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by Todd Woody

Photo: NREL/Iberdrola RenewablesAs Paul Krugman’s New
York Times Magazine cover story on environmental economics, “Building the
Green Economy,” was ricocheting around the
enviro blogosphere last week, the American Wind Energy Association released
its
annual report [PDF] on the state of the wind industry.

It was an interesting juxtaposition—Krugman’s deep dive
into the macroeconomics of an aggressive cap-and-trade or carbon-tax policy to
limit greenhouse-gas emissions alongside a report from the frontlines where the
green economy is actually under construction.

What’s striking is that the wind farm–building boom
continued through the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, with a record
10,010 megawatts of new capacity added last year in the United States.
In fact, wind energy accounted for 39 percent all new electricity generation
that came online in 2009.

Sure, the renewable energy tax incentives in the Obama
stimulus package and various state renewable-energy requirements certainly
helped prime the pump. But even absent a national cap on greenhouse-gas
emissions, the strength of the wind industry indicates the decarbonization of
the economy is already underway, if haltingly.

According to AWEA, 90 percent of new power generation
built over the past five years has come from renewables and natural gas. In
other words, you are not likely to see many, if any, new coal-fired power
plants built in the coming years. California
regulators have prohibited big investor-owned utilities from signing long-term
contracts for electricity generated by coal plants in places like Utah and Arizona, while
the Golden State’s biggest coal-consuming utility,
the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, has pledged to wean itself from
that particular fossil fuel.

And if carbon caps don’t do in other coal-fired power plant
projects, their voracious appetite for water may well halt expansion in the
desert Southwest. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that a coal-fired
power plant equipped with carbon
capture and storage could consume twice as much water as a conventional
power plant.

Kristin Mayes, chair of the Arizona Corporation Commission,
the state’s utility regulator, told me last year that all power-plant projects
are being closely scrutinized for their water use. “If one of our utilities wanted to build a new coal plant, we would be
talking very much about water issues as well as cap-and-trade,” she said.

Wind-turbine farms,
of course, use no water in electricity production. AWEA estimates that by
displacing fossil-fuel power, wind farms saved 15 billion gallons of water in
2009.

Where the wind do blow

The knock against
wind is that despite the huge increases in capacity that have made the U.S. the
world’s biggest wind power—with more than 35,000 megawatts installed—all
those turbines still satisfy less than 2 percent of the nation’s demand for
electricity.

True enough, but the
picture changes if you take a state-by-state look. Iowa, for instance, relies on wind farms to
generate 14.2 percent of its electricity, according to the wind industry
report. Wind power supplies 9.4 percent
of Minnesota’s electricity, 8.1 percent of North Dakota’s, and 6.4 percent of Oregon’s.

In the report,
there’s a series of color-coded maps of wind-farm installations in the United States
between 2000 and 2009. Those states with significant numbers of turbines are
colored in shades of blue, those with few or none are white. At the beginning
of the decade, broad swaths of the country were blank slates, with California the only dark
blue state along with a handful of light blue states.

Maps: AWEA

By decade’s end,
most of the West and wind-swept Great Plains
states as well as parts of the Northeast were a sea of blue of varying hues.
Only the wind-poor Southeast and a handful of other states remained as white spots
on the map.

So, is the wind boom
only benefiting the blue states?

Not at all. Turn to
a map of wind-related manufacturing and the red states are a pincushion of red
dots from Arkansas to Georgia to Virginia, each dot indicating a factory.

Map: AWEA“Currently, over 200
facilities across the U.S.
supply to the wind industry, and this figure does not capture the many
additional facilities at the sub-supplier level,” the report states. “Wind manufacturing
facilities can be found in every region of the United States, and include major
new wind-dedicated facilities and established businesses that have diversified into
the wind-energy industry.”

Since 2005, the
number of turbine makers doing business in the U.S. has tripled from five to 15.
The wind industry currently employs 85,000 people, according to the report, a
figure that remained flat in 2009 after growing rapidly in previous years. Texas
remains the place to get a wind job, with more than 10,000 people employed in
the industry.

A cap-and-trade
market would certainly boost the fortunes of the wind industry, but emissions
trading probably can’t solve one of the biggest obstacles to further expansion—the lack of transmission to connect far-flung wind farms to population centers.

“The inadequacy of
the nation’s electric grid is a major impediment to the continued growth of the
wind industry,” the report noted. “Many wind projects that have connected to
the grid are forced to curtail a significant amount of their output or are
facing low or even negative electric prices because there is inadequate
transmission to carry their full output.”

