Category: News

The ranks of lobbyists from cleantech, green energy and investment firms have swelled in recent years but are still heavily outgunned by manufacturing and power company lobbyists, according to a report from The Center for Public Integrity.

The report, which catalogs the new players who are looking to influence “the most important environmental treaty of our time,” counts roughly 60 lobbyists from venture and investment firms in addition to 170 alternative energy and 160 environmental lobbyists.

But those numbers are a drop in the ocean of the 2,780 climate lobbyists working for all interest groups in Washington – a 400 percent increase over the numbers six years ago when Congress first considered emissions curbs, according to The Center for Public Integrity.

The numbers now include food manufacturers, such as the Campbell Soup Company and Kellogg Company, who are looking to extract emissions allowances in the process.

Meanhile, the investment and venture lobby is loooking for higher prices on carbon in the short term and predictability for the burgeoning green energy industry, themes we’ve heard before.

Will Coleman, a partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif., notes that investors are looking for a climate change bill that will open up the market for new technologies.

Coleman says,

My biggest concern is that if we are less aggressive in carbon targets and carbon pricing, we may incur more costs in the future, because we’ll drive less investment into the space.

The report also notes that the natural gas lobby has been upping its profile as a relatively clean fossil fuel that can be a bridge fuel for a low carbon economy.

We have noted in the past the efforts by Exxon and BP to rebrand the fuel as the most realistic and cost-effective solution for America’s energy needs. The Center for Public Integrity report finds that the rest of the industry has upped the pressure on senators after having “missed out” on influencing the Waxman-Markey bill.

As a bunch of countries continue to negotiate ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, in secrecy, Kenya already has its own Anti-Counterfeit Act. Michael Geist points us to the news that that particular law is now being challenged in Kenya for violating peoples “right to health.” The issue is worth following, because it will almost certainly become an issue assuming ACTA moves forward. Whenever we discuss ACTA, it’s inevitable that someone stops by to say that anti-counterfeiting is really, really important to stop dangerous counterfeit drugs from being sold, potentially harming people. Now, I have no doubt that counterfeit drugs may be a serious problem — but if that’s the problem, we should target a narrow attack on that problem alone, not some wider “anti-counterfeiting” effort.

We’ve already seen that lobbyist-funded and promoted reports on the “counterfeiting problem” are widely exaggerated, and any real “problem” is much smaller than the numbers that get tossed around. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that counterfeit products quite frequently lead to purchases of the real product in the future (i.e., people aren’t “fooled” into buying counterfeits — they know they’re buying counterfeits). But that’s with things like luxury goods. What about drugs?

Well, we’ve already seen that big pharmaceutical companies conveniently like to use anti-counterfeiting laws not to stop dangerous counterfeit drugs, but to destroy legitimate generic drugs. It’s not about making sure that drugs and people are safe — but quite the opposite. It’s about limiting competition so that these pharma firms can jack up prices even higher.

And that’s the issue in Kenya. About 90% of the drugs in Kenya are generics — for a very good reason. Those drugs are much cheaper and are helpful in saving many lives. The Kenyan anti-counterfeit law makes counterfeiting a criminal issue, rather than a civil one, and gives the power to police and border officials, who have no way of knowing counterfeit from generic, so often label generic drugs as being counterfeits. There are plenty of good reasons to try to stop counterfeit drugs from hitting the market, but if that’s the real problem, any solution should be narrowly focused on that specific problem. Unfortunately, since it’s quite often the big pharmaceutical lobbyists who help write and push through these bills, that’s not how it works at all.

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It’s no secret that Modern Warfare 2 has the biggest entertainment launch (qjnet/playstation-3/modern-warfare-2-sets-all-time-entertainment-industry-record.html) of all time under its belt, in addition to the award-hoarding Inifinity Ward did in the Inside Gaming Awards (qjnet/news/infinity-ward-pwns-first-annual-inside-gaming-awards.html). Just before the calendar

Filed under: Classics, Convertible, Performance, Porsche, Specialty

Update: Although the seller bills this car as a Porsche, Porsche historians note that it was never claimed to be a genuine Porsche and is in fact based on a VW chassis. That said…

The Porsche 356 holds a special place amongst the ranks of historic automobiles. As one of the first vehicles to wear the Porsche badge after World War II, this car has direct ties to the model that would forever define the German maker of fine sportscars. That, of course, is the iconic 911.

