Seed Magazine

Here are the quotes from the September 2006 issue (of Seed):

"There are many rationales for keeping a species from extinction, like its intrinsic right to exist, its functional role in ecosystems and its potential use to humans"

"The distinction between past and future doesn't matter on the scale of the cosmos, it's just a feature we observe locally."

"We just cannot adopt toward ourselves the same attitudes that we adopt easily and in fact, reflexively, with others. No matter how strong the evidence."

"There is an immense number of models that can explain our universe--more by far than there are atoms in the universe."

German Leadership On Curbing Emissions

Excerpts from:
"Germany to Put Global Warming Back on G8 Agenda"
September 27, 2006 — By Erik Kirschbaum, Reuters via ENN

BERLIN — Germany will make fighting climate change a top priority when it takes control of the G8 next year and will try to persuade the United States of its importance, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday.

Merkel, a former environment minister, said she wants to put cutting emissions of the "greenhouse gases" blamed for global warming back on the agenda of leading industrial nations after Russia played down the issue during its G8 presidency in 2006.

But she said any efforts to stop global warming without the cooperation of "our American partners", the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, were doomed to failure.

"That means we've certainly got our work cut out for us -- let me say that clearly," Merkel said to applause, referring to the United States, which in 2001 withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty designed to limit greenhouse gases.

"To prevent global warming, the nations with the largest emissions of gases that are causing climate change have to take part," Merkel, who holds a doctorate in physics, told a meeting of conservationists in Berlin.

"That's why we will make this an important issue once again on the agenda during our G8 presidency," said Merkel, who has picked a village on the Baltic coast as the venue for the 2007 G8 summit.
...

Merkel said she was encouraged that developing nations with booming economies had acknowledged the danger of climate change.

"China, India and other countries are now much more aware of the risks," she said. "As a result, the ground is now more fertile than it once was."

"We urgently need agreements for the period after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Germany will do all it can within its realm as president of both the G8 and the EU ... We have a great chance next year to have an international impact."

Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Boreal Forests

"Intact Northern Forests Worth $250 Billion a Year, According to Study"
September 27, 2006 -- By Alister Doyle, Reuters via ENN

OSLO — Forests in northern nations such as Russia and Canada are worth $250 billion a year because of services they provide by purifying water or soaking up greenhouse gases, a researcher said on Tuesday.

Mark Anielski, an ecological economist based in Edmonton, Canada, urged governments to follow suit and place value on natural services rather than go on treating them as free.

"We only realise what nature is worth when it's gone," he told Reuters of a study he presented to a forestry congress in Canada about the value of forests in Alaska, Russia, the Nordic nations and Canada.

It estimated that services provided by intact forests in filtering water and waste, providing habitats for animals and plants, capturing greenhouse gases and attracting tourists were worth about $250 billion a year.

He said his estimates ranged from $145-$300 billion.

"This natural capital should be in the balance sheets of nations," he said.

Such valuations would help preserve forests, for instance, and discourage logging of trees that were not replaced by new plantings. Trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, as they grow.

The study estimated that environmental services provided by Canada's forests alone were worth about 93 billion Canadian dollars (US$83 billion) a year and that each hectare of forest was worth 160 Canadian dollars (US$143.4).

"If these ecosystem services were counted in Canada, they would amount to roughly 9 percent of GDP," he said. Countries including Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Algeria have annual gross domestic product (GDP) of around $250 billion.

Under conventional accounting, governments can spur short-term GDP growth by axing forests for building materials or pulp. The valuations suggested by Anielski would show up longer-term risks, ranging from erosion to loss of habitats.

Other scientists are also trying to put values on natural services, ranging from mangroves to peat marshes.

A U.N. report in January, for instance, said that coral reefs were worth $1,000-6,000 per hectare per year -- because of services ranging from fisheries to tourism. Some scientists question the validity of assumptions underlying such estimates.

Anielski said forests could also help to counter global warming, widely blamed on a build-up of heat-trapping gases emitted by burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars. "The forests and peatlands store an estimated 67 billion tonnes of carbon in Canada alone," he said, adding this was almost eight times the amount of carbon produced by human activities worldwide in 2000.

Google & Power Supply Standards

Excerpts from:
"Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in PC’s"
September 26, 2006 -- By JOHN MARKOFF, NYTimes

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 25 — Google is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard that it says will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy annually.

In a white paper to be presented Tuesday on the opening day of the Intel Developer Forum here, two leading data center designers at Google will argue that the industry is mired in inefficiency for historical reasons, dating to the introduction of the first I.B.M. PC in 1981.

At that time, standard power supplies, which convert high-voltage alternating current to low-voltage direct current, were required to provide multiple output voltage, which is no longer necessary in today’s PC’s.

The Google plan calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies.

The Google proposal is similar in its intent to an existing effort by the electric utility industry to offer computer makers financial incentives for designing more efficient power supplies for personal computers. Existing PC power supplies vary widely in efficiency, from as high as 90 percent to as low as 20 percent.

The existing effort, 80 Plus, sets an 80 percent efficiency standard as a goal. It is a partnership between Ecos Consulting, an environmental consulting firm, and a group of electric utility companies. Ecos began measuring the efficiency of computer power supplies in 2003 and found that none of them met the efficiency standard.
...

Both the Google engineers and Mr. Calwell agreed that there was a significant design flaw, which they described as “overprovisioning,” in today’s PC power supplies. “It’s like putting a 400-horsepower engine in every car, just because some cars have to tow large trailers every once in a while,” Mr. Calwell said.

The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC’s running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California’s energy rates.

Although Google does not plan to enter the personal computer market, the company is a large purchaser of microprocessors and has evolved a highly energy-efficient power supply system for its data centers.
...

According to EPRI Solutions, an energy research and consulting firm, over 2.5 billion AC/DC power supplies are used in the United States and 6 to 10 billion worldwide.

Currently, EPRI said, power supplies account for more than 2 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption and that more efficient design could cut use in half, saving nearly $3 billion in electricity costs.

One personal computer industry pioneer said he believed that the Google proposal might have important indirect benefits.

“I imagine a standard low-voltage distribution system inside buildings having alternate energy supplies like solar,” said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the Osborne 1 and Sol personal computers. “Google’s proposal would make that a practicality.”

Economic Overview

This week, The Economist published an overview of the previous weeks economic headlines. Here are the overviews:

Economic and financial indicators
America's Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rate at 5.25%, extending its pause for a second consecutive month after two years of tightening. The Fed said that the “moderation in economic growth appears to be continuing” and that “inflation pressures seem likely to moderate over time”, but added that “some inflation risks remain.”

Inflationary pressure in America eased. The annual rate of consumer-price inflation was 3.8% in August, down from 4.1% in July. Month on month, consumer prices rose by 0.2% in August, having increased by 0.4% in July. Core prices, which exclude the volatile categories of energy and food, increased by 0.2% for the second consecutive month.

The American housing market cooled further. Housing starts dropped by 6% in August compared with July and were 19.8% below their rate in August 2005. Confidence among homebuilders continued to fall. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index fell for the eighth consecutive month in September, to its lowest level since 1991.

America's current-account deficit, the broadest measure of trade in goods, services and investment flows, widened to $218.4 billion, or 6.6% of GDP, in the second quarter.

Industrial production in the euro area fell by 0.4% in July compared with the previous month, thanks to weak production in France and Italy. Year-on-year growth in industrial output slowed to 3.2% in July, from 4.4% in June and 5.2% in May.

Spirits were low in Germany. The ZEW economic-sentiment indicator, based on a survey of analysts and institutional investors, fell by 16.6 points in September to -22.2, far below its historical average of 35. The decline is attributed to fears of weakening global demand, slowing private consumption and higher costs.

The annual rate of growth of Britain's broad money supply, M4, rose to 13.7% in the year to August, its fastest pace in almost 16 years. The money supply grew by 0.8% in August after expanding by 1% in July.

In Japan department-store sales in August were 0.9% lower than a year earlier. This was the fifth such monthly drop in a row. Clothing sales fell by 1.7% and sales of household products dropped by 3.2%, but food sales rose by 0.7%.

Emerging-market indicators
Argentina's GDP grew by 7.9% in the year to the second quarter; it rose by 8.8% in the year to the first.

Poland's inflation rate went up to 1.6% in August, from 1.1% in July. Industrial production rose by 12.5% in the year to August.

The inflation rate in Malaysia fell to 3.3% in August from 4.1% in July.

