for accidents.

States have often modeled their RTK legislation after the federal EPCRA law, but some states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey have added new reporting requirements for their TRI programs. In these states facilities must disclose inventories of all chemical materials arriving and leaving a location -- a "materials accounting" approach.

Environmental right to know also encompasses broader issues such as labeling consumer products, accessing information about pesticides, and bio-monitoring. For example, California passed legislation that mandates labeling of workplaces and consumer products that could expose individuals to carcinogens or reproductive toxins.

ResultsDisclosing environmental information to the public allows communities to develop plans to make its residents safer, and creates incentives for industry to improve its environmental performance. Industry also benefits by decreasing pollution and waste because it saves money on raw materials. Publicizing TRI data has resulted in substantial reductions in toxic releases, dropping from 2.96 billion pounds in 1988 to 1.61 billion pounds in 1995 (45.6 percent), without any regulations requiring the reductions.

Additionally, access to environmental information allows citizens to make more informed choices about things such as what they eat and drink, where they live, and how they invest money. Most major mutual funds now offer investment portfolios that only support the most environmentally responsible companies. Of course, the most effective choice informed citizens can make is to take action and help ensure their environment is protected. Time and again citizens empowered with information about environmental hazardous have written letters, called officials, protested companies, boycotted products and used many other methods to make their informed opinions heard. Environmental groups have also used the government information to generate hundreds of reports that highlight excessive environmental impacts, unaddressed risks, and poor protection efforts. These reports often focus attention and prompt improvements to the identified problems.

RTK is always at risk from attacks from corporations and industry-friendly legislators. It is important that citizens, public interest groups, community groups, worker unions, heath care officials and others continue to promote and protect environmental right-to-know laws and programs.

From OBM Watch: http://www.ombwatch.org/article/archive/97?TopicID=2

Public Law 87-297

2008-04-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

http://documents.governamerica.com/publiclaw87-297.html

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/articles/Base%20Closures.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=public+law+87-297&btnG=Google+Search

Global warming hysteria is new eugenics

2008-04-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

Posted: March 05, 2005
1:00 am Eastern

By Henry Lamb© 2008
WorldNetDaily.com

Also See:
Alex Jones Report - Eugenics - End Game For Global Depopulation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6056499818120863453&q=depopulation&total=356&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2

The most important point in Michael Chrichton's runaway best seller "State of Fear" is his comparison of the global warming theory to the theory of eugenics.

The theory of eugenics contends that the human condition would be improved through government-mandated selective breeding. The theory of global warming contends that government-mandated reduction in the use of fossil fuel is required to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Francis Galton coined the term "eugenics" in 1883 to describe the practice of studied, selective breeding to improve the human race. It was a reasonable idea at the time, supported by the growing practice of agricultural selective breeding to produce more productive farm animals.

The eugenics theory attracted popular support on both sides of the Atlantic. The first International Congress of Eugenics was held in 1912, and the American Eugenics Society was organized in 1922. Yale University professor Irving Fisher served as president. Similar organizations were formed in Europe, headed by leading scientists and academicians.

Eugenics proponents reasoned that since society could be improved by insuring that only the "well-bred" should produce offspring, then society would be diminished by the offspring of people who were not "well-bred," or who were poor, criminals or "feebleminded." It was quickly discovered that marriages among the rich, professional classes tended to produce fewer offspring than marriages among the poor, uneducated working classes.

Social progressives concluded that were this situation allowed to continue unchecked, within a few generations the whole earth would be overrun by undesirables. Consequently, the scientific community, led by August Weismann, produced studies and scientific papers that justified a range of laws governing mixed-race marriage and even government-mandated sterilization of "degenerates."

The theory of eugenics was taught in public schools, recommending government-mandated sterilization and race segregation. Eugenics was a common subject of sermons in many churches. John Harvey Kellogg created the Race Betterment Foundation. America's leading families, such as E.H. Harriman, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, provided funding and leadership to organizations such as the Galton Society, created to promote the theory of eugenics.

Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown and many other major universities included courses on eugenics. The National Education Association set up a special committee on "racial well-being" to help teachers integrate the principles of eugenics into their courses.

By the mid 1930s, the theory of eugenics was accepted as fact in America and throughout Europe. Julian Huxley (founder of UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) was the president of the European Eugenics Society. Scientists, academicians, politicians and individuals who did not embrace the eugenics theory were ostracized as heretics and contrarians. Eugenics was the consensus belief among the scientific, academic, political and philanthropic communities.

They were all wrong.

Eugenics gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan, to the white supremacy movement and to Adolf Hitler's gas chambers. Despite these horrors, it was not until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's "Racial Integrity Act" and similar laws in 15 other states. Government-mandated sterilizations continued until the mid 1970s. Interestingly, the American Eugenics Society changed its name in 1973, to the Society for the Study of Social Biology.

Eugenics proponents misused science to advance their social-engineering agenda.

When it was introduced, the global warming theory sounded reasonable: Since carbon dioxide was known to be increasing in the atmosphere, the "thickened" atmosphere would trap the sun's heat and cause global warming. (Of course, initially, in the 1970s, it was thought that the result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be global cooling and the onset of a new ice age).

Had computers been available to the eugenicists, no doubt they would have produced computer models to predict how long it would take for mixed-race marriages and cross-breeding degenerates to destroy the world as they knew it. They did the best they could without computers, and were successful in forcing more than 60,000 sterilizations in the United States and the slaughter of 6 million Jews in Germany.

Scientists who dare to question the global warming "consensus" are ridiculed and branded as contrarians, as were the skeptics of eugenics. Government and foundations withhold grants from researchers whose work product fails to advance the global warming consensus, in much the same way skeptics of eugenics were denied research grants. Universities and education associations teach the global warming theory as fact, just as they taught the theory of eugenics as fact. Even churches are pressured to take up the global warming cause – just as they were pressured to preach eugenics. Politicians who fail to toe the global-warming line are targeted for replacement – as were the politicians who opposed segregation and forced sterilization.

Social progressives who are advancing the global warming theory would do well to consider the similarity of their campaign to the rise and fall of the eugenics campaign.

In the end, the truth will prevail. If it takes a century for the global warming theory to collapse, the bodies of people who were denied electricity – and the heat, clean water and refrigeration it can provide – will weigh more heavily than the Holocaust upon a society that should have learned from its mistaken belief in eugenics.

Article from: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43159

The Military's Pandora's Box

2008-04-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

by Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning

Read and See more on HAARP at: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=HAARP&btnG=Google+Search and http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=HAARP&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv

This article was prepared to provide a summary of the contents of a book written in 1995 which describes an entirely new class of weapons. The weapons and their effects are described in the following pages. The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to build a prototype for a ground based "Star Wars" weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska.

The individuals who are demanding answers about HAARP are scattered around the planet. As well as bush dwellers in Alaska, they include: a physician in Finland; a scientist in Holland; an anti-nuclear protester in Australia; independent physicists in the United States; a grandmother in Canada, and countless others.

Unlike the protests of the 1960s the objections to HAARP have been registered using the tools of the 1990s. From the Internet, fax machines, syndicated talk radio and a number of alternative print mediums the word is getting out and people are waking up to this new intrusion by an over zealous United States government.

The research team put together to gather the materials which eventually found their way into the book never held a formal meeting, never formed a formal organization. Each person acted like a node on a planetary info-spirit-net with one goal held by all -- to keep this controversial new science in the public eye. The result of the team's effort was a book which describes the science and the political ramifications of this technology.

That book, Angels Don't Play this HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology, has 230 pages. This article will only give the highlights. Despite the amount of research (350 footnoted sources), at its heart it is a story about ordinary people who took on an extraordinary challenge in bringing their research forward.

HAARP Boils the Upper AtmosphereHAARP will zap the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an "ionospheric heater." (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth's upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.)

Put simply, the apparatus for HAARP is a reversal of a radio telescope; antenna send out signals instead of receiving. HAARP is the test run for a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything -- living and dead.

HAARP publicity gives the impression that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is mainly an academic project with the goal of changing the ionosphere to improve communications for our own good. However, other U.S. military documents put it more clearly -- HAARP aims to learn how to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes." Communicating with submarines is only one of those purposes.

Press releases and other information from the military on HAARP continually downplay what it could do. Publicity documents insist that the HAARP project is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely throughout the world in places such as Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union. However, a 1990 government document indicates that the radio-frequency (RF) power zap will drive the ionosphere to unnatural activities.

" ... at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma processes will 'runaway' until the next limiting factor is reached."

If the military, in cooperation with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, can show that this new ground-based "Star Wars" technology is sound, they both win. The military has a relatively-inexpensive defense shield and the University can brag about the most dramatic geophysical manipulation since atmospheric explosions of nuclear bombs. After successful testing, they would have the military megaprojects of the future and huge markets for Alaska's North Slope natural gas.

Looking at the other patents which built on the work of a Texas' physicist named Bernard Eastlund, it becomes clearer how the military intends to use the HAARP transmitter. It also makes governmental denials less believable. The military knows how it intends to use this technology, and has made it clear in their documents. The military has deliberately misled the public, through sophisticated word games, deceit and outright disinformation.

The military says the HAARP system could:
Give the military a tool to replace the electromagnetic pulse effect of atmospheric thermonuclear devices (still considered a viable option by the military through at least 1986)

Replace the huge Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) submarine communication system operating in Michigan and Wisconsin with a new and more compact technology

Be used to replace the over-the-horizon radar system that was once planned for the current location of HAARP, with a more flexible and accurate system

Provide a way to wipe out communications over an extremely large area, while keeping the military's own communications systems working

Provide a wide area earth-penetrating tomography which, if combined with the computing abilities of EMASS and Cray computers, would make it possible to verify many parts of nuclear nonproliferation and peace agreements

Be a tool for geophysical probing to find oil, gas and mineral deposits over a large area
Be used to detect incoming low-level planes and cruise missiles, making other technologies obsolete

The above abilities seem like a good idea to all who believe in sound national defense, and to those concerned about cost-cutting. However, the possible uses which the HAARP records do not explain, and which can only be found in Air Force, Army, Navy and other federal agency records, are alarming. Moreover, effects from the reckless use of these power levels in our natural shield -- the ionosphere -- could be cataclysmic according to some scientists.

