Delahunt backs off controversial wind energy deal, tells Hull he'll help for free This piece on a former Bay State congressman reversing himself to offer free consulting service on a wind turbine project he funded while in office, has NBN rethinking—very slightly—its many previous statements that our privately-financed electoral process is nothing more than institutionalized corruption. Our change of heart here is not because this project is earth friendly. It’s because the numbers don’t convince us that Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt, was just lining his pockets after leaving elected office with funds secured while in elected office. Admittedly the story does smack of legislator to lobbyist/consultant political corruption a-la Newt Gingrich. But Delhunt was a state prosecutor for 20 years before spending 15 years in Congress. He was looking to make $90,000—$15,000 a month for six months—to grease the regulatory skids for an experimental wind turbine project in his hometown: experimental because the turbines in question are built of unusually large blades. Alas, the story broke of his plans and advocates of various political persuasions started taking shots. Here’s why NBN thinks they may be cheap shots. In 35 years in public office, you know Delahunt has the political power to quickly see this project through the regulatory process, unlike the Cape Wind turbine project which has been slugging it out with regulators for 11 years now through less connected channels. And after 35 years as law enforcer and law maker, Delahunt has got to have the legal skills to get a job paying a heck-of-a-lot more than $15,000 a month. Sadly, we can only argue that in this case the lawmaker-to-lobbyist model of American governance might have been for the best. But it’s still an awful way to run a country.

Plant May be Sold How suitable for the Waste-not-want-not issue of NBN than to discuss an article on a shuttered coal-fired powerplant being refitted for natural gas? The prospect of replacing this 60-acre plant with a turbine or solar farm is more attractive then converting it to burn another fossil fuel. But in these hard times we have to be practical: the area needs the energy, the city certainly needs the taxes and natural gas is cleaner than coal. What’s less practical is the unions seem to have a say in this and they are complaining that the gas-fired plant will need roughly 30 of the 175 workers now running the coal-fired operation. “Red” the Union boss, wants to make damn sure as many workers are re-hired as possible, not necessarily as many workers as are needed. Let’s face it folks, waste occurs everywhere and nowhere more so than in many union shops. Union waste laid waste New York's commercial shipping industry. This country is going to be cutting back everywhere and those folks skilled at running coal-fired power plants might have to find new careers, just as so many other Americans have. Maybe they can learn to install solar panels and build windmills.

Then Ronald Regan came along and showed us that America could afford to be profoundly wasteful  for another few decades and lunched the country down a multi-trillion-dollar exercise in unbridled consumerism that culminated in the Chevy commercial shown here. Can anyone see this country retuning to that kind of thinking? It seems every one of these folks is fighting hard as they can to do just that.

American Health Care System Gets Positive Prognosis In an issue dedicated to waste, how can NBN leave out our health care system? Accordingly, we are particularly eager to watch this PBS documentary examining a handful of U.S. cities bucking the national trend of spending obscenely on a Champaign health care system being administered in a Budweiser country. As the world population grows, how can health care not become an increasing liability we all must share? What’s the alternative, deny a poor young patient a potentially life saving MRI? It’s not going to happen. The U.S. focus on the most sophisticated medical technology has been fueled by worker's salaries and benefits that are far in excess of what folks overseas now charge for the same--Steve Jobs argued better—service. Those low-paid folks overseas think a bandaid is a medical miracle. This is a tough one. It seems we have to either lower our health standards, or codify in some way insurance discounts for those who exercise regularly, watch their weight, and don’t smoke or drink excessively. That might not go down to well with the obese, smoking, alcoholics in this country, and their ranks are formidable. It also might not go down well with the folks selling sugar, cigarettes and alcohol and their campaign contributions are formidable.

_ MIT’s Education Arcade uses online gaming to teach science While learning’s role in evolutionary survival may be up for debate, learning’s role in economic survival is set is stone. There’s a reason you don’t go to college to work at McDonalds. So this proposal by MIT to help teenagers learn math and science through video games presented something of a problem. Is it a reach to think kids attracted to video games are less attracted to math and science? Math and science require concentration and innovation. Video games require reflexes and whatever is the opposite of innovation. Can this MIT project take the hormone-charged minds of teenagers and put them back on an innovative track before they find themselves on the wrong side of the fast-food counter of life? A better question in today’s political climate is: how do we keep many of our wanna-be world leaders from changing this country into a place where there's plenty of work for expert video game players.

