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1014 discussions

Act for OVEC in Coal's Boycott of Kroger
by duane330＠aol.com 02 Feb '08

02 Feb '08

?From the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy www.wvhighlands.org ? ????The WV Coal Association's Friends of Coal has denounced the Ohio Valley Environmental Council? (OVEC) as an extremist organization. They are boycotting Kroger for including OVEC in their gift card program. If you would like to show your support for the wonderful work OVEC is doing in their fight against mountain top removal strip ?mining you are?encouraged to purchase a Kroger gift card and write and /or email?Kroger and?encourage them to continue including?OVEC?in their gift card program.? ????Here is the process for buying an OVEC Kroger gift card-- Go to the OVEC website www.ohvec.org?and just down from the top of the homepage,in the center,is a link with full explanation and a printable pdf application to mail in. You the Kroger shopper buys a Kroger gift card from OVEC for $20, it is preloaded with $20; then as you shop at Kroger, pay for your purchase with the gift card,making sure you have it sufficiently recharged at the customer service desk before you check out. You can load the Kroger card with any amount up to $500 and spend it over time,?& OVEC get's 5% of whatever?you spend. If you normally pay for groceries with a credit card,you can just recharge your gift card with the same credit card, continuing to earn frequent-flier miles,bonus points,cash back,or whatever. ????Kroger has held up well and so far continues to include OVEC in the gift card program. ????You can email Kroger on line at http://services.kroger.com/comments/comments.aspx ????To write to Kroger and thank them for including OVEC use the address below. Please cc martinjul(a)aol.com? so we know how many have responded. ? Mr. Carl York Public Relations Manager Kroger P.O. Box 14002 Roanoke, VA? 24038? ? "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, things aren't going to get better, they're not!" From The Lorax by Dr. Suess For The Mountains Julian Martin Vice-President for State Affairs West Virginia Highlands Conservancy www.wvhighlands.org 1525 Hampton Road, Charleston, WV 25314 Contact me(martinjul(a)aol.com) for a trip to Kayford Mountain to see active and so-called reclaimed mountain top removal. Go to www.wvhighlands.org for I Love Mountains t-shirts, hats, I Heart Mountains and Friends Of The Mountains bumper stickers and for speakers, information and exhibits on environmental issues in West Virginia. . . Who's never won? Biggest Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music. ________________________________________________________________________ More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://webmail.aol.com

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Re: [MVCAC] Fwd: CAD & TrAILCo Joint Stipulation
by James Kotcon 10 Jan '08