Two Alaskans put it bluntly. A founder of the NO HAARP movement, Clare Zickuhr, says "The military is going to give the ionosphere a big kick and see what happens."The military failed to tell the public that they do not know what exactly will happen, but a Penn State science article brags about that uncertainty. Macho science? The HAARP project uses the largest energy levels yet played with by what Begich and Manning call "the big boys with their new toys." HAARP is an experiment in the sky, and experiments are done to find out something not already known. Independent scientists told Begich and Manning that a HAARP-type "skybuster" with its unforeseen effects could be an act of global vandalism.

HAARP History
The patents described below were the package of ideas which were originally controlled by ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Company, one of the biggest oil companies in the world. APTI was the contractor that built the HAARP facility. ARCO sold this subsidiary, the patents and the second phase construction contract to E-Systems in June 1994.

E-Systems is one of the biggest intelligence contractors in the world -- doing work for the CIA, defense intelligence organizations and others. $1.8 billion of their annual sales are to these organizations, with $800 million for black projects -- projects so secret that even the United States Congress isn't told how the money is being spent. E-Systems was bought out by Raytheon, which is one of the largest defense contractors in the world. In 1994 Raytheon was listed as number forty-two on the Fortune 500 list of companies. Raytheon has thousands of patents, some of which will be valuable in the HAARP project. The twelve patents below are the backbone of the HAARP project, and are now buried among the thousands of others held in the name of Raytheon. Bernard J. Eastlund's U.S. Patent # 4,686,605, "Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere; and/or Magnetosphere," was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order.

The Eastlund ionospheric heater was different; the radio frequency (RF) radiation was concentrated and focused to a point in the ionosphere. This difference throws an unprecedented amount of energy into the ionosphere. The Eastlund device would allow a concentration of one watt per cubic centimeter, compared to others only able to deliver about one millionth of one watt.

This huge difference could lift and change the ionosphere in the ways necessary to create futuristic effects described in the patent. According to the patent, the work of Nikola Tesla in the early 1900's formed the basis of the research.

What would this technology be worth to ARCO, the owner of the patents? They could make enormous profits by beaming electrical power from a powerhouse in the gas fields to the consumer without wires.

For a time, HAARP researchers could not prove that this was one of the intended uses for HAARP. In April, 1995, however, Begich found other patents, connected with a "key personnel" list for APTI. Some of these new APTI patents were indeed a wireless system for sending electrical power. Eastlund's patent said the technology can confuse or completely disrupt airplanes' and missiles' sophisticated guidance systems. Further, this ability to spray large areas of Earth with electromagnetic waves of varying frequencies, and to control changes in those waves, makes it possible to knock out communications on land or sea as well as in the air.

The patent said:
"Thus, this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art, particularly by detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes... "

"...it is possible not only to interfere with third party communications but to take advantage of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network even though the rest of the world's communications are disrupted. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communication network at the same time."

"... large regions of the atmosphere could be lifted to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction."
"Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles which will act as a lens or focusing device.... molecular modifications of the atmosphere can take place so that positive environmental effects can be achieved. Besides actually changing the molecular composition of an atmospheric region, a particular molecule or molecules can be chosen for increased presence. For example, ozone, nitrogen, etc., concentrations in the atmosphere could be artificially increased."
Begich found eleven other APTI Patents. They told how to make "Nuclear-sized Explosions without Radiation," Power-beaming systems, over-the-horizon radar, detection systems for missiles carrying nuclear warheads, electromagnetic pulses previously produced by thermonuclear weapons and other Star-Wars tricks. This cluster of patents underlay the HAARP weapon system.

Related research by Begich and Manning uncovered bizarre schemes. For example, Air Force documents revealed that a system had been developed for manipulating and disturbing human mental processes through pulsed radio-frequency radiation (the stuff of HAARP) over large geographical areas. The most telling material about this technology came from writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security Advisory to U.S. President Carter) and J.F. MacDonald (science advisor to U.S. President Johnson and a professor of Geophysics at UCLA), as they wrote about use of power-beaming transmitters for geophysical and environmental warfare. The documents showed how these effects might be caused, and the negative effects on human heath and thinking.

The mental-disruption possibilities for HAARP are the most disturbing. More than 40 pages of the book, with dozens of footnotes, chronicle the work of Harvard professors, military planners and scientists as they plan and test this use of the electromagnetic technology. For example, one of the papers describing this use was from the International Red Cross in Geneva. It even gave the frequency ranges where these effects could occur -- the same ranges which HAARP is capable of broadcasting.

The following statement was made more than twenty-five years ago in a book by Brzezinski which he wrote while a professor at Columbia University:
"Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth ... in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period" " ... no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades."

In 1966, MacDonald was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee and later a member of the President's Council on Environmental Quality. He published papers on the use of environmental control technologies for military purposes. The most profound comment he made as a geophysicist was, "the key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy." While yesterday's geophysicists predicted today's advances, are HAARP program managers delivering on the vision?

The geophysicists recognized that adding energy to the environmental soup could have large effects. However, humankind has already added substantial amounts of electromagnetic energy into our environment without understanding what might constitute critical mass. The book by Begich and Manning raises questions:

Have these additions been without effect, or is there a cumulative amount beyond which irreparable damage can be done?

Is HAARP another step in a journey from which we cannot turn back?

Are we about to embark on another energy experiment which unleashes another set of demons from Pandora's box?

As early as 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted a "more controlled and directed society" would gradually appear, linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how. Angels Don't Play This HAARP further quotes Brzezinski: "Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits," Brzezinski predicted.
His forecasts proved accurate. Today, a number of new tools for the "elite" are emerging, and the temptation to use them increases steadily. The policies to permit the tools to be used are already in place. How could the United States be changed, bit by bit, into the predicted highly-controlled technosociety? Among the "steppingstones" Brzezinski expected were persisting social crises and use of the mass media to gain the public's confidence.

In another document prepared by the government, the U.S. Air Force claims: "The potential applications of artificial electromagnetic fields are wide-ranging and can be used in many military or quasi-military situations... Some of these potential uses include dealing with terrorist groups, crowd control, controlling breaches of security at military installations, and antipersonnel techniques in tactical warfare. In all of these cases the EM (electromagnetic) systems would be used to produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation. In addition, the ability of individuals to function could be degraded to such a point that they would be combat ineffective. Another advantage of electromagnetic systems is that they can provide coverage over large areas with a single system. They are silent and countermeasures to them may be difficult to develop... One last area where electromagnetic radiation may prove of some value is in enhancing abilities of individuals for anomalous phenomena."

Do these comments point to uses already somewhat developed? The author of the government report refers to an earlier Air Force document about the uses of radio frequency radiation in combat situations. (Here Begich and Manning note that HAARP is the most versatile and the largest radio-frequency-radiation transmitter in the world.) The United States Congressional record deals with the use of HAARP for penetrating the earth with signals bounced off of the ionosphere. These signals are used to look inside the planet to a depth of many kilometers in order to locate underground munitions, minerals and tunnels. The U.S. Senate set aside $15 million dollars in 1996 to develop this ability alone -- earth-penetrating-tomography. The problem is that the frequency needed for earth-penetrating radiation is within the frequency range most cited for disruption of human mental functions. It may also have profound effects on migration patterns of fish and wild animals which rely on an undisturbed energy field to find their routes.

As if electromagnetic pulses in the sky and mental disruption were not enough, T. Eastlund bragged that the super-powerful ionospheric heater could control weather.

Begich and Manning brought to light government documents indicating that the military has weather-control technology. When HAARP is eventually built to its full power level, it could create weather effects over entire hemispheres. If one government experiments with the world's weather patterns, what is done in one place will impact everyone else on the planet. Angels Don't Play This HAARP explains a principle behind some of Nikola Tesla's inventions -- resonance -- which affect planetary systems.

Bubble of Electric Particles
Angels Don't Play This HAARP includes interviews with independent scientists such as Elizabeth Rauscher. She has a Ph.D., a long and impressive career in high-energy physics, and has been published in prestigious science journals and books. Rauscher commented on HAARP. "You're pumping tremendous energy into an extremely delicate molecular configuration that comprises these multi-layers we call the ionosphere.""The ionosphere is prone to catalytic reactions," she explained, "if a small part is changed, a major change in the ionosphere can happen."
In describing the ionosphere as a delicately balanced system, Dr. Rauscher shared her mental picture of it -- a soap-bubble-like sphere surrounding Earth's atmosphere, with movements swirling over the surface of the bubble. If a big enough hole is punched through it, she predicts, it could pop.

Slicing the Ionosphere
Physicist Daniel Winter, Ph.D., of Waynesville, North Carolina, says, "HAARP high-frequency emissions can couple with longwave (extremely-low-frequency, or ELF) pulses the Earth grid uses to distribute information as vibrations to synchronize dances of life in the biosphere." Dan terms this geomagnetic action 'Earth's information bloodstream,' and says it is likely that coupling of HAARP HF (high-frequency) with natural ELF can cause unplanned, unsuspected side effects.

David Yarrow of Albany, New York, is a researcher with a background in electronics. He described possible interactions of HAARP radiation with the ionosphere and Earth's magnetic grid: "HAARP will not burn holes in the ionosphere. That is a dangerous understatement of what HAARP's giant gigawatt beam will do. Earth is spinning relative to thin electric shells of the multilayer membrane of ion-o-speres that absorb and shield Earth's surface from intense solar radiation, including charged particle storms in solar winds erupting from the sun. Earth's axial spin means that HAARP -- in a burst lasting more than a few minutes -- will slice through the ionosphere like a microwave knife. This produces not a hole but a long tear -- an incision."