_Galapagos Giant Tortoise Species to be Brought Back from Extinction. We’re not sure why we’re posting this, other than so much of this issue is dedicated to evolution and genetics we felt compelled. Geneticists of all stripes are foaming at the mouth that a subspecies of giant tortoise long thought extinct might still be alive somewhere out on the Galapagos Islands. Apparently, another subspecies of the giant tortoise was recently found containing much of the DNA of the extinct species. That discovery is leading scientists to think that there must be living versions of the extinct species somewhere because there’s no other explanation for their DNA appearing in the hybrid. The real beauty of all this is these geneticists are making a living on these beautiful tropical islands chasing turtles around.

_Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz The Christian Science Monitor, ran this science test at the beginning of this week and NBN got 23 of 37 correct when we noticed an sudden up-tick in the difficulty of the questions, like this one. “The mathematical constant e is defined as the base of the natural system of logarithms, having a numerical value of approximately what?”  We don’t know, maybe…2.718? Bingo! Now who the heck knows that? We figured it better to quit the quiz before we hit the depressing .500 mark. We admit to making a few lucky guesses but having many more near misses. The quiz if fun and more important an excellent insight into how science touches so many facets of our lives. Take the test. If nothing else it might bump NBN’s “visits duration” statistic for this week. Yeah, we’re addicted to our website stats.

_ Seals blamed for lack of cod recovery There are two thoughts to take away from this fairly straight forward article linking exploding seal populations to collapsing cod populations. First is these boom-and-bust population swings are increasingly becoming the new "system" in our ecosystems. The days of homeostasis are over.  Man’s influences keep the global environment in a constant state of change. Second, the damage the resurgent seal population is doing to cod populations pales in comparison to the damage some fishing boats do to the ocean-floor ecosystems that provide the nursery for cod populations. Which might explain why fishermen quoted in this story are tripping over themselves to propose way to curb seal populations.

_ Interpol replies to Taib arrest call File this under the fighting-the-good-fight file. The Environmental News Service listed this with last week’s news but there isn’t a shred of news here. The press release simply states that the international police agency Interpol told folks upset over relentless rainforest logging in Malaysia to file a complaint with the Malaysian police. Sadly, the fellow doing the logging is the Chief Minister, Finance Minister and Minister of State Planning for one of Malaysia’s largest states. Talk about an uphill battle. So this press release clearly falls into the keeping-the-subject-alive-hoping-it-gains- traction category. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Then again fighting losing battles hoping one day the battlefield changes, is a hard call, particularly when there are so many other worthy environmental causes out there with significantly greater chance of immediate success. Unless the Mayalsian people start to rally behind this commendable effort, what chance does it have? Particularly when we can’t get people to fight global warming in this country.

_Climate change skepticism seeps into science classrooms NBN strongly believes an increase in human population means an increase in government regulation. It's inevitable. We just as strongly believe those regulations should only extend to environmental considerations, and maybe the sale of rocket propelled grenades. So, when you have school boards mandating science education include some form of climate change denial science, something is seriously rotten in Denmark, and in Texas, Louisiana, Utah, North Dakota and Oklahoma, according to this LATimes piece. No doubt, there are probably pro-climate change instruction mandates in many U.S. school curricula. In 2008 California rejected such an effort. If the public is taught that global warming is wrong it will unleash an enormous industry that will generate millions of jobs and billions in revenue at a time when we desperately need both. The only problem is, now that we have seven billion people on board, we even more desperately need this planet. It's funny, every generation wants to believe they live in a pivotal time in history. This may be the only generation that, according to an overwhelming majority of scientists really does, but wants to believe otherwise.

_ Iran issuing $240 million in bonds for hydropower improvement It looks like Iran isn’t only interested in nuclear power. But isn’t most of the Middle East desert? Just how many rivers does Iran have to dam? One clue lies in this website dedicated to Iranian tourism. It says: “There is a vastly extended network of rivers in Iran most of which seasonally are filled with water.” A hydropower industry reliant on rivers that occasionally dry up? While the bonds are supposed to go to dam projects “across Iran” the country inked a $13b deal in March with China to build the world’s tallest dam across the Baktiari River. Think any of that money will be going into a fish ladder or lift?

