The environment thread

[StrangeSox]

OTC inhalers suck anyway

[Rex Kickass]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/...E78L3NL20110922

 

Clearly, Obama hates you Balta.

 

And our government is just here to help, as always.

 

Haha, cute. The details of this decision were finalized in 2008. Under the Bush administration.

 

So, clearly George Bush doesn't care about Wheezing People.

[Balta1701]

Of course, the article doesn't give me enough information to evaluate if that matters, since it says the FDA can approve it when they're essential, and there's no argument given for why that design is "essential".

[Balta1701]

Here's one reaction which appears to be a doctor...it's from his blog though so yeah, as usual it only counts for about 40% of the people here.

On the one hand, these ephedrine inhalers are less expensive than prescription inhalers. On the other hand, these over-the-counter inhalers are universally considered to be extremely poor choices for asthma treatment, being both less effective than prescription medications and having far more side effects. While the safer and more effective prescription bronchodilators are more expensive, their use should be minimized by asthma patients with the use of prophylactic medications such as inhaled steroids. Regardless of their legal status, I had strongly advised my asthma patients not to use these products even well before the ban (which, once again, was passed under George Bush).

 

Update: The real problem is that many asthmatics have resorted to this type of treatment because of lack of health care coverage. Obama does deserve credit for addressing this problem.

[southsider2k5]

More at link...

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/s...rious-creditor/

 

Out of the hundreds of out-of-work employees, vendors, investors and other creditors in the bankruptcy of government-backed solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, one name stands out: the California Democratic Party.

 

Why California Democrats would be creditor to a company that received more than a half-billion dollars in federal loans to build a solar-panel plant isn’t clear. Even party officials say they’re not sure.

 

The California Democratic Party’s communications director, Tenoch Flores, said the organization was not owed “any funds in any form” by the California-based company. He said he was unclear why the party would be listed as a creditor in Solyndra’s bankruptcy filing.

 

According to campaign-finance records, Solyndra donated $7,500 to the California Democratic Party in October 2010. It’s legal in California for corporations to make donations. But that doesn’t explain why the company would identify the Democratic Party as a creditor in its bankruptcy filing a year later.

 

A Solyndra spokesman did not respond to messages seeking more details about the filing.

The empty parking lot of bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra is seen in Fremont, Calif., on Sept. 16, 2011. (Associated Press)The empty parking lot of bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra is seen in Fremont, Calif., on Sept. 16, 2011. (Associated Press)

 

Solyndra’s spending habits are under sharp scrutiny after it fired more than 1,000 employees, filed for bankruptcy this month and had its offices raided by the FBI.

 

Just two years ago, the company received federal loan guarantees of more than $500 million, money it burned through but hasn’t repaid. Because of a subsequent loan restructuring, taxpayers won’t be repaid before the private investors who poured $75 million into the company earlier this year as it tried to stay afloat.

 

The Washington Times reported last week that law firms that took credit for helping to push through the federal loan package were paid millions of dollars reported through the federal Recovery Act.

 

The same month Solyndra donated to the California Democrats, the company also contributed $1,000 each to three California state Assembly candidates, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

 

The state Democratic organization was identified in a document called a “creditor matrix.” It’s a standard filing in bankruptcy cases, where the debtor provides an alphabetical list of the names and addresses of all creditors. In the Solyndra case, the list runs more than 100 pages.

 

In an affidavit along with the court filing, the company’s chief executive, W.G. Stover Jr., swore under penalty of perjury that that creditor list was true and accurate to the best of his knowledge and that the information came from a review of the company’s books and records.

 

Powerful lobbying

 

Beyond being listed as a creditor, the state Democratic Party’s ties to Solyndra aren’t clear, but a fuller picture could emerge as the bankruptcy case unfolds. What is clear, based on public records, is that despite its well-known business failings, Solyndra was no novice when it came to politics.

 

Company officials visited the White House on numerous occasions, hired an expensive team of Washington lobbyists and, in the months before its bankruptcy, walked the halls of Congress to personally assure lawmakers that “business was booming,” as one lawmaker later recalled.

 

In the wake of the company’s collapse and subsequent raid by the FBI this month, Solyndra’s top two executives, citing their Fifth Amendment rights, refused to testify last week before the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee, which has been looking at the Solyndra loan deal for months. In bankruptcy records, the company blamed stiff foreign competition and an oversupply of solar panels for its fast downfall.

