Dan Gainor, The Examiner
2008-04-28 07:00:00.0

You can tell the days we’re supposed to be afraid — they end in a “y.”

No matter what day you wake up, someone somewhere wants you to be afraid to get out of bed.

Or afraid to stay there.

Don’t read this article, you might learn something — or get a paper cut.

Either could be the end of life as we know it.

Are you eating right?

Is there enough bran in your diet?

Is there too much sugar or salt?

Is caffeine good or bad today?

Think it all through while you drink your eight glasses of water.

Oops, water’s out.

Those eight glasses are an old wives’ tale from ancient history of a couple months ago.

Tap water is supposedly bad — too many drugs (or too few).

Bottled water is worse because it hurts Mother Nature to ship it.

God help you if you take either and put it into another plastic bottle.

By the time you’re finished your bacon and eggs, you’re bound to have indigestion just thinking about it all.

Not that you should eat meat.

It uses more grain than going vegan — and vegan food isn’t edible either.

Then you have to save the food so you can hoard against the global food riots.

Sam’s Club and Costco are actually limiting how much rice you can now buy because some folks are hoarding. (That last one wasn’t a joke.)

How folks afford those tasty calories is anybody’s guess because of economic fears.

We might even go into a recession! (Cue scary organ music.)

We forget recessions have hit every few years since we had money and jobs to recess.

Somehow America has survived.

 Leave your house and you fear the unknown.

Maybe we’ll have another sniper or another terrorist attack or a giant robotic Barbra Streisand. (“South Park” fans should get that one.)

The fear about Alar on apples did more harm to growers than to anybody who ate them.

Then there are the lawsuit-driven fears.

Don’t eat that chili at Wendy’s or drink that scary hot coffee at McDonald’s.

Now lawyers are something to fear.

America has created whole industries to promulgate fear.

Think tanks, politicians and, yes, the media make a fortune from our terror. 

Some are mere scolds who say we would live better if only we’d do what they think we should.

Others would make us live better — for our own good.

Time magazine is the latest.

It is so convinced it’s right on global warming that it rips apart the photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising to convince us climate change is our new great war.

I’m sick of it.

I don’t want to fear the reaper.

And if I fear the turtle — that’s only because of how they played last season.

What I really fear is our loss of liberty and control of our own lives as the fear industry runs roughshod over us.

I’d tell you how to fix it in your own lives, but I’m afraid that’s up to each one of you.

Brno, April 25 (CTK) - Czech President Vaclav Klaus Friday received the Green Pearl 2007, an anti-prize the environmentalists annually award for the worst anti-environment statement.

Klaus owes his prize to his interview with the daily Hospodarske noviny in which he said "I can’t see any devastation of the planet, I’ve never seen any in my life and I don’t think any serious and sensible man could say this."

Klaus, a 66-year-old economist by training, received as many as 17 nominations for the Green Pearl for 2007, mainly in connection with his criticism of the scientific theory of global warming.

Klaus received a Green Pearl once in the past, in 2005, for his statement in the daily Pravo: "Civic society means a challenge to free society! It is every democrat’s duty to do his utmost for all his life to fight against it!"

Klaus was also proposed for Oil Guzzler, another anti-prize presented for the most environment-unfriendly act of the year.

He was nominated for "playing down the risks posed by the global climate change and for his book Blue, Not Green Planet," the organisers said.

Klaus was declared Oil Guzzler in 1993, when he was prime minister, for pushing through the completion of the Temelin nuclear power plant and for promoting financial policy that transforms nature into a single economic indicator - the GDP.

The 2007 Oil Guzzler finally went to Jiri Hodac, deputy transport minister who allegedly threatened to sue civic associations over the financial damage they allegedly caused by participating in construction proceedings.

Hodac also boycotted the government decision under which an expert team was to be established to assess alternatives to certain motorway projects.

As a result, the projects’ preparation goes on though they are controversial from the environment’s point of view, the organisers of the poll say.

Last year, the Oil Guzzler nominees included Prague Mayor Pavel Bem for his promotion of the construction of skyscrapers on Prague’s Pankrac plain, and Bohumir Rada, a farming cooperative head who planned to establish a big crocodile farm in south Moravia.

By BEN LIEBERMAN, IBD | Posted Monday, April 28, 2008 4:30 PM PT

Environmentalists love natural gas — except when they hate it. This schizophrenic approach is costing the rest of us a bundle and is standing in the way of badly needed sources of supply like liquefied natural gas.

Green activists and legislators love natural gas relative to its dirtier fossil-fuel competitor, coal. Tough measures in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments targeted new coal-fired power plants, and very few have been built ever since.

In effect, new coal plants were declared "out of bounds" — along with new nuclear plants — as an option for generating additional electricity. But while these power sources were consigned to the sidelines, America’s electricity needs kept expanding.