_ A Shrinking Military Budget May Take Neighbors With It With an uncharacteristic dearth of anonymous sources the New York Times recently did a great examination of the relationship between defense spending and scientific research. The latter, the article says, will be greatly hurt in coming years by cuts in the former. In its very characteristically balanced reporting, the Times concludes that such fears, while not completely unfounded, may be slightly overblown. First it notes that just 12 percent of defense spending goes to research and development. Yet that spending makes up 55 percent of the research and development spending in this country, public and private. We can thank the military for launching such life-changing technology as the internet, lasers and jet engines. In hindsight, any spending cut to those programs would seem ludicrous. But with 88 percent of military spending going to sources with no such similar long term gains, it seems like there’s plenty of room for cuts without having to cut into the military’s R&D programs. It helps to consider that the military is now spending big time on renewable energy technology.

_New estimate boosts permafrost contribution to climate change Here’s yet another indicator we’re playing Russian roulette with the planet. Rather than blather on with our own thoughts, NBN thought it better to excerpt the article: melting permafrost will contribute 1.7-5.2 times more co2 than thought….the estimated amount of carbon stored in northern soils has tripled in recent years, to roughly 1,700 billion tons. That’s four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity since the Industrial Revolution and twice as much as is currently present in the atmosphere….If permafrost thawing happens at the rate the scientists believe it will, its greenhouse effect will match that of worldwide deforestation…all the scientists in the survey felt existing models were too conservative in their projection of emissions from thawing permafrost…Boy, that sounds awful. We'd rather believe Rush Limbaugh who says it’s all a hoax. Who wouldn’t?

_US Forest Service Approves Vermont Wind Power Facility This press release on a 17 tower windfarm proposed for Vermont’s scenic Green Mountains got us searching out stories about NIMBYism and bird collision concerns. But like so many such inquiries undertaken by those with short attention spans and high speed internet access, NBN soon found itself heading off on a tangent and then lost in cyberspace. We ended up paging through this government website which went live in November and shows yet another controversial initiative by a president who knows nothing about the importance of public relations. Where do we start on this subject? Do we wring our hands over what appears to be an administration giving short shrift to environmental deliberation in order to expedite economic initiatives? Or do we congratulate him for recognizing that this country’s addiction to fossil fuels may well be the greatest threat to the environment. There are a lot of tangents, for those so prone, to pursue reading this press release. One thing is for certain: in the face of legions of critics this president is doggedly moving this country forward at a time when half its citizens yearn to turn the clock back. Bravo, Mr. President. Bravo. This article does a nice job of explaining the government website and the initiative behind it.

_California Truckers Take EPA to Court Over Emissions Rules Last issue we asked if incandescent lightbulb hording Phillip Miller of California is what’s wrong with this country. This week we ask if Sacramento trucker Robert McClernon is what’s wrong with our economy. He’s the trucker quoted in Fox News saying of new federal emissions regulations: "With the cost of the new equipment that they're requiring, and the oversight of the government in every part of my business, I can't afford to be in business.” So he’s suing the government with a bunch of other truckers, despite an endorsement of the new regulations by American Trucking Association president Bill Graves who said, in the same Fox News article, the federal government “did a really fine job,” on the regulations. So why is NBN saying McClernon’s plight the fault of the economy and not the government? Because our economy is fueled in large part by exploitation of the environment. Historically, and now almost by default, this country places economic priorities over ecologic. It’s how we have senators of all stripes now battling regulations shrinking the ground fishing fleet in New England which has almost wiped out many ground fish populations in the Atlantic with insanely destructive fishing techniques. How is it that these folks have a right to drive filthy trucks and pillage ocean floor ecosystems? We don’t have senators or law suits going to bat for journalists whose ranks were thinned far more thoroughly by the advent of the internet. That's because these days, the economy trumps everything. Which makes Graves’ comment on the regulations almost as astonishing as the fact that Fox News published it. No doubt the journalist who reported is now joining his unemployed brethren. 