[Balta1701]

The California Democratic party's finances had a nuclear bomb go off in them about a month ago when one of their treasurers was discovered to be doing some illegal dealings. They don't have a clue how much money they actually have right now and so I'm not surprised no one has a clue where that comes from. Apparently Senator Feinstein's reelection funds have completely vanished.

[southsider2k5]

The California Democratic party's finances had a nuclear bomb go off in them about a month ago when one of their treasurers was discovered to be doing some illegal dealings. They don't have a clue how much money they actually have right now and so I'm not surprised no one has a clue where that comes from. Apparently Senator Feinstein's reelection funds have completely vanished.

 

This is the opposite of that though. Soylent Green owes the Cali Dem's money.

[Balta1701]

This is the opposite of that though. Soylent Green owes the Cali Dem's money.

I'm replying to the part where no one knows why they are on the list. No one knows where money has gone or come from in the California Dem Party for years now it seems.

[southsider2k5]

Hmm, maybe we need more regulations?

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sol...8Y5K_story.html

 

The U.S. Department of Energy learned in December that Solyndra was violating its federal loan deal, but the agency changed the loan terms to allow the solar company to continue receiving taxpayer funds, federal officials confirmed Wednesday.

 

Executives at Solyndra, which had been awarded a $535 million government-backed loan to spur its solar-panel production, confided to the Energy Department late last fall that the Fremont, Calif., company was running out of money and at risk of liquidating.

 

The company was unable on Dec. 1 to make its first $5 million payment into a special reserve fund, which was required under the loan terms and designed to help protect taxpayers.

 

Congressional investigators have questioned why the Obama administration agreed to help the company in late 2010 when it was warned that the firm was at risk of collapse. Internal e-mails show federal reviewers initially estimated they could save the taxpayers as much as $168 million by letting the company go under in December 2010, rather than resuscitating it and allowing it to draw down more federal money.

 

Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera confirmed Wednesday that the agency knew Solyndra had violated the loan terms but agreed to change the requirement to help Solyndra. The agency originally required that Solyndra make six installments of $5 million each, starting in December, to create a $30 million cash cushion for problems.

 

Solyndra closed its business Aug. 31, then filed for bankruptcy protection. Its closure laid off 1,100 workers without warning and left taxpayers on the hook to repay its half-billion-dollar loan. Days later, the Energy Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Justice Department executed surprise search warrants at the company’s headquarters as part of a criminal probe.

 

On Wednesday, the Energy Department approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona, two days before the expiration date of the program, the Associated Press reported. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant near Phoenix.

 

The Solyndra matter has turned into a political issue for the Obama administration because some of the principal investors in the start-up were linked to a major Democratic Party fundraiser, Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser. Kaiser has said through a spokesman that he had no involvement in the federal loan.

 

LaVera said the Energy Department approved a restructuring of Solyndra’s loan terms because the agency “thought it gave Solyndra a fighting chance to survive and the taxpayers their best chance to recover their loan.”

 

A House subcommittee probing the loan has questioned the decision. Obama administration officials testifying at a Sept. 14 hearing did not disclose that they had removed the requirement that Solyndra create a cash reserve.

 

By the end of 2010, Solyndra had withdrawn an estimated $460 million of its loan, approved and guaranteed by the Energy Department. With the restructuring, which some federal officials said in internal e-mails they considered highly risky, it was able to tap an additional $67 million.

 

The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), said: “Even when Solyndra was out of cash in December 2010, DOE turned a blind eye to reality, doubling down on a bad bet that further put American taxpayers at risk. . . . ”

[Balta1701]

From an article in the American Economic Review.

Abstract:

This study presents a framework to include environmental externalities into a system of national accounts. The paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the United States. An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages of air pollution emissions for the US which are multiplied times the quantity of emissions by industry to compute gross damages. Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. The largest industrial contributor to external costs is coal-fired electric generation, whose damages range from 0.8 to 5.6 times value added. (JEL E01, L94, Q53, Q56)

 

 

Money line:

 

Coal-fired electric power generators produce the largest GED of $53 billion annually. Coal plants are responsible for more than one-fourth of GED [gross external damages] from the entire US economy. The damages attributed to this industry are larger than the combined GED due to the three next most polluting industries: crop production, $15 billion/year, livestock production, $15 billion/year, and construction of roadways and bridges, $13 billion/ year.