There’s an
astounding 300,000 megawatts worth of planned projects seeking connection to
the grid, only a fraction of which is likely to get built due to transmission
constraints, according to the report.

Constructing that
transmission will be akin to building the interstate highway system of the past
century, and will involve juggling a slew of competing local, state, and federal
interests—a task the market alone is unlikely to facilitate and finance.

“These are daunting tasks,” the report concluded. “But the
progress made in 2009 suggests an industry that is at the cusp of new growth,
and new opportunity.”

Related Links:

The problem with a green economy: economics hates the environment

Krugman says what political media won’t: economists agree climate action is necessary, affordable

Paul Krugman on ‘Building a Green Economy’

Found under: Intel, Motorola, Samsung, WiMAX, LTE, WiMAX 2,

WiMAX has not even been properly unleashed in various markets around the world USA included and people are already talking about its successor. Dubbed WiMAX 2 the new standard should bring us even better data speeds in the distant future. Companies like Intel Motorola Samsung and others are apparently ready to support the new initiative and they already have an organization behind it. The WiMAX 2 Collaboration Initiative or WCI is formed Alvarion Beceem GCT Semiconductor Intel

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 Want a new villain to blame for the financial crisis? Try central bankers — or, more specifically, their commitment to be boring.

According to Francis Yared and Abhishek Singhania of Deutsche Bank, central bankers were so predictable during the 2004 to 2007 tightening cycle that their actions became easy for economists to forecast.

The Deutsche Bank duo argue that the increased predictability encouraged borrowers and lenders to take more risk since they could safely assume that they knew what central banks would do next. According to the Financial Times, the implication seems to be that central bankers should become less predictable. This would encourage everyone to play it safe.

But is that really wise? It seems just yesterday that central bankers were talking up the benefits of rule-based approaches to monetary policy that would prevent shocks. We’re not sure if the world is ready for surprising central bankers.

Freelance business journalist Ian McGugan blogs for the Financial Post.

According to folklore and Woody Woodpecker, St. Bernards once carried barrels of brandy around their necks to revive stranded mountaineers. Now such barrels can go around your dog’s neck to revive you for $50. [Kegworks via TheGreenHead via OhGizmo!] More »

Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, reports on his blog that earmarks have declined sharply, down 17 percent in volume and 27 percent in dollar value between 2009 and 2010:

For too many years, the practice of congressional earmarking continued virtually unabated. During the 10-year period that ended in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service, the number of earmarks skyrocketed, increasing by more than 400 percent and reaching a level of more than 16,000. This increase was particularly troubling because all too often, earmarks are an easy vehicle for special interest deal-making – inserted into congressional spending bills without filter for merit, need, priority, or any scrutiny by the public, the media, or other members of Congress.

The Administration has just completed its count of the earmarks contained in the Fiscal Year 2010 appropriations bills, the last of which the President signed into law in mid-December. Although more needs to be done, the news is encouraging: earmarks are down by double-digit percentages….These reductions build on the progress that has been made on earmarks since 2006, reductions prompted by a series of reforms that then-Senator Obama helped to write – including bringing more transparency and disclosure to the process.

In a later post, he accounts for discrepancies between his numbers and those produced by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the federal budget watchdog.

True story: Lately I have been finding myself cutting down on the massive amounts of coffee I love to drink, not for health reasons, but for time management reasons. These days, I often go from one conference call to another, then head from one meeting to another, to writing one thing or another — and so I literally barely have time to hit the restroom — let alone rest.

It seems every morning I wake up to face a list of 20 things to do, with time only to do 10, and somehow I always wind up squooshing in 30.

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, author Sogyal Rinpoche describes a Western tendency he calls “active laziness”: the need to compulsively cram your life with a myriad of unimportant activities, leaving little time to confront what really matters. He jokingly renames the petty projects called “responsibilities” as “irresponsiblities.”

What Rinpoche describes is reminiscent of what author Milan Kundera philosophized about in his book Slowness, a slender volume I ironically sped through in a night. Kundera explains how we live in a highly sped-up culture, and that our need for speed promotes forgetting. For example: If you want to forget something, you will pick up speed walking down the street. If you want to remember something, you’ll slow down your steps.

With this in mind, Kundera warns how speeding up your life not only keeps you from remembering daily details like “Oops! Forgot to pick up more milk,” but also keeps you forgetful about your overall life values and how to live your most passion-filled, love-filled, growth-filled, fun-filled life.