_ Nickel producer inaugurates 90-MW Karebbe in Indonesia Here we have a Brazilian mining company working with a Canadian sponsor to dam an Indonesian river to power a nickel mining operation. The article says nothing about providing passage for fish that may need the river and, given Indonesia’s environmental track record, this looks like yet another example of private enterprise cashing in at the expense of the environment in a place few really care about. No doubt Indonesians will be put to work, in this mine. How many more Indonesians would be put to work if the Brazilian and Canadian investors were held to some kind of environmental standard? But then you can make the argument that such standards will prevent investment in the first place. Where have we heard that argument before.

_ The New Digital Divide Every once in a while NBN needs a reminder that the world is not half-full of morons, and that we are not nearly as clever as we’d like to think. This article in the NYTimes a few weeks back is just the latest such reminder in a fairly constant stream of them. It’s easy to think you're Mr. Know-it-all when you’ve got the luxury of sitting in front of a computer all day, pretty much absorbing information from sunup to sundown. But what about those who spend their days tiling bathrooms, or harvesting fields for a living? What about those folks who don’t have high-speed modems connected to fiberoptic lines? Outside of being a vast supply of recruits for unscrupulous corporate causes these under-served folks are also increasingly at a huge competitive disadvantage in this, the Information Age. Here we have yet another project that will only be financed publicly—installing fiberoptics in rural communities—aimed at serving people most likely to oppose public spending. Amazing the similarity between this map and this map.

_ Asia Report: China Takes Sharp Turn in Push for Solar Energy Is there a civics lesson for the U.S. to learn from a communist country? Perhaps, if you believe in conservation over consumption. China’s big on conservation of capital, refusing to pay workers a decent wage and refusing to pay for environmental controls that might stem the country’s rampant pollution problems. Through such government policy, China has left the consumption of its grotesquely under-priced products up to countries like the U.S. that are all too happy to borrow like crazy to provide a decent wage and protect the environment. China now wants to start buying its own low-cost solar panels, thereby protecting its environment. Can the U.S. afford to start buying its own high-cost solar panels? We don’t know. We do know that if we did, we might resolve all kinds of disputes and problems, like fracking, the Keystone Pipeline, global warming and unemployment. But then Exxon, Conoco Phillips, Koch industries and the litany of bribed Congressmen enacting their polices, would never allow this country to follow an example set by a country where voters don’t dictate policy.

_ UNH Climate Change Assessment to be Released at Dec. 2 Coastal Climate Summit We know that this article linked above is two weeks old and as such hardly constitutes news. The news comes from the fact that absolutely nothing was written about this summit or the results made public during it. So let NBN fill you in:  The only thing written about the study is this article in Fosters Democrat, which is a hard-core conservative newspaper that is anything but Democratic. The headline jokes about the need to “batten down the hatches” because tides are expected to rise about 10 feet by 2100. NBN thinks the joke’s on the Democrat and the roughly 6 people who read it. NBN's reckless prediction for this week is that it’s going to take a lot less than 88 years for tides to rise high enough to drown New Hampshire’s low-lying coastline and the newspaper's Dover offices.

_ The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle It’s sad but not surprising to see Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal dance on the grave of government biofuel initiatives, the way it does in this op-ed piece. And he does a good job of describing how government subsidy of this industry has been laughable. Still, can readers forgive the anonymous author not one mention counter arguments like global warming, the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, or the miniscule amount of government money spent on biofuel incentives versus bank bailouts? NBN can’t. The article concludes that these government biofuel initiatives would be folly, were that not an insult to fools. To NBN, the insult is to Wall Street Journal readers being offered opinion so thoroughly one-sided as to resemble dogma more than deliberation. But then again, this is Rupert—wiretap—Murdoch we’re talking about, taking down ever further the credibility of what was once one of the nation’s finest newspapers.

_ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA’s Fisheries Service Propose Policy to Improve Implementation of Endangered Species We’re surprised not to see more press on this press release proposing what could be a significant shift in enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. The beloved piece of legislation that birthed such brewhahas as the snail darter debate and the spotted owl logging controversy may actually be getting stronger. The feds now want endangered species act protection to be available for any species that’s shown to be declining significantly in a significant portion of its population range. The old wording requires a significant decline throughout a species’ entire population range. It’s more than semantics at stake here. A “significant” portion, as described in the proposed policy change, can be a small portion of a species’ entire population range. It just has to contribute significantly to maintaining the entire population’s health. Get it? If not, just understand the new policy will make the Endangered Species Act stronger, the sort of policy shift that itself is becoming endangered these days.