WASHINGTON — House Democrats, in their first draft of new energy legislation, would wipe out California’s landmark global warming law — despite their California speaker’s promises that her party would use the state as a model to combat climate change. The legislation would pre-empt California and 11 other states from implementing laws requiring automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across their fleets. The bill would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from granting the states waivers to put their climate change rules into effect. California officials, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s top environmental aides, blasted the legislative proposal. ‘We’re concerned that Congress is trying to take away the state’s right to clean our air and protect our citizens,’ said BreAnda Northcutt, a spokeswoman for the California Environmental Protection Agency. The bill ‘appears to be singling out California’s climate action efforts, and the 11 additional states that have adopted our standards, and tying our hands.’ The move was an ironic twist on a familiar story for California. When Republicans ran the House, they regularly tried to pre-empt the state’s laws on food safety labeling, the minimum wage and consumer privacy — and Democrats often cried foul. But this new […]
NEW YORK — More than 170 restaurants in New York City are giving up their cooking oil to a non-profit organization, which then sells the cooking grease to a bio-diesel manufacturer on Long Island. The Doe Fund designed the program to help restaurants get rid of their leftover cooking oil, promote recycling, and help the homeless. After restaurants collect barrels of vegetable oil, the oil is sucked up into a truck and brought to a plant in Long Island. From there, it is converted into bio-diesel fuel. Program officials say the fuel burns 78 percent cleaner than regular gas. And with money going to help the homeless, officials say it’s a win-win situation. The cooking grease can be useed in diesel engines and in home heating units that burn fuel oil.
The legal front of the US government’s ‘war on terror’ suffered a stunning reversal today as military judges threw out charges against a Canadian-born al-Qaida fighter and Osama bin Laden’s former driver. The surprise rulings on Toronto native Omar Ahmed Khadr, 20, and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 36, threatened to torpedo the government’s pursuit of Guantanamo Bay terror suspects through new-look military tribunals. In both cases, the judges found they had no jurisdiction to proceed with military commission trials, as neither Khadr nor Hamdan had been classified as an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ as required by a recent US law. The only full Guantanamo trial held so far has been that of 31-year-old Australian David Hicks, jailed in March for seven years with all but nine months suspended. He is now imprisoned in Adelaide’s Yatala jail. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, head of US military defence lawyers at Guantanamo, said today’s rulings could have a ‘huge impact’ for Hicks and other terror suspects. But Hicks’s father, Terry Hicks, said his son would not be appealing his conviction for providing material support for terrorism because he risked having to serve his full seven-year sentence. Hicks’s Australian lawyer David McLeod […]
The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases. A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago. Because of technology glitches and a near-doubling in the original $6.5 billion cost, the Defense Department has decided to downsize and launch four satellites paired into two orbits, instead of six satellites and three orbits. The satellites were intended to gather weather and climate data, replacing existing satellites as they come to the end of their useful lifetimes beginning in the next couple of years. The reduced system of four satellites will now focus on weather forecasting. Most of the climate instruments needed to collect more precise data over long periods are being eliminated. Instead, the Pentagon and two partners – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA – will rely on European satellites for most of the […]
BEIJING — China acknowledged Monday that it soon may become the world’s biggest source of harmful greenhouse gases but said the United States and other advanced countries must take the lead in fighting global warming because they had been polluting heavily for longer. Unveiling its first climate-action plan, China pledged greater energy efficiency and offered robust targets for developing solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. ‘We are ready to work with the rest of the international community to reduce the effects of global warming,’ Ma Kai, the minister in charge of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said after issuing the climate-change report. While pledging to slow the relentless growth of greenhouse-gas emissions – blamed for global warming and rising seas – Ma rejected mandatory caps for China on those emissions. He said it would be ‘neither realistic nor fair’ to make China and other nations sacrifice economic growth and postpone modernization to fight global warming when it was an ‘indisputable fact’ that well-off nations had produced 75 percent of the carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels from 1950 to 2002. ‘Developed countries have an unshirkable primary responsibility for climate change,’ Ma said. ‘They […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
