Amber Waves Of Pain Once seen as a way of decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, ethanol now is being viewed by many as interfering with people's dependence on food. On Tuesday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, introduced legislation to freeze the mandate in last year's energy bill requiring a fivefold increase in ethanol production by 2022. As Hutchinson stated on these pages the day before: "This was a well-intentioned measure, but it was also impractical. Nearly all our domestic corn and grain supply is needed to meet this mandate, robbing the world of one of its most important sources of food." Diverting food to fuel, she noted, has contributed to a 240% rise in the price of corn, wheat and soybeans since February 2006. The rising price of grain raises the cost of raising farm and ranch animals. This raises the price of beef, poultry, milk and eggs. Also on Tuesday, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called on Congress to revisit the ethanol mandate and asked the EPA to exercise its "congressionally given authority to waive all or portions of these food-to-fuel mandates as part of its rule-making process." "Decades of ill-conceived planning by politicians and bureaucrats afraid of expanding our energy supplies are now bearing an ugly fruit," Inhofe said. "Our current biofuels mandates are having massive and potentially life-threatening consequences." Even Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat from corn-growing Illinois, said of the issue: "The object of having homegrown fuel in America is a good goal. . . . But we have to understand it's had an impact on food prices . . . even in the corn belt. We better be honest about it." Indeed, let's be honest about ethanol. It receives a 51-cents-per-gallon tax subsidy, which will cost $4.5 billion this year....
Chickenfeedhawks Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.” And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to “global warming” — or, at any rate, the “war on global warming” that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad. Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy. So what happened? Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022. The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat?....
Wildlife groups call for end to Mexican wolf removal policy Two wildlife conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday to keep federal agencies from aggressively removing endangered Mexican gray wolves that have attacked livestock more than twice from a recovery program in Arizona and New Mexico. WildEarth Guardians and The Rewilding Institute are asking the U.S. District Court to stop the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's removal policy, known as "Standard Operating Procedure 13." Under the policy, Fish and Wildlife removed 45 wolves from the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area during the past three years. That's almost twice the number that the agency removed in the prior seven years. The removal sometimes involves killing the wolves and other times involves bringing them back to captivity, authorities said. "We don't think the removal of any of the wolves in the wild is appropriate," said Rob Edward, director of carnivore restoration at Santa Fe-based WildEarth Guardians. "The top priority should be the recovery of the species." Meanwhile, Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity also sued the Fish and Wildlife, hoping to force the agency to develop a recovery plan and habitat for the endangered American jaguar. The group said that construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will stop jaguars from re-colonizing their former habitats in the southern United States....
Whale-watching boats are putting whales in jeopardy In the lush waters of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, whale watching is one of the region's most beloved - and jaw-dropping - experiences. When one of the animals is spotted in the dark, cold waters, boats filled with awestruck tourists make a beeline to watch the leviathan feed and, if luck is with them, breach. But a new study says whale-watching boats are going too fast near whales, endangering them and disregarding a decade-old pledge to slow down. As part of the study, published this month in the journal Conservation Biology, researchers went undercover 46 times in 2003-2004 on ships owned by New England's whale-watching companies. Armed with global positioning system units, the observers recorded time, speed, and location at 5-second intervals. Every trip exceeded the voluntary speed limits, sometimes more than threefold, they found. "I want to see whale watching, but it has to be done in a way as safe as we can make it," said Dave Wiley, lead author of the report, funded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an advocacy group. "They are going too fast," said Wiley, research coordinator for the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The whale-watching companies are not named in the study....
Battle over eminent domain is another civil rights issue Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II. The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a crucial constitutional rights issue. Current eminent domain horror stories in the South and elsewhere are not hard to find. At this writing, for example, the city of Clarksville, Tenn., is giving itself authority to seize more than 1,000 homes, businesses and churches and then resell much of the land to developers. Many who reside there are black, live on fixed incomes, and own well-maintained Victorian homes. Eminent domain has always had an outsized impact on the constitutional rights of minorities, but most of the public didn’t notice until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. In Kelo, the Court endorsed the power of a local government to forcibly transfer private property to commercial interests for the purpose of “economic development.”....
