WASHINGTON — U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told reporters in Washington that the conversion to ethanol at refineries is the reason for gasoline production setbacks that causing fuel prices at the pump to climb to record highs. Some gas stations on the east coast are seeing fuel shortages thanks to limited supplies from refiners who are still in the process of switching to ethanol while on the west coast, most transfers to ethanol have been completed. In Philadelphia, six filing stations in the area were out of gasoline because of the switch to ethanol, AAA reported. According to AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline is $2.90, up 2 cents from yesterday and 40 cents a month ago. Hawaii is the No. 1 state for the highest prices paid at the pump at $3.22 per gallon of unleaded regular gasoline on Sunday. The second highest price paid at the pump is in California, where the average price for unleaded regular gasoline is $3.10 per gallon, according to AAA, with New York coming in a close third at $3.05 per gallon. The lowest price paid for unleaded gasoline is in […]
Many adults in the United States are aware of climate change, according to a poll by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. 66 per cent of respondents think the claim of a gradual warming of the earth’s atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions is completely or probably true. The term global warming refers to an increase of the Earth’s average temperature. Some theories say that climate change might be the result of human-generated carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In 1998, several countries agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, a proposed amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The agreement commits nations to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. signed the protocol but has not ratified it. In July 2005 at the G-8 summit in Perthshire, Scotland, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States promised to implement a ‘new dialogue’ on climate change, deeming the issue a ‘serious long-term challenge’ for the planet. In his Apr. 22 radio address, U.S. president George W. Bush discussed his environmental policies, saying, ‘I have proposed the Advanced […]
Champagne, chandeliers and toastmasters might seem a long way away from the world inhabited by Arab women. Indeed, the City might seem an odd sort of place for Arab women to converge. And, as venues go, Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, might seem stranger still. But it was to this grandest of Georgian houses that some 300 Arab women, not least Sheikha Lubna al-Qasimi, Arabia’s first female economy minister, repaired on Thursday for a ‘celebration dinner’. Their mission? Not only to foster links with Britain’s commercial heart but to prove that, from Morocco to Oman, women, in this field at least, are beginning to take the lead. ‘If you look at the history of Islam, even the Prophet Muhammad married a businesswoman,’ said al-Qasimi, who holds what is regarded as the most important cabinet post in the United Arab Emirates. ‘Khadija was her name, she was his boss and she recruited him to work with her,’ she smiled, as the likes of Cherie Blair worked the distinctly veil-less crowd. ‘The West always looks at the veil as a stigma and I think that’s the number one problem,’ she added, adjusting her […]
INDIANAPOLIS — The Bush administration failed to prepare well for the war in Iraq and ‘lost a lot of lives’ as a result, an Iraq war correspondent told a gathering of open-government advocates Saturday. Sig Christenson, a military writer for the San Antonio Express-News who has been to Iraq three times, said many reporters who have been there are ‘conflicted’ in their feelings about the war because they have the opportunity to cover ‘an extraordinarily historic moment’ but one that they contend was poorly planned. ‘A lot of people like me believe the president and his men did a really bad job leading up to this war,’ said Christenson, speaking at the Saturday lunch of the national Freedom of Information Conference. ‘They didn’t do their homework and lost a lot of lives. ‘`It’s a tough thing to say because you want to think of your leadership as competent and prepared. But it seems like they went into this war with a lot of wishful thinking.’ Christenson was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he reported on six battles. He has returned twice to Baghdad. He is […]
Camille Parmesan is a conservation biologist, an expert on butterflies – and she has the gentle, unhurried disposition that comes from living in a tent for weeks at a time, studying the breeding cycles of insects and animals in their native habitats. Yet there is a hardness in her voice, a sense of urgency, whenever she talks about global warming and its effect on the planet. ‘We’re definitely seeing species going extinct because of climate change,’ says Parmesan, sitting in her second-floor biology office at the University of Texas, which overlooks the turtle ponds north of the UT Tower. ‘We’re going to lose the penguins. We’re going to lose the polar bears, no question. . . . I’m seeing high mountain butterflies literally being pushed off the mountains. This is happening. It is not theory. It is not people saying, ‘Oh, we think it might happen.’ It is happening, and it is incredibly depressing.’ Parmesan has been talking this way for almost a decade now – on ABC’s ‘Nightline,’ in magazines such as Nature and National Geographic, in major scientific papers and in public lectures, long before the recent surge of global warming stories in American media. Her […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