Crudely Plucking the Strings
Second concept: As Earth rotates, HAARP will slice across the geomagnetic flux, a donut-shaped spool of magnetic strings -- like longitude meridians on maps. HAARP may not 'cut' these strings in Gaia's magnetic mantle, but will pulse each thread with harsh, out-of-harmony high frequencies. These noisy impulses will vibrate geomagnetic flux lines, sending vibrations all through the geomagnetic web. "

"The image comes to mind of a spider on its web. An insect lands, and the web's vibrations alert the spider to possible prey. HAARP will be a man-made microwave finger poking at the web, sending out confusing signals, if not tearing holes in the threads. " "Effects of this interference with symphonies of Gaia's geomagnetic harp are unknown, and I suspect barely thought of. Even if thought of, the intent (of HAARP) is to learn to exploit any effects, not to play in tune to global symphonies. "

Among other researchers quoted is Paul Schaefer of Kansas City. His degree is in electrical engineering and he spent four years building nuclear weapons. "But most of the theories that we have been taught by scientists to believe in seem to be falling apart," he says. He talks about imbalances already caused by the industrial and atomic age, especially by radiation of large numbers of tiny, high-velocity particles "like very small spinning tops" into our environment. The unnatural level of motion of highly-energetic particles in the atmosphere and in radiation belts surrounding Earth is the villain in the weather disruptions, according to this model, which describes an Earth discharging its buildup of heat, relieving stress and regaining a balanced condition through earthquakes and volcanic action.

Feverish Earth
"One might compare the abnormal energetic state of the Earth and its atmosphere to a car battery which has become overcharged with the normal flow of energy jammed up, resulting in hot spots, electrical arcing, physical cracks and general turbulence as the pent-up energy tries to find some place to go."

In a second analogy, Schaefer says "Unless we desire the death of our planet, we must end the production of unstable particles which are generating the earth's fever. A first priority to prevent this disaster would be to shut down all nuclear power plants and end the testing of atomic weapons, electronic warfare and 'Star Wars'." Meanwhile, the military builds its biggest ionospheric heater yet, to deliberately create more instabilities in a huge plasma layer -- the ionosphere -- and to rev up the energy level of charged particles.

Electronic Rain From The Sky
They have published papers about electron precipitation from the magnetosphere (the outer belts of charged particles which stream toward Earth's magnetic poles) caused by man-made very low frequency electromagnetic waves. "These precipitated particles can produce secondary ionization, emit X-rays, and cause significant perturbation in the lower ionosphere."
Two Stanford University radio scientists offer evidence of what technology can do to affect the sky by making waves on earth; they showed that very low frequency radio waves can vibrate the magnetosphere and cause high-energy particles to cascade into Earth's atmosphere. By turning the signal on or off, they could stop the flow of energetic particles.

Weather Control
Avalanches of energy dislodged by such radio waves could hit us hard. Their work suggests that technicians could control global weather by sending relatively small 'signals' into the Van Allen belts (radiation belts around Earth). Thus Tesla's resonance effects can control enormous energies by tiny triggering signals. The Begich/ Manning book asks whether that knowledge will be used by war-oriented or biosphere-oriented scientists.

The military has had about twenty years to work on weather warfare methods, which it euphemistically calls weather modification. For example, rainmaking technology was taken for a few test rides in Vietnam. The U.S. Department of Defense sampled lightning and hurricane manipulation studies in Project Skyfire and Project Stormfury. And they looked at some complicated technologies that would give big effects. Angels Don't Play This HAARP cites an expert who says the military studied both lasers and chemicals which they figured could damage the ozone layer over an enemy. Looking at ways to cause earthquakes, as well as to detect them, was part of the project named Prime Argus, decades ago. The money for that came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, now under the acronym ARPA.) In 1994 the Air Force revealed its Spacecast 2020 master plan which includes weather control. Scientists have experimented with weather control since the 1940's, but Spacecast 2020 noted that "using environmental modification techniques to destroy, damage or injure another state are prohibited." Having said that, the Air Force claimed that advances in technology "compels a reexamination of this sensitive and potentially risky topic." 40 Years of Zapping the Sky?
As far back as 1958, the chief White House advisor on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville, said the U.S. defense department was studying "ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather" by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.

In 1966, Professor Gordon J. F. MacDonald was associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and later a member of the President's Council on Environmental Quality.

He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: "The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy. " World-recognized scientist MacDonald had a number of ideas for using the environment as a weapon system and he contributed to what was, at the time, the dream of a futurist. When he wrote his chapter, "How To Wreck The Environment," for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet's energy fields.

He also said that these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims. Is HAARP that weapon? The military's intention to do environmental engineering is well documented, U.S. Congress' subcommittee hearings on Oceans and International Environment looked into military weather and climate modification conducted in the early 1970's. "What emerged was an awesome picture of far-ranging research and experimentation by the Department of Defense into ways environmental tampering could be used as a weapon," said another author cited in Angles Don't Play This HAARP.

The revealed secrets surprised legislators. Would an inquiry into the state of the art of electromagnetic manipulation surprise lawmakers today? They may find out that technologies developed out of the HAARP experiments in Alaska could deliver on Gordon MacDonald's vision because leading-edge scientists are describing global weather as not only air pressure and thermal systems, but also as an electrical system.Small Input - Big Effect
HAARP zaps the ionosphere where it is relatively unstable. A point to remember is that the ionosphere is an active electrical shield protecting the planet from the constant bombardment of high-energy particles from space. This conducting plasma, along with Earth's magnetic field, traps the electrical plasma of space and holds it back from going directly to the earth's surface, says Charles Yost of Dynamic Systems, Leicester, North Carolina. "If the ionosphere is greatly disturbed, the atmosphere below is subsequently disturbed."

Another scientist interviewed said there is a super-powerful electrical connection between the ionosphere and the part of the atmosphere where our weather comes onstage, the lower atmosphere. One man-made electrical effect -- power line harmonic resonance -- causes fallout of charged particles from the Van Allen (radiation) belts, and the falling ions cause ice crystals (which precipitate rain clouds). What about HAARP? Energy blasted upward from an ionospheric heater is not much compared to the total in the ionosphere, but HAARP documents admit that thousandfold-greater amounts of energy can be released in the ionosphere than injected. As with MacDonald's "key to geophysical warfare," "nonlinear" effects (described in the literature about the ionospheric heater) mean small input and large output. Astrophysicist Adam Trombly told Manning that an acupuncture model is one way to look at the possible effect of multi-gigawatt pulsing of the ionosphere. If HAARP hits certain points, those parts of the ionosphere could react in surprising ways.

Smaller ionospheric heaters such as the one at Arecibo are underneath relatively placid regions of the ionosphere, compared to the dynamic movements nearer Earth's magnetic poles. That adds another uncertainty to HAARP -- the unpredictable and lively upper atmosphere near the North Pole.

HAARP experimenters do not impress commonsense Alaskans such as Barbara Zickuhr, who says "They're like boys playing with a sharp stick, finding a sleeping bear and poking it in the butt to see what's going to happen."

Could They Short-Circuit Earth?
Earth as a spherical electrical system is a fairly well-accepted model. However, those experimenters who want to make unnatural power connections between parts of this system might not be thinking of possible consequences. Electrical motors and generators can be caused to wobble when their circuits are affected. Could human activities cause a significant change in a planet's electrical circuit or electrical field? A paper in the respected journal Science deals with manmade ionization from radioactive material, but perhaps it could also be studied with HAARP-type skybusters in mind:

"For example, while changes in the earth's electric field resulting from a solar flare modulating conductivity may have only a barely detectable effect on meteorology, the situation may be different in regard to electric field changes caused by manmade ionization... " Meteorology, of course, is the study of the atmosphere and weather. ionization is what happens when a higher level of power is zapped into atoms and knocks electrons off the atoms. The resulting charged particles are the stuff of HAARP. "One look at the weather should tell us that we are on the wrong path," says Paul Schaefer, commenting on HAARP-type technologies.
Angels Don't Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology is about the military's plan to manipulate that which belongs to the world -- the ionosphere. The arrogance of the United States government in this is not without precedent.

Atmospheric nuclear tests had similar goals. More recently, China and France put their people's money to destructive use in underground nuclear tests. It was recently reported that the US government spent $3 trillion dollars on its nuclear program since its beginnings in the 1940's. What new breakthroughs in life science could have been made with all the money spent on death?

Begich, Manning, Roderick and others believe that democracies need to be founded on openness, rather than the secrecy which surrounds so much military science. Knowledge used in developing revolutionary weapons could be used for healing and helping mankind. Because they are used in new weapons, discoveries are classified and suppressed. When they do appear in the work of other independent scientists, the new ideas are often frustrated or ridiculed, while military research laboratories continue to build their new machines for the killing fields.
However, the book by Manning and Begich gives hope that the military industrial academic bureaucratic Goliath can be affected by the combined power of determined individuals and the alternative press. Becoming informed is the first step to empowerment.

Story is from: http://www.haarp.net/

The "Global Warming" Issue: Real or Manufactured???

2008-04-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

As we all know the earth's climate is changing. The question is: WHY??? WHY have govenment officials dragged their feet on cleaning up the environment? Is "Global Warming" manufactured to induce fear into the population? We need to begine wathing the man behind the curtain!

Chemtrails (as posted earlier), HAARP and many other weather modification activities are being thrust upon us without the knowledge of the general polpulation. Do I have to mention 911? Fear will motivate us to give up what few rights we have left. These people use; "Crisis, Reaction, Solution" (David Icke) for that. They create a crisis. This crisis generates the reaction of fear and anger. Then they create a solution that is in their favor. By the way, LOOK OUT FOR YOU MONEY!!! They are deliberately crashing the dollar to bring about the "AMERO" and "The North American Union".
Read and view more on the subject:
The Amero - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+amero&btnG=Search
The North American Union - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+North+American+Union&btnG=Search

View the following videos and state how you feel about it.

Global warming threat (pre)arranged 1961?