Meaning? The next time you find yourself racing quickly down the street, know that you’re not only running to your next appointment, you are literally running from contact with your truest feelings, deepest needs and most valuable insights.

With this in mind, I would love to encourage everyone to take DAILY BREATHERS, where you literally take time to focus on your breathing, which is a form of healthful meditation that can clear your mind and create more clarity.

DAILY BREATHER ASSIGNMENT: Set aside anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to sit in a quiet place, and focus on breathing out negativity, breathing in positivity, breathing out fear, breathing in courage, breathing out anger, breathing in love.  Repeat until you feel calm, relaxed, centered. When you’ve finished your DAILY BREATHER, look at your TO DO LIST, then figure out how you can re-write it so it becomes a TO DO WHAT MATTERS MOST LIST! Make sure you have a balanced list of activities relating to a variety of categories including work, love, family, friendship, health, growth, community, entertainment, fitness, self-growth.

WANT MORE DAILY HAPPINESS? Check out THIS daily blog at my site!

ADDED BONUS FOR OVER-WORKED, OVER-STRESSED NEW YORKERS! (Hmmm, is that redundant?) How’d you love to enjoy a nice, relaxing massage? (Hmmm, is that a DUH?) DailyFlock.com is practically giving away massages – with a 50% discount at Azure day spa + laser center. You get $100 worth of massage services on any massage from their menu for 50 buckeroos! Plus any Dailyflock members who sign up get $5 added to their account! And just for signing up on Dailyflock.com from me telling you about this fab deal, YOU get an added $5 to your account! Just CLICK on this LINE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW – and maybe I’ll see you at Azure in a nice plush robe feeling happy, dammit!

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-Loving Drake’s new video for “Over” – Check It Out!

-Actress Andie McDowell shares some of the secrets of her lengthy career in Hollywood with the May issue of Prevention Magazine….

–Private Practice star Kate Walsh will make her Off-Broadway debut later this spring in a two person production written by Stephen Belber…..

-The cast of Glee recreates some of Madonna’s most iconic looks on the cover of TV Guide…..

-You don’t have to be an expert on babies to know that Suri Cruise, who turns 4 on Sunday, is just too damn old to still be using a bottle. Would someone please introduce this child to sippy cups?

-Gisele Bundchen unveiled the latest collection of her European flip flop line in Paris last week…..

-Interesting…..With Jennifer Lopez’s latest romantic comedy, The Backup Plan, scheduled to open in theaters this month, some critics are questioning why the Bronx-born Latina is almost always coupled with a White love interest…..

-Brandy spills the tea on Flo Rida…..

-There will be no ninth trip down the aisle for Elizabeth Taylor….

-The guys of Jersey Shore chat about their plans for life after Seaside Heights in the new issue of Interview….

–Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. for Men’s Fitness May 2010….

-Did you know that Fred Savage took Jennifer Love Hewitt out on her first date? Too bad he never called her again!

-Life after Betty is looking up for America Ferrera. The Golden Globe winner is developing a TV and web-based telenovela inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet….

-The parents of a Hollywood reality TV producer suspected of killing his wife South of the Border have taken custody of the couple’s two young children….

-Pittsburgh Steeler QB “Big Ben” will not face charges for an alleged sexual assault in the bathroom of a Georgia nightclub last month…

-Bryant Gumble celebrates 15 years of Real Sports….

–The cast of Shrek goes chic for VMAN…..

–The Blind Side’s gentle giant, actor Quinton Aaron, has been dropped from his Hollywood casting agency after failing to land any new jobs. Do we smell a Blind Side curse?

-Miley Cyrus’ former flame, guitarist Justin Gaston, will be performing with former Idol contestant Brooke White on this week’s Idol Results Show…..

-ABC and Dancing with the Stars producers have been “chasing” Pamela Anderson around with covers for her ample nipples. BTW, Pam says she’s not feuding with Kate Gosselin….

–The list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners is in — and The National Enquirer is not on it. Enquirer editors had hoped that blewing the lid off of John Edward’s lovechild sex scandal would earn them literature’s most prestigious prize — despite the publication’s sleazy reputation. It was not to be…..

Two men were arrested with 60 pounds of marijuana that police believe they were going to sell on skid row hours after the Los Angeles city attorney announced an injunction aimed at curbing so-called commuter drug dealers who travel to the area to sell their goods, authorities said.