Wal-Mart Strives For Sustainability

Excerpts from:
"Wal-Mart grows ‘green' strategies"
September 25, 2006 -- By Mindy Fetterman, USA Today

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Andrew Ruben, vice president of strategic planning for the world's biggest retailer, leans across the table and pleads passionately for consumers to embrace the compact fluorescent light bulb. Though a CFL bulb costs more, it uses 75% less energy and lasts 10 times longer than a regular bulb.

“Tell everyone to buy this light bulb!” he says, his voice trembling a bit. “If we could get every American to change a single light bulb, we'd be doing the world a world of good.”

What's sparking Ruben's fervor is a new mission at Wal-Mart: Embrace the Earth.

The $312.4 billion retailing giant has launched an aggressive program to encourage “sustainability” of the world's fisheries, forests and farmlands, to slash energy use and reduce waste, to push its 60,000 suppliers to produce goods that don't harm the environment, and to urge consumers to buy green. Last Monday, for the first time, Wal-Mart reported on its carbon dioxide emissions — the “greenhouse gases” that cause global warming. It said it emits 20.8 million tons worldwide, an amount greater than what's released by an auto company but much less than that released by a major utility company.

“We asked ourselves: If we had known 10 years ago what challenges we would face today, what would we have done different?” says CEO Lee Scott. “What struck us was: This world is much more fragile than any of us would have thought years ago.”

Already, Wal-Mart has become the world's largest buyer of organic cotton. It introduced “fair trade” coffee at its Sam's Clubs. It began selling some organic foods in the spring and will introduce others this fall. And it is pushing suppliers to use smaller packages to cut waste.

Critics such as WakeUpWalMart call the efforts “green-washing.” They say the efforts are an attempt to polish a corporate image tarnished by controversies over low pay and limited health care benefits for its employees and “anti-big-box” feelings in some towns.

But many environmentalists are ecstatic. Wal-Mart is a very big rock to throw into the pro-environment pond, and its ripples, they say, will be felt across the globe.

“Wal-Mart is a huge player, and they have enormous clout,” says Scott Burns of the World Wildlife Fund, which has 10 employees working with Wal-Mart on several projects, including sustainability of fisheries. “They're sending a very powerful signal that already is having effects on the way people produce products for them.”

Wal-Mart says it will:

•Slash gasoline use by its trucking fleet, one of the largest in the USA, and use more hybrid trucks to increase efficiency by 25% over the next three years and double it within 10 years. That will save $310 million a year by 2015, the company says.

•Buy 100% of its wild-caught salmon and frozen fish for the North American market only from fisheries that are certified as “sustainable” by the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council within three to five years. That designation means areas of the ocean aren't fished in ways that destroy fish populations.

•Cut energy use at its more than 7,000 stores worldwide by 30% and cut greenhouse-gas emissions at existing stores by 20% in seven years. Wal-Mart is the largest private electricity user in the USA.

•Reduce solid waste from U.S. stores by 25% within three years.

The company, second-largest in revenue in the world behind ExxonMobil, has vowed to invest $500 million a year in energy-saving technologies.

It has built test lab stores in Aurora, Colo., and McKinney, Texas, where it is experimenting with everything from wind power to permeable asphalt that lets rainwater seep through parking lots to help refill groundwater aquifers. It wants to build stores that produce 30% fewer greenhouse emissions in the next four years.
...

Wal-Mart isn't pushing sustainability solely out of the goodness of its heart. It has realized that it can make money by selling products that are environmentally friendly. It can make millions selling recycled trash and save hundreds of millions by cutting transportation costs.

It even is actively supporting the idea of a system for companies to “trade” carbon dioxide credits. Wal-Mart believes it can earn lots of credits by saving energy, and it can sell them for millions of dollars to companies that can't. All of those savings will go into keeping prices on its products low, it says.

Wal-Mart also says it is worried about having enough products, primarily fish and other foods, to sell to consumers in the future. “We set out to do (sustainability) as an obligation, a good-works effort,” says Scott. “But we discovered the truth: The real reason to do this is for the business itself.”

Wal-Mart has formed 14 sustainable value networks made up of employees, suppliers and environmentalists. The groups get together regularly in person or on conference calls to brainstorm how products that don't hurt the environment can be made or bought.

The networks work with Wal-Mart's buyers and suppliers, and the suppliers of its suppliers, to push change all the way down the business chain. “We've never worked this way before,” says Matt Kistler, vice president of product and packaging innovation.

The company is mapping whole product lines to find out where the environment is hurt along the way and how to stop that. “When you hear your words coming out of their mouths, it's amazing,” says Suzanne Apple of the World Wildlife Fund. “These are issues we've been working on for years.”
...

When you buy strawberries from a Wal-Mart today, they come in packages made not from plastic but from biodegradable corn. Same with Paul Newman's organic salad dressing. And this holiday season, those Sam's Club gift cards you may put in your family's stockings will be made from corn-based PLA (poly lactic acid), too.

If you're selling to Wal-Mart, you'd better be thinking about smaller packaging, less packaging and recyclable packaging. Wal-Mart said Friday that it will start “grading” suppliers on how well they do. Less, in this case, is more.

When it cut excess packaging on its private-label line of toys, Kid Connection, the company estimates it saved $2.4 million a year in shipping costs, 3,800 trees and 1 million barrels of oil.

“A 2% reduction in a package's size is worth millions and millions of dollars,” says Kistler, vice president of packaging innovation. “You can get more in a container, more in a boat, more in a truck. The numbers are just amazing.”

Downsizing a product's package is tricky, though. Products are sold on store shelves by volume. Bigger packages get more shelf space and can catch consumers' eyes better.

That was the problem when Wal-Mart started pushing Unilever to downsize its laundry detergents. It was reluctant to lose shelf space.

To compensate, Wal-Mart made All Small & Mighty, Unilever's concentrated detergent that comes in a bottle two-thirds the size of a regular jug of detergent, a “VPI.” That's in-house code for a “volume-producing item.” It got heavy promotion and top space on the end of aisles with lots of signs. It's been a huge success, Wal-Mart says.

The single biggest energy success that Wal-Mart has discovered so far is inside a newly designed refrigerator case. It's LED lights. “Fluorescent lights don't like the cold. LED loves the cold,” says Don Mosley, senior engineering manager of special projects who helped design the energy-efficient mechanical systems Wal-Mart is testing at the lab stores in Colorado and Texas.

Wal-Mart spent about $30 million to develop the refrigerator LED lighting system with General Electric and Royal Philips Electronics. LED (light-emitting diode) lights use semiconductor chips to create energy and emit light. LEDs have been used on digital clocks and cellphone screens but never for such a big item.

“This application will change the grocery industry,” says Charles Zimmerman, vice president of new format development. “One-third of our energy costs come from lighting, and the LED cuts 50% of the cost of lighting.”

Wal-Mart began using LED lights in its giant, red Wal-Mart signs about two years ago. The life of the lights is much longer, even though they cost more. “It's important that our signs say Wal-Mart and not al-Mart,” laughs Mosley.

The compact fluorescent light bulbs from GE that Wal-Mart is pushing for consumers to buy are beginning to catch on, says Michael Petras, vice president of lighting for GE. “The cost is good, it comes on quicker, the colors are better.”

GE sold $75 million of the energy-saving bulbs in 2005. Sales across the industry are up 20%, while sales of traditional incandescent bulbs have fallen 7%.

Wal-Mart has been doing “sunlight harvesting” through skylights at 2,000 of its stores for about 10 years. For much of the day, the only electric lights used in a store are along the inside outer walls. The rest of the floor is lit by skylights.

Now it's testing wind power in the Colorado store. So far, it's been a failure. “It might be our familiarity with the equipment,” admits Mosley. “When they break, they break pretty good before we realize it.” The company hasn't abandoned wind power yet but isn't blown away by it, either.

WakeUpWalMart, a union-funded group that criticizes Wal-Mart's wages and health care benefits, doesn't believe Wal-Mart is sincere. It says Wal-Mart is just trying to get some good public relations in light of all the lawsuits against the company, including claims of discrimination against female employees and forcing employees to work “off the clock.” Wal-Mart also is being investigated for problems with hazardous waste disposal.

“We don't know whether Wal-Mart's environmental changes are real or a Machiavellian attempt to green-wash a declining public image,” says Chris Kofinis, communications director. “But its long record of irresponsible behavior forces one to be skeptical.”