Rare video the Iron Mountain Report PART 1

See More at: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Rare+video+the+Iron+Mountain+Report+&search_type=

'No Sun link' to climate change

2008-04-03T06:11:00.000-07:00

By Richard Black
BBC Environment Correspondent

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

"This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40
years can't have been caused by solar activity Dr Piers Forster

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain's Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

"All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that," he told the BBC News website.

"You can't just ignore bits of data that you don't like," he said.

Warming trend
The scientists' main approach on this new analysis was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature, which has risen by about 0.4C over the period.

The Sun varies on a cycle of about 11 years between periods of high and low activity.
But that cycle comes on top of longer-term trends; and most of the 20th Century saw a slight but steady increase in solar output.

However, in about 1985, that trend appears to have reversed, with solar output declining.
Yet this period has seen temperatures rise as fast as - if not faster than - any time during the previous 100 years.

"This paper reinforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of climate science.

Cosmic relief
The IPCC's February summary report concluded that greenhouse gases were about 13 times more responsible than solar changes for rising global temperatures.

But the organisation was criticised in some quarters for not taking into account the cosmic ray hypothesis, developed by, among others, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish National Space Center.

Their theory holds that cosmic rays help clouds to form by providing tiny particles around which water vapour can condense. Overall, clouds cool the Earth.

During periods of active solar activity, cosmic rays are partially blocked by the Sun's more intense magnetic field. Cloud formation diminishes, and the Earth warms.

Mike Lockwood's analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant hypothesis.

He said: "I do think there is a cosmic ray effect on cloud cover. It works in clean maritime air where there isn't much else for water vapour to condense around.

"It might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate; but you cannot apply it to what we're seeing now, because we're in a completely different ball game."

Drs Svensmark and Friis-Christensen could not be reached for comment.

This story is from BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6290228.stm

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2008-03-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the birth, limited commercialization, and subsequent death of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
It was released on DVD to the home video market on November 14, 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
During an interview with CBS News, director Chris Paine announced that he would be making a sequel called Who Saved the Electric Car? This idea was later scrapped as there were not enough topics to discuss.[1]

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.- The New York Times

A potent hybrid of passion and politics fuel this energetic and highly compelling documentary.- Michael Rachtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter

If $3-a-gallon gasoline doesn't make you hate the big oil companies, the shocking revelations in Chris Paine's thought-provoking documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? will.- V. A. Musetto, New York Post
From: http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

Elecric Cars and much more at: http://www.ev1.org/

More Sites: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Who+killed+the+electric+car&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=11&ct=title

The City of Dothan Begins Stage 2 Water Conservation

2008-03-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

Updated:
March 26, 2008 07:29 PM EDT
The city of Dothan gets a head start conserving water.

Beginning April 1st customers of the water department are being asked to comply with what is called a "stage 2" conservation plan.

Residents with even-numbered street numbers should water their lawns on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.

Residents with odd addresses should water their lawns on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Nobody waters on Monday.

Dothan - which gets its water from deep-water wells, has suffered through some serious water shortages in recent years.

Article from: http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=8075024&nav=menu33_2

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

2008-03-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

Sponsored by The Heartland Institute
March 2 - March 4, 2008Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel1535 BroadwayNew York City, NY U।S.A.

Joseph L. BastConference HostPresident, The Heartland Institute

Opening Remarks delivered Sunday, March 2, 2008

Welcome to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change।

This is a truly historic event, the first international conference devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change। We’re asking questions such as:

how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?
how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?
how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and
is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

Obviously, these are important questions। Yet the IPCC pays little attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty surrounding them।

Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all। A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

82 percent said global warming is happening, but only
56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only
35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years।”

That’s a long ways from “consensus।” It’s actually pretty close to what the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:

70 percent thought global warming is happening,
only 41 percent thought it was due to human causes,
and only 19 percent thought it was a high-priority issue.

The alarmists think it’s a “paradox” that the more people learn about climate change, the less likely they are to consider it a serious problem। But as John Tierney with The New York Times points out in a blog posted just a day ago, maybe, just maybe, it’s because people are smart rather than stupid।

And incidentally, 70 percent of the public oppose raising gasoline prices by $1 to fight global warming, and 80 percent oppose a $2/gallon tax increase, according to a 2007 poll by The New York Times and CBS News।
I’ve got news for them: Reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent, which is what the alarmists claim is necessary to “stop global warming,” would cost a lot more than $1 a gallon.

Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of step with the real “consensus।” They claim to be certain that global warming is occurring, convinced it is due to human causes, and 100 percent confident we can predict future climates।

Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the skeptics?

These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are told by many distinguished scientists?

Former Vice President Al Gore has said repeatedly that there is a “consensus” in favor of his alarmist views on global warming। And of course, he’s not alone।

Two weeks ago, Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, when told of our conference, said, “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” (Denver Post, February 12, 2008).

RealClimate।org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this conference।

Well ...

We have with us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States।

They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University।

From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics।

From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm।

And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
And I apologize if I left anyone out।

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books। If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?

Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?

Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?

These scientists and economists deserve to be heard। They have stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.

And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous।

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined।”

It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his recent Bradley Prize up against Gore’s Nobel any day।

You’ve probably read some of the attacks that have appeared in the blogosphere and in print directed against this conference, and against The Heartland Institute। Let me repeat for the record here tonight what appears prominently on our Web site:

No corporate dollars were used to help finance this conference.
The Heartland Institute has 2,700 donors, and gets about 16 percent of its income from corporations.
Heartland gets less than 5 percent of its income from all energy-producing companies combined. We are 95 percent carbon free.

And let me further add to the record:
The honoraria paid to all of the speakers appearing at this conference add up to less than the honorarium Al Gore gets paid for making a single speech, and less than what his company makes selling fake carbon “off-sets” in a week.

इis no crime for a think tank or advocacy group to accept corporate funding। In fact, corporations that fail to step forward and assure that sensible voices are heard in this debate are doing their shareholders, and their countries, a grave disservice।

We’re not doing this for the money, obviously। The Heartland Institute is in the “skeptics” camp because we know alarmism is a tool that has been used by opponents of individual freedom and free enterprise since as early as 1798, when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth.

We opposed global warming alarmism before we received any contributions from energy corporations and we’ll continue to address it after many of them have found ways to make a fast buck off the public hysteria।

We know which organizations are raking in millions of dollars a year in government and foundation grants to spread fear and false information about climate change। It’s not The Heartland Institute, and it’s not any of the 50-plus cosponsoring organizations that helped make this conference possible.

The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say--over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films। They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people. Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still hope to.

But they have lost the debate।

Winners don’t exaggerate। Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.

As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues।”

We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his $200,000 honorarium। He refused. We invited some of the well-known scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.

All we got are a few professional hecklers registered from Lyndon LaRouche, DeSmogBlog, and some other left-wing conspiracy groups। If you run into them over the course of the next two days, please be kind to them ... and call security if they aren’t kind to you.

Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere। Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true। Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.

The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory। It can be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a “consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.

Which reminds me ... the true believers at RealClimate are now praising an article posted on salon।com by Joseph Romm--a guy who sells solar panels for a living, by the way--saying “‘consensus’? We never claimed there was a ‘consensus’!”

And notorious alarmist John Holdren a couple weeks ago said “‘global warming’? We never meant ‘global warming।’ We meant “‘global climate disruption’!”

I’d say this was a sign of victory, but that would suggest their words and opinions matter। It’s too late to move the goal posts, guys. You’ve already lost.

It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, in the U।S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.

Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal। Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve।
From: http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/newyork08.cfm

Chemtrails

2008-03-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

By Ken Adachi <Editor> http://educate-yourself.org/ct/index.shtml
Copyright 1998-2008 Ken Adachi and Educate-Yourself.org All Rights Reserved

IntroductionIf you are unfamiliar with the subject of chemtrails, you should first read this general overview of the chemtrail spraying operations which began in earnest in late 1997. Without first reading the introductory overview, it's difficult to understand the later informaiton that is being presented here. There are several key points to understand about the chemtrail spraying program.

Most people discover the reality of chemtrails by initially reading about it on the Internet and then going outside and looking up into the sky. They are shocked to realize that what they had been reading about (and studying photographs of) is also taking place right over their heads. What some people had dismissed as mere "jet plane exhaust" (because there are now scores of internet propaganda web sites trying to convince you that 'everything is well' and 'there's nothing to be alarmed about' and that unaccountable 'jet plane exhaust' plumes are magically being converted into horizon-to-horizon overcasts of "cirrus clouds" !) are dismayed to realize that chemtrails are indeed the toxin-laden aerosols that have been described here and at other web sites since 1998 and they are not being sprayed for any benign or national security reason as the disinformation peddlers would have you believe.

Nothing brings home the comprehension of the New World Order depopulation agenda than the realization that you and your family are also on the "useless eaters" (Henry Kissinger) elimination list.

I experienced that wake-up call in February of 1998. I had taken my 35 mm camera with me to the monthly meeting of the Orange County Chapter of the American Society of Dowsers and after the meeting, I had stopped off at a supermarket. After getting out of the car, I photographed for the very first time, the strange looking "contrails" that William Thomas had been describing on the Art Bell radio program a couple of weeks earlier. Thomas had dubbed them "chemtrails" on the Bell show to distinguish them from genuine (and rarely seen) short-lived ice crystal trailings properly identified as contrails. "Holy Cow", I thought to myself, ."We're being sprayed right here in southern California!" (Thomas lived near Vancouver, British Columbia). Although I had a number of articles about the NWO and their dark Machiavellian agendas posted at my web site, I was now witnessing (and breathing in) the stark reality of those depopulation plans. The NWO was no longer just words on the printed page.

Chemtrail spraying seems to be heaviest and most constant over North America and most countries of western Europe. Some countries in Asia are being sprayed (Japan and Korea), but the greatest exception to any chemtrail activity whatsover is China. The Chinese are being spared completely because China is being groomed by the NWO to replace the United States as the leading nation of the world, both economically and militarily.