10 Jan '08

I am not sure a lot of action by the Committee is needed. The legal team will be responding formally during the hearings. My testimony has already included the position that any "free" electricity for landowners must come from the TrAILCo stockholders, not from the ratepayers, which means we are already in opposition to this settlement. However, letters to the editor, or calls to legislators expressing this position would be worhtwhile. I think that Delegates Beach and Shook and Senators Prezioso and Oliverio could use some citizen input on this settlement. JBK >>> Barbara Fallon <brbr_fallon(a)yahoo.com> 01/09/08 8:41 AM >>> How does the Sierra Club go on record in opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate and the TrAILCo. Barbara ----- Original Message ---- From: James Kotcon <jkotcon(a)wvu.edu> To: freesource(a)cheat.org; wreger(a)hsc.wvu.edu Cc: Duane330(a)aol.com; mvcac(a)cheat.org; william.depaulo(a)gmail.com; ec(a)osenergy.org; pjhunt(a)xemaps.com; brbr_fallon(a)yahoo.com Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 5:40:11 PM Subject: Re: [MVCAC] Fwd: CAD & TrAILCo Joint Stipulation While Byron Harris is the new Consumer Advocate, Billy Jack has stayed on as attorney for this case and was the one who signed the settlement. A copy with his signature is available on the PSC's TrAILCo case web page. JBK >>> Jonathan Rosenbaum <freesource(a)cheat.org> 01/08/08 2:18 PM >>> According to the Dominion Post the new PSC Consumer Advocate is Byron Harris. Are we sure that it was Bill Jack Gregg who was in support of this sell-out? This is clearly a desperation move by Trailco. I oppose this agreement. -Jonathan Bill Reger-Nash wrote: > Duane et al, > > I concur that we oppose this agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate and the TrAILCo. What was he thinking!!!! What does Billy Jack Gregg think about this? In his former life, we could count on Billy Jack for a balanced and insightful perspective. > > Again, the ecology of the state is sold out for a few shekels to select stakeholders all the while the rest of us bear the brunt of the ill effects in perpetuity. > > Bill > > WV Walks - 30 minutes or more daily > Feel the power of half an hour! > > Bill Reger-Nash, Ed.D > Professor of Community Medicine > West Virginia University School of Medicine > Morgantown WV 26506-9190 > Phone: 304/293-0763 > Fax: 304/293-6685 > > Dept. web page: http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/som/cmed > BRN's web page: http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/som/cmed/wreger/ > > > > > >>>> <Duane330(a)aol.com> 1/8/2008 1:21 PM >>> >>>> > RE: Forwarded message from Jim Kotcon. > > > 1. I make a motion that the Energy Committee of the Sierra Club of West > Virginia > go on-record in opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer > Advocate and the TrAILCo. > > 2. I make a motion that the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition go on-record in > opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate > and the TrAILCo. > > Notes: > > 1. This Agreement is a front page story in the Morgantown Dominion Post > today. This Agreement was posted yesterday on the web site of the Public > Service Commission and is attached to this forwarded message; or, it can be > found under Case 07-0508 at _www.psc.state.wv.us_ > (http://www.psc.state.wv.us) > > 2. It is particularly disturbing that the offer of free electricity will be > available > only to a select group of people, not all those that are affected by the Line. > And, from an overall point-of-view, the cost of this free electricity will be > charged back to the customers of Allegheny Energy in West Virginia, as > I understand it. > > 3. Herbicides could still be used, just not sprayed from aircraft. > > 4. This Agreement reflects an arbitrary decision by the Consumer > Advocate, without consideration of whether it is fully supported > by the affected citizens, or the people of the State who will > need to pay the the proposed Line. > > Duane Nichols, Member. > > > > > > > **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. > http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489 > > > > _______________________________________________ > MVCAC mailing list > MVCAC(a)cheat.org > http://cheat.org/mailman/listinfo/mvcac > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

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Re: [MVCAC] Fwd: CAD & TrAILCo Joint Stipulation
by James Kotcon 08 Jan '08

08 Jan '08

While Byron Harris is the new Consumer Advocate, Billy Jack has stayed on as attorney for this case and was the one who signed the settlement. A copy with his signature is available on the PSC's TrAILCo case web page. JBK >>> Jonathan Rosenbaum <freesource(a)cheat.org> 01/08/08 2:18 PM >>> According to the Dominion Post the new PSC Consumer Advocate is Byron Harris. Are we sure that it was Bill Jack Gregg who was in support of this sell-out? This is clearly a desperation move by Trailco. I oppose this agreement. -Jonathan Bill Reger-Nash wrote: > Duane et al, > > I concur that we oppose this agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate and the TrAILCo. What was he thinking!!!! What does Billy Jack Gregg think about this? In his former life, we could count on Billy Jack for a balanced and insightful perspective. > > Again, the ecology of the state is sold out for a few shekels to select stakeholders all the while the rest of us bear the brunt of the ill effects in perpetuity. > > Bill > > WV Walks - 30 minutes or more daily > Feel the power of half an hour! > > Bill Reger-Nash, Ed.D > Professor of Community Medicine > West Virginia University School of Medicine > Morgantown WV 26506-9190 > Phone: 304/293-0763 > Fax: 304/293-6685 > > Dept. web page: http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/som/cmed > BRN's web page: http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/som/cmed/wreger/ > > > > > >>>> <Duane330(a)aol.com> 1/8/2008 1:21 PM >>> >>>> > RE: Forwarded message from Jim Kotcon. > > > 1. I make a motion that the Energy Committee of the Sierra Club of West > Virginia > go on-record in opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer > Advocate and the TrAILCo. > > 2. I make a motion that the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition go on-record in > opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate > and the TrAILCo. > > Notes: > > 1. This Agreement is a front page story in the Morgantown Dominion Post > today. This Agreement was posted yesterday on the web site of the Public > Service Commission and is attached to this forwarded message; or, it can be > found under Case 07-0508 at _www.psc.state.wv.us_ > (http://www.psc.state.wv.us) > > 2. It is particularly disturbing that the offer of free electricity will be > available > only to a select group of people, not all those that are affected by the Line. > And, from an overall point-of-view, the cost of this free electricity will be > charged back to the customers of Allegheny Energy in West Virginia, as > I understand it. > > 3. Herbicides could still be used, just not sprayed from aircraft. > > 4. This Agreement reflects an arbitrary decision by the Consumer > Advocate, without consideration of whether it is fully supported > by the affected citizens, or the people of the State who will > need to pay the the proposed Line. > > Duane Nichols, Member. > > > > > > > **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. > http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489 > > > > _______________________________________________ > MVCAC mailing list > MVCAC(a)cheat.org > http://cheat.org/mailman/listinfo/mvcac >