The charges don't bother Wal-Mart. “I don't respond to that criticism,” says CEO Scott. “We know what our goals are. We think we can have an extraordinary impact on the environment.”

Some environmentalists who are in the company's corner are reserving judgment. Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, says Wal-Mart is “off to a promising start” but will be judged by “the results of its efforts.”

Still, Environmental Defense in July opened its first satellite office near a U.S. corporate headquarters — in Bentonville.

“Wal-Mart has as much or more potential than any other company to change the way the world does business,” says Krupp. “And we intend to be right there.”

World Population & U.S. Debt

The current human population as of 12:40am on September 24th 2006 is 6,542,842,222
The current U.S. National Debt as of 12:40am on September 24th 2006 is $8,488,417,227,179.59

The human population has increased by 12,469,723 since July 24th 2006
The U.S. National Debt has increased by $66,349,624,915.68 since July 24th 2006

The human population has increased by 18,775,769 since June 24th 2006
The U.S. National Debt has increased by $91,874,778,800.55 since June 24th 2006

Cellulose-Degrading Enzymes In Termites

"Termites Could Eat into Oil's Bottom Line"
September 20 , 2006 -- By Bill Baum, Renewable Energy Access

Scientists in San Diego are using termites to advance the development of cellulosic ethanol.

In order to make the economic production of cellulosic ethanol viable and cost-effective, the discovery of new enzymes must be found in order to convert agricultural biomass to clean burning fuel. Surprisingly, one rich source of these enzymes has been found in the digestive tracts of termites.

These household pests can convert 95% of what they consume into energy within 24 hours. However, it's not the termites themselves that are doing this remarkable transformation, rather the bacteria and protozoa that inhabit their digestive tracts. These microbes naturally generate a broad range of enzymes that convert the cellulosic materials into fermentable sugars.

In the past, the U.S. has focused primarily on the production of biofuels by relying on the conversion of cornstarch into fuel ethanol. However, there has been a recent dialogue regarding the amount of corn that can be used without creating imbalances with other major industries or impacting food supplies. Additionally, it is estimated that in 2006, the U.S. will only produce between 5 billion and 15 billion gallons of ethanol from corn, which will represent less than 10% of total transportation fuels at that time.

To meet this demand for ethanol, sources other than those also serving as a food supply are needed to produce alternative fuel. The most underutilized energy asset on the planet is cellulosic biomass; cellulose-containing natural waste products are widely abundant and can be sustainably produced.

Still, the technology that works for starch isn't viable for the creation of biomass-based ethanol. Biomass has been a challenge to convert to ethanol with scientists using harsh acids and high temperatures to try to hydrolyze the cellulose molecules.

In order to solve this conversion problem, Diversa Corp., a biotech company based in San Diego, examined how biomass is converted into energy in the natural environment. They found the answer in the digestive tracts of the common termite.

During experiments, scientists dissected hundreds and thousands of individual termite intestines. Using proprietary DNA extraction and cloning technologies, they were able to isolate the cellulose-degrading enzymes. By reenacting this natural process, the company created a "cocktail" of high-performance enzymes for industrial ethanol production enablers. Although still in the early stages of this work, the initial results are promising.

The call to action to pursue a renewable energy source becomes more crucial every day. Cellulosic ethanol has enormous potential for fueling our future. Who would have guessed that the pest eating away at your floorboards may hold the key to solving our nation's gas crisis?

Roadless Rule Reinstated

"Judge Reinstates Original Roadless Rule Marking Huge Victory for Americans, Wild Forests"
September 20 , 2006 -- Sierra Club

Statement of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director

"Today marks a huge victory for America’s last remaining wild forests and the millions of Americans who have spoken out in support of protecting these special places for future generations. These are increasingly scarce unspoiled places that provide some of the highest quality fish and wildlife habitat, backcountry recreation and clean water supplies in the country.

"Today’s ruling underscores the strong framework of the Roadless Rule, the basis of which was overwhelming scientific and economic evidence and public opinion in favor of protecting America’s last wild forests.

"The Bush administration replaced the original rule with a policy that left wild forests across the country vulnerable to destructive oil and gas development, commercial logging and road building. The administration has already moved forward with timber sales in roadless areas in Alaska, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

"From policies that prioritize logging over community fire protection to proposals that sell-off National Forests, the Bush administration has worked to weaken or eliminate the core protections for America’s wild forests. They have put the interests of the timber industry ahead of the clean water, recreational opportunities, economic benefits and wildlife habitat that these forests provide the country."

Background on Roadless Area Conservation Rule, Today's Decision:

The Roadless Rule, designed to protect 58 million acres of roadless wild forests in 39 states, was the result of the most extensive public comment process in history, spanning three years and 600 public meetings. During the rulemaking, the Clinton administration received a record-breaking one million public comments in support of protecting wild forests. To date, the Forest Service has received more than 4 million comments from the American people.

Blocking the Roadless Rule was one of the new administration’s first decisions upon taking office, followed shortly by refusal to defend the rule in court. In the spring of 2005 the administration officially repealed the original rule and replaced it with a process whereby Governors must petition the federal government for forest protections in their states. Governors had until November of this year to announce their petitions. In the public comment period for the Bush administration policy, the majority of the 1.8 million comments were opposed to the change.

Today's decision reinstates the original Roadless Rule and finds that the Bush administration violated the law when it adopted their petition process. The ruling enjoins the Forest Service from taking any action contrary to the Roadless Rule.

California Sues Carmakers

"State sues car firms on climate"
September 20, 2006 -- BBC News

The state of California is suing six carmakers for costs associated with their cars' greenhouse gas emissions.

The suit names General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chrysler and Nissan.

California is asking for "monetary compensation" for the damage which it says their emissions are doing to health, economy and environment.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM), a pan-industry body, called it a "nuisance" suit and suggested it may be dismissed.

"Right now, global warming is harming California," runs the state's complaint.

"Human-induced global warming has, among other things, reduced California's snow pack (a vital source of fresh water), caused an earlier melting of the snow pack, raised sea levels along California's coastline, increased ozone pollution in urban areas, [and] increased the threat of wildfires."

State lawyers want any judgement for damages to be ongoing, so that manufacturers will be liable every year.

Guto Hari, the BBC's North American business correspondent, notes that California has taken an aggressive stance on global warming, passing legislation to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

'Time to answer'

The lawsuit, lodged on behalf of the Californian people by state attorney-general Bill Lockyer, alleges that emissions from cars made by the firms in question account for 30% of all carbon dioxide emissions in California.

The complaint alleges that the firms' activities have harmed the state's environmental health, with California having to spend million of dollars responding to environmental threats such as coastal erosion.

Mr Lockyer said he had not put a figure of the level of damages he was seeking but that it was likely to run into "hundreds of millions of dollars".

"Global warming is causing significant harm to California's environment, economy, agriculture and public health," he added.

"The impacts are already costing millions of dollars and the price tag is increasing. It is time to hold these companies responsible for their contribution to this crisis."

'Most significant'

This is the latest in a series of legal and quasi-legal cases in the US aimed at forcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

An Inuit group is taking the federal government to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights

Conservation groups are trying to force the government to protect coral and polar bears from the effects of global warming

There are ongoing attempts to force the Environmental Protection Agency to define CO2 as a pollutant and regulate emissions

Roda Verheyen of Climate Justice, an international organisation which co-ordinates legal climate cases, said California's suit took action to a new level.

"It is the most significant piece of climate change litigation that has ever been brought," she said.

Car manufacturers have their own case against California pending over laws requiring them to reduce emissions.

The AAM said in a statement: "Automakers will need time to review this legal complaint [by California], however, a similar nuisance suit that was brought by attorneys-general against utilities was dismissed by a federal court in New York."

Solar Energy

"Powering up"
Sep 14th 2006 -- The Economist

Improved devices may make better use of sunlight
Most of the power generated by mankind originates from the sun. It was sunlight that nurtured the early life that became today's oil, gas and coal. It is the solar heating of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans that fuels wave power, wind farms and hydroelectric schemes. But using the sun's energy directly to generate power is rare. Solar cells account for less than 1% of the world's electricity production.

Recent technological improvements, however, may boost this figure. The root of the problem is that most commercial solar cells are made from silicon, and silicon is expensive. Cells can be made from other, cheaper materials, but these are not as efficient as those made from silicon.

