Could the Arctic be the Next Middle East?

According to an article from PhysOrg, the potentially huge deposits of energy resources beneath the melting Arctic ice cap is moving to the fore in the international scramble for new energy supplies.

According to PhysOrg, analysts and key industry figures addressing the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, argued that unlocking the region's potential could help ease global concerns over assured energy supplies.

Obviously, difficult questions remain about the impact on the environment and the uncertainty of exactly who owns what, with up to eight countries claiming some interest in the Arctic and others racing to catch up presents additional difficulty.

The PhysOrg article continues:

"It will never replace the Middle East" as an oil source, said Helge Lund, head of Norway's Statoil energy group, but "it has the potential to be a good supplement."

Lund said the Arctic may account for as much as 25 percent of undiscovered oil and gas resources worldwide, the equivalent of 375 billion barrels.

Analysts say the Arctic is highly attractive because it is closer to Europe and the United States, reducing transportation costs, and offers the prospect of more stability and supply security than the volatile Middle East.

Moreover, global warming has reduced Arctic sea ice -- which last year was the lowest on record -- and opened the way for increased marine transport and access to natural resources.

George Newton, chairman of the US Arctic Research Commission, said surface temperatures were set to rise up to 5.5 degrees within a century even without taking the impact of booming economies such as China and India into account.

He predicted tourist and commercial maritime traffic through the fabled and normally ice-locked Northwest Passage within a decade.

Even China, he added, was showing an increasing interest in Arctic research and had recently bought an icebreaker.

European Union energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs said Brussels wanted to diversify its energy suppliers. Currently, a quarter of its natural gas comes from Russia, and 15 percent from Norway.

"We regard Russia in the future as a reliable supplier," he said, but that did not mean the European Union should not seek alternatives.

"We should be more concerned about situations where there is disruption of supply."

Lund said that if Barents Sea resources could be successfully exploited, a new gas pipeline could be attached to existing pipelines serving Europe.

He said concerns over the environmental impact of increasing use of Arctic resources could be allayed by new technologies such as sub-sea facilities that would not harm fish and other marine stocks.

"Often people under-estimate the power of technology" to cope, Lund added, calling for a single management regime for all the Arctic's natural resources on the basis that "neither fish and hydrocarbons know boundaries."

But that touches on another tricky issue -- deciding which country owns or can exploit which parts of the Arctic.

Eight nations -- Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States -- have Arctic interests.

Of those, all bar Sweden and Finland enjoy Arctic coastlines, and border and sovereignty disputes, such as between Russia and Norway, Russia and the United States and the United States and Canada, are hampering cooperation.

A country is permitted 200 nautical miles under the Law of the Sea for its territorial waters, but can also lay claim to extra mileage on the continental shelf -- essential to explore and utilise sub-sea energy resources.

"I don't see any geopolitical tensions arising out of the Arctic," Piebalgs said, although Newton pointed out that unlike Russia, the United States still had not ratified the treaty.

This is yet another sign that concerns about resource depletion are leading the world's industrial nations (as well as rapidly industrializing nations like China and India) to search in some unlikely places for new energy resources.

What strikes me as extremely ironic about this new focus on Arctic energy resources is that they are becoming accesible due to global climate change (which is particularly pronounced in the low latitudes). That is, our fossil energy use is fueling global climate change that is melting Arctic sea ice and unlocking more fossil energy resources for us to use which will continue to fuel global climate change. Does this sound like a particularly smart strategy?

Wouldn't we be much better off turning to renewable and clean energy resources with a greater focus on the development of wind, solar, geothermal and biomass technologies as well as energy storage technologies (to help overcome the intermittency of these renewable energy sources)? Wouldn't it make more sense to reduce our demand for fossil energy through energy efficiency and conservation than to begin to exploit the fragile and hard to access Arctic Ocean region?

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Top NASA Climate Scientist Says Bush Administration Tried to Silence Him on Global Climate Change

PhysOrg reports that NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, has accused the Bush administration of trying to stop him from speaking out after he called in a lecture for swift cuts in emissions of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Hansen, the director of the US space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his forthcoming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for media interviews, the New York Times reported Sunday.

"They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," said Hansen, who told the paper he would ignore the restrictions.

The article continues:

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, denied to the Times that there was any effort to silence Hansen.

"That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

Acosta said that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

"This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he told the Times. "It's about coordination."