Many Ways To Deal With Energy But First Things First: Start Drilling What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices. We are because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling. It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25-30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves). What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity. Americans favor both "energy independence" and cheap fuel. They deplore imports — who wants to pay foreigners? — but oppose more production in the United States. Got it?
Republicans Go Green? California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, once the proud owner of a fleet of gas-guzzling Humvees, got religion on global warming pretty quickly after taking office. And in one of the great political reversals of the decade, he has emerged as a major figure in the environmental movement. Last week Yale University hosted the signing by Schwarzenegger and a handful of other governors of a "Declaration on Climate Change" (no substance, just lofty principles). He delivered the keynote address to a large crowd of overachieving tree-huggers. If it had been a different audience, you might say he threw them some red meat. But given the venue, let's just say Schwarzenegger was dishing prime tofu. But he also railed against the "enviro-wimps" who prevent him from taking tougher action on climate change. Environmentalists want renewable energy, he said, "but they don't want you to put it anywhere. .  .  . It's not just businesses that slows things down, it's not just Republicans that have slowed things down, it's also Democrats and sometimes those environmental activists that slow things down." Schwarzenegger also blamed Washington, and while he was careful not to name names, everybody understood that the man really slowing things down keeps office hours in an oval room. Yet just two days before, President Bush had made an Arnold-like U-turn of his own, delivering a major speech on global warming in which he set a target date for capping greenhouse emissions (delightfully distant 2025), and spoke of "working toward a climate agreement that includes the meaningful participation of every major economy."....
Rage over Mt. Taylor — Rumors of closure fly More than 200 people packed the Cibola County Convention Center to give voice to concerns and feelings about Mount Taylor and the recent decision to temporarily list parts of the sacred mountain as a cultural property. The Cibola County Commission called for the special meeting of the commission to allow time to the large number of people who wished to speak to the issues raised when the New Mexico State Historical Preservation Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs held an emergency meeting Feb. 22. Citizens from the Cibola area expressed outrage that they were not notified of the pending decision. Star Gonzales of the New Mexico Mining Museum was contacted about the meeting by telephone. Gonzales attended the meeting and asked that the review be postponed, but the request was denied, said the energy spokeswoman, who was present at the SHPO review. Ben Chavez of the Cubero Land Grant said land grant residents east of the mountain had never been notified of the meeting. Neither of the newspapers in wide circulation in Cibola County was given notice of the meeting. KDSK/KMIN radio in Grants first heard of the meeting in a news release announcing the decision, after the event....
Forest Service struggling with Wyoming Range The Forest Service is trying to clean up the mess it made by involving Denver-based Stanley Energy in meetings about environmental studies for disputed energy leases on the Wyoming Range. But the agency might not be as much to blame as Governor Dave Freudenthal, as well as the general public, might believe. Freudenthal has already sent two livid letters to the Forest Service deriding the agency’s rash choice of including Stanley Energy, or Stanley, in initial discussions about the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS), a document due for release in November that will determine whether 44,720 acres on the Wyoming Range should be leased for energy development. Although the Forest Service announced last week that Stanley will no longer be included in the meetings about the environmental studies, the governor has demanded that the agency trash the DSEIS and start anew, or at least pace its “aggressive timeline” and allow more public input with a Reasonably Foreseeable Development (RFD). An RFD is a baseline projection of gas exploration, development, production and reclamation prepared by qualified specialists and subject to peer review....
Mine plan near Mount St. Helens nixed The Bureau of Land Management has rejected a lease application from a Colorado-based company seeking to mine copper 12 miles northeast of the Mount St. Helens crater, just outside the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. The surprise decision Wednesday effectively ends the effort by Moly Inc. of Lakewood, Colo., to develop its mining claims on the federal land. “Given the BLM decision of no action on the lease application, it’s our intention to spend no further time, money or energy on the application,” said Seth Foreman, the company’s manager of investor relations. Instead, he said, the company, formerly Idaho General Mining Inc. of Spokane, will focus on developing two molybdenum mines in central Nevada. Ed Shepard, BLM director for Washington and Oregon, said the agency was not able to determine whether a hard-rock mining lease would be compatible with the purpose for which the lands in question were purchased. The Forest Service bought a portion of the land from the Trust for Public Land in 1986, using Land and Water Conservation Funds. Congress appropriates those funds from offshore oil and gas leasing revenues and dedicates them to buying land for state and local conservation projects....
