Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs After reading an article such as this NYTimes piece on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and its applications in manufacturing, the whole “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra of the past election becomes even more absurd. Forget about worrying whether artificial intelligence may one day replace your job, we should worry more about finding ourselves in jobs that can one day soon be done by a machine. Is that really the highest and best use for that most amazing of machines, the human mind? The whole concept of hard work being the best use for idle hands presumes the mind controlling those hands isn't very useful to begin with. What’s most disturbing about the work-hard-play-hard ideology is that it clings to 18th century ideas of life. Yes, such thinking is what helped make this country great, but to think that sacrificing one-third of our lives to enjoy the other third that we’re not sleeping is absurd in this day and age. From an evolutionary standpoint, humans are not the same species as the folks that founded this country and we can only marvel at what the stuff talked about in the article link above will do for those following in our footsteps.

The Capitalist Manifesto It’s kind of disturbing when two clever fellows provide two convincing arguments for and against an economic principle vital to the world’s future while ignoring a issue key to both arguments. That’s what happens in this book review discussing whether or not economic growth is key to moral improvements in society. The book author argues it is because when everybody is making money we all tend to be more tolerant of each other. The book critic argues otherwise and presents various evidence to the contrary. Both scholars seem to ignore the problem of grotesque waste in an era of diminishing natural resources. There’s also no mention of the economic impact of technology replacing workers. If you think the Chinese work cheap, think what a handful of robots can do for an auto assembly line, or what a few thousands lines of computer code can do for government administrative offices. How do you put more people to work as technology increasingly makes their efforts obsolete? Economic growth and standard of living as these two are discussing the subjects are things of the past. The new economic growth will be measured in waste reduction and resource conservation while standard of living will be measure in the time both allow humans to enjoy life. Now that’s a capitalist manifesto that NBN wants to see manifest in this country, the greatest of all capitalist countries. Here is another NYTimes article that completely misses the boat on the new nature of economic growth.

We’re all getting smarter, so I.Q. scores tell us Much was made this week about a study by a New Zealand scholar suggesting humans are getting smarter because of all of the information available to us. In the sanitized words of many an American high-schooler: no kidding Sherlock. What makes this fairly obvious study worth mentioning here is that intelligence so often is thought to involve a physiological component that has many of us believing it’s something you can only be born with. This New Zealand study flies in the face of that suggestion. As we discuss throughout this week’s issue, technology is allowing Americans more and more free time in a consumer culture that depends on us wasting as much of it as possible. But there is just so much of that time that we can waste. Eventually, even the most addled mind (see video above) is going to learn a thing or two about its surroundings when given ample time to observe them. Either that or the peddlers of self fulfillment will be forced to provide ever more stimulation to absorb all that free time. Even Disney World, jetskies and ski-diving can get boring after a while. This is what makes NBN so optimistic about the future. At some point humans are going to realize the only sustainable form of satisfaction is growth. And given that there are limits, hopefully, to how much our bodies can grow, the only thing left is growing our minds. In doing so we should be much less susceptible to salesmen with great ideas about how to spend our time, and what we trade so much of that time for, our money.

Reality Laughs Again at North Carolina In the past NBN has cautiously posted items suggesting those folks in this country most reluctant to endorse government efforts to curb global warming are the ones also being hardest hit by climate change. Places like Tornado Alley. We’re cautious because people are dying from global warming and NBN doesn’t want to dance on anyone’s grave. That doesn’t allow us to ignore the price being paid by those ignoring global warming and the Scientific American article linked above deserves merit for shaking an accusatory finger at a very irresponsible North Carolina Legislature. The article details how, thanks to global warming and a cruel twist of ocean hydraulics, north and central Atlantic coastal communities will suffer sea level rises greater than most other parts of the country. Yet North Carolina’s leaders are not just ignoring the threat, they are actively working to stop efforts that might mitigate it. It’s not dancing on anyone’s grave to say that’s pretty stooped. But then hard-core red states like Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, Arizona are all still very much in drought-watch which, you can bet the ranch, is also caused by global warming. This author thinks those states will see their circumstances turn much worse in the coming year, again, thanks to the global warming that their leaders urge them to ignore. Call it just desserts, poetic justice, or payback but it seems the folks most resistant to stopping climate change are now paying the highest price. Ignorance is not going to be blissful for these folks.

Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary) Week in and week out, the overworked staff at NBN wonder if and when we should quit. Then an article like this comes along making clear we can’t. The author, who is an economist, nonetheless argues quite persuasively that the overly strident stance we feel we take in this publication, isn’t strident enough. We harp on more mainstream environmental concerns like invasive species, deadzones, plummeting ocean fish populations, and contaminated groundwater supplies. This guy notes that we’re also running out of odd, but no less vital resources, like potash and phosphorus. On the environmental concern we share, global warming, this guy is even more doom-and-gloom than NBN. And he’s anything but a fringe element, something NBN has been accused of being. We urge you to open the link above and read the article for yourselves. In case you don’t, consider this excerpt: “Simply, we are running out…It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem.” NBN would like to add that it’s crucial the rest of us do likewise and if that means finding time to write websites like this one, then find the time.

Chasing Ice NBN stumbled upon this global warming documentary while bemoaning who unfollowed us on twitter last week. (Egad, mixing social media metaphors!) At first, a few things bothered us about the project. Foremost is the melodrama mixed into the message in order to make it more interesting to the masses. Do we really need to hash over the producer’s use of stem cells to repair a knee mutilated in the selfless pursuit of risky glacier footage needed to most effectively drive the movie’s message home? Did they get some actor to play the surgeon who administered the stem cells? Then there is the petition we’re asked to sign using our email and street addresses. Isn’t the science of global warming scary enough? Do we really need the melodrama and marketing? Sadly, yes, if we want to get the ignoramuses off the fence and directly involved in this global catastrophe. There’s an important point that all the melodrama makes: global warming touches our lives in all manner of ways. Not just flooding our homes but ruining our lives. So, if seeing the producer risk life and limb to get a message across is what gets the message across to another 10,000 or so who would otherwise be watching Survivor, so be it. So we signed the petition with the requisite information and are now asking our readers to do the same. For the Record, the staff at NBN are huge Survivor fans.

Boffins build program to HUNT DOWN CO2 polluters where they LIVE Building-by-building government surveillance of carbon footprints may sound like Al Gore meets Joe McCarthy, but is it really so farfetched that energy waste in the home and office be targeted for correction in some deliberate, if not mandatory, fashion? Local zoning laws restrict what people can do with their property in order to protect surrounding land-owners. Automobile inspections restrict what can come out of car tailpipes to protect the air we all breath. Why not have some sort of mandatory surveillance of how much heat (read energy) we’re throwing away through our walls? The article above says using simple mathematical modeling and a little local construction history, building by building maps of energy waste for an entire community can be created. That’s not to say NBN thinks you shouldn’t be allowed to waste energy. That’s un-American. But such surveillance could be a wonderful tool for implementing community wide home energy efficiency improvement programs using, for example, cap and trade carbon tax revenue. We can also just turn down our thermostats and wear a sweater around the house, like our mothers, or fathers, told us to do. Turns out a cooler house also helps you lose weight along with curbing global warming. Funny, isn’t it, that wasting less always seems to benefit everybody but the people selling the stuff we’re wasting.

Carbon capture: 130 plants needed 'to avoid dangerous climate change' Whilst looking for fodder to funnel into a file on Koch brothers campaign contributions, NBN’s limited attention span got diverted by this article on United Kingdom carbon capture and storage (CCS) efforts. That got us thinking about clean coal and soon we were skimming this 2010  NYTimes Op-Ed on the futility of CCS. Our search for more objective input produced this Wikipedia entry which noted clean coal technology successfully curbed acid rain ruining lakes in the U.S. Northeast. However, our round-up of articles seems to support the notion that effectively removing carbon from coal fired power plants reduces the efficiency of the plants too much. Which means there is no clean coal technology at his point in time. So why is the president talking about it? Just like Romney he’s got to mislead his base to get as many votes as possible. Obama misleads liberals voters and Romney misleads conservatives while reality is going to force both to govern in ways far from their campaign platforms. Right now they are just telling us what we want to hear in the hopes we will believe them as politicians have for generations. When you think about it, whose fault is that?

These things have to be expensive. What makes this product attractive to NBN is something not mentioned in any of the marketing material. These are go anywhere renewable energy power producers. Forget the lights, what about use for back-up power sources? It seems that five or six of these things could run an entire a house. NBN guesses they cost about $15k each. Any other guesses out there?

A123 Systems runs out of cash and sells assets for $125 million This article illustrates perfectly why this nation must continue to invest in renewable energy despite the risk involved versus the risk not involved in continued fossil fuel exploitation. For the sake of 650 bad batteries this company had to sell itself to another company. By contrast mammoth coal companies can kill scores of workers and still find cash aplenty to pump into the campaign coffers of those willing to bend U.S. energy policy in their favor. That’s not to say the car battery maker that went broke shouldn’t atone for its mistake in the fatal fashion it has. What we are saying is if the battery company got half the government help the politician-bribing big oil companies get global warming wouldn’t be half the problem it is now. (How’s that for reckless prognostication?) To double down on fossil fuels as the savior for this economy as Romney is suggesting is short-sighted. NBN has said before it has a hard time believing even Romney believes in his own almost militant opposition to renewable energy. His rhetoric is too strident and his use of it too calculating for us to believe it’s sincere. That said, how do we vote for a man that insincere? This election is an unsavory selection between a well meaning man who will say anything to get into office and a well meaning but naïve almost to the point of Jimmy Carter incumbent who knows telling the truth will never get him back into office. Worse, that selection is being made by people who don’t want to hear the truth. Boy, we wandered of the reservation on that subject.

But it seems that argument holds no water because those contaminants are going to be returned to the environment one way or another. You could even argue that the grasses the waste-water-cum-snow-fall will nourish in the offseason might break down those contaminants more than treating them otherwise. These folks made that argument in a pilot study in Yellowstone Club ski slope last year. Sorry, no word on the findings. We also feel little love for the local Indian argument that their sacred mountains are being desecrated with waste water. There is just less and less room for such claims in this increasingly crowded planet. This is a tough one.