That growing demand has been met largely by building facilities that use natural gas. In less than two decades, natural gas has gone from being a relatively minor source of electricity to providing 20% of the nation’s needs. About 25% of our natural gas supply now goes to electric utilities, rather than to residential and industrial uses.

Of course, this added demand has raised prices. Though the jump in oil and gasoline costs in recent years has garnered most of the attention, the percentage rise in natural gas has been just as big.

Lost Jobs

At more than $9 per thousand cubic feet wholesale, that’s more than four times its average price during the 1990s. Consumers are feeling the pain — especially in winter — given that nearly 60% of America’s homes are heated with natural gas.

In addition, industries dependent on natural gas — like chemicals and fertilizer production, which use it both as a chemical feedstock and an energy source — have seen hundreds of thousands of jobs lost to parts of the world where natural gas is relatively abundant and costs much less.

Here’s where the love-hate stuff comes in. At the same time environmental policy drove up the demand for natural gas, it has also constrained the supply.

For example, substantial domestic reserves of natural gas, both onshore and offshore, have been placed off-limits due to various environmental restrictions. Many of the same activists and politicians responsible for higher natural gas usage are also among those standing in the way of increased natural gas drilling.

The same is true for LNG. It’s uneconomical to ship natural gas from other continents in its natural, gaseous state. But natural gas can be condensed at very low temperatures and shipped as a liquid.

Special receiving facilities have safely handled shiploads of LNG for decades, but the need to expand has skyrocketed. LNG currently supplies less than 3% of our needs. It could provide much more.

Future Needs

Once again, the usual suspects are doing everything they can to stop any expansions of the LNG infrastructure.

Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts have been busy trying to block an onshore LNG facility in their state — at least when they’re not busy denouncing high home heating bills or the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. Sen. Frank Lautenberg is no less critical of a proposed facility off the New Jersey coast. Ditto a large California delegation regarding several proposed LNG projects there.

The reasons for opposition — usually safety and environmental concerns — are belied by the excellent record LNG has amassed in this country.

To be sure, these concerns, including the overhyped claim that LNG facilities would be easy terror targets, should be addressed through strong safeguards. But overblown fears are hardly a valid reason to stop these projects.

Natural gas is only part of the solution to our energy challenges, and LNG is only part of the natural gas equation. Nonetheless, affordable energy is indispensable to economic growth and to maintaining our nation’s standard of living.

Americans will need access to every reasonable energy source available in the years ahead. Increased LNG should be a part of our energy future.

Lieberman is a senior policy analyst with the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
4/23/2008 6:27:15 PM

      It was a night filled with anti-corporate protests, anti-Bush comments, folk songs and the president of the Hip-Hop Caucus bellowing about America’s “illegal war” in Iraq. Welcome to the 2nd Annual “Climate Super Rally” featuring NASA’s Dr. James E. Hansen.

     “Our addiction to oil has caused millions to be displaced,” liberal activist Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. said, one of the event’s speakers. “And thousands – close to millions to lose their lives in this illegal war.”

     Not exactly typical climate change rhetoric. But Hansen was one of three headliners and his message was designed for the “super rally.” He played to crowd and said the battle was the fossil-fuel industry against “young people and nature.”

     Hansen is one of the most-often cited scientists warning about the alleged dangers of climate change. Although he has claimed he was “censored” by NASA, he has been featured repeatedly on network news shows and in The New York Times. Former Vice President Al Gore has referenced Hansen on several occasions, but Gore has also called for a more cooperative approach to the environment – a stance which conflicts with the “super rally.”

Read more…

By Peter Foster

In my column last Friday – headlined “Bioperversity” – I suggested that a new book, “Sustaining Life,” from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which claimed that species loss was threatening medicinal discoveries and thus human health, was a typical alarmist crock. It was intended primarily as propaganda to whip up eco-hysteria ahead of next month’s huge United Nations conflab in Bonn to discuss the floundering Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

As if to prove my point, the IUCN the very next day issued a release about the so called “COP9,” that is, the ninth “Conference of the Parties” to the Bonn boondoggle. The release noted that COP9 would feature a “high level ministerial segment” (nothing is ever pitched at anything less than a stratospheric level in UN wonkworld), a Mayors’ Conference titled “Local Action for Biodiversity,” and a “Global Island Partnership Event.” Bonn will also address the “role of women in biodiversity.” According to Lorena Aguilar Revelo, head of IUCN’s Gender Programme, “Ministers in Bonn must listen to the experience of women when deciding on the future of our planet.”

Now I’m all in favour of hearing women’s "stories" being heard, but the thought of government Ministers “deciding on the future of our planet” scares me far worse than any possible prospect of species loss.