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Fwd: CAD & TrAILCo Joint Stipulation
by Duane330＠aol.com 08 Jan '08

08 Jan '08

RE: Forwarded message from Jim Kotcon. 1. I make a motion that the Energy Committee of the Sierra Club of West Virginia go on-record in opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate and the TrAILCo. 2. I make a motion that the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition go on-record in opposition to the Consent Agreement between the WV Consumer Advocate and the TrAILCo. Notes: 1. This Agreement is a front page story in the Morgantown Dominion Post today. This Agreement was posted yesterday on the web site of the Public Service Commission and is attached to this forwarded message; or, it can be found under Case 07-0508 at _www.psc.state.wv.us_ (http://www.psc.state.wv.us) 2. It is particularly disturbing that the offer of free electricity will be available only to a select group of people, not all those that are affected by the Line. And, from an overall point-of-view, the cost of this free electricity will be charged back to the customers of Allegheny Energy in West Virginia, as I understand it. 3. Herbicides could still be used, just not sprayed from aircraft. 4. This Agreement reflects an arbitrary decision by the Consumer Advocate, without consideration of whether it is fully supported by the affected citizens, or the people of the State who will need to pay the the proposed Line. Duane Nichols, Member. **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489

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Reminder: MVCAC meeting Tuesday
by William Wonderlin 10 Dec '07

10 Dec '07

The next MVCAC meeting will be on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 7PM, at St. Paul's Lutheran Church. Dr. Tim Nurkewicz will attend this meeting. Tim is an Assistant Professor at WVU's Health Sciences Center, and his research is focused on the relationship between air pollution and cardiovascular disease. Tim will lead a discussion of recent advances in understanding the potential effects of air pollution on our health. If you would like to do a little "homework" in advance, the following page of the EPA's website as some links to useful information regarding air pollution and health: http://www.epa.gov/air/toxicair/newtoxics.html.

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WSJ: Emission Caps Hit Snags
by duane330＠aol.com 04 Dec '07