Obama Versus Romney: Everything You Need to Know About Where the Candidates Stand on Energy Policy This article appeared in Renewable Energy News a publication we’ve always viewed as being unbiased. If that assessment is correct then how in the heck does anyone in their right mind vote for Romney? We’ll let the candidates say the rest as they are represented in the article: “President Barack Obama’s first term featured the adoption of essential toxic and carbon pollution reduction measures to protect public health. In addition, he modernized fuel-economy standards for the first time in two decades, which also helped the auto industry; invested in energy efficiency and renewable electricity; and created tens of thousands of jobs. Gov. Mitt Romney’s energy agenda couldn’t be more different. He would undo new safeguards from mercury, carcinogens, soot, and smog from industrial sources. He opposes the improved fuel-economy standards, and would continue and expand tax breaks for big oil companies, while openly disparaging clean energy and investments in wind power.” As NBN has said before, we strongly suggest Romney is not going to be nearly as bad on the environment as his present campaigning seems to suggest (see post below).

Romney Shifted Right on Energy as Presidential Politics Beckoned A few weeks back we speculated on a GOP shift toward embracing a new Cap and Trade policy to reduce greenhouse gases and if a President Romney would follow suit. This 1,800-word Sunday NYTimes piece has us thinking we might be right. NBN had no idea how pro-environment Massachusetts Gov. Romney was until we read this piece. His green roots stretch all the way back to his father’s embracing the fuel efficient Rambler as head of American Motors. It was the elder Romney’s answer to AMC’s gas guzzling competition, according to the Times. George Romney apparently helped popularize the term “gas guzzler”. So how is it, everything Romney is saying today is anathema to anyone concerned about the environment? If a President Romney did embrace a much more environmental agenda how do we view his deceitful campaign rhetoric? Our leaders can’t level with us because nobody wants to hear that this country, and the world, are going to undergo some harsh changes if we’re to survive economically and ecologically. Who wants to hear that these days? Nobody.

VCS approves Wetland Restoration Baseless NBN prediction of the month? If Romney gets elected he proposes some form of Cap and Trade legislation. That’s what the tea leaves are saying to NBN and if we’re correct this revelation that wetlands restoration will qualify for carbon credits is great news. Not just because wetlands are the most biologically productive ecosystems short of coral reefs. Rising tides from global warming are killing wetlands all over the world and replacing them is going to be a top priority if we’re to forge a new future for these age-old, vital ecosystem. It helps to add that successful wetlands restoration does not need to take centuries (see picture). Even spartina grass marshes, the nursery of marine ecology can be rebuilt in a few years. Freshwater wetlands can be restored in a decade or less, and we have no clue how long it takes for mangrove swamps to reestablish themselves be we suspect, they won’t be the subject of a lot of carbon credit claims.

The Ryan Sinkhole Kudos to this New York Times article for directing NBN to Veep candidate Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee’s 2013 Budget. Now, let’s forget the article and look on page 16 of the budget. It says: “Too great a percentage of America’s vast natural resources remain locked behind bureaucratic barriers and red tape. This budget lifts moratoriums on safe, responsible energy exploration…” NBN reads that and sees a complete contradiction. Exploration by definition involves uncertainty. The same applies to oil exploration. How can you expand oil exploration without expanding regulations that keep it safe and responsible? Would Ryan have judged the operations on the Deepwater Horizon safe before it ruined the Gulf of Mexico? Would he have proposed fewer regulations there too? Ryan's budget is based on increasingly popular, free market economic theory that posits that BP’s desire to stay in business will prevent accidents like the Gulf oil spill. Those free market theorist need to spend some time with evolution theorists discussing the concept of parasitism. If we expand exploration and lift restrictions we’ll be inundated with unsafe quick-buck artists who are happy to make a mess for others to clean up, after they’ve retired to a gated community on a beach far from any oil platforms.

Bavarian Village Rakes in $5.7 Million/Year by Selling Green Energy Week in and week out NBN tries to tone down its criticism of conservative elements boasting of U.S. exceptionalism over European complacency. But we keep coming across articles like this one. Conservatives’ blind faith in this country’s consumption-based economic model leaves little room for the leap of faith allowing this Bavarian village to leverage conservation into economic advantage. Not while we’ve got oil companies bribing Romney to preach about the power of coal and oil to do the same. The difference in perspective is bewildering. How can NBN not feel Conservatives are just plain ignorant for not seeing the economic opportunity in conservation? Romney is a smart man, unlike the last Republican offering the conservatives in this country doubled down on. Should that give NBN hope in the event short term fear and blind faith once again trump long term planning and deliberation on Nov. 7 and Romney is elected? Nah. For Romney to incorporate anything resembling conservation-driven common sense into his administration he will have to betray an awful lot of conservatives, including those who bankrolled him. We just don’t see that happening.

Gun Sales Hinge on Obama Re-Election We really, really hate to admit this, but this is NBN’s week for venting: every time we read about another shooting of innocents in this country it stirs this little flicker of hope inside of us. Hope that the country will come to its senses on gun safety issues. We’re very sorry for the loss of life, and our hearts sincerely go out to those killed by unhinged people possessing weapons they should not be allowed to possess. At the same time, something has got to give, and we can’t help but hope all this senseless slaughter will bring the country to its senses. The U.S population cannot just go on believing the solution to gun violence is making more guns. In case no one has noticed, this is becoming a bitterly divided country. We don’t just disagree with those from the other camp, we dislike them. At the same time our population is 100 times what it was when the constitution provided for a right to bear arms as a means of national defense. So, we’ve got a considerably more crowded, angry American citizenry being told by the people making guns that we have a constitutional right to own assault weapons with extended magazines at the same time were spending $600 billion a year on national defense. Don't these people have a conscience? It makes you think that if Smith and Wesson wasn’t fighting for Americans' right to shoot guns they'd be selling drugs and fighting for American's right to shoot heroin.

Given the unlikelihood that Ailes suddenly grew an appreciation for the flagging integrity of the industry he’s so thoroughly corrupted, NBN has to opt for the latter. Rupert Murdoch has proven before money and power trump morals and public service in his little universe.

Has Trenberth’s missing heat been found? Southern Oceans are losing heat  NBN dug into this article thinking it might be a nice counter argument to global warming theory, lending badly needed perspective to a problem that defies perspective. The first paragraph talks about the discovery that Antarctic oceans are getting cooler in contravention to global warming theory. The second paragraph talks of poor deployment of environmental monitors in this still very secluded section of the globe as an argument against rushing to judgment in matters of global climate. Ok, so far. Then the author hits us with a few graphs of this stuff: “The observed annual mean net air-sea heat flux is a small net ocean heat loss of −10 Wm−2,with seasonal extrema of 139 Wm−2 in January and −79 Wm−2 in July.” Then he wraps up talking about: “the high level of uncertainty that currently exists in Southern Ocean air-sea flux datasets.” Uncertainty! That’s the point NBN wants to make when it comes to whether or not global warming is a reality. We can’t stand toe-to-toe with this guy and argue datasets. But we can argue caution in the face of uncertainty. There is no way civilization can burn, over the course of 300 years, several million year’s worth of accumulated energy without creating a whole lot of uncertainty in the atmosphere. Accordingly, uncertainty makes this article, which clearly took a great deal of work, and many others defending the uses of fossil fuels, moot. Say what you want about the seasonal extrema of 139 Wm−2 in January, smart people do not fool with Mother Nature and we’re doing a lot more than fooling with her. How’s that for perspective?

Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet' NBN dedicates itself to making science simple and often finds itself mired in analyses and datasets that can take hours to simplify. There are definite ROI issues preparing this website every week. Not so with this piece. It gets two green thumbs up for greatly simplifying  an analogy between ant communication systems and internet transmission protocol that we will now try to boil down to one sentence. Empty-handed ants returning to the nest send a signal to those heading out that’s similar to a signal information heading out into the internet picks up from information that’s returning. OK, there may be a few more sentences needed here to make sense of things. Like: Why the heck does online information return from where it came? The reason we bring this article up is to get you to read it and roll this anternet analogy around in your head a little. The article is incredibly readable, unlike the one above on global warming, and it lends wonderful perspective on how science really is just adding numbers and equations to common sense.

New England Governors Plan Massive Renewable Energy Procurement for End of 2013 While Texas’ effort to secede from the Union may be losing ground, this article provides an argument for New England to mull the same sort of move today. Led by Massachusets Gov. Deval Patrick, the various Yankee chief executives vowed to collaborate on a “massive” renewable energy project. While vowing to collaborate may be a far cry from a declaration of independence, there is good reason to believe this vow to collaborate will be an economic boon New England may to keep to itself. It could save the collaborators a lot of money and produce a lot of jobs.  Massachusetts has a lock on offshore wind turbines, while New Hampshire and Vermont have mountains aplenty on which to post windfarms. Northern Maine’s unorganized territories have water flowing all over the place to power hydro-electric plants. Rhode Island’s got the requisite political corruption to get undue, excess federal funding while Connecticut is about to elect the Queen of Professional wrestling to kick the snot out of any environmental types who question the ecological impacts of these projects. Here’s to the People’s Republic of New England.

Mixed blessings: A smaller Gulf dead zone offers less to celebrate than you’d think. This excellent Grist article is as horrifying for its subtext as for the focus of the story so well expressed in the headline. Not only is the Gulf deadzone smaller this year, it is half its original size. All because the Mississippi has so dramatically shrunk during the current drought. What got our attention is just how poisoned the Mississippi River watershed is. Referring to a Scientific American article on the subject, Grist says the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer farmers throughout the watershed use, sits for decades in the ground water. That means if fertilizer use by the corporate farms growing the mountains of corn needed to sweeten the oceans of soda the beverage industry tells us they have a right to addict our children on stopped tomorrow, the Gulf deadzone will be with us for another 50 years or so. That is seriously bad news that no one will be paying attention to until the Gulf itself is dead or the Mississippi is dry. It’s hard to imagine rooting for the latter but clearly in the case of this drought, there’s a silver lining in these cloudless skies over the Midwest. It seems to us we need the Gulf more than the corn sugar.