The IUCN release inevitably adopted the Chicken Little approach for which the organization is famous. “We need to act now to stop the destruction of life on this planet,” intoned Sebastien Winkler, head of IUCN’s Countdown 2010 (the date by which biodiversity is somehow to be “saved.”).

Alleged loss of biodiversity (which is based on claims of the extinction of tens of thousands of species annually, even though the IUCN can’t actually name one because they haven’t been discovered yet!) is of course closely conjoined to the allegedly catastrophic consequences of climate change (which also tend to be difficult to spot on any objective basis).

According to Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN’s director general, “We need sophisticated and uncompromised strategies to address these issues – the world expects nothing less.”
I have to agree that sophisticated and uncompromised strategies – whatever the hell they might be – are certainly likely to be superior to unsophisticated and compromised ones, but the notion that the world is waiting with baited breath for the results of Bonn may be stretching it a bit.

Not only do such meetings consistently fail to produce anything but a further proliferation of busybody but useless initiatives and an urgent agenda for the next COP-out, the vast majority of mankind is blissfully unaware that they are taking place. Which is a real danger, because if anything threatens humanity, it is the UN and its handmaidens, prominent among which is the IUCN.

Australian scientists report weight loss breakthrough

Australian scientists may have discovered how to help people lose weight without cutting back on food, a breakthrough that could pave the way for fat-burning drugs.

Researchers in Melbourne found that by manipulating fat cells in mice they were able to speed up the animals’ metabolisms.

They found that when a particular enzyme, known as angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), was removed, mice were able to eat the same amount as other mice but burn more calories and therefore gain less weight.

Animals without the enzyme were on average 20 percent lighter than normal mice and had 50 to 60 percent less body fat, senior researcher at the Howard Florey Institute Michael Mathai said.

"It is very clear that they do have less body fat," he told AFP.

Mathai, who is also a lecturer in nutrition at Victoria University, said the slimmer mice also appeared to have less chance of developing diabetes because they processed sugar faster than normal mice.

He said the research, to be published Tuesday in the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be used to develop drugs to assist weight loss.

Drugs which impair the action of ACE already exist and are mostly used to combat high blood pressure.

"The drugs are out there because they are used for hypertension," he said.

"So we know their safety and their tolerability. What we don’t know is whether or not they will work in humans. And we don’t know whether it will work in all obese humans."

Mathai said it could be a question of finding the right dosage of hypertension medication, or developing a new type of drug of the same class, to be used as weight-loss pills.

"This might be one way in which you can increase metabolic rate in combination with managing nutrition to limit the intake of calories," he said.

Mathai said the research, conducted at the Howard Florey Institute, Victoria University, La Trobe University, Deakin University, the Baker Institute and the University of Melbourne, was yet to pinpoint why the genetic manipulation led to weight loss.

"Because we deleted the gene, the gene is gone from the whole body, that means that it is gone from all tissues including the brain," he said.

"And so we don’t know whether it’s a direct effect of the deficiency in the tissue or whether it’s something coming from the brain."

Watering tomatoes with diluted seawater can boost their content of disease-fighting antioxidants and may lead to healthier salads, appetizers, and other tomato-based foods, scientists in Italy report. Their study is scheduled for the May 14 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Besides their use in a variety of ethnic food dishes, tomatoes are one of the most commonly grown home garden vegetables, particularly cherry tomatoes. Scientists have linked tomatoes to several health benefits, including protection against prostate cancer and heart disease. Researchers have known for years that seawater does not stimulate the growth of tomatoes, but scientists know little about its effects on the nutritional content of the vegetables.

In the new study, Riccardo Izzo and colleagues grew cherry tomatoes in both freshwater and in a dilute solution of 12 percent seawater. They found that ripe tomatoes grown in the salty water showed higher levels of vitamin C, vitamin E, dihydrolipoic acid, and chlorogenic acid. All of these substances are antioxidants that appear to fight heart disease, cancer, aging, and other conditions.

Using saltwater to irrigate tomato crops also appears to be a promising alternative to freshwater irrigation, especially in the wake of water shortages in some parts of the world, the researchers note.

Source: ACS

(AP) — The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger - often secret - say, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago.

Cancer risk assessments for nearly a dozen major chemicals are now years overdue, the GAO said, blaming the new multiagency reviews for some of the delay. The EPA, for example, had promised to prepare assessments on 10 major toxic chemicals for external peer review by the end of 2007, but only two reached that stage.

GAO investigators said extensive involvement by EPA managers, White House budget officials and other agencies has eroded the independence of EPA scientists charged with determining the health risks posed by chemicals.

The Pentagon, the Energy Department, NASA and other agencies - all of which could be severely affected by EPA risk findings - are being allowed to participate "at almost every step in the assessment process," said the GAO.