[southsider2k5]

http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/c.jsp?ite...&wpmsrc=sms

 

Administration officials and outside advisers warned that President Obama should consider dropping plans to visit a solar startup company in 2010 because its mounting financial problems might ultimately embarrass the White House.

 

“A number of us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra,” California investor and Obama fundraiser Steve Westly wrote to Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett in May 2010. “Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term. . . . I just want to help protect the president from anything that could result in negative or unfair press.”

 

The warning, which did not convince the White House to drop the Obama factory visit, was detailed in e-mails released Monday by the Democratic minority on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel is investigating a $535 million government-backed loan to the now-shuttered company.

 

Democrats said the e-mails demonstrate that there was no political favoritism for Solyndra or for the Obama fundraiser whose family foundation held an interest in the company. But the internal messages revealed for the first time the high level of White House interest in the startup and its faltering finances after the Energy Department backed it with $535 million in loans.

 

On Monday, Obama made his first public comments about Solyndra’s collapse, saying that he does not regret supporting or visiting the company as part of his administration’s backing of clean-energy companies.

 

“Now there are going to be some failures,” he said in an ABC News/Yahoo online television interview. “Hindsight is always 20/20. It went through the normal review process and people thought this was a good bet.”

 

Since Solyndra filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 31, leaving taxpayers on the hook for almost half a billion dollars, the White House has said that decisions about supporting the solar-panel manufacturer were made by career employees at the Department of Energy, starting in the Bush administration.

 

But the e-mails capture the vigorous debate within the Obama White House about whether the solar-panel manufacturer was a smart bet. They also highlight the angst inside the West Wing about whether the president’s initiative to support clean energy was ill-equipped to pick winners, or could, as some hoped, help validate Obama’s use of $80 billion in stimulus to build a clean-energy industry.

 

Obama’s Energy Department had provided Solyndra with a government-backed loan in 2009. A year later, when the company ran out of money, the agency agreed to refinance Solyndra’s loan and continue paying out federal funds.

 

What was once a showcase of that Obama clean-energy initiative is now a political crisis for the White House. Despite the federal largesse, Solyndra’s sudden shutdown left 1,100 employees out of work and many of its assets up for auction.

 

A week later, FBI agents raided the company’s headquarters in a criminal probe looking at potential accounting fraud.

 

In spring 2010, before Solyndra’s fortunes turned, the White House highlighted the administration’s investment in the company in a “Main Street Tour,” to show taxpayers how their stimulus dollars had been put to work.

 

“Rahm is very pleased,” one staffer wrote referring to then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and the decision to have Obama visit Solyndra in May 2010. Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, has said he does not remember discussions about the company.

 

But the administration was being waived off by worried venture capitalists, some of whom were major Obama fundraisers and also advised the White House.

 

Obama fundraiser and investment fund president Steve Westly warned Obama senior deputy Valerie Jarrett days before to reconsider whether the president should visit the company that May. He cautioned that Solyndra’s financial problems might worsen and embarrass Obama later.

 

Westly’s fear stemmed from a warning issued by Solyndra’s outside auditors the previous month, in April. They noted that the company was burning through cash rapidly and might not remain a “going concern.”

 

Westly told Jarrett that if Obama visited, he should be careful about touting the company’s future.

 

“If it’s too late to change/postpone the meeting, the president should be careful about unrealistic/optimistic forecasts that could haunt him in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall, files for bankruptcy, etc.”

 

The White House Office of Management and Budget also worried. An OMB official e-mailed a White House staffer in May 2010: “I am increasingly worried that this visit could prove embarrassing to the Administration in the not too distant future.”

 

Top officials at the Energy Department counseled the White House not to worry.

 

Matt Rogers, senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on stimulus funding, responded that these kinds of warnings were typical in the Silicon Valley startup world.

 

Rogers wrote that “the ‘going concern’ letter is standard for companies pre-IPO,” and he predicted that “the company should be strong going into the fall with their new facilities on line.”

 

Obama did visit Solyndra on May 25, 2010, calling the company an“engine of economic growth.”

 

But the previous year, one of Solyndra’s own investors raised concerns in an e-mail to Obama’s senior economic adviser.