"Since 1988, (Hansen) has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore," the Times reported.

Hansen told the Times that "efforts to quiet him" had begun in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on December 6, 2005, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 'a different planet'," the Times said.

US administration policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

"After that speech and the release of data by Dr Hansen on December 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr Hansen that there would be 'dire consequences' if such statements continued, those officers and Dr Hansen said in interviews," the Times said.

In discussions with the daily paper, Hansen said "it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase 'to understand and protect our home planet'".

It added that he was "incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents".

The Times quoted Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, as saying there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up".

"That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied," he told the paper.

This seems perfectly in keeping with the Bush administration's stance on global climate change. The administration's past record on editing (i.e. censoring) reports on global warming makes claims like this seem more credible and Bush et. al. have repeadetly tried to downplay global climate change while taking very little action to address its causes or mitigate its consequences.

When are we going to see some real leadership on climate change from the federal level?

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Move Over Insight - Here Comes the 330 mpg Diesel-Electric Hybrid Aptera

Three San Diego engineers have designed a two-passanger, three-wheeled diesel-electric parallel hybrid that will achieve a phenomenal 330 mpg while selling for less than $20,000 (USD).

The engineers have formed a company, Accelerated Composites, LLC, (AC) to refine the design and build a prototype.

According to a press release, the innovative vehicle, dubbed the "Aptera," will be constructed from composite, light-weight materials, will post this fuel efficiency in normal city and highway driving and will demonstrate acceleration and handling similar to that of a Honda Insight.

The vehicle achieves these remarkable numbers through the use of cutting-edge materials, manufacturing methods, and a maverick design mantra. AC's slogan is "Innovation in Orders of Magnitude" and seems appropriate considering the reported specs of the Aptera.

The press release goes on:

Unique, optimized aerodynamics gives the Aptera© a drag form factor that will be lower than any mass produced car in the world. “It looks like nothing you’ve ever seen because it performs like nothingyou’ve ever seen,” says Accelerated Composites founder and CEO Steve Fambro. “What we’ve done is changed the way cars are thought of and designed. Rather than designing to a styling aesthetic, like the big auto makers do, we hew to an efficiency and safety aesthetic. When you do that, math and physics mostly dictate the shape of the car, and in this case, math and physics look awesome.”

But aerodynamics is only half of the equation. The other half is weight. The Aptera© is made almost entirely of lightweight composites, making it one of the lightest cars on the road. Yet this savings does not come at the cost of safety. In fact, the construction of the car is based on the driver-protection “crash box” found in Formula One race cars. “Composites are enormously strong and lightweight,” says Fambro. “That’s why all the aircraft manufacturers are switching to them.”

So why aren’t the auto makers switching? “Cost” says Fambro. "They haven’t figured out cost-effective manufacturing processes for composites. But we have."

The Aptera will weigh only 850 pounds and, as mentioned above, is made almost entirely of lightweight composites, based on AC’s Panelized Automated Composite Construction (PAC2) process.

The light weight and three-wheel design means the Aptera will be liscenced as a motorcycle.

The production model of the vehicle will pair a 12 horsepower (hp) CARB-certified diesel engine with a 25 hp permanent magnet electric motor and will be able to run in all-electric mode (AC is designing the prototype with a gasoline engine for cost). AC plans to use ultracapacitors for energy storage and regenerative breaking. Ultracaps are not chemical batteries and thus can quickly and efficiently accept the energy from regenerative breaking. They also offer very high power densities (albeit with correspondingly low energy densities).

The Aptera will feature an automatic continuously variable transmission (CVT) and will be able to accelerate from 0-60 in 11 seconds with a electronically regulated top speed of 95 mph.

To increase aerodynamics, the slippery vehicle will not have side mirrors but will rather incorporate video cameras and a rear view display inside the vehicle. All told, the aerodynamics of the Aptera are practically an order of magnitude better than anything on the road today and AC claims that the coefficient of drag on the vehicle will be only 0.055-0.06.


The initial response by many to this design (myself not exluded, see lengthy discussions here and here) is that it could never pass safety standards or that it is too unsafe to drive on the same roads as SUVs and semis.