Road Dust from Gas Rigs Eroding Ancient Pictographs in Nine Mile Canyon Road dust from gas rigs traveling through Nine Mile Canyon near Price is slowly sanding away pictographs from ancient American Indian cultures. The defacing of these archaeological sites will speed up with the increased traffic from a proposed expansion of a nearby gas field, says Nine Mile Canyon Coalition member Ivan White, with a voice hoarse from spending the afternoon in the dusty canyon. "We don't have any desire to stop the gas drilling, but we do not want the longest art gallery in the world, you know, to be completely destroyed," White says. Today is the last day for public comment on the draft Environmental Impact Statement for Bill Barrett Corporation's proposal to fully develop the gas field south of Nine Mile Canyon. White's group has asked the Bureau of Land Management to extend the deadline for 2 months to further study the dust, survey the archaeological sites, and conduct an engineering study of alternate routes to the gas field. The Environmental Coordinator for BLM's Price Field Office, Brad Higdon, says results of a recent study on dust and the use of magnesium chloride as a dust suppressant indicate they are contributing to the erosion of the ancient art carved into the canyon's walls. In light of this study, Higdon says the BLM is partnering with Carbon County to test different dust suppression methods along Nine Mile Canyon Road to determine short-term fixes for the problem, and possible long-term solutions....
Wildlife panel wrestles with energy drilling Limiting energy company access to sensitive wildlife areas and fine-tuning requirements for after-drilling cleanup led discussion Wednesday as the Colorado Wildlife Commission hammered out a resolution to send to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. House Bill 1298 requires the oil and gas commission to balance energy development with wildlife conservation and to consult with the wildlife commission on ways to minimize the affect of development on wildlife. The oil and gas commission already has a set of draft regulations on the table, and the wildlife commission Wednesday tackled what it saw as shortcomings in the oil and gas commission draft. Chief among those concerns are timing restrictions, surface-occupancy limitations and reclamation. The wildlife commission wants reclamation, particularly the reseeding of disturbed land including well pads and pipelines, done quickly, using a proper seed mix of wildlife-favorable forbs, shrubs and grasses. The timing stipulations, which would limit when and how long an energy company can operate in sensitive areas, centered on impacts to greater sage grouse and mule deer. Timing restrictions are “one area the energy companies pushed back real hard,” DOW Director Tom Remington said. “These directly affect their profitability. Bureau of Land Management (timing stipulations) are routinely waived. We want to find a way to keep some. They are our leverage to get industry to come to the table to discuss other impacts.”....
Ocean Cooling to Briefly Halt Global Warming, Researchers Say Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind, Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said. Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period. The study was based on sea-surface temperatures of currents that move heat around the world, and vary from decade to decade. This regional cooling effect may temporarily neutralize the long- term warming phenomenon caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases building up around the earth, said Richard Wood, a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, a U.K. provider of environmental and weather-related services. ``Those natural climate variations could be stronger than the global-warming trend over the next 10-year period,'' Wood said in an interview. ``Without knowing that, you might erroneously think there's no global warming going on.''....
Pressure mounts to drop 'squaw' from place names Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the term is offensive. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed 16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board says. American Indians consider "squaw" a derogatory term for women, says Jacqueline Johnson of the National Congress of American Indians. Native Americans have pushed states and the federal government to eliminate it. Their most high-profile success came April 10, when the federal board renamed Squaw Peak, a hiking spot outside Phoenix, Piestewa Peak to honor Lori Piestewa, a Hopi-Hispanic soldier from Arizona who was killed in Iraq in 2003. Nine states — Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Oregon, Maine, Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee — have passed laws changing names of public places that use certain terms defined as offensive. At least 940 places from churches to bridges and natural formations use the word, the names board says. At Squaw Valley in California, a push to rename the ski resort failed five years ago....
