NEW YORK — If you’re thinking of purchasing a hybrid car or SUV, which supplements a traditional internal combustion engine with an electric motor to boost fuel efficiency, you should be aware that you could qualify for a substantial credit on your federal income tax. But you may need to hurry. The Energy Policy Act, passed by Congress last year, replaced a tax deduction for buying a hybrid with a credit, which is better for the consumer since a credit subtracts directly from your total tax bill. The IRS Web site, www.irs.gov, lists the qualifying vehicles and the amount of tax credit for each, based on each model’s fuel efficiency and reduced emissions. For example, buying the ultra-efficient Toyota Prius will get you a maximum of $3,150 off your federal taxes. But that isn’t the whole story. Because of the way the law was set up, how much of that credit you can claim depends on how many hybrids the manufacturer has sold and when they sold them. Once a manufacturer has sold its 60,000th hybrid of any model, car buyers have until the end of the following calendar quarter to get the […]
SAN FRANCISCO — BP Plc. is shutting down its Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska, taking some 400,000 barrels a day of crude oil off the world market, following BP ) , one of the three major operators in the North Slope, was disclosed Sunday night and is expected to take several days to complete, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition. See Wall Street Journal story. (Subscription required.) The reduction represents almost half the total daily production from the North Slope, and about 8% of daily U.S. output. The fields are a major source of crude for U.S. refineries, particularly in California, the largest market in the U.S. for gasoline. BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. The reduction comes when global supplies are tight and prices have been volatile because of the Middle East crisis and other issues. In global electronic trading, crude-oil futures for September delivery rose as much as $1.23 a barrel, to $75.99, after BP reported the shutdown. The September contract settled at $74.76 Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 2.1% for the week. BP officials said they wouldn’t resume production at Prudhoe Bay until they and government regulators can be […]
Whatever climate scientists may currently disagree about (and good scientists are always disagreeing about something) virtually all of them have long since agreed that human activity — burning fossil fuels — has been making the global temperature go up. And now they have two very sobering, visual ways to explain how. The first is in the basement of a futuristic building in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies and requires a special pass, the other is down on the sea floor off the coast of California, requiring SCUBA gear and a waterproof map. The gigantic super-computer in the basement of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is so big you can walk down the aisles inside it, the walls of the sleek black servers at either elbow, wrapped in the constant hum of air coolers and countless trillions of silicon chip operations working day and night to calculate the climate future over the next several decades of the only home we’ve got: Earth. ‘These super computers are getting more and more powerful every year,’ scientist Jerry Meehl told us as he gave us the tour. ‘It makes the computers we were using for global […]
ASPEN, Colo.– A new study in Aspen paints a dramatic picture of the area’s climatic future should temperatures and atmospheric pollution continue to rise. In a better-case future, in which the growth of global emissions of greenhouse gases are slowed, Aspen temperatures are projected to rise 6 degrees by the year 2100, giving it a climate comparable to what is now found at Los Alamos, N.M., or even Glenwood Springs, Colo. On the other hand, if the direst warnings of scientists are correct and greenhouse gases remain unchecked, temperatures could rise 14 degrees by century’s end, making Aspen’s average daily temperatures more like those of Salt Lake City or Boise. Even in the better-case scenario, skiing is expected to shrink as a component of Aspen’s economy. In the worst-case scenario, skiing will disappear altogether. These and other findings were released last month by Aspen town leaders, who have been working with climate scientists and others during the last year in an effort that, by several measures, is groundbreaking. The study was the result of Aspen’s Canary Initiative, which was launched a year and a half ago by the city government. In the first part of […]
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force assumed command from coalition forces in southern Afghanistan Monday, continuing a process that began with the establishment of the force in Kabul in August 2003. As of August 4, 2006, at least 262 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. Of those, the military reports 161 were killed by hostile action. Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 56 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two are the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, Djibouti, Eritrea, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen. There was also one military civilian death and four CIA officer deaths. The NATO forces operating in Regional Command South come from Australia, Britain, Canada, Estonia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Romania and the United States. They have been flowing into the south for several months, preparing for the transfer of authority. When fully deployed, the force will total about 8,000 troops in the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