04 Dec '07

Kyoto's Caps on Emissions Hit Snag in Marketplace U.N. Mulls How to Fix Pollution-Credit System; 'Expecting Too Much' By JEFFREY BALL. Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2007; Page A1 The Kyoto Protocol was supposed to harness market forces to solve global warming. It slapped caps on greenhouse-gas emissions and set up a complex market for companies to trade permits to pollute. But it hasn't yet ignited the green-energy revolution its architects were expecting. The cap-and-trade system has brought about useful projects targeting a few especially potent greenhouse gases. It hasn't, however, forced the industrialized world to meaningfully curb what scientists say is the biggest problem of all -- the growing consumption of fossil fuels. Today, diplomats at a big United Nations global-warming conference in Bali, Indonesia, will begin looking for a fix as they open debate on a new global-warming agreement. Also this week, a Senate committee in Washington is scheduled to debate a proposed cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases in the U.S., which opted not to ratify the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty requires the industrialized countries that ratified it to reduce their overall emissions by 5% from 1990 levels. The caps, which expire in 2012, will not go into effect until next year. But participating nations have spent several years scrambling to get ready. The European Union has already instituted caps on its member nations. This has fueled a nascent carbon-permit trading system: Countries and companies that can't meet the new requirements can buy emissions permits from others that can. Trading in permits hit $30 billion last year, according to the World Bank. Yet problems with the system loom large. The world's two biggest energy users, the U.S. and China, aren't subject to emissions caps. Countries that face the caps have been reluctant to push their industries too hard. And industry itself has proved adept at fulfilling its obligations without cutting down much on fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. It is doing this largely by funding projects in the developing world that destroy potent but uncommon greenhouse gases. "What has happened is, markets work as markets will do, to find the lowest-cost alternative," says Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat who during the Kyoto talks was head of the U.N. body that gave birth to the carbon market. The cap-and-trade system was "a brilliant idea," he says, but implementing it has exposed the "tension between the market approach and the sustainable approach." The big question now is how to structure a carbon-trading system that's palatable to the U.S. and to developing countries such as China. The U.S. and China together account for about 40% of emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion, which scientists say is the most common source of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions. That alone dwarfs the 28% share from the countries that did sign up for Kyoto caps, among them Canada, Japan and the nations of the EU, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. The politicians face a dilemma: They want emissions constraints to be tough enough to matter, but loose enough to persuade the U.S. and China to play greater roles. European nations have expressed a willingness to cut emissions deeply, but only if the U.S. does too. The U.S. and China are calling on one another to play ball. The broader question is whether a cap-and-trade system targeting industry is enough to meaningfully curb greenhouse gases. Some favor the introduction of carbon-emission taxes, such as an added tax on gasoline, saying that would push consumers to trim their energy use. Others say even blunter tools are needed, such as tougher government rules on the energy-efficiency of cars and buildings. Industry long has resisted such steps. The current carbon-trading system is producing modest environmental benefits. In Europe and Japan, where the Kyoto emissions caps are set to kick in next year, some companies have begun changing their operations as the effective cost of burning fossil fuel rises. If governments toughen emission caps in coming years, as is expected, the cost will rise further. But progress has been much slower than Kyoto's architects hoped for. Japan's emissions are rising, Canada has backed away from its target, and the EU says it will meet its goal only if member nations get tougher. Scientists say far bigger cuts than those called for in the treaty are needed. But global energy use is expected to rise by 50% by 2030. The U.S. pioneered the concept of harnessing markets to solve environmental problems. In 1995, it imposed a cap-and-trade program to curb power-plant emissions of sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that causes acid rain. Under that program, the federal government gives power plants yearly allocations of permits to emit sulfur dioxide. Power plants that are over the limit have a choice: cut their emissions or buy pollution