Defying Gravity: Is Asia’s Economic Miracle About to Stall? Time magazine put a lot of work into this story and did its job well, if the magazine’s aim was to prove itself as a source of serious economic research. But it seems to NBN that Time provides a very complex argument for the obvious. Over the past 20 years Asian economic power grew freakishly by shifting cheap labor from farms to industry with a healthy dose of new technology and foreign investment thrown in. The author talks about “charted income levels (on a purchasing power parity, or PPP, basis) versus average annual GDP growth.” It's impressive stuff. But it seems the author overlooks a much more obvious factor behind every economic boom. The bulk of US wealth over the past century came at the exploitation of a natural resource—real cheap oil. Similar growth in China came over the past quarter century from the exploitation of an equally valuable natural resource—real cheap labor. Now the world is running out of cheap oil, putting pressure on America’s economy. But China is confronted with a world with dramatically declining need for its cheap labor. The U.S. is in trouble. China’s screwed. You don’t need an overpaid Time magazine economist to figure that out.

Young Conservative Changes Dynamic NBN had a chance to read all 5,000 words the New York Times devoted to making Romney’s Veep choice Paul Ryan sound human. (Sorry no link to the original article.) Ya know what? The article worked. Who can find fault with a fellow who prefers hiking over jetsking and makes his own sausage and knockwurst from the deer he hunts? After reading the Times’ piece, NBN could almost vote for this fellow and not fear for the future of the world. Almost. In all 5,000 words the Times wrote about this fellow, or the 3 trillion words Ryan’s uttered in campaign appearances since, not one word about the environment, that we’ve heard or read. Secondly, Ryan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the woman who revered industrialization and reviled anything that constrained it. Ayn Rand was utopian and given present day realities anyone who embraces utopian ideologies in the ugly reality of today’s global ecology is an idiot. Ryan is no idiot. Expect him to start moderating his positions so severely in the coming weeks we won’t recognize him, politically. Even Ayn Rand would back away from her books if she were alive today.

UMASS Extension Vegetable Notes NBN included this very local article to illustrate the challenges of farming in a global warming world. Logic dictates that the more uniform the crops grown, the more dependent the farm is on a stable climate. So how does a farmer today square that with the increasing weather instability being brought on by climate change? They don’t, as the UMASS newsletter linked above illustrates so well. New England farmers blessed with recent heavy rains are now turning their efforts from battling drought from too little rain to battling bugs and bacterial being brought back from the brink thanks to too much rain.   

E-Waste Systems, Inc. Signs Letter of Intent for Acquisition of Logistics Solutions Company In its never-ending search for press releases to punch up into website posts, NBN pounced on this announcement that a London-based electronic waste recycler is buying a southwest, U.S. company in the same business. Why the pounce for so-pedestrian a press release? Because it says England has the world’s most stringent e-waste recycling laws while the U.S. buys the most electronics. Hence a London recycling company is buying a U.S. recycling company. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? If the U.S. had the world’s most stringent e-waste laws would the Southwest company be buying the London company? Would this country be willing to expand an industry that extracts resources from our waste stream, a.k.a. recycling, at the expense of another industry that extracts resources from our natural resources, a.k.a. mining. Not if this clown gets elected, because mining interests have lobbyists, recyclers don’t. Also he hates government regulation, even if it nurtures a potentially larger industry that’s less demanding of natural resources.

Kemp's Ridley Turtle Protection Efforts Frustrate Shrimpers Gulf shrimpers are saying turtle protection devices are turning their mom and pop businesses into an endangered species. The turtle protection folks say shrimpers are killing some 5,000 endangered Kemps Ridley turtles a year, while one shrimper quoted says he’s caught three his entire life and another says he throws them back before they die. Near as NBN can tell, these high-water gulf shrimp trawlers don’t cause nearly the ecosystem damage caused by  bottom trawlers working the more northern waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. Yet it seems the ocean ecosystems everywhere are getting to where they can tolerate no more collateral damage. Case in point, the Gulf of Mexico where these shrimpers work. The gulf has so much trash in it that the shrimpers say the turtle exclusion devices, called TEDs that are being forced on them, get clogged with debris making it impossible to catch anything. Here’s an idea, lets pass a national $.25 plastic bottle deposit law. And for those using plastic for shipping and packaging purposes let's pass another law requiring them to buy back those materials at prices that will make sure no one those them out any more. Problem solved.

On the Edge of the Subsidy Cliff: Will the US PTC Expire? NBN argued last issue that greed, not ideological conviction or political principal is the driving force behind the money that is driving the conservative movement in this country. The battle simmering over the $4 billion wind energy subsidiary called the Production Tax Credit is a sterling example of that greed. Tax-loathing, ultra-conservative states like Colorado, Kansas and much of the Red State southeast find themselves in the awkward position of loving an alternative energy tax credit that the leader of their party, Mitt Romney, has latched onto as emblematic of what’s wrong with the leader of their country. Why are these conservative forces latching onto legislation the financiers of their party, Big Oil, is vehemently opposed to? Because the fate of the PTC translates into losing some 35,000 or gaining another 70,000 jobs for their state’s residents, according to the article. So here we have elected officials actually being forced to defer to the interests of those who voted for them instead of those who finance their campaigns. This truly is an odd election coming up.

Coral Reef Thriving in Sediment-Laden Waters Finally, amidst all the bad news for coral reefs, Science Daily cites a study saying river sediments in Australia may actually be helping in-shore stretches of that country’s famed Great Barrier Reef. To quote the study: “Although there is evidence that other reefs have suffered degradation from high levels of sediment, these findings suggest that in some cases reefs can adapt to these conditions and thrive…The team believe this is because the accumulating sediment rapidly covers the coral skeletons after their death, preventing their destruction by fish, urchins and other biological eroders.” It’s nice to know that in a world of ever increasing human stressors being placed on our most treasured ecosystems, in some places life still finds a way. Now if oyster reefs can just find a way to thrive in sediment laden waters. Here’s a neat article on that subject.

The New Lawn: Shaggy, Chic and Easy on the Mower Despite Rupert Murdoch’s best efforts, every once in a while the Wall Street Journal writes something genuinely newsworthy that serves the environment over the economy. Accordingly, this article on the urban meadow replacing the manicured lawn earns the paper, if not the owner, two NBN green thumbs up. Prospects of knee-high wildflowers and meadow grasses that need no watering, fertilizer or weed-killer filling in the front laws of communities like Levitown, NY, and Naples, Fla., may be dim. However, with the average U.S. lawn occupying just under a quarter-acre, roughly one-fifth of a football field, there seems plenty of room in this country to roam around and still let some of our lawn spaces go wild. In places like Georgia, where the average lawn is half an acre, it seems that an urban meadow could claim half that state and still leave enough space to play croquet. The upsides are enormous. You only have to mow once, in the late winter. The wild flowers last through half the growing seasons and, best of all, we stop poisoning our watersheds. Of course it will put a few thousand Chemlawn and Scotts Lawn Care people out of work, but maybe they can find jobs installing meadows. Or, better yet, maybe they can work as baymen earning a living catching the clams, scallops and oysters that will return to our estuaries once we stop poisoning them with lawn chemicals. Would Murdoch approve of that? Here’s a great slide show on urban meadows.

Restoring Oyster Populations in Great Bay It’s funny how folks from groups like the Conservation Law Foundation, The Nature Conservancy and News by Nature can spend hours penning articles that provide valuable perspective, but no new information. Take this CLF article on oyster reef creation in New Hampshire’s Great Bay. It covers all the familiar ground: diseases wiped the oysters out, and global warming’s new age of super storms is creating more siltation that threaten efforts to build new reefs. Then we dredged up this article from Alabama on excess fertilizer in road runoff possibly overwhelming efforts to restore oyster reefs down south. Reading all this NBN is thinking there may be some news here after all. What if the massive human efforts to restore this estuary-saving mollusk are doomed to failure? Have humans disturbed the global and local ecosystems too dramatically to every hope to restore more fundamental components like oysters and eelgrass? For three years NBN hounded the folks quoted in the CLF story above for news of progress in establishing oyster reefs in New Hampshire’s Great Bay. No luck. Many years ago NBN also fruitlessly hounded the good folks over at Cornell Cooperative Extension for positive progress in its long running efforts to restore eelgrass to the Peconic Estuary. Before we conclude both efforts failed we have to ponder what oyster and eelgrass populations in these vital estuaries would be like without the unflagging efforts of these two organizations. Then ponder again what these estuaries will be like if we roll back even further, pollution control efforts that in some small, as yet uncertain way, may have helped these ecosystem anchor-species, and many other species, hang on in the nation’s estuaries. Finally think of all the above when you vote this coming November.

Mitsubishi i-MiEV Is The Most Affordable All-Electric Car NBN read this article with great interest only to find we never found the answer that interested us most: Is the roof of this ridiculous little car outfitted with a solar panel, and if not, why not? Next, we wanted to know how long it would take such a solar panel to fully charge the battery. With those answers in hand NBN could start preaching that every family should own a couple of these things—maybe even three—so that one, or two, can charge while the third is driven around. Then we could propose that the $4 billion government subsidies being given to oil companies be applied instead to purchase a handful of these things for every family, thereby weaning the nation of fossil fuels with transportation technology that doesn't tax our power grid. But the only mention of solar power is in the comments.

Got Bats? New Rule Protects Vulnerable Bats with Restriction on Exclusion. Bats are being decimated by white nose syndrome so much so that New Hampshire is passing protective measures for bats taking up residence in unoccupied buildings, like barns. Estimates are that 99% of the state’s brown bats have died. This study says some species could be going extinct soon. These little buggers eat a lot of bugs. Yet they crap all over the place and carry rabies. What to do? The new law says if the animals are inside your home they can still be removed, but if they are in your garage apparently not. Seems like a reasonable compromise that might help restore the disappearing species in other states. However, what happens when a homeowner wanting to get rid of barn bats ends up contracting rabies? Here come the lawsuits.