2 beef processors cited for humane violations Two of the nation's largest beef processors were slapped with humane handling violations during a government review of meat providers to the National School Lunch Program, records show. One of those companies' violations was rescinded after the company appealed, and the other company's appeal is pending. Audits by the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service resulted in "noncompliance" determinations for a National Beef Packing Co. plant in Dodge City, Kan., and a Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Fresno, Calif., according to information obtained by The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request. Overall, the audits of 18 slaughterhouses found that some cattle were not being stunned properly on the first try, others were subject to overcrowding, and others had to be electrically prodded to get them to move. On Monday, after AP raised questions about Cargill's violations, FSIS officials notified the company that it was granting its appeal of the noncompliance determination and would instead issue a "letter of concern" to the plant. "The merits of their appeal were acceptable," FSIS spokeswoman Amanda Eamich said, while declining to provide any specifics. Cargill spokesman Mark Klein also declined to discuss why the noncompliance record was rescinded. The Agriculture Department told Sen. Herb Kohl in a letter three weeks ago that the audits found violations in four of the 18 slaughterhouses reviewed, including one serious enough to lead to a temporary suspension, but declined to identify the plants....
First Offspring of an Equine Clone Born in Italy Prometea, the blazed Haflinger who gained notoriety in 2003 as the world's first horse clone, has given birth to a colt. Today the Laboratorio di Tecnologie della Riproduzione (LTR) in Cremona, Italy, announced the March 17 arrival of Pegaso, who was produced by a single artificial insemination attempt. Continuing the family tradition of world firsts, Pegaso is the first offspring of an equine clone, and he's apparently healthy and thriving. Cesare Galli, DVM, and his research team at LTR were responsible for the production of Prometea, who was born on May 28, 2003. The first equine clone, born May 4 of that year, was a mule colt that was followed by the birth of two more cloned mules in June and July, respectively. Mules are sterile, so Prometea was the first candidate for reproducing. She was bred to Haflinger stallion Abendfurst, using artificial insemination....
State moves to ban fake testicles on vehicles Senate lawmakers in Florida have voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state. Republican Sen. Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined $60 for displaying the novelty items, which are known by brand names like "Truck Nutz" and resemble the south end of a bull moving north. The Florida Senate voted last week to add the measure to a broader transportation bill, but it is not included in the House version. In a spirited debate laced with double entendre, Senate lawmakers questioned whether the state should curtail freedom of expression in vehicle accessories. Critics of the ban included the Senate Rules Chairman, Sen. Jim King, a Jacksonville Republican whose truck sported a pair until his wife protested....
Tin can tied to colt's tail sparked gunfight It was a rainy day on Oct, 1, 1878. Texas Rangers were playing cards at a Ranger camp on the Banquete Creek west of Banquete. A man named Josh Peters, a 24-year-old son of a nearby rancher, asked one of the Rangers "Who tied that can to my colt's tail?" It was a prank. Peters' sorrel gelding was grazing nearby when a Ranger named George Talley, drinking tequila, took a tomato can, put gravel in it to make a rattling sound, and tied it to the colt's tail. It spooked the colt and he ran himself almost to death. Next day, an angry Josh Peters came to the Ranger camp. The story was told later by a Ranger George Durham in the book "Taming the Nueces Strip." The details also came out in a trial in Corpus Christi later. It was early evening. The Rangers were playing a card game called "pitch" when Peters showed up, on the prod. Peters said, "Who tied that can to my colt's tail? I'll whip the sorry bastard who did it." Talley, the guilty Ranger, put down his cards and started to stand up. "I done it." Both men pulled their guns and shots were fired. Talley got in the first shot and it hit Peters under the right rib, the bullet going through his heart. Peters' shot went wild and missed. Talley's second shot hit Peters in the temple. He was dead before he hit the ground. Four weeks later, on Oct. 30, 1878, Talley was indicted for murder....