permits from plants that don't need their entire allocations. The system has reduced U.S. sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants by about 40% from 1990 levels. It's widely viewed as an environmental and economic success. In the talks leading to the Kyoto treaty, the U.S. argued successfully for using the cap-and-trade model to fight greenhouse gases. But because global warming involves many countries and many gases, solving the problem is far more complicated than addressing acid rain. The Kyoto treaty sets emissions limits for industrialized countries and for the EU, which decided itself how to divide the burden among member countries. Developing nations face no caps. Diplomats decided that it wasn't fair to burden their economies right away with pollution controls, given that the industrialized world had faced no restrictions during decades of growth. It's up to each participating nation to determine which companies to slap restrictions on. After a government sets an emissions limit for a company, it gives that company just enough permits to cover it. Companies that reduce emissions below their caps can sell excess credits to companies that don't have enough. Each company must decide how much to cut emissions and how many permits to buy from others. The EU's cap-and-trade system has been in effect since 2005. It's a dry run for the Kyoto treaty's emissions caps, which go into effect next year and run through 2012. Holcim Ltd., a Swiss cement maker, faces caps. In 2005 and 2006, it didn't need all its permits, so it sold a total of about one million of them for an average of about €11, or about $16, apiece, says Bruno Vanderborght, Holcim's vice president for environmental strategy. This year, Holcim increased cement production and needed to buy about 100,000 permits. Mr. Vanderborght says the company has improved its energy efficiency "slightly" and is looking to improve further. It has also been buying permits from another source: developing nations. The treaty includes a unique mechanism for involving the developing world in the process. Carbon-reduction projects in developing nations generate emissions permits, or credits, which can be sold to companies in industrialized nations facing emissions caps. In effect, these companies can fulfill some of their emission-reduction obligations by financing pollution-control projects in the developing world. The troubles with the system began even before it went into effect. In 1997, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution urging President Clinton not to embrace the Kyoto treaty, and soon after President Bush took office in 2001, he announced he wouldn't support emissions caps because they would be too costly for the economy. That made it tougher for the EU to force stringent emissions caps on its industry. Tough caps would make it harder for European companies to compete against American ones. In 2005, when Europe introduced its first round of caps, it kept them soft. As an added shock absorber, governments and companies began looking hard in the developing world for cheap emissions credits. Kyoto's architects now say they didn't anticipate how the projects in the developing world would suppress efforts to cut back on fossil-fuel use. Under the treaty, projects targeting more potent gases generate more credits than projects targeting carbon dioxide. The treaty covers six kinds of greenhouse gases. At one end of the spectrum is carbon dioxide. It accounts for 77% of all man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, the U.N. says, but it's also the weakest. At the other end is HFC-23, a byproduct of the manufacture of a common refrigerant. Every ton of it is 11,700 times as damaging to the atmosphere as a ton of carbon dioxide, according to the U.N. But despite its high potency, the gas accounts for less than 1% of the effect of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, the U.N. says. Under the Kyoto trading system, each credit represents one "carbon-dioxide-equivalent" ton of avoided emissions. So a project that eliminates one ton of carbon-dioxide emissions generates one sellable credit. A project that gets rid of one ton of HFC-23 emissions generates 11,700. Installing machinery on a refrigerant plant to incinerate HFC-23 is cheap. According to the World Bank, generating one carbon credit through an HFC-23 project typically costs less than $1. Generating a credit from a renewable-energy project -- erecting a wind turbine or a solar panel -- can cost $5 to $10, the World Bank says. Such credits currently sell for as much as €17, or about $25. So the economic incentives to undertake HFC-23 projects have far exceeded those for fossil-fuel reduction projects. During the Kyoto talks, there wasn't much discussion about whether such disparities might focus too much activity on eliminating gases that aren't a big part of the overall problem, according to Mr. Cutajar, the Maltese diplomat who headed the U.N. body. The provision that allows industrialized countries to obtain credits in the developing world was "an