People are starving, Earth's a mess, and our best minds are doing what? As huge fans of the scientific frontier known as physics, NBN has a confession to make: we only fully read one article on this whole Higgs boson thing. That article, linked above, really cut to the quick by asking the question that kept us from reading other articles on the subject: why care about the Higgs boson? Through the requisite, if opportunistic, sarcasm the article fairly challenges a point that is going to play a big part in this country’s future: How much did the discovery cost and what promise does it hold? A wild, but probably near-accurate guess is that $50 billion was spent making this “discovery.” Meanwhile scientific solutions still lag for cancer, coastal deadzones, affordable solar power, affordable sea-water desalinization, cold fusion, 100 percent olive oil mayonnaise …you-name-it. Is the Higgs worth $50b while these problems remain, the article asks? NBN offers a very qualified yes, because of the possible role the Higgs could play in the development of quantum computers. The folks over at CERN think Higgs is the stuff that ties the cosmos together. NBN thinks information is the stuff that ties people to the cosmos. Higgs may help us better understand the cosmos, but by far more important is the role it may play in helping us to understand our role in the cosmos by, we hope, dramatically advancing the science of quantum computing. Anybody hear anything on that subject yet?

Gulf states set to spend billions in oil spill fine money Gulf State environmental and tourism groups are already jockeying for claims to an estimated $5 billion to $20 billion in BP oil spill fines expected early next year. We’ve got West Florida’s Business Enterprise, Inc., asking for $50 million for new bed and breakfasts, boutique hotels and revamped tourism services for the downtown historic district. And we’ve got a Mobile, Alabama environmental group pressing for a project to build 100 miles of coastal oyster reefs. The latter is great for the environment the former is great for the economy. According to federal legislation, 30 percent of the fines will be controlled by the governors of the five states affected and a handful of federal officials, while 65 percent will be controlled by the same five states for such things as tourism, the environment and the economy. Another five percent goes to environmental research. OK. Based on this description, NBN is laying 3:1 odds that of the 95 percent of fine money not going to research, 90 percent goes to economic restoration and 5 percent goes to environmental restoration. Are we wrong thinking folks down south make clear through their politics they care more for the economy than the environment? This is the land of the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival which, btw, will be on Aug. 30 this year.

Green Fireworks—Environmentally Safe, That is When probing the grey areas between enjoying the outdoors and protecting the environment, no recreation is more conflicting to NBN than fireworks. Year after year NBN staff sit so close to one show long the Merrimack River estuary that unidentified bits of debris rain down in concentrations sufficient to clog a hair brush. It’s mesmerizing eye candy. It’s also full of chemicals, like barium, that can’t be good for the variety of plant and animal life dependent on this vital marine nursery. Not to mention scaring the snot out over any nesting bird in a 50-mile radius. What the heck, we say, it’s just once a year: year after year, in about a half dozen other river towns also shooting off fireworks. Great News. Thanks to the Pentagon, NBN may now be able to comb this crap out of our hair with a clear conscious. In the search for environmentally friendly stuff to kill folks with, munitions makers have produced a greener 50 caliber M8 armor-piercing incendiary bullet.  It uses periodate salts in place of the more toxic perchlorates. Sodium periodate produces a brilliant yellow white flash that would be perfect for fireworks, according to the article above.

Bees and Pesticides (again) NBN has no idea who bug_girl is, but we think we love her. NBN knows we love her blog. How can you not love anyone calling social media "digital trophallaxis?" Brilliant. The 1,500-word piece linked above that she did on the danger a pesticide called neonicotinoids presents to honey bees should be of extreme disinterest to 99.999999 percent of the literate world. Yet NBN made it all the way through. She calls some unknown group of pocket-protector types studying this issue: “folks what really know their bees.” She wraps up another aspect of this issue saying: “we have no freakin’ clue.” Anyone undaunted by words like trophallaxis and neonicotinoids in the search for better understanding of the world around them will be amply rewarded by the extra time bug_girl clearly spends making her blog more accessible to them. But what we really love about bug_girl is she preaches the gospel of Find Out First. To quote bug_girl: “we have to look at the whole picture to figure out how to make things right for bees.” The same applies to everything else these days, bug_girl.

 This is an industry in dire need of heavy regulation. This is doubtless the master plan by the federal agencies putting these policies in place on both sides of the Atlantic. The ocean, and those protecting it, can no long afford to have thousands of small vessels working its waters unwatched. They can easily be more destructive than a few dozen huge vessels because they are much harder to control. Nobody with a pulse wants to put mom and pop out of work, but without dramatic change soon they will be out of work anyway. Our fisheries are in a crisis from centuries of catch-as-catch-can fishing policy as well as rampant storm water, waste water and industrial pollution. Fixing the pollution will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and is clearly not a priority in today's political climate. Something has to give. NBN applauds the federal policy people in England and New England for taking a bold and very unpopular stand. At the same time, Greenpeace needs to get back to the sometimes ugly job of protecting the environment, particularly when it's not politically correct.

Mapping microbes in people For better or worse each of us is an ecosystem and recent Harvard research suggests that our individual ecosystems are much more non-human than human. Harvard found that microbes, all the little bugs and bacteria setting up shop on our skin and in our intestines and orifices, have 100 times the number of different genes than can be found in our own genome. The key phrase here is different genes. Obviously, there are more copies of our individual DNA in our bodies than all this bacterial DNA combined. But in terms of the distinct living entities hitching a ride all over and inside the bodies we think we own, there are more than 10,000 distinct life forms also laying claim to us. So, before you slam down that second Big Mack for dinner, think of those poor little E.coli sitting in your intestines waiting to share them with you. You might also think of them the next time you’re popping antibiotics to kill a cold or using antibacterial body soap in the shower. Here’s a NYTimes piece on the Harvard study that might be easier to understand.

The Pied Piper of Grid Parity  With energy supplies likely to set both the economic and ecologic world agenda for the foreseeable future, does anyone doubt that an integral element of solar industry entrepreneurship is courage? Shouldn’t the same apply to writers hanging their careers on the subject? Even more so those writers daring to use 19th century poetry to make this drool subject less so? So it is with admiration and empathy that NBN posts Paula Mints' piece above which uses Robert Browning’s Pied Piper to make a point about the price-point problems face by those promising a new dawn for photvoltaics. Such promises, Mints posits, have solar power on the horns of dilemma in large part because many oil-producing countries subsidize the industry such that solar can’t compete.  She makes a great argument suggesting solutions are scarce yet industry aspirants embrace optimism as stubborn storm clouds forever threaten the horizon. (Are you still reading this?) The piece is worth reading, if for no other reason than for the creative courage of its author. She also happens to make a great point, in an amusing way that almost got us to the end of the article. Bravo Ms. Mints.

NBN can’t let the recall victory of Wisconsin’s Scott Walker go unchallenged in our humble website because it illustrates so well how majority opinion is manipulated on both sides of our political system to further minority interests. The minorities these days are corporate and union interests. The majority are those resentful of both corrupting our political system to protect their interests at our expense. There is no way this economy and country—the terms are synonymous—can survive under the union abuse of public trust that’s turned highway workers leaning on shovels into the new symbol of American labor. At the same time encouraging business to create jobs through any and all means available will mean the unchecked plunder of our natural resources that has turned mountaintop mining into a symbol of American industry. The biggest problem in this country is not union excess or corporate greed, it’s campaign finance reform. Both sides have turned our democracy into an oligarchy and the Wisconsin recall is a textbook illustration of that.

Ocean acidification worst for 300 million years Want to know what the biggest problem with the global warming movement is? It has got an awful marketing department. Case in point: this headline linked here. The article starts off well enough: You’ve got acid levels in oceans at their worst in 300 million years. That’ll get you reading. But then the article says we’re seeing the worst ocean-acidification event since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and that the nightmare scenario predicted from those acid levels won’t unfold until 2100. You’re kidding right? You want people to buy fluorescent bulbs for fear of something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that’s not gonna happen for another 100 years? If you want Hummer drivers to buy hybrid’s, you need something they can appreciate without too much thought. Tell then the acid levels will mean the end of oysters on the half shell in the next decade. Or that the elimination of an entire section of the ocean food chain through acidification will mean no more weekend fishing trips with their buddies. That’s the problem with scientists, they are far too factual. You can’t hope to stop global warming through informing and understanding. Fear works so much better.

Ice, ice, baby: Arctic sea ice on the rebound Now these guys have their high-impact information act together. They say: “data shows Arctic sea ice extent highest in 7 years for this date!”   (Note the exclamation point.) Not only that, the article says the Arctic ice melt was much worse in 1922 than it is these days. Then the article says that global warming alarm bells have been going off ever since 1922: in 1947, Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish physicist, predicted the catastrophic loss of sea ice within a few years. In 1969, The New York Times predicted the Arctic would be ice-free by 1970. In 2008, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said the Arctic would be ice-free by that same summer. Other predictions suggested the demise of North Pole ice by 2010, 2011, and now 2013 and 2015, and so on. Add all that to the highest sea-ice level in seven years and you have a powerful argument that global warming is a hoax. Sadly, it’s just one side of the argument and people will believe it anyway.

Is it possible this fellow suddenly got religion and starting reporting objectively on the subject? After five years of cheerleading for them that’s hardly likely. Without the commercial fishing fleet in New England this clown would have no readers. NBN's theory is that even the most biased reporter will be forced to provide some opposing perspective if he writes about a subject often enough. This writer and his editors have become authorities on a sleeper subject of vital ecological importance because no one else writes about it. Yet their misinformation and slanted coverage rivals anything Hurst or Chandler did in their days.

Conservative Politics, 'Low-Effort' Thinking Linked In New Study How is this for liberal elitism: A Huff Post article citing one study saying conservatives are stupid and another saying they are lazy. Nobody with an IQ higher than their shoe size makes such statements. Sure enough, when the latter study’s author was asked to explain, he equivocated thusly: "Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking." NBN would like to suggest conservative philosophies  appeal to people who are just plain too busy. Take a look at this 2008 election map. Red/conservative voters live in much more rural areas. They are less likely to work in offices and that probably means they work longer, harder hours than their city-dwelling counterparts. It also means if they aren’t working longer, harder hours they are outdoors enjoying all the wonderful recreation the same provides. That means they aren’t glued to Google News, CNN, and the New Yorker. Is it safe to say then that these folks are less informed and are forced to vote more with their hearts than with their heads? That does not make then stupid. However in a political system where governance is often bought by the highest bidder, it does make them dangerous.