The disparity is stark. Commercial silicon cells have efficiencies of 15% to 20%. In the laboratory, some have been made with an efficiency of 30%. The figure for non-traditional cells is far lower. A typical cell based on electrically conductive plastic has an efficiency of just 3% or 4%. What is needed is a way to boost the efficiency of cells made from cheap materials, and three new ways of doing so were unveiled this week in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Solar cells work by the action of light on electrons. An electron held in a chemical bond in the cell absorbs a photon (a particle of light) and, thus energised, breaks free. Such electrons can move about and, if they all move in the same direction, create an electric current. But they will not all travel in the same direction without a little persuasion. With silicon, this is achieved using a secondary electrical field across the cell. Non-silicon cells usually have a built-in “electrochemical potential” that encourages the electrons to move away from areas where they are concentrated and towards places where they have more breathing space.

Cooking the chips
Kwanghee Lee of Pusan National University, in South Korea, and Alan Heeger of the University of California, Santa Barbara, work on solar cells made of electrically conductive plastics. (Indeed, Dr Heeger won a Nobel prize for discovering that some plastics can be made to conduct electricity.) They found that by adding titanium oxide to such a cell and then baking it in an oven, they could increase the efficiency with which it converted solar energy into electricity.

The trick is to put the titanium oxide in as a layer between the part of the cell where the electrons are liberated and the part where they are collected for dispatch into the wider world. This makes the electrically conductive plastic more sensitive to light at wavelengths where sunlight is more intense. Pop the resulting sandwich in the oven for a few minutes at 150°C and the plastic layer becomes crystalline. This improves the efficiency of the process, because the electrons find it easier to move through crystalline structures.

The technique used by Dr Lee and Dr Heeger boosts the efficiency of plastic cells to 5.6%. That is still poor compared with silicon, but it is a big improvement on what was previously possible. Dr Lee concedes that there is still a long way to go, but says that even an efficiency of 7% would bring plastic cells into competition with their silicon cousins, given how cheap they are to manufacture.

A second approach, taken by Michael Grätzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is to copy nature. Plants absorb solar energy during photosynthesis. They use it to split water into hydrogen ions, electrons and oxygen. The electrons released by this reaction are taken up by carrier molecules and then passed along a chain of such molecules before being used to power the chemical reactions that ultimately make sugar.

Dye-sensitised solar cells seek to mimic this assembly line. The dye acts like chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green and that is responsible for absorbing sunlight and liberating electrons. The electrons are passed via a semiconductor to an electrode, through which they leave the cell. By using a dye called phthalocyanine, which absorbs not only visible light but also infra-red wavelengths, Dr Grätzel has been able to raise the efficiency of the process to 11%. That, he says, should be enough to make dye-sensitised cells competitive with silicon.

The third technique, being developed by Prashant Kamat of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and his colleagues, uses that fashionable scientific tool, the carbon nanotube. This is a cylinder composed solely of carbon atoms, and one of its properties is good electrical conductivity. In effect, nanotubes act as wires a few billionths of a metre in diameter.

Dr Kamat and his team covered the surface of an experimental cell made of cadmium sulphide, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide with nanotubes, so that the tubes stuck up from the surface like hairs. The tubes then eased the passage of the liberated electrons from the cell to the electrode that collected them. Using this technique doubled the efficiency of Dr Kamat's cell from 5% to 10% at ultraviolet wavelengths and he reckons it would create similar increases in efficiency in both plastic and dye-based cells.

Such a boost would take novel solar cells closer to becoming a commercial reality. And that would be a very good thing. Production of solar cells has increased by 32% a year, on average, for the past decade and jumped by 45% in 2005. That sounds impressive, but it has been achieved largely by subsidies from the governments of Germany, Japan and California. Only in places unconnected to an electricity grid, such as much of rural Africa and rural Asia, are solar cells truly commercially viable. But if the price were to come down because efficient cells could be made from cheap materials, that could change quickly. The rest of the world would then be able to join the poor of Africa and the rich of California, and generate solar power for itself.

Gore Proposes Immediate Freeze In Emissions

Excerpt from:
"Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions"
September 19, 2006 -- By Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times

Former Vice President Al Gore called yesterday for a popular movement in the United States to seek an “immediate freeze” in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked by most scientists to global warming.

Speaking at the New York University law school, Mr. Gore said that rising temperatures posed an enormous threat and that only a movement akin to the nuclear freeze campaign for arms control a generation ago, which he said he opposed at the time, would push elected officials out of longstanding deadlock on the issue.

“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”

Text from speech
White House on Global Climate Change

Economic Overview

This week, The Economist published an overview of the previous weeks economic headlines. Here are the overviews:

Economic and financial indicators
America's trade deficit in goods and services reached a record $68 billion in July, rising by 5% from the month before. Exports declined by $1.3 billion in the month, to $120 billion, while imports increased by $1.9 billion, to $188 billion. However, America's biggest bilateral deficit, with China, shrank: to $19.6 billion from $19.7 billion. The recent slide in the price of crude oil could narrow the trade deficit in the coming months.

Mortgage applications in America increased by 3.2% during the first week in September, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The demand for loans to buy homes had eased, but has bounced back a bit after a decline in the cost of borrowing.

In Japan core orders for machinery, which exclude those from shipbuilders and electricity companies, fell by 16.7% in July. It was the sharpest decline in almost 20 years, suggesting that investment spending may weaken. However, Japan's GDP grew by 0.2% between April and June—or by 1.0% at an annualised rate. Japanese wholesale prices increased by 3.4% in the year to August on the back of expensive oil and raw materials. The Cabinet Office's index of consumer confidence in Japan declined to 47.6 in August from 48.6 the month before.

In Britain prices rose beyond expectations last month, as annual inflation increased to 2.5%, from 2.4% in July. Inflation has now been above the Bank of England's 2% target for four months, raising the possibility that interest rates will rise this autumn. In the three months to July, average earnings were 4.4% higher than a year earlier, the fastest increase for more than a year.

France's consumer-price index rose by 1.9% in the year to August, the same as July. On the European Union's harmonised measure, inflation eased a bit, from 2.2% to 2.1%. French industrial production fell by 1.3% in July: forecasters had expected a slight increase. Carmaking declined by 1.4%, consumer-goods production dropped by 0.6% and the output of capital equipment fell by 0.4%.

Industrial production in Germany beat expectations in July, rising by 1.2% from the previous month and 4.7% from a year earlier on the back of growth in construction and spending on household appliances. The construction sector gained 3.4% in July, whereas manufacturing output increased by 1.2% and energy dropped by 0.5%.

Emerging-market indicators
China chalked up a record trade surplus of $18.8 billion in August and its industrial production was 15.7% greater than in the same month a year before.

Russia's GDP grew by 7.4% in the year to the second quarter, faster than the 5.5% it managed in the year to the first; India's industrial production expanded by 12.4% in the year to July, its quickest pace in a decade.

Corn vs. Wheat: Water, Biofuels, & Agricultural Subsidies

Excerpts from:
"For Kansas Farmers, Water Is a Vanishing Commodity"
September 16, 2006 -- By Alexei Barrionuevo, The New York Times

ULYSSES, Kansas — ...When the early homesteaders first arrived here in the mid-1800’s the area was so hot and dry in the summer that it was thought to be unfit for farming. Then Mennonites from Russia and Ukraine brought red Turkey wheat to Kansas, said Craig Miner, a Kansas historian. And it grew.

Kansas became America’s top wheat grower, regularly producing close to one-fifth of the country’s total harvest. With their sheaves of wheat, called shocks, stacked upright everywhere in the fields to dry, wheat became so ingrained in the Kansas mind-set that Wichita State University adopted the name Shockers for its mascot.

But in the last two decades, farmers have increasingly turned to corn and soybeans, which need nearly twice as much water.

“That part of the state is going to be out of water in about 25 years at the current rate of consumption,” said Mike Hayden, the secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks and a former Kansas governor.

Until recently, farmers had little incentive to conserve water, said Thomas J. Lear, a farmer south of Garden City. Now with the high cost of energy, he pays more attention to how he uses his water. Twice a day he checks on the 29 pumps that drive sprinklers watering his corn and soybeans. But this fall, he will do something his family has not done for more than a decade — grow more irrigated wheat — because it requires less water than corn and soybeans, which make up 85 percent of his farmland.