On the brighter side, you should know that methods have been discovered to help neutralize chemtrails and return the sky to a normal blue with real clouds taking the place of the chemtrail soup and overcast which a host of disinformation peddlers are trying to convince you are just ordinary, "cirrus" clouds that "are formed from persistent contrails" (current disinformation spiel from government climatological web sites).

This "rescue" effort of neutralizing and transmuting the toxic elements in chemtrails was initiated in early 2002 with the introduction of a device called the "chembuster" which will transmute the atmospheric orgone energy envelope from one polarity ('DOR') which allow chemtrails to persist, to another orgone polarity ('OR') which will cause chemtrails to disperse. The proliferation of chembusters around the country led to another dramatic development in early 2004: legions of huge air elemental beings called "Sylphs" by ancient Greeks made their presence known by assuming cloud shapes that often look like wispy winged angels or animal forms (there are dozens of photos of Sylphs posted on the Sylph /Chemtrail page) who set about "cleaning up" the skies of chemtrail toxins by engulfing and transmuting chemtrail toxins into non-toxic substances.

If you're just finding out about chemtrails, you should read the earlier articles to understand the full extent and gravity of the chemtrail undertaking, but bear in mind that we have turned a corner on combating chemtrails and have now thrown a huge spanner wrench into the Dark Side's finely oiled genocide machine. If you want to hasten the demise of the chemtrail spraying program, please take the time to read about orgone generators, chembusters, and the use of your mind-with focused intent- to rid the sky of these poisons.

New or Recent Info:

Important Breakthroughs in eliminating Chemtrails! Please Read:

April 2005: The massive appearance of Sylphs in 2004 (see next paragraph below- August 2004) and their neutralization/transmutation of chemtrails into non-toxic elements was a huge leap forward in neutralizing the diabolical chemtrail genocide aerosol spraying operation, but apparently we have progressed to yet another level. People are now reporting the ability to clear the skies of chemtrails by use of the mind alone to obtain assistance from unseen helpers (Sylphs and others) and do the job for you based on your focused intention. It's really amazing to see this development. I first posted an article in 2002 by Rich Work about using the mind and the the power of prayer to disperse chemtrails, and now we see this ability coming into reality with many people. You can read more at these links:

Mind Over Chemtrails-Is It Possible?

The Art of Mental Chembusting & Other Strategies of Etheric Resistance (June 19, 2007) http://educate-yourself.org/lte/mentalchembusting19jun07.shtml

Sylphs & Chemtrails, Kim Hits a Home run! (Apr.16, 2005) http://educate-yourself.org/lte/kimshomerun15apr05.shtml

Can Humans Influence the Dispersion of Chemtrails? (Apr. 16, 2005) http://educate-yourself.org/lte/humansinfluencectdispersion16apr05.shtml

August 2004: The very latest reports and photos are now posted on a new index page, Sylphs & Chemtrails (http://educate-yourself.org/cn/sylphandchemtrailindex.shtml), which seems to confirm that Sylphs are neutralizing, converting, and eliminating chemtrails from the atmosphere in any local geographical area where a sufficient number of orgone generators have been deployed to convert the dominant DOR orgone atmospheric conditions into an OR dominated atmosphere. Read these articles to understand what Sylphs are, what orgone generators are, and the difference between a DOR atmosphere and an OR atmosphere. We are talking about nothing less than the demise of the chemtrail spraying operations! Chemtrails cannot exist in the presence of these giant air elementals and are they being destroyed as rapidly as they are being sprayed out of spew planes. You must read these articles and see the photographic evidence for yourself. All of the information posted below is interesting and informative, but it is now HISTORY. We are winning the battle against chemtrails and defeating the satanic traitors at their own game. Spread the word: DEPLOY ORGONE GENERATORS IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD and you too will be free of chemtrail laden skies!

June 25, 2004 We have good news: The not-so-secret chemtrail spraying program, intended to keep us from attaining higher spiritual awareness/consciousness, to reduce ethnically targeted populations worldwide, and to induce bioengineered disease organisms in order to reap staggering profits for the pharmaceutical cartels is apparently failing- and failing badly. I have seen the evidence here in southern California and have read of similar reports from different regions of America. Read the articles below for an historical overview of chemtrails and the reasons for their deployment, but don't dwell on the negative aspects of this story because things are beginning to look up and we have good reason for optimism! Get involved with making or obtaining orgone generators in your immediate environment and be part of the 'hit team' bringing down this Luciferian inspired genocide operation.

Jan. 26, 2002. If you are just beginning to learn about Chemtrails, the introductory article below will give you an overview of how this spraying program began in late 1997 and how the situation stood up to early 2000. The overhead spraying of chemtrails has continued unabated for over five years now. Thankfully, the Goodbye Chemtrails, Hello Blue Skies! article describes a simple orgone transmutation tool called the "C hembuster" which will physically disperse chemtrails and possibly mitigate some of their noxious energies and immune crippling pathogens.You can also obtain a ready made Chembuster along with other types of orgone generators from this web site.

The essay below by Montalk was posted to the Internet in September of 2000, but rings as true today as it did two years ago. Montalk's analysis of the purpose behind chemtrails strikes me as intelligent. He's seems closer to the mark than most writers on the topic. The fourth article describes a metaphysical method to destroy chemtrails that could work better than the physical method if employed by enough people and practiced correctly. Print out these articles and pass them around. The fifth article is a brief description of Dr. Len Horowitz's latest book (Death in the Air) on the chemtrail spraying program describing its sinister goals, It's a valuable resource to have in your library. Lydia Mancini put together a good web site devoted to articles about Chemtrails and Radar Matrix offers some of the most amazing radar graphics of the unprecedented EMF/microwave assault that the military and government are bombarding their own citizens with...

Water shortages looming? Get ready now

2008-03-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

By Ken SheinkopfHome Energy
Article Launched: 03/23/2008 12:12:22 AM PDT

Q: I just heard a radio program about future energy problems, and one of the speakers said she thought water shortages would be more a problem in the coming years than energy shortages. If this happens, what can we do now to prevent this?

A: I tend to agree with what you heard, especially since some parts of the world are experiencing this situation already. And many homeowners right here in the United States are paying water bills that are pretty close to or sometimes even higher than their energy ones.

The good news is that there are a number of things homeowners can do today to make dramatic cuts in their water usage and costs. Making water-efficient improvements can lower your water usage by 50 percent or even more. By reducing hot water usage, you'll further save on the costs of heating water you won't need. And putting water-efficient appliances and products into a new home during construction might let your builder downsize the plumbing system, resulting in enough water savings to pay for the cost of the efficient fixtures.
Plumbing fixtures sold in the United States today have to meet standards set in the early 1990s that require shower heads and faucets to have maximum flow rates of 2½ gallons per minute and toilets to have a maximum of 1.6 gallons of water per flush. If you have an older home and haven't upgraded these fixtures, you know the place to start making improvements. Note that there are many good products on the market today that use even less water than these maximum standards require, saving even more.

Major home water users such as dishwashers and clothes washers are required to meet federal energy standards, and newer models of these appliances are considerably more water-efficient than older ones. When it's time to replace your home's water-using appliances, you'll find that current models save a great deal of water over what you were using before.

An easy way to get started saving water is to install low-flow shower heads and faucets. Even cheap water flow restrictors can dramatically cut down on water use while still giving a strong stream of water for your shower or other uses. Finally, if you notice any water leaks in the faucets or toilet, get them fixed now, even if they are very slow leaks. You're wasting a huge amount of water and adding to your water bills by letting even tiny drips go unfixed.

If you want to find out how much water you're using in your home now, check out a Water Use Calculator I found on the Internet at www.waterbudgets.com/ConserVision/CUWCC/Datainput.htm.

Inputting information on the water-using fixtures in your home, along with how much you spent on water bills during the past year, will point out how much you can save. It's a great tool for driving home the point on how much water people use and how much of that is really being wasted.

Ken Sheinkopf is a communications specialist with the American Solar Energy Society (www.ases.org). Send your energy questions to askken@ases.org.
HOME ENERGY

Article from Mercury News at: http://www.mercurynews.com/realestatenews/ci_8667475?nclick_check=1

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming

2008-03-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

To Listen At Democracy Now Go To: http://media.switchpod.com/users/democracynow/ftp/dn2008-0321-1.mp3

Transcript:

Dr. James Hansen is widely regarded as the leading climate change scientist in the country. For the past twenty-five years, he has headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Just over a year ago, Dr. Hansen went public with a charge that made headlines around the world—that the Bush administration had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgent need to address climate change. Dr. Hansen joins us in our firehouse studio. His story is detailed in a new book by author Mark Bowen titled Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. Mark Bowen joins us from Massachusetts.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Dr. James Hansen is widely regarded as the leading climate change scientist in the country. It was his testimony to a Senate committee in 1988 that first brought the threat of global warming to the world’s attention. For the past quarter of a century he has headed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA’s premiere climate research center.
Just over a year ago, Dr. Hansen went public with a charge that made headlines around the world, that the Bush administration had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgent need to address climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: You may have heard Dr. James Hansen mentioned before on Democracy Now! His name has been cited by many guests on the show.

JOHN PASSACANTANDO: This government, at the behest of its oil company contributors, has been told not to put out information about global warming, not to allow the scientists to talk about their expertise with the press, about the connection between global warming and hurricanes. That happened at NOAA. There’s been pressure on Dr. James Hansen at NASA.

PAUL EHRLICH: I think it’s true that attitudes have changed slightly in the White House, because they now see a political issue, but they have worked very, very hard to suppress the science on global warming. For instance, they sent some junior jerk to try and keep Jim Hansen, who’s one of our very top climate scientists, from saying what he thought.

CHRIS MOONEY: Apparently, a NASA aide was instructed to interfere with Hansen’s ability to do press interviews. Actually, this completely backfired, because Hansen is not someone to be told to be quiet. And so, he just went to the media anyway, and it ended up exploding.