While I certainly wouldn't love to get hit by a semi in this car - not too different from any other car really - as AC's founder and CEO, Steve Fambro, quickly pointed out, such criticism is a bit misplaced. Indeed, the Aptera is being designed with the full intent of making it a safe and liscencable vehicle. As Fambro writes:

"The Aptera will be treated as a motorcycle in the eyes of the law, but that doesn't mean it's unsafe. On the contrary, it will have the same type of airbag-in-seatbelt technology used in newer light planes. Additionally, the dirver and passenger sit in a 'crashbox' thats underneath the aeroshell...or body. There's crushable/absorbing material between the aeroshell and body as well. The crashbox design, still being modeled and simulated, offers much more protection than most car doors/pillars."

Furthermore, while composites may be light, they aren't brittle and actually have strengths similar to steel.

In short, we're not talking about a fiberglass tin can here, but rather a composite shelled vehicle with an inner crashbox modeled after those used by forumala race cars, a crushable/absorbing material and airbags protecting the driver and passanger. So while you're car may be totalled in an accident with an SUV, you'll walk away fine (can the SUV driver say the same?

Furthermore, millions of people the world over ride motorcycles while plenty of us treehuggers feel safe enough riding your bikes everywhere. Why wouldn't you feel safe enough to ride around in a vehicle surrounded by a composite shell and protected by a 'crash box' modeled after those in a formula racer? (We've all seen those spectacular high-speed, end-over-end race car crashes from which the driver walks away a bit bruised but otherwise unhurt).

Finally, plenty of people got excited about the Honda Insight and I can't imagine that the Aptera is any less safe than the Insight which is about the same size and made of similar ultra-light materials.

In the end, the most exciting part about this vehicle is that it pushes the limits of what we think is possible for a vehicle to obtain. 330 mpg! How can we get excited about GM's 70 mpg boxfish-styled diesel concept (also with video instead of side mirrors for aerodynamics) when this baby is out there?

Even if this vehicle never makes it on the roads (and I dearly hope it does), or if when it does, it only gets 150 mpg or some such, it will still be a testament to what is truly possible when you are willing to innovate and to let form follow function.

The designers at Accelerated Composites have moved the goal posts and pushed the edges of what we thought was possible and I hope that their design serves to inspire vehicle designers elsewhere to imagine what else might be possible, to truly innovate, and to begin designing the cars of tomorrow today.

Depending upon the completion of funding, a prototype could be ready to roll as early as the end of March or April, according to Steve Fambro.

[A hat tip to Green Car Congress]

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'Precooling' Office Buildings Cuts Peak Energy Costs

PhysOrg reports that Purdue University engineers say they've developed a method for "precooling" small office buildings to cut energy costs.

According to James Braun, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering, precooling would reduce energy consumption during times of peak demand, promising not only to save money but also to help prevent power failures during hot summer days.

Precooling involves running air conditioning at cooler-than-normal settings in the morning and then raising the thermostat to warmer-than-normal settings in the afternoon. The method has been shown to reduce the cooling-related demand for electricity in small office buildings by 30 percent during hours of peak power consumption in the summer, Braun said.

As PhysOrg points out, small office buildings represent the majority of commercial structures, so reducing the electricity demand for air conditioning in such buildings could help prevent rolling blackouts, such as those that plagued California during the summer of 2000.

Braun said the study focused on California because research was funded by the California Energy Commission, but the same demand-saving approach could be tailored to buildings in any state.


Reducing peak power demands is very important. Not only does it help prevent rolling black-outs which occur when peak demand exceeds generating capacity, but in the longer run, reducing peak demand avoids the construction of new power plants.

Power generating capacity must exceed peak power demands at all times, not just average demands. Peak demand can be two to three times higher than average demand (the exact amount varies regionally due to climate and local building/efficiency codes).

When peak demand exceeds generating capacity, power companies are forced to buy power from the 'spot market' - the open energy trading market; i.e. where Enron made all its money - often at prices significantly higher than the price they charge their customers. If peak demand exceeds capacity too often, utility companies are forced to build more power plants or contract for more output from other plants - i.e. increase capacity.

In short, additions to plant capacity are driven by increasing peak power demand, not increasing total consumption.

Technologies and practices like this that reduce peak demand are thus critical in maintaining the effectiveness and integrity of our power generation infrastructure while mitigating the need for new infrastructure investments. They are thus nearly always very cost effective, both for the business or home owner as well as for the utility company that gets to avoid the costs of adding new capacity or purchasing power at peak periods from the spot market.