He sees the future for this parched area in more drought-resistant crops like grain sorghum, which can be used in ethanol plants as a corn substitute, and in sunflowers or cotton. “For a generation we thought the water was infinite,” Mr. Lear said. “What is going to drive conservation is the high cost of pumping. It is going to force you to do what you ought to do anyway.”

Still, he is not giving up on corn just yet. Next year he is planting a drought-resistant corn seed on a test plot, for a major seed manufacturer whom he declined to name. If the seed companies can “come up with a way for us to be better off out here,” he said, “that would be great.”

Excerpts from:
"Crop Rotation in the Grain Belt"
September 16, 2006 -- By Alexei Barrionuevo, The New York Times

GARDEN CITY, Kan. — Once the driving force behind transforming the United States into the “breadbasket of the world,” wheat is being steadily replaced by corn as the crop of choice for American farmers.

Genetic modifications to corn seeds, the growing demand for corn-based ethanol as a fuel blend and more favorable farm subsidies are leading farmers to plant corn in places where wheat long dominated. In Kansas, known for a century as the Wheat State, corn production quietly pulled ahead of wheat in 2000, with Kansas producing 23 percent more corn than wheat last year.

This year’s drought-ravaged crop is expected to be the second-smallest harvest for American farmers since 1978. It follows a year in which American farmers planted the fewest acres of wheat since 1972. And while corn acreage nationwide passed wheat about a decade ago, its footprint and that of soybeans are spreading across a greater swath of the Midwest, farther north and west into the Dakotas and central Minnesota — traditional wheat country, where growing corn and soybeans was once almost unthinkable.

“It is getting harder and harder for American farmers to say they feed the world,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research group based in Washington. “Instead, they feed S.U.V.’s.”

The decline of wheat and the broad relandscaping of America’s farmland have come about for several reasons. Better seed technology has given corn and soybeans a widening edge over wheat, and more favorable subsidies have encouraged farmers to abandon wheat. Changing consumer tastes and food packaging advancements have slowed American wheat demand.

But the growing biofuels industry is creating the strongest drag on wheat lately, as corn and soybeans are increasingly favored for their use in ethanol and biodiesel.

The spread of corn and soybeans at the expense of wheat, while not expected to significantly affect food prices, could nevertheless put more pressure on scarce water supplies, since both crops are more water- and energy-intensive than wheat.
...

Wheat has long been associated with the United States’ standing as the breadbasket of the world for its ability to feed the world through food shipments. American presidents used wheat to support Allied troops in both world wars and tried to wield it as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union. Huge wheat surpluses regularly helped the United States balance its trade deficits.

In the early 1970’s American farmers controlled half of the world’s wheat exports, but this year the United States will account for just 22 percent, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, an export trade group.

Driving the shift away from wheat have been advances in hybrid and genetically modified seeds for other crops. Major companies like Monsanto have been spending millions of dollars developing improved forms of corn, soybeans and cotton — not wheat — and those investments are paying off handsomely. Seeds engineered to resist drought and insects have yielded huge gains and have helped produce record corn harvests the last three years.

The more-resistant seeds have made it possible for farmers in colder climates with shorter growing seasons to produce successful corn harvests. North Dakota, which for decades was the second-biggest producer of wheat after Kansas, has lost 1.69 million wheat acres since 2000, a 16 percent decline. Corn acres in the state, meanwhile, have shot up by 670,000, or 62 percent.

In Kansas, wheat acreage is down 20 percent from 1980, though it has been fairly stable statewide the last four years. But without genetic modification, wheat is lagging behind.

American corn yields rose by 30 percent from 1995 to 2005, while wheat yields grew by only 17 percent. In recent years corn has pulled further ahead, with an annual growth rate in yield that is four times that of wheat.

So far, public resistance to genetically engineered wheat has been strong. Buyers in Europe and Japan said they would refuse American wheat if it was genetically modified. American farmers are divided on the issue. Monsanto dropped an effort to produce the world’s first genetically engineered wheat two years ago, yielding to the concerns of farmers that the crop would endanger exports. The wheat was genetically modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, which would have allowed farmers to spray their fields to kill weeds while not damaging the crop.

The company has said it is not giving up on wheat research. But the genetic engineering of corn, cotton and soybean crops is less controversial because those crops are used primarily in animal feed, clothing and food oils, while wheat is more likely to be used directly in food.

Syngenta, a Monsanto competitor, said it was continuing to develop a genetically engineered wheat that was resistant to fusarium, a fungus that damages crops and produces dangerous toxins. The crop could be ready for the market by early next decade but the company has not decided whether to put it on a commercial path, said Anne Burt, a Syngenta spokeswoman.

To a lesser extent, the structure of the federal farm program has also signaled to farmers that growing corn and soybeans is a better economic bet than wheat. The federal government rewards high corn production by guaranteeing growers the repayment of loans that become deficient when prices fall below the government loan rate of $1.95 a bushel. Corn prices that fell below $2 a bushel in recent years led to record payments to farmers: $4.6 billion last year and $2.9 billion in 2004. Wheat prices have generally averaged $3 a bushel, staying above the $2.75-a-bushel government floor.

Corn’s higher yields and better subsidy support have meant that it is much more economically attractive to grow an acre of corn than wheat on average, government statistics show. But wheat subsidies have not been adjusted much to account for the larger yields farmers obtain with corn through better seed technology.

Tighter wheat supplies could further lift wheat prices, which have hovered above $4 a bushel in recent months, but most experts do not expect food prices to rise much as a result of the switch to biofuels crops.

The cost of wheat is less than 10 percent of the total cost of products like bread and cereal.

The rub is in the trade-off over resources. While it takes more energy to produce a bushel of wheat than corn, an acre of corn uses a far larger overall basket of resources: energy, fertilizer and water.

Recent high prices for wheat, driven by drought in some of the world’s prime wheat-growing regions, may prompt some American farmers to plant more wheat acres this fall. But that is not likely to reverse wheat’s decline, analysts say.

Neither will diplomacy. For decades, America’s dominance of grains, especially wheat, was viewed as a potential diplomatic weapon, from the time President Gerald Ford tried to trade grain for discounted oil from the Soviet Union to President Jimmy Carter’s grain embargo against Moscow in 1980.

And other countries are picking up the slack. Major competitors — including Europe, Australia, Argentina and Black Sea countries like Ukraine — have increased their wheat output. America’s traditional customers like China are also growing more wheat for their own consumption, limiting the need for imports.

The high-protein Atkins diet that symbolized the low-carbohydrates fad helped reduce per-person flour consumption by 9 percent from 1997 to 2004, said Marcia Scheideman, president of the Wheat Foods Council in Washington.

Over all, the incentives to grow corn and soybeans have led farmers to try to grow corn against all odds, even as the economics have gotten tougher with higher costs of fertilizer and fuel for irrigation.

Stung by high costs to pump water, Larry Kepley, a farmer in Ulysses, west of Garden City, decided a few years ago to go back to dry-land farming, similar to what his great-grandfather did in 1888 when he first arrived in the area. The family had been irrigating since 1941.

Dry-land farming meant sticking with wheat. Still, wanting to experiment with corn, he planted 50 acres of dry-land corn last fall, figuring he needed 60 bushels an acre to break even. He got 17 bushels an acre. “It was an utter failure,” he said.

Mr. Lightner, the Garden City farmer, said he was more fortunate to have shallower water wells that made irrigation less costly than on Mr. Kepley’s farmland.

But the plastic tubes that line his rows of corn, delivering water into the soil every 60 inches, are the real key, he said. The water is pumped by natural gas and costs Mr. Lightner $50 to $120 an acre.

With higher fuel costs making his corn crop prohibitively more expensive last year, he planted 300 more acres of wheat, which he grudgingly admires as a crop with “nine lives.” But this time, the wheat failed him.

“The drought got it and then the hail came through, so I don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Mr. Lightner said. “For now, I’ll stick with corn.”

Genetically Modified Forests

"Genetic code of a tree unlocked"
September 14, 2006 -- AP via CNN

Researchers have deciphered for the first time the genetic code of a tree, which could lead to new varieties better at producing wood, paper and fuel.

The work could vastly increase cultivation of the black cottonwood, a fast-growing poplar already used by the timber and paper industries. Details of the analysis of the tree's DNA, performed by dozens of researchers in eight countries, appear this week in the journal Science.

Today, the black cottonwood is still considered "wild," even though it's grown for lumber and pulp. Fifteen years from now, fully domesticated varieties of the tree, optimally tuned to grow faster and longer, better resist insects and disease and require less water and nutrients, could be growing like any other crop on tree farms spread across large regions of the United States, researchers said.