Collectors, take note: one of two early 356 prototypes is now up for sale, located in New York. We wonder, would that make this a 355? No, probably not. Looking over pictures of the car, it’s clear to see the shape that would eventually turn into the classic 356 as well as the expected air-cooled powerplant sitting aft of the cockpit and driving the rear wheels.

Notable features that didn’t make it to the production car include the front grille that directs cooling air to the rear-mounted engine and the head lamps that are sunk into the bodywork on either side. No price is listed on this particular sale, but we certainly wouldn’t expect it to be sold without a large sum of money changing hands. Check out the high-res images below and click here for the car’s description from the seller.

[Source: Hemmings Auto Blog]

Hemmings Find of the Day: Rare Porsche 356 Prototype hits the market originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We talk a lot about improving your kitchen — we love a dramatic before & after of a kitchen renovation, and we also love finding small and inexpensive tips to make your kitchen more beautiful and functional. Here’s a look back at some of our kitchen improvement posts from this past year, including how to tutorials on painting your floors and improving your countertops, along with makeover requests, small and practical solutions for rental kitchens, and inspiring before & afters!

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Porsche specialized tuning company 9ff has taken its TR 1000 tuned 911 Turbo to the ATP automotive testing circuit in Papenburg, Germany and tested the car’s top speed, obtaining an impressive figure of 391.7 km/h (243.4 mph), as Option Auto reports.

The force responsible for this performance comes from the TR-1000’s 4 liter flat-six engine with two improved turbochargers, a modified intercooler, sport camshafts, titanium rods, revised cylinder head and driveshaft, a sport air fi… (read more)

The latest Case-Shiller numbers came out yesterday, and while they confirmed that the plunge in housing is basically over, the market still remains very weak.

But actually there’s no national market, but several local markets. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.

Take a quick spin through the numbers to find out if your city is still in housing hell, or if it’s on the mend.

Now, take a look at the cities — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The 60-Second Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Oil, Gold, Bonds, China, And Stocks In 2010
• Case-Shiller: Housing Recovery Still Weak, October Decline Of 7.3% Slightly Worse Than Forecast

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Ugly sweaters

A new trend that I just heard about is ugly sweater parties. They are especially popular around Christmastime. There is even a website where you can buy one if you are one of the two people in the country who can’t find one hidden or forgotten in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

Swedish guys

I have a Swedish friend who is over 90 years old! He is a very fit and healthy 90-year-old. I usually see him at the gym, either in the sauna, one of his region of origin’s gifts to the world, or in the aerobic room doing a series of exercises similar to the 5BX — more popularly known as the Canadian Air Force Exercises — originally developed in the 1950s.

He broke his arm last year slipping on the ice in Stockholm during a visit with his family. He’s probably has lived in the Florida sunshine a little too long, and was out of practice. It healed up without any problems!

Speaking of Swedish guys, a new study has come out of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden on the BMI and health. The work was conducted in conjunction with Britain’s University of Bristol, and the results have just been published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

This was not some minor study. It seems these Swedish researchers measured the BMI and mortality among more than a million pairs of Swedes over 50 years!

Previous studies have found a positive link between BMI and higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers. In addition, a low BMI had been associated with increased mortality from respiratory disease and lung cancer.

These findings about health and a low BMI have been challenged, citing that the figures could be skewed by something called reverse causality, meaning that people with lung cancer, for example, which will cause significant weight loss, are being factored in as those with a low BMI. Smoking and poor socioeconomic circumstances will also induce this error.

The results

The investigators found a significant relationship between increased mortality and increased BMI. This link was especially noticeable in cardiovascular disease, for which the existing estimates may be “substantially underestimated,” according to the researchers.

There was also a positive correlation with diabetes and kidney cancer. There was, however, no evidence of an association between having a low BMI and an increased risk of respiratory disease and lung cancer mortality.