add-on" late in the talks, he notes. "The general impression was that low-carbon development was about clean energy," Mr. Cutajar says. "It sounded good. It smelled good. It was only later that the details got worked out." Between 2002, when credits generated in developing countries began trading, and the end of last year, HFC-23 projects accounted for 46% of all developing-world credits traded -- by far the biggest chunk of that market, according to the World Bank. All told, at least 70% of developing-world credits traded during that market's first five years came from projects targeting gases other than carbon dioxide, the World Bank says. At present, most eligible plants that emit HFC-23 have been signed up for carbon-credit projects. As a result, projects targeting less-potent gases are getting more funding. One such gas is methane. It's emitted when animal dung decomposes on farms and when trash rots at landfills. Ton for ton, it's 21 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the U.N. says. That's provided an incentive for two types of popular carbon-credit projects: putting tarps over animal-waste lagoons, and putting pipes in landfills to tap and burn off the methane. Burning methane produces less-potent carbon dioxide. Programs to reduce the burning of fossil fuels -- a far bigger environmental problem -- accounted for less than one-third of the developing-world credits traded between 2002 and last year, the World Bank says. But they have begun getting more attention. The trading system has given birth to an industry of middlemen who arrange projects in developing countries to produce credits. Natsource LLC, a New York-based asset-management firm, manages a roughly $700 million investment fund through which companies, including many Japanese and European utilities, buy carbon credits. Most come from projects targeting the potent but ancillary gases such as HFC-23 and nitrous oxide, a byproduct of nylon production. "Of course the market is going to do the cheaper thing first," says Jack Cogen, Natsource's chief executive officer. "That's what markets do." The World Bank has put together some of the biggest emissions-reduction projects. Karan Capoor, a senior financial specialist at the World Bank, says "it's expecting too much" to think the Kyoto treaty could significantly curb fossil-fuel consumption without long-term caps and the participation of big countries such as the U.S. Some investors in the carbon market cite another reason for the scarcity of clean-energy projects: a panel of U.N.-sanctioned officials who meet periodically in Bonn, Germany, and decide which proposed carbon-reduction projects will get to sell credits. The panel approves only environmental projects it determines wouldn't happen without the sale of the credits. Clearing that bar can be difficult for clean-energy projects. Those related to potent gases such as HFC-23 and methane have an easier time, because they rarely make economic sense without the carbon-credit revenue. U.N. officials say that to keep the system honest, it's important not to subsidize projects that would happen anyway. In 2006, the European Commission, the EU's governing body, reported that the European industry ended 2005 with more permits than it needed to meet caps under the EU's system. That caused the price of European credits to plummet. The commission now is pressuring member governments to tighten their emissions caps, which has pushed prices back up. Eight countries have sued or threatened to sue, arguing the commission is being too stringent. At the U.N. conference in Bali, the price issue is likely to color debate over whether to award carbon credits to projects that preserve forests, which consume carbon dioxide. Kyoto's architects authorized credits for planting new trees. But they declined to allow credits for preserving existing trees. They worried, among other things, that nations might seek credits to preserve trees they have no intention of destroying. Heavily forested nations such as Indonesia and Brazil want to reverse that decision. On Capitol Hill, companies anticipating a U.S. carbon cap are gunning to make it as loose as possible. Duke Energy Corp., the nation's third-biggest coal burner, is one. In October, Duke joined the heads of other big emitters in writing to the head of a Senate committee on the environment. Their letter declared it "critically important" for any cap-and-trade system to set an upper limit on the market price of a carbon permit. That ceiling would rise over time. A system without price controls might force utilities to switch to fuels that are cleaner but costlier than coal. "While a lot of people started down the road romanticizing" the use of emissions caps to fight global warming, says Duke's chief executive, James Rogers, in an interview, they're "now coming to grips with the cold reality of the economics." ________________________________________________________________________ More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://o.aolcdn.com/cdn.webmail.aol.com/mailtour/aol/en-us/text.htm?ncid=ao…