LAPD Lt . Paul Vernon said investigators, acting on a tip, arrested Hector Cabrera, 33, and his passenger, Fernando Padilla, 38, last Wednesday as they sat in their car at a Bunker Hill apartment building. A third adult was questioned and released.

“It didn’t take the detectives long to realize they had the right car,” Vernon said. "There was so much weed in the car, they could smell it when they approached the driver’s window."

Detectives seized marijuana valued at at least $24,000 and as much as $100,000 if sold on the streets in small amounts, Vernon said.

"This marijuana was destined for Skid Row,” Vernon said. "It is both ironic and tragic that the country’s largest recovery area is also the region’s biggest drug bazaar.”

The city attorney’s office announced last week that it would seek a criminal injunction specifically targeting 80 named drug dealers who try to do business in the area.

— Richard Winton

Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.

According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.

However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.

For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
80beats: Study: Damage to Brain’s Fear Center Makes People Riskier Gamblers
DISCOVER: How Not To Be a Racist

Image: Current Biology

For the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, it is WaMu week.

Tomorrow, the subcommittee will release more than 500 documents on Washington Mutual, the $300 billion bank that helped fuel the subprime bubble and then collapsed in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. It will also hold a hearing with WaMu executives, including Kerry Killinger, the former chairman and chief executive officer. Then, on Friday, the subcommittee — headed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) — will release an investigative report, the fruit of 18 months of labor, into how the Main Street bank took on and eventually died due to Wall Street practices.

Details about the report started to emerge today. The company decided in 2003 to move aggressively into subprime lending to bolster earnings, ultimately producing $77 billion in mortgage-backed securities. The company changed pay practices to prize quantity over quality. And it “built a conveyor belt to dump toxic mortgage assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping toxic substances into the river,” Levin told reporters. Expect ugly revelations all week.

Found under: Palm, Nokia, HTC, Lenovo, Dell, Huawei, ZTE, ,

Just a few days ago we were talking about the possibility of HTC buying Palm and today we hear that the creators of webOS are indeed looking for a buyer. While it might not be HTC Lenovo or Dell Palm desperately needs an alternative for getting out of the hole they are into. The Palm Pre and Pixi are not selling as everyone assumed and neither Sprint nor Verizon are really doing their best at convincing people to buy these two webOS handsets. According to Bloomberg Palm has alr

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Los Angeles police have arrested a woman for allegedly stealing the car of a good Samaritan who had been giving medical aid to a crash victim, dragging her 60 feet and leaving her unconscious in the street after she tried to prevent the theft, authorities said Monday.

The victim, a nurse whom police did not identify, was filling up her car about 3 a.m. Sunday at a gas station at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue when she saw a light pole fall on a pedestrian when it was struck by a vehicle.

The nurse was aiding the pedestrian when she noticed a woman — whom the LAPD later identified as Deserie Marie Guzman, 28 — get into the nurse’s car and start the engine. The nurse ran to her car and tried to reach inside for the keys but got stuck on the steering wheel.

Guzman began driving away, and the nurse was dragged about 60 feet before falling into the street and temporarily blacking out.

Two men who saw the crime unfold followed Guzman, who eventually collided with another car near Western Avenue and 20th Street, police said. The men pulled up to Guzman, who was attempting to leave the scene, and asked if she needed a ride.

They drove to a nearby CHP station, and when they did not see any officers, they drove Guzman back to the original crime scene, where they flagged down officers.

The nurse later identified Guzman. Paramedics treated the nurse at the scene for cuts to her head and leg. The pedestrian who was hit by the light pole was pronounced dead. A man identified as Jasen Jack, 25, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, causing injury, in connection with the light pole incident.

— Andrew Blankstein

With the scourge of Internet addiction growing ever more fearsome, a Boston-based company has designed a clever way to entice such addicts to once again join the outside world. The trick is allowing them to keep their eyes firmly glued to the screens of their iPhones.

The company’s app, called Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, is built for a walking tour of that old neighborhood in Boston, kind of like a museum audio tour. But instead of hearing someone drone on drily about the various numbered stops, you follow the map and watch the place’s history unfold in a series of videos corresponding to their locations. The app has been so well-received that its videos are going to be screened on April 18th at the Boston International Film Festival–the first-ever app to make it to a film festival.

This particular app tells the story of the Parkman murder, in which wealthy Bostonian George Parkman is killed and his dismembered body is discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical School. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

The app, with its tightly produced videos tells the story of the Parkman murder and, according to the creators, is a “page-turner mystery powered by your feet.”