[BTW, Interface Engineering of Portland used a simiar 'precooling' technique for their new Oregon Health Sciences University River Campus One building in Portland's new South Waterfront development district, which is expected to be (by far) the largets building to achieve LEED Platinum certification while cutting mechanical and electrical costs by 10%! Expect more on this soon...]

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News From My Backyard: Oregon State University Energy Technology Takes the Waste Out of Wastewater

A new "microbial fuel cell" technology being developed at Oregon State University (OSU) could revolutionize the treatment of wastewater, according to a university press release.

The system developed by my sister university just up the valley uses organic material that until now had been literally wasted - i.e. 'flushed' down the drain in our wastewater - and creates either usable electricity or hydrogen gas to potentially help fuel the cars of the future.

Some of the latest findings on these systems were recently published in a professional journal, Environmental Science and Technology, by engineers from OSU and Penn State University.

According to the press release, with only slight adaptations, these microbial fuel cell systems could take almost any biodegradeable organic matter and produce a useful product - such as the electricity to help operate a waste treatment plant or hydrogen for fuel cells, which many believe will be the most practical alternative to gasoline-powered vehicles.*

The press release goes on:

When used with sewage, another fringe benefit of the process is that it also cleans the water by a completely different method than the traditional use of aerobic bacteria, opening the door for new generations of waste treatment plants that are efficient, effective and might produce much of the energy needed for their own operation.

"These systems would use oxidation to remove up to 80 percent of the pollutants in wastewater, and at the same time provide a substantial portion of the energy used to operate the treatment plants," said Hong Liu, an assistant professor of biological and ecological engineering in the OSU College of Engineering. "In the United States, about $25 billion a year is spent for domestic wastewater treatment, so major cost savings may be possible.

"And in developing nations where waste treatment technologies are often considered too expensive, making a waste treatment plant almost self-sufficient in energy might mean the difference between being able to afford proper treatment of wastes, compared to no treatment at all."

Those possibilities, Liu said, will take further refinement of existing technology. But the concept has clearly been proven in laboratory experiments, she said. It's renewable, and efforts are under way to bring down costs, identify less expensive materials and improve operational efficiency.

It's been known that microbial fuel cells can be run from high- energy materials such as glucose, but is now clear that many organic waste materials may also work, including grass straw, wood pulp, and of course wastewater. Bacteria oxidize the organic matters and, in the process, produce electrons that travel from the anode to the cathode within the fuel cell, creating an electrical current.

As a new concept in sewage treatment, this approach eliminates the need to pump oxygen into a mixture of sewage and aerobic bacteria - in one stroke eliminating almost half of the cost associated with a conventional sewage treatment plant.

For hydrogen production, some of the latest studies outline a related process in the absence of oxygen that uses an electrical assist to greatly increase the efficiency of direct hydrogen production at the cathode of the reactor. This "bio- electrochemically assisted microbial reactor" also treats the wastewater at the same time - just like in the approach used to create electricity - but instead yields hydrogen as a useful end product and the ultimate power source for hydrogen fuel cells. And the approach is more cost-effective than existing technology to produce hydrogen, which uses large amounts of electricity.

"Some of the newest experiments indicate that for hydrogen production, we can increase the amount of potential hydrogen recovered from sewage from about 15 percent to about 70 percent," Liu said. "This completely anaerobic technology is very promising, but we still have improvements to make."

Part of the challenge, scientists say, will be to identify less costly materials that produce results similar to those already being achieved in laboratories with fairly expensive materials, such as platinum.

Depending on the level of improved efficiencies and other improvements, researchers believe it may be possible to create sewage treatment plants that are completely self-sufficient in energy production. Alternatively, if there is more of a demand for hydrogen to use in fuel cells and the next generation of automobiles, the technology could be aimed in that direction. But in either case, what's now considered wastewater would become a valuable energy resource - not a waste.

In other work that's under way at OSU, oceanographers are using related processes to harness plankton in the ocean as a fuel source, creating mobile instruments that might glide through the water, producing their own energy as they go, and aid oceanographic research. And other devices might have value to provide energy in remote areas where organic materials are available but electrical grids are not.

The theoretical ability of microbes to produce electricity has been known for decades, scientists say, but only in the past few years has the efficiency of these devices been improved enough to make them useful for various purposes.

Some of the most recent research in this field has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

"Bacteria eat food to get energy, just like people do," Liu said. "But in the process they shed electrons, and this is something we're learning how to use. The concept is very environmentally safe and should find some important applications."

