Welcome to NBN’s Waste-Not-Want-Not issue. In Opinion News this week we have a piece on all the wonderful, wasteful things in this country. Right below we’ve got a new name for Sin City and below that we offer insight into ice cream cones, self indulgence, and the U.N. conspiracy to reduce oil consumption in this country.

Welcome To Las Vegas. Pictured here is the parking lot of the Rio All Suites Resorts and Casino on Jan. 30, 2012. While much of Rio's business is convention driven and arrives by the bus-load, this parking lot is empty and there is more to this ocean of asphalt on the left that couldn't fit into the frame. The cavernous casino floor of the almost brand new Wynn Encore on the strip was at 5 percent of capacity at 1 pm the next day. Hundreds of tables were empty. Is it possible Sin City is feeling the pinch from the recession? How can it not? This is a city that sells waste as a virtue on a planet placing an ever higher premium on all its resources. And everything gets wasted here: the billions of gallons of fresh water evaporating into the air of the second driest city in the country, the thousands of half-eaten plates of food discarded hourly at the hundreds of buffet restaurants, the millions of incandescent lightbulbs radiating increasingly expensive energy into nothing. Let’s not leave out the money wasted in the casinos. Anyone want to guess at the carbon footprint of The Strip when you take the hard-earned cash tossed around like confetti into consideration? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas because no one wants the rest of the world to know how irresponsible we can be when immersed in a culture that says waste is fun. It lets you think, if just for a brief period, that life’s essentials are non-essential. The bloom is off the rose folks. Fun or not, the planet can no longer afford to subsidize this bizarre notion that it’s somehow OK to rampantly waste the natural resources we all share because the people encouraging us to do so say we have a constitutional right to. Toward that end we offer you an 800 word rant in Opinion News this week on other forms of waste, one even more obscene than Vegas, and a few constitutional amendments we’d like to see that might reduce that waste and still guarantee our right to the pursuit of happiness. Have a great week folks and thank you for reading News by Nature. We can only hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy writing it.        

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.

GM debuts green label on Chevrolets, first with 2012 Sonics For anyone thinking the worm hasn’t turned in today’s consumer culture, we offer you the GreenLabel line of Chevrolets. How is it possible that in seven short years this icon of automotive excess has gone from hawking Hummers to pasting “EcoLogical” labels of its offering? NBN can only own it up to the fickle natural of human sentiments and aggressive embrace of same, no matter what the expense or benefit to the planet, by marketing mavens heading up the mega-corporations. Where and when have we seen this before? Oh yeah, back in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter’s embrace of energy efficiency had the country running around in things like diesel Rabbits and Chevy Chevettes. 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.

Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot Why is this front page NY Times story in our Really Strange Stuff feed? What else can you call a political movement that says government energy efficiency initiatives are a U.N. plot to take away American freedoms. If that’s not strange enough, these folks are actually slowing those government initiatives. In some respects a UN plot for world domination through energy efficiency fits rather neatly into this age of the Tea Party, 9.11 conspiracy theorists and Occupy Wall Street. What's worth noting is the Tea Party is fueling this latest conspiracy-driven political movement and it's working. They are successfully fighting government initiatives like bike paths, high-speed trains and energy efficient housing all over the country. What do all these initiatives have in common? They will dramatically reduce this nation’s oil consumption. What do the Tea Party and the people selling oil have in common? They share the same bank account. If these folks want a conspiracy theory to gather behind they might take a hard look at their own organization’s funding. Read the story linked above. It's shocking and depressing. Now consider that article alongside this piece on folks in Maine begging for oil to heat their homes, and not getting it while Big Oil reaps record profits.

Kyocera to Launch Solar With Li-Ion Battery Storage for Homes in Japan Speaking of those folks in Maine in the story linked above, would their lives be any different if they had the systems Japan’s government is helping its citizens buy. Or would such an effort be viewed by the Big-Oil fueled Tea Party folk as a government conspiracy to take away our freedom to waste the oil Big Oil sells us. OK enough teeing off on the Tea Party. Clearly the organization has many well-meaning, good hearted Americans among its ranks. NBN contends they are there despite the best efforts by the organization's leaders. These are misguided people, not bad people.

_Integrating Anaerobic Digestion Into Our Culture Part 2: Stats, Reality and the Future NBN knows just enough on the subject of renewable energy from organic digestion, to sound knowledgeable. This article on the other hand sounds like an excellent review of the subject that we only wish we had the time to digest, pardon the pun, in both parts. However, this sentence got our attention: “Germany, which has the largest installed base of solar and the third largest installed base of wind gets more renewable energy from organic materials than wind and solar combined.” Is there really that much energy to be gleaned using bacteria to break down sugar and starch into natural gas? We may revisit this piece when time allows. In the meantime we have to wonder how the Koch Brothers feel about this technology.

  WikiCells: Bottles That We Eat This might be taking efficiency to an extreme, but you have to love the concept of packaging food in edible containers. We read though the intro to this article and it sounds like the foods stuffs being packaged are the sorts of things astronauts eat: foams, liquids and pastes. They are served up in containers of edible, water resistant membranes held together by electrostatic forces. While that sounds unpalatable, we can think of one wikicell held together with gluten, sucrose and hydrocarbons that even six-year-olds eat with enthusiasm, see video above.

We needed a filler to help balance off the front page more—hey, esthetics are everything—so NBN thought this photo filled the bill. All those little gray dots are aquatic deadzones, areas where nutrient loading have created algal blooms that suck all the oxygen out of the water killing all the fish through a process called eutrophication. Two points to make here: one is that deadzones are becoming an enormous problem and the other is that Google has once again earned the fawning appreciation of NBN with yet another amazing, free data base that allows a unique view of the world. You have to check out the Deadzone tab on Google Earth to get a real appreciation of how bad this problem is. And unless we dramatically clean up our wastewater treatment plants and reduce the use of fertilizers in this country these deadzone are only going to grow in size and number.