To create such poplars, researchers first must hunt among the tree's more than 45,500 genes to understand how they control its growth. Doing so can allow later tinkering, including selective breeding and genetic manipulation to bring out desirable traits. Already, they have found 93 genes associated with the production of cellulose and lignin, which form the walls of plant cells.

One goal is to create a poplar variety that can be used as a source of ethanol, which can be burned as fuel. Currently, ethanol is more expensive and difficult to produce from wood than it is from crops like corn.

Researchers also would like to create poplar varieties to soak up even more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lessen the impact of the gas on global warming.

The black cottonwood is the third plant, after rice and a weed called Arabidopsis thaliana, to have its genome sequence published. Comparing their respective genomes is expected to shed light on their separate evolutionary paths, researchers said.

The team isolated the sequenced DNA from a poplar tree growing along the Nisqually River in Washington state.

More than three dozen researchers from the U.S., Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany and Sweden were led by Gerald Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

20 Unusual Things About Death

"20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death"
September 2006 -- By LeeAundra Temescu, Discover

Newsflash: we're all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn't know about kicking the bucket.

1 The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

2 Never say die: There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including "to be in Abraham's bosom," "just add maggots," and "sleep with the Tribbles" (a Star Trek favorite).

3 No American has died of old age since 1951.

4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.

5 The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest.

6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.

7 So much for recycling: Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.

8 Alternatively . . . A Swedish company, Promessa, will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch coffin. They claim this "ecological burial" will decompose in 6 to 12 months.

9 Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures.

10 The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.

11 Queen Victoria insisted on being buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert, and a plaster cast of his hand.

12 If this doesn't work, we're trying in vitro! In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village in a ceremony called famadihana. The remains are then wrapped in a new shroud and reburied. The old shroud is given to a newly married, childless couple to cover the connubial bed.

13 During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives.

14 Well, yeah, there's a slight chance this could backfire: English philosopher Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method, died in 1626 of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve it.

15 For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.

16 Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It's not.

17 Buried alive: In 19th-century Europe there was so much anecdotal evidence that living people were mistakenly declared dead that cadavers were laid out in "hospitals for the dead" while attendants awaited signs of putrefaction.

18 Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.

19 If you can't make it here . . . More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.

20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.

10 Big Stories That Major Media Has Ignored

"The 10 big stories the nation's major news media refused to cover last year"
By Sarah Phelan, San Francisco Bay Guardian

1. The Feds and the media muddy the debate over Internet freedom

The Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren't required to share their wires with other Internet service providers. The issue was misleadingly framed as an argument over regulation, when it's really a case of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone companies the freedom to control supply and content -- a decision that could have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay to get information and services that currently are free.

Source: "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story," Elliot D. Cohen, BuzzFlash.com, July 18, 2005.

2. Halliburton charged with selling nuclear technology to Iran

Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions. The story is particularly juicy because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. law.

Source: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran's Nuclear Team," Jason Leopold, GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005.

3. World oceans in extreme danger

Governments deny global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced greenhouse gases."

Source: "The Fate of the Ocean," Julia Whitty, Mother Jones, March-April 2006.

4. Hunger and homelessness increasing in the United States

As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality, a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.

In 2003, the Bush Administration tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs and in 2004 and 2005 attempted to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.
Sources: "New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness," Brendan Coyne, New Standard, December 2005; "U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire," Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net, March 2006.

5. High-tech genocide in Congo

If you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that is a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect this terrible suffering with the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones, laptop computers and other high-tech equipment.
What's really at stake in this bloodbath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin, and copper, as well as cobalt -- which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries -- and coltan and niobium, which is most important for the high-tech industries.

Sources: "The World's Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow," The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005; "High-Tech Genocide," Sprocket, Earth First! Journal, August 2005; "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo," Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Z Magazine, March 1, 2006.

6. Federal whistleblower protection in jeopardy

Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud, and other financial abuse since George W. Bush became president, the agency charged with defending government whistleblowers has reportedly been throwing out hundreds of cases -- and advancing almost none. Statistics released at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led to claims that special counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.

Sources: "Whistleblowers Get Help from Bush Administration," Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Web site, Dec. 5, 2005; "Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins," PEER Web site, Oct. 18, 2005; "Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections," PEER Web site, Sept. 22, 2005.

7. U.S. operatives torture detainees to death in Afghanistan and Iraq

While reports of torture aren't new, the documents are evidence of using torture as a policy, raising a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as: Who authorized such techniques? And why have the resulting deaths been covered up?
Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU's FOIA request, 21 were homicides and eight appear to have been the result of these abusive torture techniques.

Sources: "U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq," American Civil Liberties Union Web site, Oct. 24, 2005; "Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, March 5, 2006.

8. Pentagon exempt from Freedom of Information Act

In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, a crucial law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to federal documents. The ruling could hamper the efforts of groups like the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the US military's torture of detainees in Afghanistan Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Sources: "Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information," Michelle Chen, New Standard, May 6, 2005; "FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency," Newspaper Association of America Web site, posted December 2005.

9. World Bank funds Israel-Palestine wall

In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall Israel is building deep into Palestinian territory should be torn down. Instead, construction of this cement barrier, which annexes Israeli settlements and breaks the continuity of Palestinian territory, has accelerated. In the interim, the World Bank has come up with a framework for a Middle Eastern Free Trade Area, which would be financed by the World Bank and built on Palestinian land around the wall to encourage export-oriented economic development.

But with Israel ineligible for World Bank loans, the plan seems to translate into Palestinians paying for the modernization of checkpoints around a wall that they've always opposed, a wall that will help lock in and exploit their labor.

Sources: "Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank," Jamal Juma', Left Turn, issue 18; "U.S. Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion," Linda Heard, Aljazeera, March 9, 2005.

10. Expanded air war in Iraq kills more civilians

At the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command Air Force statistics showed an increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths thanks to increased bombing of Iraqi cities.

Sources: "Up in the Air," Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, December 2005; "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, December 2005 SFBG.

Project Censored then compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, underreported or self-censored by the country's major national news media.
See Project Censored.

Economic Overview

This week, The Economist published an overview of the previous weeks economic headlines. Here are the overviews:

Economic and financial indicators
America's businesses (excluding farms) added 128,000 workers to the payrolls in August. The unemployment rate fell slightly, to 4.7%. Unit labour costs are also rising faster than previously thought. In the second quarter they increased at an annual pace of 4.9% (in the non-farm business sector), compared with earlier estimates of 4.2%; in the first quarter they rose by a revised 9%.

America's house prices increased by just 1.2% in the second quarter, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which publishes the most reliable, but least timely, house-price figures. This was the smallest quarterly gain since 1999 and a marked slowdown from the 2.2% increase recorded in the first quarter.

In Japan companies raised their investment spending by 16.6% in the year to the second quarter. The figures were stronger than expected and helped to lift the yen, which had been languishing.

In the euro area the volume of retail trade grew by 2.5% in the year to July. But surveys of purchasing managers a month later revealed a slowdown in both services and manufacturing. The index for services fell to 57.1 in August from 57.9 in July; the index for manufacturing fell to 56.5 from 57.4.

Britain's industrial production in the three months to July was only 0.1% higher than in the previous three months.

Emerging-market indicators
Thailand's GDP growth slowed to 4.9% in the year to the second quarter, down from 6.1% in the first. Brazil's growth fell from 3.3% to 1.2% over the same period—the slowest growth of any economy in our table.

In August the inflation rate fell in several Asian economies, including Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. Turkey's rate also eased to 10.3%, from 11.7% in July. But Argentina's inflation edged up to 10.7%.

Earth's Velocity Through Space

"Confused About Your Direction?"
September 2006 -- By Bob Berman, Discover

If you lack a sense of personal trajectory, astronomers can help.

Throughout most of history, humanity hasn't had a clue about where it's going. The idea that we're all being whisked through space aboard a spinning Earth was alien even to brilliant thinkers like Aristotle and Pythagoras. The first to argue that our planet is in motion was Heracleides, who in 350 B.C. maintained that Earth turns on an axis. A century later, Aristarchus of Samos earned a lot of laughs for saying that we go around the sun, not the other way round.