TIM FLANNERY: Can you imagine what it would be like for one of the world’s leading scientists, who is revered by everyone, to have this pipsqueak who lied about his credentials controlling what he tells the public? Just appalling. And, you know, the countries around the world would—I don’t know what they’d pay to have the advice of a Jim Hansen. It’s the sort of stuff we all desperately need. And here, in a country that actually pays him a salary and allows him to do his work, he is silenced. I mean, I honestly cannot see the sense of that. I can’t see who benefits.

AMY GOODMAN: That last speaker was acclaimed Australian scientist and writer Tim Flannery. Well, today, Dr. James Hansen himself joins us in our firehouse studio. His story of how the Bush administration tried to silence his warnings on climate change is detailed in a new book. It’s called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. It’s written by author Mark Bowen. He joins us from a studio in Watertown, Massachusetts.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Hansen, 1988, talk about the significance of that time.

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, I think it had become clear that the climate was changing and that human-made greenhouse gases were a reason for the long-term trend in the climate. And I just wanted to draw that to the attention of the public, because we really need to do something before the climate change becomes large, just because of the inertia of the system. If we wait until the climate change is large, then it’s too late to stop it from happening.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what did you do twenty years ago?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, I just reported that the world at that time was getting warmer, and I expected 1988 to be the warmest year in the period of instrumental record, which it did turn out to be, and that humans were primarily the reason for this long-term warming trend.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, that was twenty years ago, and while the Bush administration has gotten a lot of attention for its failure to heed any kinds of warnings, there was another administration before that, the Clinton administration, as well. And I think Bowen talks in the book about some problems that you had with Al Gore and—could you talk about how the Clinton administration reacted to some of the warnings you raised?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, my concern is general with both Republican and Democratic administrations. They both feel that they can control what scientists say to the public. So their offices of public affairs in the science agencies are headed, in general, by political appointees, and they review the press releases before they go out. So, it doesn’t really make sense in a democracy. The public should be honestly informed. And then, of course, the publications are allowed to make the decisions, and they don’t have to follow exactly what the science says. There are other considerations that they have. But they shouldn’t influence what is presented, the scientific evidence. And I object to that, regardless of which administration is in power.

AMY GOODMAN: So, before we go on to the Bush administration, where you did have the most trouble, can you talk about what happened during the Clinton years and how you were able to express or not your research?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, the one particular event that stands out in my mind is when I wrote a paper called “Global Warming in the 21st Century: An Alternative Scenario,” in which I emphasized that it’s not only carbon dioxide, but other climate forcings—methane and black soot—and we need to address those also. And for some reason, the people in the White House didn’t like emphasis on the non-CO2 parts of the story, and I just—the press release just kept coming back, and I would try to change it, they would change it, and finally I gave up. I just couldn’t get a press release through the way I wanted it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So, in essence, in these kinds of press releases, there’s a back-and-forth, as the White House or the environmental people at the White House—

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —edit your press releases?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Yeah. And that’s another strange thing, because they don’t even admit that it’s going to the White House. You know, it goes to NASA headquarters, and then it sort of disappears for a couple weeks. And where is it? Well, it’s very often at the White House, and I mentioned that. And now, they tried not to make that known, you know? And that’s, again, something that’s very inappropriate, in my opinion. And again, it’s happened in both administrations.

AMY GOODMAN: So let’s talk about what happened when the Bush administration came in. You were continuing to do your research. First of all, explain your place of work and the significance of NASA Goddard.

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, NASA is important, I think, because of the global observations that we make from satellites. We see what’s happening, for example, on Greenland and then West Antarctica. My laboratory is also involved in the global models that try to interpret what’s happening. And we’re also located at Columbia University, where we have the opportunity to work with people who have the data from the history of the earth over thousands and millions of years. You put together these different things—the satellite information, the information on how the earth responded in the past when greenhouse gases changed and other things changed, and the models—and then you get a picture of how the system works.
And that’s what really concerns me, because it’s the inertia of the system which tells us we’re already pushing it, so that it’s going to respond more over the next several decades. There’s a lot more climate response which is already in the pipeline, that we haven’t seen it yet, and that’s why we have to have an understanding of what’s happening, so we can take the actions now before it’s too late.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Of course, the speech of yours that got even more attention was then in December of ’97—was it?—when you also then raised again the sense that you were—not only that the planet was reaching the tipping level in terms of the dangers of greenhouse emissions, but also, shortly afterwards, you started getting the articles appearing in the New York Times and other places about the direct attempts by the government to silence you.

DR. JAMES HANSEN: 1997—I think you mean—

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m sorry, 2007.

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Yeah, 2006, I believe. I gave a speech in December of 2005 at the American Geophysical Union meeting, in which I tried to connect the dots. And the dots extend all the way to the role of special interests in confusing the public, you know, in not allowing straight scientific discussion of what’s happening and what’s causing it.
And, of course, the main problem is fossil fuel use. And the truth is, we cannot put all of the fossil fuel—the carbon dioxide from all the fossil fuels back into the atmosphere without creating a completely different planet. The last time that carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere, there was no ice on the planet. It was a completely different planet. And we have to realize we either are going to have to leave a lot of the fossil fuels in the ground, or else we’re going to have to capture the carbon dioxide when the fossil fuels are burned. And that just is not well understood, and the fossil fuel companies would rather that you didn’t understand that.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are those special interests, those fossil fuel companies that you’re talking about?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, it’s—

AMY GOODMAN: How do they stop the conversation?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, it’s the coal industry, and it’s also the oil industry. And they—you know, they put out disinformation, they fund a small number of scientists, and they expect the media to give you a balanced story. And by “balanced,” they mean that the scientists are saying that something’s happening, it would have to balanced by someone saying, “Oh, this is just natural.” You know, and even though the story has become very clear—you know, it’s 99.99 percent certain that humans are influencing the climate—but still, they make the story appear much less certain than it is, and therefore, why should we take actions as long as it’s uncertain?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dr. James Hansen, who is heading up the NASA’s Goddard Institute. He has for twenty-five years. And when we come back, we will also be joined by Mark Bowen, who has written a book about James Hansen called Censoring Science. Stay with us.

James Hansen and Mark Bowen on Censored Science

2008-03-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

James Hansen has been widely described as NASA's leading climate scientist; he's been studying the topic for more than three decades, and he began speaking publicly about the threat of global warming almost 20 years ago.
Just over a year ago, he went public with a charge that made headlines around the world: The Bush administration, Hansen said, had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgency of the need to address climate change.
Now, writer and scientist Mark Bowen has written a book on the affair. It's called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

From NPR at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17926941&ft=1&f=13

Big Farms to Get Free Pass in Reporting Air Pollution from Animal Waste

2008-03-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Dec. 28, 2007, proposal in a second attempt to exempt farms from reporting air pollution caused by animal waste and to reduce information available about toxins at the local level.

In response to entreaties by the National Chicken Council, National Turkey Federation, and U.S. Poultry and Egg Association in 2005, EPA initially attempted to exempt only ammonia emissions from poultry farms. The new rule proposal extends the reporting loophole to all farms with any hazardous substance resulting from any animal waste released into the air. Farms must still report other water and land waste.

Congress enacted the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) in 1986 in response to concerns about human and environmental health from toxic spills and pollution. National, state, and local emergency response teams were organized to ensure the immediate and well-planned reaction to any chemically dangerous situation. EPCRA details public notification as crucial for those emergency plans. In addition to requiring companies to report spills and pollution levels to the federal government, the law also also tasks companies with divulging specifics to emergency response teams, the Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC), and the State Emergency Response Commission (SERC). These entities are responsible for participating in response planning and providing information to the public to allow citizens to make their own risk evaluations.

The EPA explained that in developing this exemption proposal, it had reasoned that since the air releases are unlikely to trigger an EPA emergency response — having never done so before — mandatory reporting is an unnecessary administrative burden on both industry and government. However, EPA failed to consider the importance of publicly available information about local pollutants and exceedances of reportable quantities (RQs) — above which EPA considers there to be the "possibility" of harm. Currently, farms only have to report when pollution levels rise above a chemical's RQ, and farms routinely release hazardous substances above their RQs. The lack of consistent compliance suggests that no longer requiring information disclosure is an effort to sweep a messy problem under the rug. The intent of EPCRA was to act as preventative legislation, ensuring that sufficient information is disclosed and well-formed plans are created to prevent and properly respond to emergencies.

Government research has shown that animal waste causes significant environmental problems. The role of such waste in climate change and water pollution has also been well documented. The public health impacts from air pollution are also significant: multiple studies in North Carolina and Iowa have found respiratory and mental health problems in residents close to animal factories.

EPA has also recognized that current air monitoring practices, which limit investigations about the correlation between animal waste air pollution and human health, are inadequate. In attempts to determine farms' compliance with regulations, EPA initiated a two-year air emissions monitoring study in large animal farms in June 2007. Although some environmentalists believed the study to be little more than a stalling tactic, acknowledgement of the lack of basic air pollution data actually bolsters the argument that more information is needed rather than less. Instead, the proposed rule would weaken regulatory oversight and public accountability and ignores the central principal of EPCRA — that potential health concerns should be known publicly so that people can participate in protecting themselves.

From OMB Watch at: http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4132/1/1?TopicID=1

2008-03-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

EPA Bucks White House and Plans for Registry on Greenhouse Gases

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has started work on a draft rule creating mandatory greenhouse gas reporting requirements, even though President Bush's proposed FY 2009 budget does not provide funding for the rulemaking.

Last year's omnibus spending bill for FY 2008 (H.R. 2764), passed at the tail end of 2007, included a provision to create a greenhouse gas registry. The provision required a draft rule within nine months and a final regulation within 18 months of the bill's enactment. Despite signing the omnibus spending bill that contained the greenhouse gas registry provision for FY 2008, President Bush's recently proposed budget for FY 2009, released on Feb. 4, failed to continue funding for the rulemaking or implementation of the registry. While EPA can move forward with the rulemaking using the money allocated in the FY 2008 omnibus bill, without additional funds in FY 2009, the program would come to a halt. Perhaps that is the point of the president's proposal to zero out spending for the registry.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) sponsored the measure, seeing reliable and accurate baseline greenhouse gas emissions data as the first step to any policies aimed at their reduction, particularly for cap-and-trade legislation. The provision specifically directed $3.5 million to EPA for establishing an emissions registry but provided little implementation direction beyond having the registry cover all sectors. Therefore, EPA has wide discretion in establishing the registry and determining reporting threshold levels.