Roger Scruton: Want to Save the Planet? Turn Right NBN waded through three quarters of this piece about a conservative environmentalist in Britain before unearthing information of some use. Beyond the bewilderment that such an animal exists, this fellow does, reluctantly, make a great point. All the big-government effort to advance environmentalism—think Kyoto— are probably no more effective in improving the planet than your hometown recycling efforts. Some 1,100 words into this article, we found this quote: “In other words, while it's straightforward for most people to see why they shouldn't litter, it's harder to attach importance to treaties concluded faraway by mostly unelected officials, the effects of which will be felt only indirectly. The environmental movement's task, Mr. Scruton argues, is to remind people why they should want clean air and green land in the first place—and to empower them to make the change themselves.” So true.

EPA orders AVX to take over harbor cleanup, complete it in eight years We can’t help but wonder how a President Romney would weigh in on this. Here’s a company that created a lot of jobs benefiting the surrounding community. It also created lucrative stock positions for thousands of investors now being ordered to dig deep, literally and figuratively, to accelerate the removal of PCB from Massachusetts’ New Bedford Harbor. Digging deep means some $400 million in the next decade or so after less than $100 million spent on the clean-up has essentially been futile. Even Exxon would struggle to come up with that kind of capital which promises no return on investment other than the heartfelt thanks of the Bedford Harbor community. Accordingly, the company spending this money will have less to invest in potential expansion which could create new jobs in the same community. The same thing is happening on a national scale. Government regulations increasingly hold industry to higher standards which siphons money from expansion potential. Maybe tax payers in the surrounding community that benefited from this company should now pick up at least more of the tab here instead turning it all over to the company? Either that or just resign themselves to living next to a polluted harbor.

All around him, (the angry white male) sees growing dependence on government. No fan of government spending, he joined the Tea Party in 2010; at the same time, he benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit, free school breakfasts for his children, and Medicare for his mother…But the more he sees it, the more he resents the government. Perhaps he resents it most of all because he knows he needs it. That’s a political conundrum for both parties, but even more, it’s an American problem. If the excerpts aren't clear that tea party people are pissed off for reasons they don't fully understand, then look at the video above.

The Ultimate Hunter Talk about an evolutionary advantage. Cats these days have it knocked. Cat owners pretty much let them prowl as they please resulting in a lot more ownerless cats these day also on the prowl. But even those ownerless cats can often count on sympathetic people not quite ready to take them in but happy to feed them all they want. Therein lies the problem, according to the article linked above which just came out in the NYDEC’s magazine Conservation. It says the country’s outdoor and feral cat population has surpassed 100 million. Each cat, the article says, kills an average of 14 animals a year, the vast majority being songbird young that can’t escape the nest. It doesn’t matter how much the cats are fed by well meaning humans, they just kill for the heck of it. This not only is bad news for the birds, but other animals which prey on the same animals the cats are killing. Oddly enough animal lovers are the ones feeding the cats that are killing all the native wildlife that animal lovers also love. As adorable as they can be, there’s something diabolical about cats. We offer up the obligatory obscene cat hoarding video as evidence. How come nobody is hording dogs?

The science of selflessness Any high school biology student knows the three isms of animal behavior: mutualism, parasitism and commensalism. That similar scholar in college will get a taste of the fourth ism: altruism. That's the study that weighs cooperation among individuals as a survival technique. Some 35 years ago E.O. Wilson got the more ethereal elements of the world upset over his study suggesting altruism tapers off the farther you get from true family, meaning those who share your DNA; like sisters, cousins,  and parents. Wilson’s theorizing carried the unpleasant prospect that these purportedly divine minds and bodies of ours were just vessels to carry our DNA from one generation to the next. You can see how that might piss off a priest or two. Those same folks might be a little more receptive to Wilson's latest ism. It's a theory called eusocialism,  and it suggests that other social dynamics, and not genetics, can drive altruistic behavior. Put another way, humans—and other eusocial creatures like ants, bees, crabs and African moles rats—will happily sacrifice themselves for the interests of the group regardless of the chromosomes they may share. Eusocialism neatly explains many extra-curricular human social behaviors like sand-lot football and street gangs. So, why are we belaboring it here? Because, like it or not, as the world population drives competition for limited natural resources to homicidal levels, we’re going to be seeing some very interesting cooperative, and less-so, behaviors emerging in ways it might help to better understand beforehand.

Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program called unfair burden on property owners This is a great piece on Massachusetts’ aggressive threatened plants and animal program and how it’s throttling development in the Bay State. Good, solid local journalism shows both sides in this matter have valid arguments. However the reporter could be guilty of burying the lead: Massachusetts “is de-listing 12 species from the threatened or endangered lists for the state.” That means 12 species the program was designed to protect have been protected enough that they no longer need protection. Is it just us or is there a bit of pretzel logic going on here? Again, the article is worth reading no matter what state you live in, because the priorities weighed are common to the entire country and they are very clearly articulated.  Good article!

Home Heliostats Now Available Worldwide Lightbulbs have come to iconize the idea because, let’s face it, they are a brilliant idea. Do home heliostats fall into the same category? No! These sun tracking solar reflectors are to interior lighting what Rube Goldberg is to automation. Intuitively it just sounds crazy: mirrors that track the sun's movement across the sky reflecting light into our homes? Interesting then, isn’t it, the makers of home heliostats, and the producers of the press release above, say that not taking advantage of the free lighting seems “crazy”. The way NBN sees it is home heliostats may become a brighter idea in another decade or three, as diminishing energy resources drive the cost of powering lightbulbs up to where we don’t mind devoting large sections of our backyards to mirrors aiming sunlight into our living rooms. But right now these folks are exclaiming over the prospect that home heliostats can save you between $200 and $600 a year. Unlike a lot of other renewable energy arguments, economics do not weigh in favor of these things quite yet. They are for true believers only. What gets interesting here is how these things will work in our cities where the same dictates of dwindling energy resources will increasingly force us to live in high rise buildings. It seems there you could be leveraging some serious vertical space into some equally serious lighting, for neighboring buildings

Mosquito control in the Florida Keys With early reports that ticks and mosquitoes are going to be murderous this spring after the winter that wasn’t, it looks like a banner year for pesticide producers. The tide of articles predicting an abundance of both disease carrying insects this year can only mean that West Nile virus, EEE and Lyme disease are going to be terrifying communities across the country. Which means planes could be spraying bug poisons over U.S. wetlands and woodlands at the same time myriad forms of plant and animal life emerge from winter recess. While it’s hard to gauge the importance of ticks to the country’s ecosystems, mosquitoes are a vital food source. Yet how do you weigh that against the prospect that people may die for lack of such spraying? NBN likes the argument that the more we guard ourselves against the viruses, bacteria and insects that can kills us the more vulnerable we become to such attack. And many believe it’s possible to build up a tolerance to mosquitoes. But as the article linked above and the photo suggest, it’s a little late in the day to ask the residents of Key West to bear the bite. Once again, there’s no black or white answer here. We belabor it because the very long article linked above shows those waging the battle of the bugs are taking all the arguments for and against spraying very seriously. It’s a little reassuring and worth reading for that reason alone.

Amount of ice in Bering Sea reaches all-time record  Along with all the other climatic firsts being recorded this year the British News aggregator The Register felt compelled to overplay a report that ice in the Arctic’s Bering Sea is at historic highs. Forget the arguments over whether or not this is proof for potential Register readers that global warming is a hoax, NBN felt more could be learned by taking a closer look at the publication itself. Early morning U.S. Google news fans will doubtless come upon The Register more often than those waiting until work to surf internet news. This is not the first time NBN has struggled at 6 am to learn where these folks are coming from. The publication’s motto—“Biting the hand that feeds IT”—suggests it’s a techie publication trending toward cynicism. Accordingly, one would think a publications with science interests would have some regard for reality. But the article linked above has bigger holes than the ozone layer in the age of CFCs. As expected,  further digging found the author only writes about the alleged fallacies of global warming. You could argue that NBN is the tree-hugger’s version of The Register. We find arguing against global warming almost always goes hand-in-hand with arguments in favor of fossil fuels and the economic advantages that bestows. NBN likes to put aside the grisly environmental arguments that our continued use of fossil fuels is pretty much dynamiting the atmosphere that spawned and supports life on earth and look at global warming from a strictly economic perspective. How can anyone defend using a non-renewable source of anything when reliable renewable sources exist?

Speaking of reliable renewable sources of energy, Renewable Energy World magazine has just come out with its annual awards for excellence. Not only do they have amazing stories about wind and solar power projects, but successful geothermal and biofuel projects are recognized as well. Despite the efforts of publications like Renewable Energy World,  the promise such projects hold out is still matched, and possible extinguished, by the power of fossil fuel industry interests and the iron grip they have on the U.S. economy. Anybody thinking that this coming election isn’t as much about the future of energy in this country as it is about the future of this country isn’t thinking. Every time we open Renewable Energy World we’re pleased with how professional it is. Take a moment and check it out.

New gear slashes sea turtle deaths in Atlantic scallop fishery How do you tell scallop fishermen who has just shelled out thousands of dollars for a dredge designed to protect sea turtles that he’s not doing enough to protect the environment? But take a look at the dredge. It has to weigh a ton or more. Now drag that dredge over the soft corals and seaweeds the scallops, and myriad other species that make up the ocean floor ecosystem, depend on. Sadly there is no easy answer to the damage that scallop dredges do to ocean floor ecosystems. There is no other practical way to catch these scrumptious shellfish which are too big and too deep for divers to catch in commercial quantities. Divers however, can make a nice living catching bay scallops. Accordingly, bay scallop dredges should be banned, in our opinion.