Not until the Renaissance did educated people accept that Earth rotates daily, spinning us all steadily eastward. If you've got a calculator handy, you can quickly determine your speed: Multiply the cosine of your latitude by 1,038. For instance, if you live in Denver, latitude 40, punch in "40," hit the cosine key, and multiply. Answer: 795 miles per hour. You are breaking the sound barrier just by sitting on your couch.

That's only the beginning of your astronomical movements. As Earth orbits the sun, it plows through space at 18.5 miles per second, or about 67,000 mph. At sunrise, the direction of Earth's travel is pretty close to straight overhead. The velocity is not constant, though, because Earth follows an elliptical path and accelerates as it moves closer to the sun. Counterintuitively, the top speed occurs in early January, the minimum in July.

Nearly a century ago, American astronomer Harlow Shapley enlarged the perspective on our motion. He discovered that we're not sitting at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Instead, we're about two-thirds of the way to the edge, making a huge loop around the galactic core every 250 million years or so. Astronomers before Shapley had already determined that the sun and its planets are moving toward the constellation Hercules at about 12 miles per second. Today we know that this is just a sideways drift superimposed on our main forward speed around the Milky Way—a brisk 144 miles per second, about one-thousandth the speed of light. That motion carries us toward the bright star Deneb, which is high overhead this month. We will be where Deneb is now, 1,600 light-years away, in a million and a half years.

Still, we're not finished. Our entire galaxy rushes toward the Andromeda galaxy at 80 miles per second. Zoom out farther and our local group of galaxies is yanked toward "the Great Attractor," a mysterious concentration of mass beyond the constellation Virgo. Even big telescopes can't really spot the source of the pull.

On the largest scale, everything is flying apart, a cosmic divorce dictated by the expansion of the universe in all directions. Measuring the exact value of that expansion yields hints about whether the universe will keep growing forever or will someday halt and then contract. Current studies say the expansion rate is around 14 miles per second for each million light-years of distance. Alien astronomers in a galaxy 100 million light-years away would see us whizzing in the opposite direction at 1,400 miles per second.

Or are they moving away from us? The usual interpretation is that the space between us is increasing, so everybody is moving and yet nobody is actually moving. That's another way of saying that there is no center to the Big Bang. It happened everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps all we can say for sure is that we've come a long way, yet we're still going nowhere—fast.

Wal-Mart, Light Bulbs, & Conscientious Consumption

Excerpts from:
"How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're Looking At It"
September 2006 -- By Charles Fishman, FastCompany.com

For years, compact fluorescent bulbs have promised dramatic energy savings--yet they remain a mere curiosity. That's about to change.

Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.

What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.

That's the law of large numbers--a small action, multiplied by 110 million.

The single greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States is power plants--half our electricity comes from coal plants. One bulb swapped out: enough electricity saved to turn off two entire power plants--or skip building the next two.

Just one swirl per home. The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100 "sockets" (astonish yourself: Go count the bulbs in your house). So what if we all bought and installed two ice-cream-cone bulbs? Five? Fifteen?

Says David Goldstein, a PhD physicist, MacArthur "genius" fellow, and senior energy scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council: "This could be just what the world's been waiting for, for the last 20 years."

Swirl bulbs don't just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it's not just lighting your living room, it's dropping quarters in your pocket. The advantages pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; it may be around to help illuminate your 40th.

In an era when political leaders and companies are too fainthearted to ask Americans to sacrifice anything for the greater good, the modern ice-cream swirl bulb requires no sacrifice. Buying and using it helps save the world--and also saves the customer money--with no compromise on quality. Selflessness and self-satisfaction, twirled into a single $3 purchase.

So far, the impact of compact fluorescents has been trivial, for a simple reason: We haven't bought them. In our outdated experience, they don't work well and they cost too much. Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $1 billion to buy about 2 billion lightbulbs--5.5 million every day. Just 5%, 100 million, were compact fluorescents. First introduced on March 28, 1980, swirls remain a niche product, more curiosity than revolution.

But that's about to change. It will change before our very eyes. A year from now, chances are that you yourself will have installed a swirl or two, and will likely be quite happy with them. In the name of conservation and good corporate citizenship, not to mention economics, one unlikely company is about haul us to the lightbulb aisle, reeducate us, and sell us a swirl: Wal-Mart.

In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers--100 million in all--one swirl bulb. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. It also aims to change its own reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new positioning as an environmental activist.

It's a bold goal, a remarkable declaration of Wal-Mart's intention to modernize and green up a whole line of business using market oomph. Teaming up with General Electric, which owns about 60% of the residential lightbulb market in the United States, Wal-Mart wants to single-handedly double U.S. sales for CFLs in a year, and it wants demand to surge forward after that.
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Which presents a daunting challenge: Wal-Mart's push into swirls won't just help consumers and the environment; it will shatter a business--its own lightbulb business, and that of every lightbulb manufacturer. Because swirls last so long, every one that's sold represents the loss of 6 or 8 or 10 incandescent bulb sales. Swirls will remake the lightbulb industry--dominated by familiar names GE, Philips, Sylvania--the way digital-music downloads have remade selling albums on CD, the way digital cameras revolutionized selling film and envelopes of snapshots. CFLs are a classic example of creative destruction.
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Incandescent lightbulbs and spiral lightbulbs make light in entirely different ways, and it is that difference that makes spirals so potent. In a classic 60-watt incandescent bulb, light comes from the little metal filament quivering inside the sealed glass bulb. Electricity passes through the metal thread, heating it to 2,300 degrees Celsius, and the filament glows with the heat and throws off light. Electricity creates heat, heat creates light. It's why incandescent bulbs are so hot--the glass is often 300 degrees. In the trade, incandescents are sometimes known as "a hot wire in a bottle."

Compact fluorescents are something else again. In a fluorescent bulb, the glass tube is filled with gas and a tiny dot of mercury. Electricity leaps off electrodes on either end of the tube and excites the mercury molecules, which have a special property: When so excited, they emit ultraviolet light. That invisible UV light strikes the bulb's phosphor coating, which itself gets excited and emits visible light, which shines out through the tube. Heat is much less of a factor--CFLs run at about 100 degrees.

Making the ionized fog bottled inside a CFL dance to the same steady tune as an incandescent has required a lot of research, and an electronics revolution. Early CFLs cost $25 per bulb (and still paid for themselves in electricity savings). The light they produced was bluish or pinkish, or varied; the phosphor coating had to be refined. The ballast--built into the bulb rather than in a separate fixture, as with traditional fluorescent tubes--hummed and didn't cycle the electricity quickly enough; it had to be made electronic and miniaturized. Costs came down, as did size. The same wizardry that gives us Hallmark birthday cards that play "Love and Happiness" makes possible CFLs at $2.60 instead of $25.

It is this--the way swirls make light--that saves so much energy. In an incandescent, only 5% to 10% of the electricity passing through the wire becomes visible light; the rest becomes heat and invisible UV light. The vibrating mercury vapor atoms in a fluorescent bulb produce light more efficiently than a tungsten filament. You get more photons for every watt of electricity pumped in. An old-fashioned incandescent makes 15 lumens per watt; a 60-watt bulb shines with 900 lumens. In a CFL, you get 60 lumens per watt. To get 900 lumens--to get the light you expect from a 60-watt bulb--you need only 15 watts.

A 60-watt classic bulb and a 15-watt swirl are identically bright--the swirl just uses 45 fewer watts.

The Swirl Cascade

What really revolutionizes the lightbulb experience, and the business itself, is a second quality of swirls, beyond their ability to squeeze more light from a kilowatt: their longevity.

The compact fluorescents that GE, Philips, and Sylvania are putting on shelves are rated to run for 8,000, 10,000, or 12,000 hours. Few bulbs in a home are lit more than four hours a day; at that rate, an 8,000-hour bulb lasts five-and-a-half years; a 12,000-hour bulb lasts eight years and three months. As swirls take hold, it will be a surprise, a novel event, when a lightbulb goes dark. Imagine all those hard-to-reach bulbs that need to be replaced every three months. From four times a year, to once a decade.

And the impact of swirls cascades outward. Since every CFL has the life span of 6, or 8, or 10 equivalent incandescent bulbs, if Wal-Mart alone sells 100 million swirls in the next year, it does away with the need for 100 million old-fashioned bulbs to be manufactured, packaged, shipped, bought, and discarded next year--and every year until 2012 or beyond.
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"It's certainly possible to see a day when a cartoonist will draw a cartoon with a character having an idea," says Kerby, "you know, with the traditional-shaped incandescent lightbulb going on over the character's head--and my grandchildren will look at that and not know what it means. And that's not a bad thing, because we'll be living in a much better world."