Discussion

You may disagree, not like it, think people can be healthy at any size, or fat but fit, feel statistically that the BMI is bogus, or that it falls apart on the individual level, or any other reason you may have to want to argue about the BMI measurement, but this study looked at over two million people over a 50-year period and showed that the BMI is valid. To quote Deep Thought, the computer from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Yes I have the answer, but you’re really not going to like it!”

I’m not asking anyone to like it. I’m asking those who need it to recognize the health risks.

I understand if you are protected by youth, or good fortune, and feel that you are healthy in spite of your high BMI that, shall we say, motivation may be lacking to find the need to do anything about it. Please realize that we are concerned about the proven increased potential for early morbidity and mortality. Once you have reached that point with numerous morbidities, it is often too late to find ways to significantly help yourself.

A high BMI, with its well-proven risks to your health, is like that ugly sweater that you may want to ignore or forget about, except try as you might, you can’t take the sweater off without making some substantial healthy changes. You don’t really want to show up unnecessarily early for your funeral in that sweater now, do you?

The time to make those lifestyle changes is now!

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

Dr. J will see you now: On ugly sweaters, Swedish guys and BMI

Talk of an 8GB model of the iPhone 3GS is as old as, well, the iPhone 3GS itself, but a rumor out of Germany has brought talk of mythical device back to the forefront of our minds. When Apfeltalk user .david ordered himself a refurbished iPhone 3G, he was quite surprised to find he had been shipped the device inside a box for the iPhone 3GS complete with a product label clearly stating it is an 8GB model of the 3GS. Here’s what .david had to say:

Seems to be an iPhone 3G (back and no compass, FW) 3.0.1 on it. However, the packaging is clearly designed for an iPhone 3G [S] 8GB. Ordered was a refurbished 3G iPhone 8GB.

So what think you, dear mythbusters? Is this simply the case of an errant S, or a sign of things to come? Be sure to hit the jump to check out one more pic and then share your thoughts.

Bonus in the form of a tip: If you’re going to redact the IMEI and serial, you might want to seriously consider redacting the bar code as well.

[Via Gizmodo]

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One Big Happy Family, a new reality show about obesity in the American family, premiered on TLC last night. The six-episode docu-series chronicles the lives of the morbidly obese Klump Coles Family as they face everyday realities and struggle to understand why they overeat. This isn’t the first time the nation’s battle against the bulge has been the focus of a reality show. The Style Network’s Ruby follows an obese woman over the course of her weight loss journey.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Norris Coles, 41, weighs 340 lbs. His wife Tameka, 36, weighs 380 lbs. Their daughter Amber, 16, weighs 348 lbs. Son Shayne, 14, weighs 308 lbs. Shayne is at risk for diabetes, but his mom sees nothing wrong with shoveling sugary snacks on the teen — which he happily devours. Amber admits that for her, food has become an addiction. In fact, each of The Coles relish indulging in eats. However, the family has decided to turn to each other for the motivation to lose weight. Coles Family matriarch Tameka hopes that documenting their weight loss journey on the small screen will inspire other overweight Americans to put down their forks and take an interest in getting healthy.

Felix Salmon discusses the sad case of a man who clearly cannot pay his mortgage and demands:

So this is what I’d like to ask Megan McArdle,
and others who like to extoll the moral virtues of paying one’s debts:
just how much of your life’s savings should you give these snakes
before they take your house?

I don’t really understand the question.  I am in favor of people are financially able to keep the house without getting foreclosed on, keeping the house rather than getting foreclosed upon.  The guy in question clearly cannot, given that he lost his job and has no tenant for the property in question.  Obviously he should have walked away immediately.

Indeed, I don’t understand why he didn’t, since the article makes no mention of any suggestion or promise that accepting a modification that didn’t reduce his payment, would later qualify him for one that did.  And since it’s pretty clear that Mr. Vellucci cannot afford much of any payment at all, it’s not clear why he–or Felix–thinks he should have gotten one.  Modifications are supposed to be a deal that makes both sides better off by avoiding the huge costs of foreclosure, not a vehicle for transferring wealth from bondholders or bank shareholders to people we like better.  The latter is what the progressive income tax is for.

