SACRAMENTO — California is poised to become the first state in the nation to enforce a comprehensive limit on the air pollution that causes global warming, under legislation announced Monday. The bill, which mirrors the goal set by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last summer, would limit greenhouse gas pollution to 1990 levels by the year 2020, and require the state’s Air Resources Board to establish a mandatory reporting system to track and monitor emission levels. If it becomes law, the limit means power plants, refineries and other large-scale consumers of gas, oil and coal would need to reduce use of those fuels, install costly equipment to prevent their byproducts from escaping into the air, or adopt cleaner, alternative energy technologies. Proponents say the limit would spur development of those technologies — possibly subsidized by a new fee on gasoline sales. And as happened with California’s pioneering limits on auto emissions, the goal is to inspire other states to impose stricter limits on all greenhouse pollutants. “We believe that if left unchecked, global warming threatens our air quality; it threatens our water supply; it threatens our coastlines, and our public health,” Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles, a […]
A US House of Representatives handed AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest a victory in an their fight for a tiered Internet. The Energy and Commerce subcommittee shot down an amendment to Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, a bill that would amend current telecommunications laws to account for certain technological advances. In a 23-8 vote, the subcommittee defeated an amendment proposed by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) that would have enshrined the principle of network neutrality into US law. Such legislation would have prevented telcos and other ISPs from selectively throttling or passing through IP traffic on their networks. In a statement (QuickTime) read before the committee, Rep. Markey said that the bill as written would ‘fundamentally alter the Internet’ and that it would preventing the FCC from translating its policy against Broadband Internet Transmission Services providers hindering ‘lawful content’ into ‘something it could effectively enforce.’ The battle over network neutrality has pitted the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Amazon against the nation’s largest telecommunications companies. AT&T was the first of the telecoms to float a tiered Internet trial balloon, when then-SBC CEO Edward Whitacre accused Google and Yahoo of using AT&T’s pipes for free and said that there […]
Even as the evolution wars rage, on school boards and in courtrooms, biologists continue to accumulate empirical data supporting Darwinian theory. Two extraordinary discoveries announced this week should go a long way to providing even more of the evidence that critics of evolution say is lacking. One study produced what biblical literalists have been demanding ever since Darwin — the iconic ‘missing links.’ If species evolve, they ask, with one segueing into another, where are the transition fossils, those man-ape or reptile-mammal creatures that evolution posits? In yesterday’s issue of Nature, paleontologists unveiled an answer: well-preserved fossils of a previously unknown fish that was on its way to evolving into a four-limbed land-dweller. It had a jaw, fins and scales like a fish, but a skull, neck, ribs and pectoral fin like the earliest limbed animals, called tetrapods. Discovered in 2004 on Canada’s Ellesmere Island by Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the 375-million-year-old Tiktaalik roseae ‘blurs the boundary between fish and land animals,’ said Prof. Shubin. It ‘is both fish and tetrapod,’ showing how life made the transition to land, evolving four limbs from […]
WASHINGTON — After days of painstaking negotiations, Senate leaders today hammered out a broad, bipartisan compromise that would put the vast majority of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. The plan would also create a temporary worker program that would allow 325,000 foreigners to fill jobs in the United States each year. The Senate was expected to vote on the measure late today or early Friday and, if passed, it would mark the most sweeping immigration accord in two decades. Under the agreement, illegal immigrants who have lived here for five years or more - about seven million people - would eventually be granted citizenship if they remained employed, paid fines and back taxes and learned English. Illegal immigrants who have lived here from two to five years - about three million people - would have to leave the country briefly and return as temporary workers. They would also be eligible for citizenship over time, but they would have to wait several years longer for it. Those immigrants who have been here less than two years - about one million people - would be required to leave the country. They could apply […]
Are we running out of oil? No. Are we running out of affordable oil? Probably. We are certainly running out of the cheap oil that has powered the world economy since the 1950s. Those of us who are willing to face reality have begun to search in earnest for alternative energy solutions. There appears to be an unlimited number of technologies that could come to our rescue. But are they all viable? No. The search for alternative energy resources is a road full of technology potholes and politically motivated wrong turns. We have to make informed choices. Can we do it? Maybe. However, before we start to make comparisons – one energy technology versus another – we need a frame of reference that will give us critical perspective. Let’s start with the basics. First of all, we need to remember there are two basic energy applications. We need high energy content mobile fuels for our vehicles, ships and airplanes. And we need bulk quantities of stationary fuels to generate heat and electricity. Our existing consumption has largely relied on oil for mobile applications; and coal, natural gas, nuclear or water power for stationary applications. A […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