Biofuels Strain Food Supplies

"Biofuels Could Strain U.N. Goals of Ending Hunger"
August 24, 2006 — By Alister Doyle, Reuters via ENN

STOCKHOLM--Rising production of biofuels from crops might complicate U.N. goals of ending hunger in developing countries, where 850 million people do not have enough to eat, a senior U.N. official said on Wednesday.

"There's a huge potential for biofuels but we have to look at ... competition with food production," said Alexander Mueller, assistant Director General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Production of fuels from sugar, maize, soybeans and other corps is surging, spurred by oil prices above $70 a barrel and a drive for more environmentally friendly fuels from renewable sources.

"This is a completely new issue, we only know that this has impact on the question of feeding the world," he told a news conference during a meeting of 1,500 water experts in Stockholm.

Still, he said that a surge in biofuels production in the past year or two had not hampered food supplies. "We have to find out what the situation will be in 5 to 10 years ... a lot of research has to be done," he said.

Biofuels now make up only a fraction of a percent of world energy use but have an economic potential to rise to perhaps 6 percent by 2050, according to rough FAO estimates.

"This is an emerging issue with no clear figures and no guidelines," Mueller said. The rise of biofuels could also strain world water supplies -- about one in three people live in areas where water is scarce, he said.

He also said that the world would need better management of fresh water to "feed all the people and to produce energy for the world."

Mueller said biofuels presented one of three major challenges for farming, alongside climate change and a rising world population.

Food output would have to rise by 40 percent in the next 25 years to keep pace with a rise in the world population to nine billion people. That in turn will strain demand for irrigation with one in three people living in regions with water shortages.

And climate change might bring more droughts, floods, heat waves and erosion. Most scientists say that emissions of greenhouse gases, largely from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, are warming the planet.

Expedia & TerraPass Partnership

Excerpts from:
"Expedia.com Offers Travelers a Greener Way to Fly"
August 28, 2006 -- Forbes.com

Expedia.com(R), the world's leading online travel provider, today became the first online travel agency to offer travelers the ability to purchase carbon offsets -- carbon dioxide reduction measures used to help cancel out the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming. Expedia(R) is offering the service through TerraPass, the leading retailer of greenhouse gas reduction projects in the U.S.
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Airline travel currently accounts for about 13 percent of U.S.- transportation-based emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. To help address this, Expedia is partnering with TerraPass to make it simple for environmentally conscious travelers to be carbon-balanced travelers by purchasing a TerraPass from Expedia as part of their trip.

Expedia travelers can now pay a small fee to sponsor a measured, verified reduction in greenhouse gas emissions directly proportional to the emissions created by their plane flight. TerraPass funds domestic clean energy projects, such as wind farms, innovative "cow power" methane capture plants on American dairies, and the retirement of carbon offsets on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

"Expedia is the pioneer for responsible tourism in the travel industry, and TerraPass is a pioneer in the market for simple, affordable tools to fight climate change," said Tom Arnold, Chief Environmental Officer, TerraPass. "One year ago Expedia formed the World Heritage Alliance in partnership with the United Nations Foundation to support sustainable tourism to World Heritage sites. We're thrilled to join with Expedia in this latest initiative to raise awareness of simple options for environmentally friendly travel."

"The voluntary market for greenhouse gas reductions has tremendous potential and this is an innovative initiative enabling consumers to reduce their greenhouse gas impact. It is a market we want to support and help to develop by providing certainty for consumers through our verification process," said Lars Kvale, Center for Resource Solutions measurement and verification services analyst.

Expedia.com travelers can choose from three levels of TerraPass to purchase during the process of booking a flight or package, or as a standalone component on Expedia's Activities page (www.expedia.com/activities). Prior to checkout, Expedia customers will be offered a chance to purchase a TerraPass that funds enough clean energy to balance out the CO2 emissions caused by their flights.

For example, a typical flight from New York to Los Angeles creates about 2,000 lbs. per passenger of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas. Pricing starts at $5.99 to offset about 1,000 lbs of CO2, the approximate amount per passenger emitted by a 2,200 mile round-trip flight. A TerraPass to cover cross-country and international flights is $16.99 for up to 6,500 flight miles, and $29.99 for up to 13,000 flight miles. Travelers who purchase a TerraPass for cross-country or international flights will receive a luggage tag that indicates their contribution to green travel. Travelers who purchase a TerraPass for short-haul flights will receive a decal.

Expedia is offering TerraPass to its customers at cost, so all proceeds will go towards TerraPass' greenhouse gas reduction efforts. All TerraPass sales and support of clean energy projects are independently audited by the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco non-profit that runs market surveillance and certification programs in the green power industry. For more information, visit www.expedia.com/activities and search in any destination, or click on this link: http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=tsdt&stat=5&ofid=6779

Economics Overview

This week, The Economist published an overview of the previous weeks economic headlines. Here are the overviews:

Economic and financial indicators
America's businesses (excluding farms) added 128,000 workers to the payrolls in August. The unemployment rate fell slightly, to 4.7%. Unit labour costs are also rising faster than previously thought. In the second quarter they increased at an annual pace of 4.9% (in the non-farm business sector), compared with earlier estimates of 4.2%; in the first quarter they rose by a revised 9%.

America's house prices increased by just 1.2% in the second quarter, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which publishes the most reliable, but least timely, house-price figures. This was the smallest quarterly gain since 1999 and a marked slowdown from the 2.2% increase recorded in the first quarter.

In Japan companies raised their investment spending by 16.6% in the year to the second quarter. The figures were stronger than expected and helped to lift the yen, which had been languishing.

In the euro area the volume of retail trade grew by 2.5% in the year to July. But surveys of purchasing managers a month later revealed a slowdown in both services and manufacturing. The index for services fell to 57.1 in August from 57.9 in July; the index for manufacturing fell to 56.5 from 57.4.

Britain's industrial production in the three months to July was only 0.1% higher than in the previous three months.

Emerging-market indicators
Thailand's GDP growth slowed to 4.9% in the year to the second quarter, down from 6.1% in the first. Brazil's growth fell from 3.3% to 1.2% over the same period—the slowest growth of any economy in our table.

In August the inflation rate fell in several Asian economies, including Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. Turkey's rate also eased to 10.3%, from 11.7% in July. But Argentina's inflation edged up to 10.7%.

Are Hybrids Cheaper?

"Some Hybrid Vehicles Becoming Sensible Purchases, According to Edmunds.com"
August 22, 2006 — Edmunds.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Edmunds.com latest hybrid study shows that despite higher sales prices, purchasing some — though not all — of today's hybrids can make good financial sense.

For the latest installment of its Fuel Economy Guide, Edmunds.com compared the sales prices and annual gas expenses of hybrid vehicles and their non-hybrid counterparts.

"Our study revealed that high gas prices and generous tax credits now offset the high sales prices of some hybrids, assuming owners keep their hybrids for a few years," said Alex Rosten, Manager of Pricing and Market Analysis for Edmunds.com.

Edmunds.com's study indicates that the higher purchase price is completely recovered for the Ford Escape Hybrid and Toyota Prius within three years of ownership, while buyers of the Honda Civic Hybrid, Saturn VUE Green Line and Toyota Camry Hybrid reach break-even within six years of ownership, in each case assuming the vehicle is driven 15,000 miles per year.

Chart available here.

Full tax credits are only provided to consumers until shortly after each manufacturer has sold 60,000 hybrids. After that threshold is reached, the tax credit gets cut in half. For Toyota and Lexus buyers, that threshold has been reached — so anyone who buys a Toyota or Lexus hybrid after September 30, 2006 will only qualify for half the tax credit. The credit for these models will drop to 25% in April 2007 and then to zero in October 2007.

"If you're in the market for a hybrid, right now is the best time to buy," said Joanne Helperin, Senior Editor of Edmunds.com's Fuel Economy Guide. "It will take buyers much longer to break-even if their tax credit is halved."

This hybrid study assumed the vehicles were sold at the Edmunds.com True Market Value® price and achieved the Environmental Protection Agency's recorded mileage for combined city and highway driving. The 2006 federal tax credit was applied when appropriate. Figures were calculated based on the assumption that one gallon of gasoline costs $3.00 (which was the nation's average price for regular unleaded fuel on Aug. 14, 2006).

For more information about this study, please visit here.