Well, it looks like this money is starting to pay off.

I'm always excited about technologies that utilize materials we previously thought were waste for some useful purpose, especially when that purpose is energy generation. There's not a lot of technical information in the press release and I wasn't able to find the journal article so I'm not sure what the efficiencies or yields of this process are but, for wastewater at least, they sound promising.

I'm not so sure these fuel cells would be the best use for all organic materials - there are plenty of other useful ways to utilize biomass including biofuels, co-firing, char to the solar-carbothermic zinc process etc - but these microbial fuel cells seem perfectly suited for wastewater treatment plants. If they can be scaled down enough, they could even be used 'on-site,' enabling individual buildings to treat their own wastewater before discharging it to the city wastewater system while generating electricity for building needs as well. Sounds like a win, win situation to me!

As far as getting the cost of materials down, it seems like this or this would help matters...

Keep up the good work up there, Beavers. Well done...

*[myself not necessarily included]

[A hat tip to Clean Edge]

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Half of Kuwait's Oil Reserves "Vanish" Overnight

Reuters reported on Friday* that Kuwait's oil reserves are actually half what was officially stated, according to internal Kuwaiti records reportedly seen by industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW).

"PIW learns from sources that Kuwait's actual oil reserves, which are officially stated at around 99 billion barrels, or close to 10 percent of the global total, are a good deal lower, according to internal Kuwaiti records," the weekly PIW reported on Friday.

PIW reported that according to data circulated in Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), the upstream arm of state Kuwait Petroleum Corp, Kuwait's remaining proven and non-proven oil reserves are only about 48 billion barrels.

The Reuters article goes on:

PIW said the official public Kuwaiti figures do not distinguish between proven, probable and possible reserves.

But it said the data it had seen show that of the current remaining 48 billion barrels of proven and non-proven reserves, only about 24 billion barrels are so far fully proven -- 15 billion in its biggest oilfield Burgan.

Kuwait has been adding up to 500 million barrels a year at Burgan which means the remaining non-proven reserves of some 5.3 billion barrels will likely be upgraded to proven, according to PIW.

Three consortia led by BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil are in the race for Project Kuwait, a 20-year operating service contract to raise crude capacity at four oilfields in the north of Kuwait.

So, just like that, world proven and unproven oil reserves drop by 5%. Many believe that Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations have also been misleading (to put it gently) with their reserve figures as OPEC production quotas are based on the size of a nation's reserves.

If Kuwiat's reserves are only half of what they have been saying, and the same is more or less true for other OPEC nations, especially Saudi Arabia (who has the largest reserves in the world), then we are headed towards Peak Oil a lot faster than many have thought.

OPEC nations have traditionally been very secrative about their reserves and do not allow anyone outside the national oil company to verify records. How exactly PIW came across this information is not revealed but it presumably wasn't just given to them.

If the world is to accurately plan for Peak Oil, it has to know with some accuracy what kinds of reserves are truly out there and this continued obfuscation by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others is very counterproduction to everyone except those countries. I'm glad this news has leaked and I hope similar news will come out of other secretive oil producers as well.

By the way, this also comes only a couple months after news that Kuwait's largest oil field, Burgan field, has peaked and its production is beginning to decline.

*[i.e. 'dump day' or the day agencies release news they want to be buried since noone reads the papers on Saturday]

[A hat tip to Treehugger]

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6 E.P.A. Chiefs Say 'Its Time to Act' on Greenhouse Gases

The New York Times reports that six former heads of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served under Republican presidents, have strongly urged the Bush administration to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

Speaking on a panel last Wednesday that also included the current EPA chief, Stephen L. Johnson, they generally agreed that the need to address global warming was growing urgent and that the continuing debate over what percentage of the problem was caused by human activities was a waste of time.

The NY Times article goes on:

"Why argue about things you can't prove?" said William D. Ruckelshaus, who served under President Richard M. Nixon from 1970 to 1973 and President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985. "We need to fashion policies with proper incentives to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere. There are all kinds of things we can do right now, and we ought to be taking those steps."

Mr. Johnson defended the agency's current policies, saying it has invested $20 billion since 2001 in research and technologies intended to cut carbon emissions through dozens of programs.