Update: U.S. Commerce Imposes Tariffs on Chinese Solar Firms Allow us to grossly over-simplify this 1,300 word article on the complex issue of the Whitehouse’s recently announced US tariff on Chinese solar panels. The tariff equal a 3-5 percent tax on Chinese solar panels where 20-30 percent was expected by industry experts. More tariffs are being mulled as US solar panel makers argue for and renewable energy advocates argue against. NBN wonders where Whitehouse economic policy makers were when Evergreen and Solyndra  flushed $600 million non-renewable tax dollars down the drain. About the only clear argument in this issue is found in the reader comment at the bottom of the article linked above noting that the U.S. has been flushing trillions down the same drain—not to mention the human misery caused—keeping foreign oil flowing to U.S. refineries. Now that’s a subsidy. Still, the math here is inescapable. Until an American solar panel company worker accepts the roughly $16 a day his Chinese counterpart makes, the U.S. is going to be grossly overpaying for products this country and the world desperately need. Much to the glee of the oil business. (See picture above.) Message to the White House: China is still the country founded by Mao Zedong. You don’t level the playing field with these folks through tariffs, you change the game.

Because our ocean ecosystems are under siege from pollution and predation. Sadly the predation part—commercial fishing—is the easiest to fix and probably will yield the biggest bang for the buck. Pollution has been reigned in dramatically over the past few decades but what remains, mostly storm water runoff and antiquated city sewer systems, is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to right. For that kind of money the nation’s entire bottom trawling industry can be retired, in style. With many billions left over. Sadly the cost of all those delicious fish they catch will skyrocket as hook-and-line operations will be the only option left. You can read more about that concept in our Commercial Fishing News page.

Climate migration is a solution, not desperation NBN latched onto this piece not for the limited insights offered on why people migrate from one place to another—fyi, it’s often as not to seek a better life, not just to escape. This article caught our eye because it’s one of the first we’ve seen that seems resigned to the notion that large scale migration forced by climate change is on the horizon. Which begs the question: are Texans and Arizonians going to be moving to New England in the next few years as global warming turns those arid regions into all-out deserts? If so, can they please leave Rick Perry and Janice Brewer behind?

Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again Funny how nowadays, when you open an article in the Wall Street Journal, you know before reading the headline the perspective it’s going to have. As expected, this article says global warming isn’t happening and that there’s nothing wrong with all this excess CO2. Read the article. It really says exactly that. And, it’s a Princeton physics professor saying it. His command of the facts, if accurate, are impressive. What’s incomprehensible is how this professor could leave out of his article entirely, discussion of rising tides. Powerful argument can be made that rising sea levels are the single biggest threat from global warming and this guy doesn’t mention it once. There’s also no mention made of the threats climate change poses to regional rainfall patterns and the potential for protracted drought in places like Arizona. Perhaps what’s most astonishing about the increasingly specious arguments cobbled together in defense and at the behest of the Koch Brothers and Big Oil is that the hard work of a Princeton professor can have such obvious holes in it. Here’s the guy’s resume. He’s clearly got an axe to grind as does everyone at the WSJ these days. That said, NBN thinks his argument and title deserve consideration.

Iconic Brands That Disappeared Pan Am, Chipwich, Brim, Levit, Oldsmobile, Wang, Hummer. All are brand names hauled from the dustbin of history in this NBC article on businesses that failed for various reasons. It’s the last one we want to single out. The Hummer was the snipe hunt of the American marketing industry. A monument to the pursuit of a quarry that existed only in the minds of those asking you to pursue it. That hasn’t stopped Florida congressman and Hummer owner Alan West from slamming the Obama administration for making it too costly to fill up this icon to the aggressive commercial exploitation of human character weaknesses at the expense of economy, ecology and overall human dignity. Call it poetic justice, call it the free market in action, called it evolution taking its toll. Whatever you want to call it, there is nothing sweeter these days than watching some crest fallen Hummer owner pumping $120 in gas into 6,000 pounds of automobile moving 150 pounds of passenger from Point A to Point B. There’s no way gas is returning to $2.50 a gallon. So, folks like West who want to display an image of power while not really possessing it are finally paying the price for their vanity.  Of course this overlooks the fact that the toll global warming is just starting to take on the world means we’re all also paying as well and the price is just becoming apparent.

Take the Subway After trashing Congressman West from Florida, allow us to genuflect before a guy we’ve praised in the past: NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman. His recent column about efficiency technologies being the best hope for bolstering American manufacturing is pretty much a distillation of what NBN has been saying for the past 18 months. Allow us to also offer up this article on the recent jump in fuel-efficient car sales as a little empirical evidence to back up all these opinions.  It seems our options as a nation are pretty stark here. We can pursue increasingly risky and environmentally costly fossil fuels sources so Congressman West doesn’t go broke driving his Hummer. Or we let gas prices sky rocket, forcing the congressman to buy a new, fuel efficient car putting more people to work while reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Lest we forget, this might also curb global warming. How is it possible we can face such options at the same time every GOP candidate in the country is promising the return of $2.50 gas?

And what of $2.50 gas. The Saturday NY Times said hatred of high gas prices doesn’t run as deep as the politicians want us to think. Roughly 4 percent of a family’s income goes to gas pumps. If gas prices went up another 20 cents per gallon it would be 5 percent, according to the article. At the same time, a $.20 per gallon federal tax on gas would raise $27.375 billion in one year. That’s enough to buy 50 million average sized solar panels. If you want to know how much less oil we’d import thanks to that 50 million panels you’ll have to figure it out for yourself. NBN's numbers say that 5 such panels could meet a quarter of the average home’s electricity needs in places like Arizona. We’re playing a little fast and loose here with the numbers, but if we’re even half right that means over the course of 10 years that $.20 extra at the pump that no one will really notice, translates into a lot of oil not being imported into this country and subsequently spewed into the sky. Click here to hear the other side of this argument.

“When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.” Do we dare discuss a second Thomas Freidman column in the same week? Why not? The guy is on much more than off. In this column he notes that the world’s wealthiest counties essentially have the dumbest kids. That’s wealth as it’s measured in natural resources and intellegence as it's measured in things like the ability to spell intelligence. (Yes, the misspelling was NBN's first stab at the word.) One need only look to the Middle East to bolster this argument. The oil richest countries over there still have one foot in a cave while the only oil-free country in the place is holding the reins of world politics.  NBN wants to ponder the unique position American has in this equation. We’ve used our smarts to acquire much more than our fair share of the world’s natural resources. Now, as those resources start to dry up at the global level, we find ourselves at a very interesting crossroads. We’ll leave the rest of this argument to imagination and those willing to read Freidman’s column themselves.

Why the Electric Car Is Doomed to Fail Here is a classic example of total disconnect between editor and reporter. The headline says electric cars are doomed to fail, while the story itself offers a much more optimistic assessment. It says rapid depreciation of electric cars is keeping buyers away, but rapid improvements in battery technology will likely fix the problem in the foreseeable future. The article also correctly notes that potential buyers fear not finding filling stations once they’ve reached their destination. That problem, the article points out, will only increase with more electric cars on the road. It’s something called range anxiety, the achillies heel of electric cars. The writer does a poor job of making another important point: that the eventual expansion of the Smart Grid will help solve this problem. The writer misses altogether the most important point of all. What will really solve the range anxiety of electric cars, and a whole lot of other energy consumption problems in this country, is the rapidly expanding reliance of the American worker on home offices. Internet technology is increasingly making commuting to work unnecessary for anyone involved in information technology and as this chart above shows, that’s an ever increasing percentage of American workers.

NOAA doubles Gulf of Maine winter flounder catch limits In this age of ever-tightening fishing catch limits, it’s noteworthy when the feds declare open season on a very valuable species like winter flounder. This is one of the best tasting fish in the ocean—and bays, where it spends the winters in the muddy bottoms of northeast creeks and estuaries. The latest stock assessments are now saying the number of winter flounder has climbed so high that fishermen can take twice this year what they took last year. NBN belabors this announcement here because the only way to catch a flounder, outside of hook and line is by dragging nets along the ocean floor in a process called trawling or, more affectionately, dragging. As the latter name implies this is not the most ecological friendly method of catching fish and NBN has been beefing up a storm, whenever it can, that this practice has to be more limited. There are two points we want to make regarding the increased catch limit. One, is this flounder rebound happens is in the face of a dramatic decline in the number of draggers working the northeast ocean waters in recent years due to the aforementioned ever-tightening catch limits. Two, is the fact that a spike in one species of fish while others, like cod, are showing equally severe declines is not necessarily a good sign.

Renewable Energy World This magazine’s monthly pleas to NBN to open the complimentary issue it sends usually works and subsequently fuels a brief or two on alternative energy. This week we’d like to invite others, if it’s possible, to take a turn through these same pages. Dollars to donuts you can get your own free subscription, and a finsky gets you frosting you might find it worth paying for. This magazine provides an excellent snapshot of where the industry is at any given time and the Page 2 editorial in the latest issue, about the need for greater government support for alternative energy, is pretty telling about our priorities in the present economy. But looking at the ads tells a slightly more reassuring story. Full-page ad after full-page ad extol the virtue of anti-theft bolts for solar panels, a home heater that burns pretty much anything outside of buffalo chips, and there are numerous ads for wind turbine makers. All indicate that fossil fuels are being challenged in every application possible. Nice work Renewable Energy World.

U.S. manufacturing can’t complete in a global economy filled with folks happy to wrest little more than room-and-board from their paychecks. Ditto for commercial fishing dependent on destructive fishing practices in a world where draconian conservation offers the only real hope for their industry. Resolution of these and other though choices we can no longer put off inevitably means some pretty bizarre solutions are going to surface on the way to solutions. Case in point, the subprime mortgage mess: Cash-strapped tax-payers gave hundreds of billions of dollars to the obscenely wealthy bankers who created the crisis. Is that any stranger than an environmental group asking for considerably smaller sums to help certain commercial fishermen now suffering under plummeting fish populations caused by the ruinous fishing techniques in the video above? Yes. The bankers knew they were ripping people off where the fishermen were just earning a hard day’s living and providing a very valuable public service.

Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs Petitions for Green Sea Turtle De-Listing Something didn’t smell right regarding recent efforts by this Hawaiian civic group to get the once-endangered green sea turtle off the federal endangered species list. Anyone spending any time in Hawaii will see the sea turtle is more than a treasured cultural icon, its cold hard cash for tour boat operators lugging small crowds of turtle-loving tourists around, like the one pictured here. The staff of NBN was on such a tour last week and learned firsthand why the civic group thinks the turtle is no-longer endangered: We saw five in one, 15-minute snorkel, three of them were within 15 feet of each other and one of those had a shell the size of a breakfast table. The tour guide referred to the area as “infested” with turtles and he wasn’t far off. He also noted that for each 5 mph increase in boat speed the ability of a turtle to dodge a propeller drops dramatically and vice-versa. That got NBN thinking about the failed Hawaii high-speed ferry project and the civic group membership’s economic priorities. Is that why the civic groups want to delist Hawaii's turtle population, to breath new life into the high speed ferry? Not likely. The island waters around Hawaii are also infested with dolphins and whales which clearly are as important to island commerce as any high speed ferry might be. Is it possible then, as the article linked above states, that the civic group just wants to “celebrate the recovery of this species” by bringing “the management of this important cultural animal back to the people of Hawaii.” Something doesn’t add up.

Whales, Wildlife Top List of Remaining Wind Farm Concerns There are a couple of points worth making on this article about federal plans to lease ocean space off Martha’s Vineyard to windfarm operations. First, it’s a great illustration of what makes this country great: the deliberative process through which all voices get heard before important decisions get made. Second is what NBN feels is the excess weight given to one of those voices: commercial fishermen, who say the federal waters proposed for these windmills are prime fishing grounds. NBN assumes the fishing in question is most likely trawling, an industry that reduces ocean biodiversity by destroying ocean habitat while catching nets full of delicious fish. It's NBN's thought that the windmills might promote ocean biodiversity, by increasing habitat through the installation of the stanchions supporting the turbines. There are a few holes to shoot into this theory—specifically the habitat damage done in the windmill construction process—but overall NBN thinks it’s on sound footing saying the windmills could enhance the biodiversity of the surrounding waters. There is no mention of this prospect in the article so we ask the question here: why do we weigh so heavily the opinion of an ecologically destructive industry in a matter that is so eco-friendly?

Animal rights group says drone shot down In NBN’s ready willingness to judge the world and ourselves with it, we declare both sides in this pigeon shooting controversy in dire need of therapy. You’ve got folks from a group called Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) arming a drone helicopter with TV cameras to document a bunch of folks from South Carolina raising pigeons for the sole purpose of blowing them out of the sky, or off their feet. To the surprise of no one save the folks from SHARK, the South Carolinians recently exercised their pigeon shooting skills on the camera-fitted drone. We can kind of understand SHARK's point. To NBN the pigeon shoot sounds like raising cockroaches to step on them. Surly there’s as much skill in killing cockroaches as there is in shooting a cloud of lead pellets at a bird that flies about 4mph. As far as SHARK is concerned, after viewing their fund raising video NBN finds we side more with than against this group, with one crucial exception. These folks are spending millions coming to the defense of animals with zero ecological importance. At the same time a very real war against the use of fossil fuels is in danger of being lost for another four to eight years. If these SHARK folks want to come to the defense of truly helpless animals they might want to think about the number of species that will go extinct through global warming. NBN can think of a few dozen more worthwhile ways for SHARK to spend their donor’s money.

Delahunt backs off controversial wind energy deal, tells Hull he'll help for free This piece on a former Bay State congressman reversing himself to offer free consulting service on a wind turbine project he funded while in office, has NBN rethinking—very slightly—its many previous statements that our privately-financed electoral process is nothing more than institutionalized corruption. Our change of heart here is not because this project is earth friendly. It’s because the numbers don’t convince us that Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt, was just lining his pockets after leaving elected office with funds secured while in elected office. Admittedly the story does smack of legislator to lobbyist/consultant political corruption a-la Newt Gingrich. But Delhunt was a state prosecutor for 20 years before spending 15 years in Congress. He was looking to make $90,000—$15,000 a month for six months—to grease the regulatory skids for an experimental wind turbine project in his hometown: experimental because the turbines in question are built of unusually large blades. Alas, the story broke of his plans and advocates of various political persuasions started taking shots. Here’s why NBN thinks they may be cheap shots. In 35 years in public office, you know Delahunt has the political power to quickly see this project through the regulatory process, unlike the Cape Wind turbine project which has been slugging it out with regulators for 11 years now through less connected channels. And after 35 years as law enforcer and law maker, Delahunt has got to have the legal skills to get a job paying a heck-of-a-lot more than $15,000 a month. Sadly, we can only argue that in this case the lawmaker-to-lobbyist model of American governance might have been for the best. But it’s still an awful way to run a country.

Plant May be Sold How suitable for the Waste-not-want-not issue of NBN than to discuss an article on a shuttered coal-fired powerplant being refitted for natural gas? The prospect of replacing this 60-acre plant with a turbine or solar farm is more attractive then converting it to burn another fossil fuel. But in these hard times we have to be practical: the area needs the energy, the city certainly needs the taxes and natural gas is cleaner than coal. What’s less practical is the unions seem to have a say in this and they are complaining that the gas-fired plant will need roughly 30 of the 175 workers now running the coal-fired operation. “Red” the Union boss, wants to make damn sure as many workers are re-hired as possible, not necessarily as many workers as are needed. Let’s face it folks, waste occurs everywhere and nowhere more so than in many union shops. Union waste laid waste New York's commercial shipping industry. This country is going to be cutting back everywhere and those folks skilled at running coal-fired power plants might have to find new careers, just as so many other Americans have. Maybe they can learn to install solar panels and build windmills.

Then Ronald Regan came along and showed us that America could afford to be profoundly wasteful  for another few decades and lunched the country down a multi-trillion-dollar exercise in unbridled consumerism that culminated in the Chevy commercial shown here. Can anyone see this country retuning to that kind of thinking? It seems every one of these folks is fighting hard as they can to do just that.

American Health Care System Gets Positive Prognosis In an issue dedicated to waste, how can NBN leave out our health care system? Accordingly, we are particularly eager to watch this PBS documentary examining a handful of U.S. cities bucking the national trend of spending obscenely on a Champaign health care system being administered in a Budweiser country. As the world population grows, how can health care not become an increasing liability we all must share? What’s the alternative, deny a poor young patient a potentially life saving MRI? It’s not going to happen. The U.S. focus on the most sophisticated medical technology has been fueled by worker's salaries and benefits that are far in excess of what folks overseas now charge for the same--Steve Jobs argued better—service. Those low-paid folks overseas think a bandaid is a medical miracle. This is a tough one. It seems we have to either lower our health standards, or codify in some way insurance discounts for those who exercise regularly, watch their weight, and don’t smoke or drink excessively. That might not go down to well with the obese, smoking, alcoholics in this country, and their ranks are formidable. It also might not go down well with the folks selling sugar, cigarettes and alcohol and their campaign contributions are formidable.

_ MIT’s Education Arcade uses online gaming to teach science While learning’s role in evolutionary survival may be up for debate, learning’s role in economic survival is set is stone. There’s a reason you don’t go to college to work at McDonalds. So this proposal by MIT to help teenagers learn math and science through video games presented something of a problem. Is it a reach to think kids attracted to video games are less attracted to math and science? Math and science require concentration and innovation. Video games require reflexes and whatever is the opposite of innovation. Can this MIT project take the hormone-charged minds of teenagers and put them back on an innovative track before they find themselves on the wrong side of the fast-food counter of life? A better question in today’s political climate is: how do we keep many of our wanna-be world leaders from changing this country into a place where there's plenty of work for expert video game players.

_Galapagos Giant Tortoise Species to be Brought Back from Extinction. We’re not sure why we’re posting this, other than so much of this issue is dedicated to evolution and genetics we felt compelled. Geneticists of all stripes are foaming at the mouth that a subspecies of giant tortoise long thought extinct might still be alive somewhere out on the Galapagos Islands. Apparently, another subspecies of the giant tortoise was recently found containing much of the DNA of the extinct species. That discovery is leading scientists to think that there must be living versions of the extinct species somewhere because there’s no other explanation for their DNA appearing in the hybrid. The real beauty of all this is these geneticists are making a living on these beautiful tropical islands chasing turtles around.

_Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz The Christian Science Monitor, ran this science test at the beginning of this week and NBN got 23 of 37 correct when we noticed an sudden up-tick in the difficulty of the questions, like this one. “The mathematical constant e is defined as the base of the natural system of logarithms, having a numerical value of approximately what?”  We don’t know, maybe…2.718? Bingo! Now who the heck knows that? We figured it better to quit the quiz before we hit the depressing .500 mark. We admit to making a few lucky guesses but having many more near misses. The quiz if fun and more important an excellent insight into how science touches so many facets of our lives. Take the test. If nothing else it might bump NBN’s “visits duration” statistic for this week. Yeah, we’re addicted to our website stats.

_ Seals blamed for lack of cod recovery There are two thoughts to take away from this fairly straight forward article linking exploding seal populations to collapsing cod populations. First is these boom-and-bust population swings are increasingly becoming the new "system" in our ecosystems. The days of homeostasis are over.  Man’s influences keep the global environment in a constant state of change. Second, the damage the resurgent seal population is doing to cod populations pales in comparison to the damage some fishing boats do to the ocean-floor ecosystems that provide the nursery for cod populations. Which might explain why fishermen quoted in this story are tripping over themselves to propose way to curb seal populations.

_ Interpol replies to Taib arrest call File this under the fighting-the-good-fight file. The Environmental News Service listed this with last week’s news but there isn’t a shred of news here. The press release simply states that the international police agency Interpol told folks upset over relentless rainforest logging in Malaysia to file a complaint with the Malaysian police. Sadly, the fellow doing the logging is the Chief Minister, Finance Minister and Minister of State Planning for one of Malaysia’s largest states. Talk about an uphill battle. So this press release clearly falls into the keeping-the-subject-alive-hoping-it-gains- traction category. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Then again fighting losing battles hoping one day the battlefield changes, is a hard call, particularly when there are so many other worthy environmental causes out there with significantly greater chance of immediate success. Unless the Mayalsian people start to rally behind this commendable effort, what chance does it have? Particularly when we can’t get people to fight global warming in this country.