Those agencies, their private contractors and manufacturers of the chemicals face restrictions and major cleanup requirements, depending on the EPA’s scientific determinations.

"By law the EPA must protect our families from dangerous chemicals," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the Senate committee’s chairman. "Instead, they’re protecting the chemical companies."

The EPA’s risk assessment process "never was perfect," Boxer said in an interview Monday. "But at least it put the scientists up front. Now the scientists are being shunted aside."

The GAO said many of the deliberations over risks posed by specific chemicals "occur in what amounts to a black box" of secrecy because the White House claims they are private executive branch deliberations.

Such secrecy "reduces the credibility of the … assessments and hinders the EPA’s ability to manage them," the GAO report said.

The White House said the GAO is wrong in suggesting that the EPA has lost control in assessing the health risks posed by toxic chemicals.

"Only EPA has the authority to finalize an EPA assessment," Kevin F. Neyland, deputy administrator of the White House budget office’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in response to the GAO. He called the interagency process "a dialogue that helps to ensure the quality" of the reviews.

One EPA scientist with extensive knowledge of the changes in the agency’s risk assessment policies ridiculed the claim that the EPA still has the final say.

"Unless there is concurrence by other agencies, … things don’t go forward. It means we stop what we are doing," said the scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of endangering his career.

"The (EPA) scientists feel as if they have lost complete control of the process, that it’s been taken over by the White House and that they’re calling the shots," the scientist said.

The GAO investigation focused on the EPA’s computerized database, known as IRIS - the Integrated Risk Information System. It contains data on the human health effects of exposure to some 540 toxic chemicals in the environment. New chemicals are being proposed constantly for inclusion under a complicated assessment process that can take five years or more.

After years of stops and starts, the GAO said, the EPA has yet to determine carcinogen risks for a number of major chemicals such as:

-Naphthalene, a chemical used in rocket fuel as well as in manufacturing commercial products such as mothballs, dyes and insecticides.

-Trichloroethylene, or TCE, a widely used industrial degreasing agent.

-Perchloroethylene, or "perc," a chemical used in dry cleaning, metal degreasing and making chemical products.

-Formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable gas used to making building materials.

Environmentalists say these chemicals have been widely found at military bases and Superfund sites and in soil, lakes, streams and groundwater.

The findings, after an 18-month investigation by the congressional watchdog agency, come at a time of growing criticism from members of Congress and health and environmental advocates over alleged political interference in the government’s science activities.

Last week, a confidential survey by an advocacy group of EPA scientists showed more than half of the 1,600 respondents worried about political pressure in their work.

Australian researchers are a step closer to turning plants into ‘biofactories’ capable of producing oils which can be used to replace petrochemicals used to manufacture a range of products.

Scientists working within the joint CSIRO/Grains Research and Development Corporation Crop Biofactories Initiative (CBI) have achieved a major advance by accumulating 30 per cent of an unusual fatty acid (UFA) in the model plant, Arabidopsis.

UFAs are usually sourced from petrochemicals to produce plastics, paints and cosmetics. CBI is developing new technologies for making a range of UFAs in oilseeds, to provide Australia with a head start in the emerging ‘bioeconomy’.

“Using crops as biofactories has many advantages, beyond the replacement of dwindling petrochemical resources,” says the leader of the crop development team, CSIRO’s Dr Allan Green. “Global challenges such as population growth, climate change and the switch from non-renewable resources are opening up many more opportunities for bio-based products.”

The production of biofactory plants can be matched to demand and will provide farmers with new, high-value crops bred to suit their growing conditions. The technology is low greenhouse gas generating, sustainable and can reinvigorate agribusiness.

“We are confident we have the right genes, an understanding of the biosynthesis pathways and the right breeding skills to produce an oilseed plant with commercially viable UFA levels in the near future,” Dr Green says.

The team will announce the successful completion of the first stage of the CBI on 28 April during the Fifth Annual World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology & Bioprocessing (WCIBB), being held in Chicago, Illinois, from 27-30 April 2008.

The team’s selection of safflower as the target crop will also be announced.

“Safflower is an ideal plant for industrial production for Australia,” Dr Green says. “It is hardy and easy to grow, widely adapted to Australian production regions and easily isolated from food production systems.”

The CBI is a 12-year project which aims to add value to the Australian agricultural and chemical industries by developing technologies to produce novel industrial compounds from genetically modified oilseed crops.

The project focuses on three key areas; Industrial Oils, Complex Monomers and Protein Biopolymers. CBI project leaders will present the latest research findings in each of these three areas at the WCIBB in Chicago which will showcase innovations in the convergence of biotechnology, chemistry and agriculture.

Source: CSIRO