But the blunt opinions of Mr. Johnson's Republican predecessors served as a sharp reminder that since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, neither the president nor the Republican-led Congress has proposed any comprehensive plan to limit carbon emissions from vehicles, utilities and other sources, a problem that Mr. Bush's own Department of Energy predicts will grow worse.

The agency's Annual Energy Outlook for 2006, which was released last month, showed that carbon emissions from inside the United States are projected to increase by 37 percent by 2030.

While Mr. Bush has accepted the notion that the earth is warming, Congress has bogged down in debate over whether and how new air quality legislation should include a plan to deal with carbon emissions. The strongest measure approved so far was a Senate resolution passed last summer that recommended exploring how to put emission reductions in place.

But the former Republican administrators, along with one Democrat on the panel, Carol M. Browner, who served under President Bill Clinton, said administration officials and Congress had spent too much time debating.

"To sit back and push this away and deal with it sometime down the road is dishonest and self-destructive," said Russell E. Train, who led the agency under Nixon from 1973 to 1977.

William K. Reilly, the E.P.A. administrator under the first President Bush, attributed much of the inaction to an enduring skepticism from influential officials he called "outliers," who remain unconvinced that climate change is an urgent issue. As a leading skeptic in Congress, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, convened a hearing last year with the novelist Michael Crichton, who argued that policy makers should take into account views held by scientists who believe global warming is part of a natural cycle.

Mr. Reilly said, "This is a debate we should not be having," arguing for action over debate.

Lee M. Thomas, the agency administration in the second Reagan administration, said the time had come for environmental and industry groups, the usual antagonists in environmental policy, to set aside their differences in favor of a plan like the one used to curb the effects of acid rain.

"This is the same kind of situation," Mr. Thomas said. "We've got to start on this action. We can't wait."

Ms. Browner, a strong proponent of a national policy to cut emissions, said she was encouraged to hear her Republican colleagues take aim at the administration.

"It's huge," she told reporters after the panel discussion. "It's a testament to the reality of the issue and the recognition that it's time to do something."

So my question is, how many people does it take saying things like this to get the Federal Government on board? This adds six former heads of the US EPA to a list that includes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the American Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the National Sciences Academies of all the G8 nations as well as India, China and Brazil and of course the governments of over 150 signatories to the Kyoto Protocol!

The states are starting to act on their own in the absence of federal leadership - i.e. California and others' adoption of CO2 emission standards for vehicles and the Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative - but its high-time for the Feds to get with the picture!

But I guess Michael Crichton still isn't convinced so maybe we should hold off and keep debating ...

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Where Do All Your Tax Dollars Go?

And who get's the bulk of it? I'll give you a hint ... it's not the Deparment of Eduction.

Triple Pundit brings our attention to a wonderful graphical chart that proportionally illustrates the breakdown of pretty much everything the US government spent money on in 2004.

The chart displays the United States discretionary budget - all the money Congress has control over, so basically all the money taken out of your paycheck for the Federal Income Taxes (Corporate and Excise taxes contribute a small portion as well) - in a series of circles varying in size proportional the the amount of tax revenue spent on them.

A small version of the graphic is below the fold:



Not surprisingly, over half of the tax revenue - some $399 billion of the total $782 billion 2004 discretionary budget - goes to the Department of Defense and various "defense" spending. The remaining half - $383 billion - is divied up amongst social services and public infrastructure expenditures headed by the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Veteran Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Interior and of course Energy and Transportation as well as the Deparments of State and Homeland Security - there are others, but those are the big ones.

This breakdown of spending is much more informative than those typically issued by the government which also include mandatory spending on Social Security, Welfare and Medicare/Medicaid. These 'official' government spending breakdowns are misleading as the mandatory spending items skew the picture and hide what your Federal Income Taxes are really going towards - you pay seperate Social Security and Welfare checks so you know where those taxes are going.

Charts like this one (True Majority offers a similar but simplified animation that gets a similar point across) serve to truly illustrate just where your elected officials are spending your money. Remember, you voted for these guys. Did you really want them to spend over half your money making war machines for "defense" purposes? If not, I suggest you speek up - both at the polls next time around (assuming you have much of a choice between the two candidates) or through communication with your representatives and grass roots action.

If you ask me, this chart is a perfect illustration of a nation with its priorities in entirely the wrong place.

[BTW, U.S. defense funding is more than all our allies and most of our enemies combined. Check out True MajorityM for more...]

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