Sarah Dunham, director of EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality's Transportation and Climate Division, reported that EPA would be moving forward on a greenhouse gas registry. Dunham also explained that avoiding overlapping reporting requirements is a priority, using carbon dioxide emissions by cars and light trucks under corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards as an example.

Creating a national greenhouse gas registry has been the focus of other legislation. Rep. Eliot Engel☼ (D-NY) introduced the Greenhouse Gas Accountability Act of 2007 (H.R. 2651), requiring all publicly traded companies to report their emissions to both EPA and in financial reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) sponsored the National Greenhouse Gas Registry Act of 2007 (S. 1387), which adds greenhouse gases to the list of chemicals tracked by the Toxics Release Inventory. Neither the House nor the Senate were able to move these bills during the 2007 session and instead opted for the omnibus provision.

As Congress reacts to the president's budget request, it is unclear whether it will insert dedicated funding for the greenhouse gas registry program during the FY 09 appropriations process to build on the $3.5 million allocated in the FY 08 omnibus bill. If Bush's proposed elimination of funding for the emissions registry remains, a greenhouse gas registry may require Congress to take action on one of the greenhouse gas bills introduced last year. Until told otherwise, however, EPA appears to be trying to stay on target.

Article from OBM Watch at: http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4173/1/531

Ralph Nader- Nader on the Record

2008-03-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Nader on the Record
An interview with Ralph Nader about his presidential platform on energy and the environment

This is part of a series of interviews with presidential candidates.

By Amanda Griscom Little
19 Mar 2008

Ralph Nader.
Photo: Sage RossHe brought you the seat belt. He launched a consumer advocacy empire. He got 2,883,105 votes in the 2000 presidential election. Ralph Nader has earned fame -- and infamy -- for many doings over his 40-plus years as a firebrand activist. Perhaps less well-known is his contribution to environmental protection in the U.S. Nader, who entered the 2008 presidential race in late February, was on the frontlines of environmental advocacy in the 1970s. He went to bat for the first auto fuel-economy regulations and was a major voice against nuclear-power development. He fought for the passage of cornerstone environmental laws including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. In the years since, he's pressed on with green advocacy, publishing numerous studies, essays, and editorials decrying coal and nuke power and advocating ultra-efficient cars and a solar-powered economy.But for all his work in these areas, Nader has done little so far to flesh out an environmental and energy platform for his presidential campaign. The only specifics on his campaign website are that he supports solar energy and a "carbon pollution tax" and opposes nuclear power. To rustle up some particulars, I called Nader on his cell phone as he journeyed from one campaign stop to the next.For more info on his environmental stances and record, check out Grist's Nader fact sheet.

Q. Why should voters consider you the strongest environmental candidate?

A. I was a big advocate of renewable energy back in the '70s -- all forms, from wind power to photovoltaic to solar thermal to passive solar architecture. I was a very early opponent of nuclear power. As a lobbyist, I was instrumental in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with legislation to control air pollution and other toxic substances. I was also involved in the passage of the first motor-vehicle efficiency laws back in the '70s. So my words on this issue as a candidate reflect what I've done, rather than what I hope to do.

Q. Going forward, what sets your environmental platform apart from the other candidates'?

A. I'm basically promoting a massive conversion from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy. I'm not talking about corn ethanol, which has a very poor net energy- and water-usage characteristic. I'm talking about industrial hemp. I'm talking about plant life that can be efficiently converted to fuel -- like sugar cane, agricultural waste, cellulosic grasses, and certain kinds of biomass that can be grown with a spectacular ratio of energy inputs to outputs. I'm talking about a very fundamental remodeling of our economy -- a conversion from industrial-age, 19th-century technologies like the internal combustion engine to renewable, sustainable technologies of efficiency and production. We should have vehicles that get well over 100 miles per gallon. As Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken have shown, we can create far greater efficiencies in the use of our natural resources, whether it's copper, iron, oil, gas, timber, you name it.

Q. Let's get more specific about how you would implement this massive shift. You propose a carbon pollution tax, for instance. How would that work?

A. You tax inefficient technology and you tax pollution. The carbon tax would not be a credit exchange [as in a cap-and-trade program], which can be easily manipulated. It would be a straight-out tax on hydrocarbon production at the production source -- where it's far, far removed from consumers and forces better choices of technology from the get-go.

Q. Would energy producers then pass an increase in prices along to consumers in the form of higher gasoline and electricity prices?

A. Not necessarily, because it will provide a competitive opportunity for companies to say, "Hey, it's now more expensive to produce polluting technology than it is to produce non-polluting technology." And they will begin to break ranks from one another in an effort to innovate, and the magnet will be toward the more efficient option.
To protect consumers, you could have an excess profits tax on companies such as Exxon, and rebate it back to the customer. Or we could use the proceeds from the pollution tax to build more alternative public transit -- that would relieve the burden on consumers.

Q. Some people argue that a carbon tax is political suicide because you can't make taxes appeal to voters, period.

A. Look, this is not a gasoline tax. This is not a final product tax that directly hits consumers. It's a tax at the coal mine, a tax at the oil well.

Q. Your website says, "No to nuclear power, solar energy first." How do you plan to phase out nuclear and phase in renewables?

A. Oh, this is easy. The first thing you gotta do to stop nuclear power is prevent government guarantees of Wall Street loans to nuclear power companies to build plants. They will not get private-sector financing without a 100 percent Uncle Sam guarantee. You appeal to conservatives and liberals who don't like corporate welfare and say, "Let's stop rigging the playing field and cut off loan guarantees to nuclear power."

As far as the renewables are concerned, you can do it in two ways: You can basically eliminate all direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear and say, "Let's have a level playing field." Or you could actively increase tax credits and subsidies to solar power because it has superior environmental and geopolitical benefits. Furthermore, the government's a big customer -- it can take its entire procurement power and direct it toward solar energy and sustainable technology.
Keep in mind that we're currently paying six, seven dollars a gallon for gasoline if you include all the military expenditures to safeguard the global oil pipeline. That's something that taxpayers are paying for, even if it doesn't show at the pump.

Q. Nuclear makes up 20 percent of America's electricity supply. Coal makes up more than half. Would you phase out coal as well, or do you believe in the promise of advanced coal technology?

A. There's no such thing as clean coal. Anybody who's been down in a coal mine knows that. You've got to phase out all fossil fuels: first coal and oil, then natural gas.

Q. How quickly would you phase out fossil fuels?

A. If we had the will, we could convert most of [the infrastructure] in 20 to 25 years, and that includes a significant portion of the housing and building stock, which you'll replace with different types of structures and solar architecture, and retrofit existing buildings for solar water heating and photovoltaic.
I think solar energy is on the verge of exploding in this country. California is adding jobs by the day. The beauty of solar energy is, the jobs it adds are very decentralized, right down to "fix it yourself" firms in little towns. It's wonderful for climate, it doesn't promote wars abroad, and we've got a 4-billion-year supply. And Exxon cannot eclipse the sun in order to produce a shortage.

Q. Do you see renewable energy costing consumers more than conventional electricity?

A. If you include the costly military and environmental externalities of fossil fuels and nuclear, solar has been cost-competitive for years. If you exclude the externalities of finite fuels, wind power is already competitive, passive solar architecture is competitive. Meanwhile, the price of photovoltaics and other forms of solar-generated electricity are coming down very fast every year, and are on an upward curve of innovation -- with new technology, refined ways of producing the film, etc. They will be uniformly competitive within the next 10 years.
Remember that consumers are paying [for today's energy system] in many other indirect ways: strip mines, acid runoff into lakes and streams, pollution in their lungs, medical costs. Sixty-five thousand people a year die from air pollution, half of them from coal-burning utility plants. Those are just a few of the external costs operating here.

Q. Would you use revenues from your carbon tax to provide incentives and tax breaks for renewable innovation?

A. Industry argues for public subsidy, but I think renewable energy technologies are moving very, very fast toward a competitive posture with fossil fuels. It's happening on its own. That's even without accounting for the horrendous external cost, military cost, pollution, health cost, and damage to land and water. Once you've incorporated all of those burdens, the cost comparison is not even close. If the geopolitical and environmental costs are so compelling, government tax credits can reverse the uneven playing field that has existed for decades to the advantage of fossil fuels and nuclear, and direct them toward solar consumers and the fledgling solar industry.

Q. Companies from Wal-Mart to GE have been launching green initiatives and building clean energy solutions. What do you think of these efforts? Do you see corporate America today as a breeding ground for transformative change?

A. Oh yeah. Why not? I mean, when they start competing over light bulbs and things like that, that's a sign the solar age has come of age. After General Electric monopolized and stagnated the electric light bulb for decades, costing billions of dollars and many, many megawatts of waste, it's nice they've finally recognized that consumers want efficient lighting systems.

Q. Many argue that the U.S. shouldn't commit to a global greenhouse-gas reduction target that doesn't involve China and India. Do you agree with this? How would you bring them to the table?

A. You bring them to the table by restricting imports of badly emitting greenhouse-gas technologies. Then you devise an international treaty where you analyze very carefully which countries really need aid in this area, which countries don't need aid, and you proceed accordingly. You have a deliberative process under an international body with a global goal of restricting greenhouse gases and acid rain and other things.

Q. What do you think is the most important environmental issue we face after climate and energy?

A. It's all about solar, in all its manifestations -- from passive solar to active, including photovoltaics, solar thermal, and efficient biomass [plant life fed by sunlight]. Wind is also a form of solar energy, because the sun creates the earth's climate, including the winds within it. Solar is the greatest universal solvent for environmental hazards.