_Climate change skepticism seeps into science classrooms NBN strongly believes an increase in human population means an increase in government regulation. It's inevitable. We just as strongly believe those regulations should only extend to environmental considerations, and maybe the sale of rocket propelled grenades. So, when you have school boards mandating science education include some form of climate change denial science, something is seriously rotten in Denmark, and in Texas, Louisiana, Utah, North Dakota and Oklahoma, according to this LATimes piece. No doubt, there are probably pro-climate change instruction mandates in many U.S. school curricula. In 2008 California rejected such an effort. If the public is taught that global warming is wrong it will unleash an enormous industry that will generate millions of jobs and billions in revenue at a time when we desperately need both. The only problem is, now that we have seven billion people on board, we even more desperately need this planet. It's funny, every generation wants to believe they live in a pivotal time in history. This may be the only generation that, according to an overwhelming majority of scientists really does, but wants to believe otherwise.

_ Iran issuing $240 million in bonds for hydropower improvement It looks like Iran isn’t only interested in nuclear power. But isn’t most of the Middle East desert? Just how many rivers does Iran have to dam? One clue lies in this website dedicated to Iranian tourism. It says: “There is a vastly extended network of rivers in Iran most of which seasonally are filled with water.” A hydropower industry reliant on rivers that occasionally dry up? While the bonds are supposed to go to dam projects “across Iran” the country inked a $13b deal in March with China to build the world’s tallest dam across the Baktiari River. Think any of that money will be going into a fish ladder or lift?

_ A Shrinking Military Budget May Take Neighbors With It With an uncharacteristic dearth of anonymous sources the New York Times recently did a great examination of the relationship between defense spending and scientific research. The latter, the article says, will be greatly hurt in coming years by cuts in the former. In its very characteristically balanced reporting, the Times concludes that such fears, while not completely unfounded, may be slightly overblown. First it notes that just 12 percent of defense spending goes to research and development. Yet that spending makes up 55 percent of the research and development spending in this country, public and private. We can thank the military for launching such life-changing technology as the internet, lasers and jet engines. In hindsight, any spending cut to those programs would seem ludicrous. But with 88 percent of military spending going to sources with no such similar long term gains, it seems like there’s plenty of room for cuts without having to cut into the military’s R&D programs. It helps to consider that the military is now spending big time on renewable energy technology.

_New estimate boosts permafrost contribution to climate change Here’s yet another indicator we’re playing Russian roulette with the planet. Rather than blather on with our own thoughts, NBN thought it better to excerpt the article: melting permafrost will contribute 1.7-5.2 times more co2 than thought….the estimated amount of carbon stored in northern soils has tripled in recent years, to roughly 1,700 billion tons. That’s four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity since the Industrial Revolution and twice as much as is currently present in the atmosphere….If permafrost thawing happens at the rate the scientists believe it will, its greenhouse effect will match that of worldwide deforestation…all the scientists in the survey felt existing models were too conservative in their projection of emissions from thawing permafrost…Boy, that sounds awful. We'd rather believe Rush Limbaugh who says it’s all a hoax. Who wouldn’t?

_US Forest Service Approves Vermont Wind Power Facility This press release on a 17 tower windfarm proposed for Vermont’s scenic Green Mountains got us searching out stories about NIMBYism and bird collision concerns. But like so many such inquiries undertaken by those with short attention spans and high speed internet access, NBN soon found itself heading off on a tangent and then lost in cyberspace. We ended up paging through this government website which went live in November and shows yet another controversial initiative by a president who knows nothing about the importance of public relations. Where do we start on this subject? Do we wring our hands over what appears to be an administration giving short shrift to environmental deliberation in order to expedite economic initiatives? Or do we congratulate him for recognizing that this country’s addiction to fossil fuels may well be the greatest threat to the environment. There are a lot of tangents, for those so prone, to pursue reading this press release. One thing is for certain: in the face of legions of critics this president is doggedly moving this country forward at a time when half its citizens yearn to turn the clock back. Bravo, Mr. President. Bravo. This article does a nice job of explaining the government website and the initiative behind it.

_California Truckers Take EPA to Court Over Emissions Rules Last issue we asked if incandescent lightbulb hording Phillip Miller of California is what’s wrong with this country. This week we ask if Sacramento trucker Robert McClernon is what’s wrong with our economy. He’s the trucker quoted in Fox News saying of new federal emissions regulations: "With the cost of the new equipment that they're requiring, and the oversight of the government in every part of my business, I can't afford to be in business.” So he’s suing the government with a bunch of other truckers, despite an endorsement of the new regulations by American Trucking Association president Bill Graves who said, in the same Fox News article, the federal government “did a really fine job,” on the regulations. So why is NBN saying McClernon’s plight the fault of the economy and not the government? Because our economy is fueled in large part by exploitation of the environment. Historically, and now almost by default, this country places economic priorities over ecologic. It’s how we have senators of all stripes now battling regulations shrinking the ground fishing fleet in New England which has almost wiped out many ground fish populations in the Atlantic with insanely destructive fishing techniques. How is it that these folks have a right to drive filthy trucks and pillage ocean floor ecosystems? We don’t have senators or law suits going to bat for journalists whose ranks were thinned far more thoroughly by the advent of the internet. That's because these days, the economy trumps everything. Which makes Graves’ comment on the regulations almost as astonishing as the fact that Fox News published it. No doubt the journalist who reported is now joining his unemployed brethren. 

_ Nickel producer inaugurates 90-MW Karebbe in Indonesia Here we have a Brazilian mining company working with a Canadian sponsor to dam an Indonesian river to power a nickel mining operation. The article says nothing about providing passage for fish that may need the river and, given Indonesia’s environmental track record, this looks like yet another example of private enterprise cashing in at the expense of the environment in a place few really care about. No doubt Indonesians will be put to work, in this mine. How many more Indonesians would be put to work if the Brazilian and Canadian investors were held to some kind of environmental standard? But then you can make the argument that such standards will prevent investment in the first place. Where have we heard that argument before.

_ The New Digital Divide Every once in a while NBN needs a reminder that the world is not half-full of morons, and that we are not nearly as clever as we’d like to think. This article in the NYTimes a few weeks back is just the latest such reminder in a fairly constant stream of them. It’s easy to think you're Mr. Know-it-all when you’ve got the luxury of sitting in front of a computer all day, pretty much absorbing information from sunup to sundown. But what about those who spend their days tiling bathrooms, or harvesting fields for a living? What about those folks who don’t have high-speed modems connected to fiberoptic lines? Outside of being a vast supply of recruits for unscrupulous corporate causes these under-served folks are also increasingly at a huge competitive disadvantage in this, the Information Age. Here we have yet another project that will only be financed publicly—installing fiberoptics in rural communities—aimed at serving people most likely to oppose public spending. Amazing the similarity between this map and this map.

_ Asia Report: China Takes Sharp Turn in Push for Solar Energy Is there a civics lesson for the U.S. to learn from a communist country? Perhaps, if you believe in conservation over consumption. China’s big on conservation of capital, refusing to pay workers a decent wage and refusing to pay for environmental controls that might stem the country’s rampant pollution problems. Through such government policy, China has left the consumption of its grotesquely under-priced products up to countries like the U.S. that are all too happy to borrow like crazy to provide a decent wage and protect the environment. China now wants to start buying its own low-cost solar panels, thereby protecting its environment. Can the U.S. afford to start buying its own high-cost solar panels? We don’t know. We do know that if we did, we might resolve all kinds of disputes and problems, like fracking, the Keystone Pipeline, global warming and unemployment. But then Exxon, Conoco Phillips, Koch industries and the litany of bribed Congressmen enacting their polices, would never allow this country to follow an example set by a country where voters don’t dictate policy.

_ UNH Climate Change Assessment to be Released at Dec. 2 Coastal Climate Summit We know that this article linked above is two weeks old and as such hardly constitutes news. The news comes from the fact that absolutely nothing was written about this summit or the results made public during it. So let NBN fill you in:  The only thing written about the study is this article in Fosters Democrat, which is a hard-core conservative newspaper that is anything but Democratic. The headline jokes about the need to “batten down the hatches” because tides are expected to rise about 10 feet by 2100. NBN thinks the joke’s on the Democrat and the roughly 6 people who read it. NBN's reckless prediction for this week is that it’s going to take a lot less than 88 years for tides to rise high enough to drown New Hampshire’s low-lying coastline and the newspaper's Dover offices.

_ The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle It’s sad but not surprising to see Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal dance on the grave of government biofuel initiatives, the way it does in this op-ed piece. And he does a good job of describing how government subsidy of this industry has been laughable. Still, can readers forgive the anonymous author not one mention counter arguments like global warming, the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, or the miniscule amount of government money spent on biofuel incentives versus bank bailouts? NBN can’t. The article concludes that these government biofuel initiatives would be folly, were that not an insult to fools. To NBN, the insult is to Wall Street Journal readers being offered opinion so thoroughly one-sided as to resemble dogma more than deliberation. But then again, this is Rupert—wiretap—Murdoch we’re talking about, taking down ever further the credibility of what was once one of the nation’s finest newspapers.

_ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA’s Fisheries Service Propose Policy to Improve Implementation of Endangered Species We’re surprised not to see more press on this press release proposing what could be a significant shift in enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. The beloved piece of legislation that birthed such brewhahas as the snail darter debate and the spotted owl logging controversy may actually be getting stronger. The feds now want endangered species act protection to be available for any species that’s shown to be declining significantly in a significant portion of its population range. The old wording requires a significant decline throughout a species’ entire population range. It’s more than semantics at stake here. A “significant” portion, as described in the proposed policy change, can be a small portion of a species’ entire population range. It just has to contribute significantly to maintaining the entire population’s health. Get it? If not, just understand the new policy will make the Endangered Species Act stronger, the sort of policy shift that itself is becoming endangered these days.