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POPSChange We Can Stomach--I Big Ag on the downslide? Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer. In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.
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POPSGotta keep up with the doom and gloom! Aging systems releasing sewage into rivers, streams. “Local governments across the USA plan to spend billions modernizing failing wastewater systems — some of which are more than 100 years old — over the next 10 to 20 years, EPA, state and local sewer authority officials said. Those improvement efforts face a huge challenge mitigating problems in what the EPA estimates to be 1.2 million miles of sewers snaking underground across the USA.” Bodies rot in cyclone-hit Burma. “Piles of rotting corpses are stacking up in remote villages of Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta, with residents saying they don't have enough fuel to cremate victims of deadly Cyclone Nargis.” Deadly battles as Hezbollah says Lebabon 'declares war'. “Deadly gunbattles erupted in Beirut on Thursday after Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah charged that a Lebanese government crackdown on his group was tantamount to a 'declaration of war,' stoking fears of a full-blown sectarian conflict."
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POPS Dumb as We Wanna Be
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN he goes on: Are you sitting down? Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies. These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies. The
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POPSCartoon Hero Will Save the Day “In the past three months, average consumer spending on energy came to $663 billion, or 6.5 percent of total consumer spending. A year ago, it represented 5.8 percent.” In simple terms: “If gasoline breaks through $4 a gallon by Memorial Day, that would mean spending on gasoline would have risen by $100 billion since the beginning of the year, or roughly the size of the tax rebate checks going out.” According to Monday’s Providence Journal, “The United States, with the lowest fuel efficient vehicles and longest average commutes in the world, is the only major industrialized country to witness a surge in oil consumption since the severe oil shortages of the 1970s and the 1980s.” While European nations have taxed fuel to pay for other more efficient forms of transportation, the U.S. has taken an Underdog approach to the problem; swooping in with borrowed cash to pay the ransom oil companies demand on our transportation and heating needs. Next week President Underdog will begin mai
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POPSFilthy Lucre
Alaska's oil-happy pols are ensnared in scandal However the scandals fall out, environmentalists can actually look forward to a cleaner brand of politics emerging up north. Squeaky-clean governor Sarah Palin (R) called the legislature into special session and got a new oil-tax law that raised taxes and tightened loopholes. And a new statewide poll shows both Don Young and Ted Stevens trailing likely Democratic challengers in this year's election.
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POPSArctic Oil Bonanza Worries Alaska Native Native groups and environmentalists most fear a serious oil spill in the Chukchi. The MMS itself estimated in the environmental impact statement authorizing the lease sale there was a 40 percent chance of a spill of at least 1,000 barrels or more over the life of any single oil development project in the Chukchi. “If oil spills under ice in the middle of January there is absolutely nothing they can do about it,” said Rick Steiner, an oil spill expert at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “There’s a large stretch of time when they would be producing oil and have no way of cleaning up a spill.” A legal challenge to the validity of the MMS’s environmental impact statement is under way, and a similar suit temporarily halted Shell’s plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea last summer. Drilling opponents are pessimistic about their chances of putting a stop to the rush into the Arctic. “Maybe there can be something worked out, but at this time it really doesn’t look that way,” sa
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POPSThe next time you fork it over at the pump remember the $40.6 billion Exxon got It’s a simple fact of life. Oil companies need huge profits to counter the insane wishes of the citizenry like alternative energy, universal health care, demcoracy and human rights. The current system in which the government taxes the middle class (and a token tax from the wealthy) to give back to the rich via no-bid military contracts and Homeland Security is under attack by grass root movements and radical authors. Democracy is a terrible thing for corporate profits and that’s why corporate America supports the most ruthless dictatorships in the world. Show your support for a corporate world by buying a gas guzzling SUV or still better… a motor yacht! Buy, buy, buy anything you can before our resources run out and finally be a good corporate citizen
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POPSBush Family Friends are the Terrorists Protecting international oil interests and his family's wealth explains why Bush continues to turn a blind eye to everything the Saudis do. A Thanksgiving Day story in The New York Times with the headline "Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S." got scant attention from the media, caught up in food and football.
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