Courtesy Scientific American:

Not many years ago, there wasn’t enoughwind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying.

A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region’s wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.

Influential natural gas producers and generators in Texas are worried. They are demanding that the state’s wind developers share the costs of backup natural gas generators that must pick up the slack when the wind doesn’t blow. The gas industry, threatened by state policies that promote wind power, is asking regulators to impose penalties on wind generators that can’t deliver scheduled energy when the wind dies down.

And last week, four senators representing New York, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania proposed to deny federal clean energy grants to wind developers that buy blades, turbines and other components from abroad.

“It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, pointing at a proposed Texas wind farm whose backers include a Chinese power company.

Some renewable policy advocates say the problem has less to do with China and more with on-and-off-again federal energy policies, and arguments over how to pay for the vast expansion of transmission lines needed to maximize wind power delivery. Instead of looking at foreign rivals, members of Congress should start with a look in the mirror, says this side in the debate.

-Source.

See Related Article.

Courtesy Grist:

The FDA’s new report on the safety of endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A is months overdue and there is still no sign of when or if the agency will release the report. Perhaps they are waiting for that piece of “smoking gun” evidence that BPA represents a clear and present danger to human health? Well, thanks to researchers from Peninsula College of Medicine in Britain, we just may have it.

In 2008, the group looked at data from the 2003-2004 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) which included urinary BPA levels for the first time. The results:

[A] quarter of the population with the highest levels of BPA were more than twice as likely to report having heart disease or diabetes, compared to the quarter with the lowest BPA levels. They also found that higher BPA levels were associated with clinically abnormal liver enzyme concentrations.

At the time, even the researchers admitted the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. But the same team has now analyzed the 2005-2006 NHANES, which used an entirely different group of people, and guess what? The association between BPA exposure and heart disease in humans is as strong as ever (via Toronto’s Globe and Mail):

According to the new research, 60-year-old American males with the highest amounts of bisphenol A in their urine had about a 45 per cent greater risk of cardiovascular disease than men the same age with lower exposures, confirming the results of a previous study on the topic released in 2008 and based on a different sample of people.

-Source.

Courtesy Wired:

Contrary to public statements made by the Transportation Security Administration, full-body airport scanners do have the ability to store and transmit images, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The documents, which include technical specifications and vendor contracts, indicate that the TSA requires vendors to provide equipment that can store and send images of screened passengers when in testing mode, according to CNN.

The TSA has stated publicly on its website, in videos and in statements to the press that images cannot be stored on the machines and that images are deleted from the scanners once an airport operator has examined them. The administration has also insisted that the machines are incapable of sending images.

But a TSA official acknowledged to CNN that the machines do have these capabilities when set to “test mode.”-

-Article continues @ Source.

Courtesy McClatchy:

The consequences of this mining in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia are “”pervasive and irreversible,” the article finds. Companies are required by law to take steps to reduce the damages, but their efforts don’t compensate for lost streams nor do they prevent lasting water pollution, it says.

The article is a summary of recent scientific studies of the consequences of blasting the tops off mountains to obtain coal and dumping the excess rock into streams in valleys. The authors also studied new water-quality data from West Virginia streams and found that mining polluted them, reducing their biological health and diversity.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this growing scientific evidence of the damages, they wrote, adding: “Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.”

New permits shouldn’t be granted, they argued, “unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

-Article continues @ Source.

Hear Bob Kincaid’s interview with  Scientists on the Review: 

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Courtesy The Bismarck Tribune:

North Dakota’s attorney general said he expects the state to sue Minnesota over a plan there to tax carbon created by electrical generation.

After discussing the issue with the state Industrial Commission in a closed session this month, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said “It is very likely that we will be suing the state of Minnesota.”

At issue is a measure by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission to add a fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide to the cost of electrical generation starting in 2012. The majority of electricity in North Dakota is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit a large amount of carbon relative to other fuels sources. North Dakota officials argue that the move would place an unfair tax on electricity from the state and discourage its use by Minnesota utilities.

Stenehjem said possible legal action would relate to constitutional protections against restrictions on commerce between states.

-Article Continues @ Source.

Courtesy Scientific American:

New research by leading alternative energy research firm New Energy Finance finds that solar power will cost less by about 50% at the end of 2009 compared to the end of 2008.

The costs are pre-subsidy, so they could be much lower if you take better government subsidies into account.

But it isn’t only solar that’s down in cost. It’s other renewable energy sources, too.

The research company found that equipment costs (in solar, wind, and other sectors) decreased throughout the year but these were offset by increasing financing costs. However, equipment prices are expected to continue falling whereas the financing market is expected to get better.

-Article with links continues @ Source.

Courtesy Alternet:

You might remember Robert McNamara’s stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. “We were wrong,” he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. “We were terribly wrong.”

Yes, they were, and so are today’s leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, “I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion.”

That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America’s “Uncle Walter,” the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.

The drug war is rife with major failures and absurdities, including the rise of a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico, caused by U.S. consumer demand for drugs outlawed by our government; Plan Colombia, a secretive, multibillion-dollar U.S. military operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production in that country, which now produces 15% more coca than it did before the plan was launched; the racist and grossly unjust sentencing disparity, established by lawmakers in the 1980s, between crack-cocaine users (mostly black) and powder snorters (mostly white); and the ridiculous refusal by pious federal authorities to allow our farmers to grow hemp–a useful, profitable, sustainable, and historic crop (see Lowdown, May 1999).

Here we focus on one particular piece of policy insanity that has afflicted our country for nearly 100 years and was foisted on us by political demagogues, power-hungry police agencies, fire-breathing preachers, fear-mongering media moguls, self-appointed moralists, and other forces of ignorance and arrogance. Thanks to them, America is mired in–get this–a war on a weed. Marijuana is the foe, and after a century of battle, the weed is winning!

A painful price

-Article continues at Source.

Courtesy Rawstory:

Israeli researchers have developed a portable device that causes excruciating sensations of burning and can be built for just $250,000, raising fears that even the world’s poorest, most oppressive governments will now be able to use advanced non-lethal weapons on their civilian populations.

The Man-Portable Active Denial System, developed by researchers at the College of Judea and Samaria, can beam a microwave ray that causes skin surface to heat up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the nerve cells in the skin to think they’re on fire.

In tests of a similar project by the US military, “nobody [was] able to stay in the beam for more than a few seconds,” writes David Hambling at Wired.com.

Reports of the US military developing a burn ray have been around for some time, but the US’s Active Denial System is a nine-ton machine that has not yet come out of testing, for technical and political reasons, Hambling reports.

-Article continues @ Source.

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Our intrepid host Jon Fox is having Streaming issues this evening and thus will not be netcasting.  However things should be back to normal next week.  Our Sincere Apologies.

The Fox’d Up Team.