Legislation Has Little Impact on Climate Change, Critic Says While the Bush administration has spent nearly $45 billion on climate change-related programs, according to Deputy Transportation Secretary Thomas Barrett, experts called for more spending and initiatives during a recent Senate subcommittee hearing on the topic. Critics, however, say the spending is wasteful and unnecessary. During his testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee last Tuesday, John D. Porcari, Maryland's secretary of transportation and chairman of the Climate Change Technical Assistance Program, said his state is developing a statewide Greenhouse Gas and Carbon Footprint Reduction Strategy to reduce emissions between 25 and 50 percent between 2006 and 2020, and to obtain 90 percent reductions by 2050. "If we can reduce the fuel burned by vehicles stalled in traffic, that is a gain," he said. "If we can improve the flow of traffic so fuel is burned at more optimal efficiency that is also a gain." Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, who was not asked to testify before the committee, told Cybercast News Service that climate change is not an imminent threat and legislation is not going to help "wave a magic wand" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "There's really nothing you can do to substantially reduce emissions," he said. "If every nation in the world followed the Kyoto Protocol, the amount of warming that would be prevented is 7-hundredths of a degree Celsius. ... We have no idea how to reduce emissions - these amounts that are being talked about in bills like Lieberman-Warner, 70 percent reductions in 42 years? Give me a break."....
Berkeley tree-sitters still hanging on In December 2006, protesters angry about campus expansion plans clambered into the branches of a threatened oak grove at the University of California-Berkeley. The tree-sitters continue to sit. There had been signs the protest might be coming to an end as a court case challenging a planned multimillion-dollar athletic-training facility inched closer to resolution. This month administrators, who won a court order allowing them to evict the protesters at any time, cut supply lines, yanked a few protesters out of the trees and drove the rest into a single redwood. For a while, it looked like campus officials were prepared to starve protesters out. But after the remaining half-dozen or so tree-sitters said they were a) not moving and b) rationing water, officials relented and offered sustenance to the protesters aloft. "This misguided effort to preserve a 1923 landscaping project certainly doesn't warrant any action that could cause harm or permanent health consequences for anybody involved," said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof....
The bulb hoarders The government wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love. Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year. And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available. In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011. The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US....Is anybody surprised at this? Soon we'll be sneaking our light bulbs in from Mexico, just like we do our toilets.
Now health and safety cut number of holes in chip shop salt shakers Pot-holed roads, crumbling schools, litter-strewn streets – there’s no shortage of problem areas crying out for their attention. But councils believe they have found a better use for their money: reducing the number of holes in chip shop salt shakers. Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half. And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas. Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution. Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’. They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer....How long will it take the food nazies on this side of the ocean to pick up on this? Note how the plan is to fool the citizen into thinking they have a "visually acceptable sprinking." The all-knowing government officials will trick us into better health. Grover Nyquist's "Leave Us Alone Coalition" is looking better every day.