Xconomy writes:

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

The creators hope that this new app, with its high-quality videos will set the pace for development of other apps that can be used for enhanced walking and audio tours. The company is one of the many startups that is focusing on “mobile documentaries” and the creation of software that will force its users to look outward and learn about the world around them.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps, a compendium

Image: Walking Cinema

Filed under: Government/Legal, Recalls, Safety, Toyota

Back in September of 2007, State Farm sent a letter to Toyota asking that the Japanese automaker pay for an insurance claim for a 2005 Camry that had reportedly wrecked as a result of unintended acceleration. According to a report in USA Today, State Farm wrote, “we are aware of several complaints to your company of sudden acceleration involving the Toyota Camry.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was copied on the note, and the government agency wrote back to State Farm stating that it had been looking into unintended acceleration claims since August of 2006, but the investigation had been closed.

State Farm wasn’t reimbursed back in 2007, but in light of Toyota’s recall of 7.7 million vehicles for acceleration-related issues, the insurance company is taking a second crack at getting cash from Toyota. The process of an insurance company receiving money from an automaker is called “subrogation” and USA Today says Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons told the national newspaper that the process is fairly common.

Common or not, State Farm can recoup up to $30 million from Toyota, and the insurance company says customers involved in unintended acceleration crashes in a Toyota could get their deductible cash back, which can range from $250 to $1,000 or more. However, customers shouldn’t expect money any time soon. Case Closure mediation attorney Mark Bunim reportedly told said that the process could take some time to resolve as someone would need to check every Toyota claim and determine whether the accident involved sudden acceleration.

If Toyota doesn’t pay for the insurance claims, the automaker could indirectly foot the bill with higher insurance premiums. Due to Toyota’s otherwise strong quality and safety reputation, its vehicles are currently relatively inexpensive to insure. If Toyota pays State Farm for accidents involving unintended acceleration it’s a near guarantee that other insurers will follow suit.

[Source: USA Today]

Report: State Farm asks Toyota to pay for unintended acceleration insurance claims originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lately, it seems that most media outlets are up in arms over Google and other news aggregators using their content. So, it’s somewhat ironic to hear veteran journalist, Robert X. Cringely, complain that he has wanted to be included on Google News for years, but has had a hell of a time getting listed. He goes as far as to claim that he is on a “blacklist” of news sources that are denied from Google News.
While this may seem like an exciting and interesting conspiracy theory, I’d have to wonder if Occam’s razor applies here. Most likely, the Google News product managers have made some sort of algorithmic decision figure into whether or not a site is included in Google News, and simply put, Cringely.com did not fit the bill. No harm or ill will need be implied. Actually, after looking at Google News’ technical requirements, it appears that Cringely’s site does not meet Google’s requirements of a numeric URL or news site map — so, perhaps the first step would be to satisfy those requirements.

That said, while Cringely does run an excellent site, he gives no reason why he should feel entitled to be included in Google News. After all, Google is incentivized to create the best news product that they can reasonably create, and if including a Cringely post would make Google News better for their users, then they would include it. After all, we are thrilled when Google News includes Techdirt on their site, but to this date, it is a mystery to us which posts are included — and we don’t feel entitled to that inclusion. That said, Cringely’s ire is a reminder to the media outlets that there are plenty of sites that would love to take their place in news aggregators, if the opportunity should arise, so perhaps they should count their blessings for now.

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by Agence France-Presse

LA PAZ—The alternative “people’s conference” on climate change called by socialist Bolivian President Evo Morales is expecting 7,500 delegates from more than 100 countries, officials said Monday.

Among those set to attend the gathering in Cochabamba April 20-22 include Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, according to Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca.

Named the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the gathering is intended to “give a voice to the people” on climate change after the perceived failure of the United Nations-sponsored Copenhagen summit on the same issue, organizers say.

In addition to government leaders, those attending will include delegates from social movements and nongovernmental organizations. Organizers say they expect attendees to include anti-globalization activists Naomi Klein of Canada and Jose Bove of France, and James Hansen, a U.S. scientist who was among the first to warn about climate change. Also invited to the event was James Cameron, the Canadian-born director of the blockbuster film “Avatar.”

Government delegations will be coming from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Dominica, Antigua, and Barbudas as well as St Vincent and the Grenadines, officials say.

The conference will seek to refine proposals put forward by Morales in Copenhagen, including the creation of a world tribunal for climate issues and a global referendum on environmental choices.