Q. What do you think of Al Gore's climate activism? Has he been an effective agent of change?

A. At last. Where was he when he was vice president? We couldn't get him to make a speech on solar energy. But now, like Martin Luther King Jr. said, he's "free at last, free at last," and he's made a major contribution.

Q. Many have called George W. Bush America's worst environmental president, and some critics have said that if you hadn't entered the 2000 race, Gore would have been president, and therefore Bush's irreversible environmental damage never would have happened.

A. Well, tell those critics to take a course in elementary statistics and engage all variables, each one of which would have put Gore in the White House. Gore won, but the Republicans stole his victory in Florida. The Electoral College stole his victory nationally after he won the popular vote. The Supreme Court stole his victory. And 250,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush. We've got to stop playing the spoiler game and treating third-party candidates as second-class citizens.

If you're going to blame me for Gore's loss -- and Gore doesn't blame me, by the way -- then you've got to credit me for Gore's Nobel Prize for his alerting the world to global climate change, for all of his successes with books, and for his millions of dollars of appreciating Google stock.

Q. Maybe you should get an honorary percentage. On to another topic: Who is your environmental hero?

A. There are several. One is David Brower. Another is Barry Commoner, who wrote Making Peace With the Planet, among other great books on the environment. The third one is Amory Lovins.

Q. What was your most memorable wilderness or outdoor adventure?

A. Camping in Yosemite National Park when I was as a student at Princeton. I thought it was the most beautiful place on earth, in spite of the haze from 25,000 vehicles in the valley below.

Q. If you could spend a week in one natural area of the U.S. now, where would it be?

A. The Green Mountains of Vermont.

Q. What do you do personally to lighten your environmental footprint?

A. I consume very little except newspapers, and I recycle them. I don't have a car. I'm the antithesis of the over-consumer.
Q. How are you getting around for your campaign?

A. We use planes and cars and trains. When we get there, we spend very few resources in getting our message across.

Q. Are you going to offset your footprint from the planes and cars?

A. I think that's an indulgence. I don't trust these offsets. We can do a lot more than that.

Q. If George Bush were a plant or an animal, what kind of plant or animal would he be?

A. Poison ivy. As for an animal, I wouldn't demean any animal species that way. It's easy to say coyote, but that's a stereotype of animals. What carnivore has ever, as a species, done what Bush has done to the Iraqis?

This is from: http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/03/19/nader/

Has Climate Already Passed Dangerous Point?

2008-03-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

Has Climate Already Passed Dangerous Point?
To Save the Planet, Roll Back Emissions to 1988 Levels

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/james-hansen-47031902

James Hansen, long an outspoken scientist warning of the dangers of doing nothing to stop global warming, has articulated a new position at odds with the scientific consensus stated by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Rather than seeking to avoid a doubling of carbon in the atmosphere (compared to pre-industrial times) in order to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, Hansen suggests that the world has already passed this point. He says we've bought an ice-free world on carbon credit, and the climate will alter life as we know it unless we act to reduce the overall concentration of carbon in the atmosphere well below today's level.
"Paleoclimate evidence and ongoing global changes imply that today’s CO2, about 385 ppm, is already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted," he writes, with eight co-authors, in a draft paper that has not been accepted for publication. Policy makers had aimed to slow carbon emissions so that the concentration does not reach 450 parts per million, or ppm, double the pre-industrial concentration.
"Realization that we must reduce the current CO2 amount has a bright side: effects that had begun to seem inevitable, including impacts of ocean acidification, loss of fresh water supplies, and shifting of climatic zones, may be averted by the necessity of finding an energy course beyond fossil fuels sooner than would otherwise have occurred," Hansen writes. "We suggest an initial objective of reducing atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm, with the target to be adjusted as scientific understanding and empirical evidence of climate effects accumulate."
As Andrew Revkin, the New York Times writer, points out in his Dot Earth blog, reducing emissions to the level Hansen suggests would be like rolling back the clock to 1988.
Accomplishing that would take tacking on a new tax or other cost for carbon, phasing out the use of coal, unless carbon emissions can be captured and stored (deep underground, most likely), and doing away with "unconventional" fossil fuels.
"The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II," Hansen writes. "The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable."
Find this article at: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/james-hansen-47031902

CRISIS, REACTION, SOLUTION!!!

2008-03-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

CRISIS, REACTION, SOLUTION!!!
Questioned to ask are: Is the crisis real? Are our reactions logical? Is the solution in our best interest??? In the case of 911 it was: Attack, Fear, Loss of Constitutional Rights ("Patriot Act")!!! What of "Global Warming".

There is an old adage from the "Watergate" era: FOLLOW THE MONEY"!!! Who stands to profit from "Global Warming"?

"Global Warming" is a multifaceted issue and must be viewed from all sides, even from the viewpoints that are not popular!

Global-Warming Payola?
March 6, 2008, 10:35 am
By John Tierney

All right, let’s talk about the money.

After I asked readers to focus on the substance of the skeptics’ arguments at this week’s conference on global warming, readers insisted that I should have focused on the financing of the sponsor, the Heartland Institute. Others objected to my (and my colleague Andy Revkin) even writing about a conference sponsored by this group. I’m used to this sort of criticism, but I still find it baffling. Do the critics really think there’s more money and glory to be won by doubting global warming than by going along with the majority?
I ask this question not because I doubt the integrity or competence of the researchers and environmental groups who are getting billions of dollars from government agencies, corporations, foundations and private donors concerned about climate change. If I write about prominent climate scientists like James Hansen of NASA, I don’t feel obliged to note how much research money they get — or how much extra money is going to their field because of the concerns they’ve raised about climate change. I don’t dismiss Al Gore’s warnings just because his campaign against global warming has been so good for his career. I don’t obsess about how much he gets per lecture or what he does with the money. I’ve criticized some of his scarier predictions (like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream) on scientific grounds, but I’ve never suggested he’s venal... http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/global-warming-payola/index.html?hp

CBC - Global Warming Doomsday Called Off
A very informative documentary about the real cause of global warming. It clearly discuss about the fact that CO2 is not cause of global warming. Take a look also at the Great Global Warming Swindle and Green House Conspiracy in google video. This documentary discusses many topics that are not covered in the Swindle such as the hockey stick graph, from the viewpoint of Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5949034802461518010

Green_House_Conspiracy.wmv
This documentary is a good companion to the latest documentary,"The Great Global Warming Swindle" recently shown on CH 4 UK and is available on Google video. The hoax of Global Warming / Green House was exposed 17 years ago by CH 4 UK in this documentary entitled Green House Conspiracy. Those who subscribe to the rubbish trotted out by Al Gore and his mindless followers are not new they were the same arse clowns who were telling us we were all going to freeze to death 30 years ago.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5949034802461518010

The Science of Air Pharmacology or Chemtrails The Science of "Air Pharmacology" or "Chemtrails"
By: Jim Phelps Copyright 2005

This page is written by the person that invented the DOE's biggest project on re-mediation for the ozone hole. Jim Phelps invented the DOE's "Global Shield" Weather Control Projects in the mid-1980s to compensate for man's damage to the ozone layer leading to global warming. Jim Phelps spotted the predominate mechanisms for global warming and found ways to lessen the damage using commercial aircraft to make cloud systems to cool the Earth... http://members.aol.com/doestar/chemtrails.html

GlobalWarming Awareness2007
...Claims of significant anthropogenic global warming due to CO2 emissions are either overblown or completely unfounded. The greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind is this “Global Warming / Climate Change” tandem. Any doomsday scenarios concocted on these theories are a scientific embarrassment that have as much credibility as Creationism, Refrigerator Gnomes, or the Late Iraqi Information Minister...

...The Global Warming scam was designed to1. Scare people into giving time, money and power to charlatan scientists and sham politicians2. Dramatically increase the size and scope of government and proliferate a worldwide socialist agenda3. Oppress developing Nations
Sadly, the scam is working.
This fraud was dreamed up by intellectually dishonest scientific professionals coveting government grant money: Was latched on to by politicians and political groups that seek to expand their own influence as well as the size and scope of government and is perpetuated by the ignorant masses who do not have the capacity to refute what Hitler coined the “The Big Lie.”

Billions of dollars in taxes, private donations and political contributions are raised every year to fight the global warming boogieman. This sham has taken many otherwise intelligent and good intentioned people and turned them into quasi-religious zealots on a crusade for a bigger, more intrusive, more powerful world government... http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/18/globalwarming-awareness2007/

Why Global Warming is Good for Business

2008-03-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

Why global warming is good for business
Climate change isn't all bad news. In fact, there may well be money in it...

...Fully 85% of Americans believe global warming is happening now, according to a recent Time/ABC/Stanford poll. We know we're in the midst of some serious climate change, and don't need pictures of polar bears stuck on fragmenting ice caps to drive the point home...
http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/13/technology/business2_futureboy0413/index.htm

"Global Warming Fraud" and "The Carbon Tax Fraud"???

2008-03-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

I thought that I would start off this discussion with some controversy and see if we can start people to thinking and not reacting.

We find ourselves in a very tumultuous situation in the world today with the war, the economy, crime and immigration etc. This blogger believes that it is wise to gather the facts from all sides rather than to fall prey to emotional reaction.

Lets take a look at a couple of interesting exposes on the subject of "The Carbon Tax" that is being presented woldwide. One is an article:

Media Promote Global Warming Fraud
By Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

When it comes to Iraq, our media have been preoccupied with the issue of whether there was adequate intelligence to justify the invasion and if policy-makers made up evidence before the war. But on the matter of global intervention to stop global warming, there seems to be no need for scientific evidence to justify what is shaping up as a global carbon tax of 35 cents a gallon of gas on the American people.

It's difficult to figure out which is the bigger fraud-the U.N. or our media… http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/kincaid020707.htm

The other a Viseo: Carbon Tax Fraud from the Video "End Game" by Alex Jones. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVmk3lUYdPA