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To Bali and beyond . . .
by duane330＠aol.com 04 Dec '07

04 Dec '07

THE MORNING BRIEF,? Wall Street Journal, By JOSEPH SCHUMAN, December 3, 2007? Finding a Successor To the Kyoto Protocol?? In his first official act as a new prime minister, Kevin Rudd today signed paperwork that will lead to Australia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, further isolating the U.S. on climate issues just as negotiators are meeting in Bali to start work on Kyoto's successor. Mr. Rudd's signature would seem to bolster the United Nations-sponsored Bali conference's momentum, already building since the Nobel Peace Prize was co-awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its work documenting human-induced global warming. ? The latest scientific warning came just yesterday, in a study published by peer-review journal Nature Geoscience, which found the earth's tropical zones have begun to spread toward the poles.?While some of the earliest signs of climate change came through melting ice in the Arctic, the study reports evidence of tropical expansion that could threaten subtropical societies. "Poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources," it says, but cautions that the implications still aren't well understood. And yet, despite the warnings and burgeoning political consensus, there's also little certainty about what the Bali talks will produce. While the U.S. delegation declared it won't be a "roadblock" to a new agreement, the Bush administration remains opposed to mandatory emission caps for greenhouse gases and some other steps many of U.S. allies support. China, which has seen billions of dollars in crops destroyed by the pollutants of its coal-burning power plants, and India, threatened by melting glaciers and devastating droughts, have both said they won't sign a treaty that slows their pace of economic development, as the Associated Press reports. Both countries are allowed to keep polluting under the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which itself has led to little actual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The product of much geopolitical wrangling, it required only 36 countries to limit pollution, and just over of third of those countries were former Soviet-bloc countries, the Los Angeles Times notes. The likes of Russia, Latvia and Romania have sharply lowered their carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, but that's more due to how the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union shut down smoke-belching factories, the Times says. And the Kyoto emissions were set far above the countries' actual emissions. Under Kyoto, industrialized countries that ratified the treaty were charged with lowering their emissions by 5% from 1990s levels -- requirements that expire in 2012 -- but in many big industrialized countries emissions have continued to increase. That's part of why regimes were created to allow countries to trade carbon credits, buying, for example, Eastern European's permission to pollute in order to emit more in Western Europe. ? It was a way, as The Wall Street Journal says, of harnessing market forces to deal with global warming. But the trading "hasn't yet ignited the green-energy revolution its architects were expecting," the Journal says. "The cap-and-trade system has brought about useful projects targeting a few especially potent greenhouse gases. It hasn't, however, forced the industrialized world to meaningfully curb what scientists say is the biggest problem of all -- the growing consumption of fossil fuels." The Bali talks are aimed at going a lot farther, looking at proposals from the attending governments -- like Britain's idea of limiting global aviation and shipping emissions, as the Guardian reports -- and working off the IPCC recommendations. But as the New York Times notes, few participants expect the current talks to produce a breakthrough. * * * ________________________________________________________________________ More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://o.aolcdn.com/cdn.webmail.aol.com/mailtour/aol/en-us/text.htm?ncid=ao…

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MVCAC meeting Dec. 11
by William Wonderlin 03 Dec '07

03 Dec '07

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Save paper, etc.; stop unwanted catalogs easily
by Paula Hunt 27 Nov '07

27 Nov '07

I heard a story on NPR a few days ago about http://www.catalogchoice.org/. Maybe you heard it too. Supposedly you can sign up at the above web site with your name and address and tell them which catalogs you no longer wish to receive. They say they will contact the vendor and get you off the mailing list. I say "supposedly" because I have just gone through the process, so it is too early to see if it works. They have a FAQ page where you can learn how to cancel catalogs that aren't in your name (but sent to your address, of course) or are not in a variation of your name. According to the guy NPR interviewed and the web site, "Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the <http://ecologycenter.org/>Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the <http://nwf.org/>National Wildlife Federation and the <http://nrdc.org/>Natural Resources Defense Council, ..." Hey, it's worth a try! Those catalogs are coming fast and furious to my house these days. -- paula PS. It's free.

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(no subject)
by Duane330＠aol.com 25 Nov '07

25 Nov '07

NOTICE OF ADDITIONAL PUBLIC COMMENT HEARINGS On March 30, 2007, Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line Company (TrAILCo) filed an application for a certificate of convenience and necessity from the Public Service Commission of West Virginia for the construction and operation of the West Virginia segments of a 500 kV electric transmission line and related facilities in Monongalia, Preston, Tucker, Grant, Hardy and Hampshire Counties. By Commission Order issued on October 24, 2007, the Commission directed that the Commission's Division of Administrative Law Judges hold additional public comment hearings in Preston County, in addition to the public comment hearings already scheduled. Accordingly, the following additional public comment hearings have been scheduled for this proceeding: On Monday, November 26, 2007, at 1:30 p.m. and again at 6:30 p.m., at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department and Community Building, 2"d Floor, Buckwheat Room, 115 Brown Avenue, Kingwood, West Virginia. Anyone interested in this proceeding may appear at the public comment hearings and make such statements as may be deemed appropriate with repect to the proceedings. **************************************Check out AOL's list of 2007's hottest products. (http://money.aol.com/special/hot-products-2007?NCID=aoltop00030000000001)

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