Do I feel sorry for Mr. Vellucci?  Very sorry.  Illness is usually framed by complaints about large medical bills, but for most people income loss is at least as great a problem, and often a much bigger one.  And Mr. Vellucci seems to have been a financial naif who was given bad-to-fraudulent advice at every turn. What happened to him is tragic, and I wouldn’t be sorry to see the folks who defrauded him spend some time in the pokey. 

But the implied combination of tiny savings, minimal income, and inability to find a paying tenant in a real-estate market with a sub-2% vacancy rate, does not suggest that the solution to his problems is a mortgage modification.  I’m not sure what the servicer could have done, other than foreclosed outright.  Or what Felix thinks this has to do with people who decide to default on their mortgages so that they’ll have more money to spend on cruises and new furniture.

Article Tags: Copenhagen Conference, Viv Forbes

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Parliament to repudiate the Copenhagen giveaways promised by PM Rudd to the failed states of Africa and the welfare beggars of the islands.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the three Climate Crusaders, Obama, Brown and Rudd, had been comprehensively conned in Copenhagen by African mendicants and fakers from the islands.

They have agreed to hand over mega-bucks of our money (anywhere from $5 billion to $100 billion) as compensation for alleged damage caused by our production of carbon dioxide – the Africans citing climate damage and the islanders claiming rising sea levels. Even a cursory examination of the facts would prove that both of these claims are fraudulent.

Source: carbon-sense.com

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2009Oct1-Dec30: Rainfall in India between 2009Oct1 and 2009Dec30 (IMD, 2009).

Reference: India Meteorological Department. 2009 http://www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/dynamic/seasonal-rainfall.htm

Image Description: see case description. Image Location: India Meteorological Department http://www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/dynamic/seasonal-rainfall.htm Image Permission: This work is copyrighted and unlicensed. However, it is believed that the use of this work to illustrate the subject in question, Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information, on Interlinked Challenges, hosted on servers in the United States by Michigan State University, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

As confirmed by the International Automobile Federation (FIA) earlier this month, the Formula One point-system will likely suffer some important changes in the upcoming season of 2010. However, despite recent reports that the new format will be MotoGP-style, it has now emerged that some other modifications are to be submitted by the F1 teams to the FIA in January.

It was Ferrari’s team principal Stefano Domenicali who revealed the news, in an interview with Italian newspaper La St… (read more)

It seems the mobile tech world is not happy unless there are rumored gadgets floating around the nexus. Google has been playing the Apple game with the leaks concerning the mystery Nexus One Android phone. Details have leaked out over time, and we now have an idea what the Nexus One will be, and how it will be sold.

First, here’s what we know about the phone:

• 512 MB of RAM and ROM
• 4 GB microSD card included with support for up to 32 GB of removable storage
• 3.7″ AMOLED display with WVGA resolution
• 5-megapixel camera sensor with 2x digital zoom
• 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi support
• 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD 8250 processor
• Removable 1400 mAh battery
• Voice supported on both AT&T and T-Mobile, but 3G is only good for T-Mo
• AT&T’s network will provide EDGE

The phone looks just like a slightly bigger Droid Eris, complete with the four touch-sensitive buttons below the screen. The Snapdragon processor makes this the fastest Android phone yet, but otherwise the Nexus is just another Android phone.

Google will sell the Nexus One for use on the T-Mobile network. The phone is reported to go on sale Jan. 5, and will be available for both a subsidized and an unlocked price.

• The phone will sell for $180 with a subsidy
• The unlocked price is $530
• The subsidy is only available with the one data plan ($80 monthly), providing unlimited web, unlimited texts, but only 500 talk minutes
• Current T-Mobile customers with other plans must buy the unlocked phone for use with those plans, or switch to the new plan
• You can only buy five phones on one Google account
• Google will sell the phone online
• If you cancel your new plan within the allowed 120 days, you will be charged the difference between the subsidized and unlocked prices ($350)
• Two docks will be available, one for home and another for car use (a la Motorola Droid)