Chavez and Morales were among the harshest critics of the December 2009 Copenhagen conference, arguing that developing countries were largely ignored in the U.N. climate debate that set an objective for limiting global warming.

Bolivia’s Environment Minister Juan Pablo Ramos said the Cochabamba conference may be “a major mobilization to fundamentally influence the next climate summit in Mexico in December.”

Other delegates said the conference may be constructive.

“The notion of more input from civil society is welcome,” said Luis Alfonso de Alba, who will be Mexico’s delegate to the Bolivia conference. “I believe that the meeting can produce positive results.”

Brice Lalonde, the French delegate to the climate conference, added that “we have to talk with everyone.”

Related Links:

Australia refloats Barrier Reef oil-spill ship

U.N. climate talks in Bonn wrap up after fresh fights

What the John Paul Stevens retirement means for energy progress

Court already far to the right

Ruth Marcus is correct —the replacement of Justice John Paul Stevens is unlikely to mean a shift to the left. [“Stevens departure from high court doesn’t mean a shift to the left,” Opinion, April 10.] She leaves out the worrisome implications of this.

A consistent pattern of nominations by Republican presidents —young, radically right judges —has pushed the court far to the right. Stevens, a conservative appointed by President Nixon, now counts as a liberal.

The result is crazy decisions such as the recent reversal of long-standing opinion, which allow corporations’ unlimited campaign donations as “free speech.”

I say crazy advisedly; Corporations lack a conscience or what the religious call a soul and fail miserably to understand the social contract that humanists assert forms the basis of morality. Increasing the legal “personhood” rights of entities such as Comcast, Boeing and even The Seattle Times only increases their already substantial rights compared to people.

With so much power vested in amoral business entities, could voting rights be far behind?

— Randy Grein, Bellevue

Due to demand in the United States, Mini USA has decided to bring a limited number of the John Cooper Works World Championship 50 to the stateside. Mini originally planned a limited production run of just 250 units for Europe only.

The United States will now get 50 of the 250 units of the limited production special edition hatchback. Sales will start later this summer with prices expected to be around $40,300.

Click here to get prices on the 2010 Mini John Cooper Works.

The Mini John Cooper Works World Championship 50 is based on the Mini John Cooper works and is powered by a 1.6L 4-cylinder with Twin-Scroll turbocharger and petrol direct injection. That’s good for a total of 211-hp with a maximum torque of 207 lb-ft. 0 to 60 mph comes in 6.5 seconds with a top speed of 148 mph. Estimated fuel-economy comes in at 6.9 liters per 100 km (34 mpg in U.S. terms).

Mini John Cooper Works World Championship 50:

– By: Kap Shah

Source: AutoWeek

Think like the common folk

This is a response to “Some rich don’t want tax breaks” [Business, April 10.]

Although I find it honorable and commendable that Judy Pigott feels the need to strive for higher tax rates, I wish that these individuals would simply donate their “extra” money to the U.S. government if they feel it could do better with their money than they can.

For a salesperson who starts the day with no money until something is sold, the levels of tax rates are not the problem. The fact that the U.S. government takes in excess of 50 percent of what they make leads me to believe what we have as a nation is a spending problem and not a taxation problem.

I would like to invite Ms. Pigott to work with me for a day to feel what it is like to have to bust her backside for her money; it could give her a different perspective. When the day wraps, I could share with her the costs of raising three kids in an expensive city, saving for their college tuition and making sure they have what they need to start their day —and of course, also making sure the government gets its 50 percent.

— Tim Sturdevant, Kirkland

‘Safety first’ not always the case

It is tragic that such an event happened at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, resulting in the tragic deaths of five and injuries to two other workers. [“Tesoro blast called fireball,” NWTuesday, April 6.]

What probably goes unnoticed is that many of the nation’s refineries and chemical plants are at least 30 years old and could pose an ever-present danger to some sort of industrial accident like the one here.

Although “safety first” is the mantra of these companies, when it comes down to retrofitting older equipment to increase output, safety is sometimes compromised. Even workers at these plants know the inherent dangers associated with their workplace, but are willing to take the risk because they are arning big bucks with a lot of overtime, among other benefits.

Sadly, as long as society craves the hundreds of byproducts that could be derived from refining or cooking crude oil at high temperatures and pressures, then demand could drive these plants to perhaps take short cuts on safety to meet production goals. When a fatality occurs, there is the usual soul-searching regarding what could have been done to prevent such a catastrophe and determining whom to blame.

— Robert Randle, Tacoma