 

In late 2009, Brad Jones of Redpoint Ventures warned Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, that the Energy Department didn’t seem “well-equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much.” He noted that Solyndra, which his company was backing, had received its loan despite having no profits and revenue of less than $100 million.

 

“While that is good for us, I can’t imagine it’s a good way for the government to use taxpayer money,” Jones wrote.

 

Summers agreed: “I relate well to your view that gov is a crappy vc [venture capitalist] and if u were closer to it you’d feel more strongly,” then added: “What should we do?”

 

Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who chairs the investigative subcommittee leading the probe, said the Democrats’ preemptive release of the unflattering e-mails was “damage control.”

 

“The Democrats deny that any political influence was involved, yet in their own memo they highlight the role of Obama fundraiser Steve Westly in the discussions,” Stearns said in a statement.

 

[email protected]

 

[email protected]

[Balta1701]

Best Buy to begin offering Geeksquad home energy audits. In addition, will start offering things like smart-thermostats and energy usage monitors in their stores.

[JorgeFabregas]

I just used this page to opt out of receiving three different phone books:

http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/

I don't think that it covers all of the publishers, but we've received four books (two pairs) since moving in less than two months ago. Oy.

[NorthSideSox72]

I just used this page to opt out of receiving three different phone books:

http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/

I don't think that it covers all of the publishers, but we've received four books (two pairs) since moving in less than two months ago. Oy.

Thanks for that, I will do so as well.

 

Still a big fan of the DO NOT MAIL list concept, which I hope is adopted at some point.

 

[southsider2k5]

Thanks for that, I will do so as well.

Still a big fan of the DO NOT MAIL list concept, which I hope is adopted at some point.

 

Won't happen. Junk mail is literally what is keeping the post office in business.

[NorthSideSox72]

Won't happen. Junk mail is literally what is keeping the post office in business.

I know it won't, but it really is a nonsensical waste of money, and society would be better off without it.

 

Sorry, "it" being unsolicited junk mail, not the USPS. Post Office is still needed, and should have a simple model - move official mail to destination, and charge postage according to what that task costs.

 

[southsider2k5]

I know it won't, but it really is a nonsensical waste of money, and society would be better off without it.

 

Sorry, "it" being unsolicited junk mail, not the USPS. Post Office is still needed, and should have a simple model - move official mail to destination, and charge postage according to what that task costs.

 

I got what you meant.

[StrangeSox]

so Perry's administration has been heavily editing environmental reports to not just remove any and all references to climate change but also any mention of measured sea level rises. You also have flagrantly wrong papers on the anti-AGW side getting retracted pretty regularly.

 

But somehow, none of that weakens the anti-AGW ideology. They still know they're right. And a handful of isolated emails from a few institutes that *maybe* implicate some ethical concerns but are all later cleared? Obvious proof of the worldwide conspiracy hoax for grant money!

[NorthSideSox72]

so Perry's administration has been heavily editing environmental reports to not just remove any and all references to climate change but also any mention of measured sea level rises. You also have flagrantly wrong papers on the anti-AGW side getting retracted pretty regularly.

 

But somehow, none of that weakens the anti-AGW ideology. They still know they're right. And a handful of isolated emails from a few institutes that *maybe* implicate some ethical concerns but are all later cleared? Obvious proof of the worldwide conspiracy hoax for grant money!

 

As with many issues, there are real and good reasons to question just how much the climate is changing, and just how much of that is anthropogenic. There are also very good reasons to stand up and say that maybe spending a zillion dollars in reaction to it isn't a great idea, so let's be reasonable.

 

Then there are the people so driven by fear, group-think and religion-gone-awry, that they just flat out refuse to acknowledge data and facts at all, instead relying on gut feelings to form scientific opinions. It is chosen ignorance, and it makes me ill. Honestly, it is probably the single biggest (but not only) reason I no longer lean towards the GOP. It wasn't always this way.

 

[StrangeSox]

Sure, and scientists question that every day. It's just that something approaching 99% of them who actually study this stuff all have a basic agreement that the globe is warming, that we're the primary driver of the accelerated warming and that these changes will have global environmental and economic impacts, leading to floods, droughts, large-scale extinctions, rising sea levels, more violent weather, etc. We can continue to figure out the best ways to address these problems in a realistic scenario that doesn't plunge the developed world into a unprecedented depression, but the flip side of that is that the cost of inaction is likely even greater than the most ambitious plans.

[Balta1701]

Crap.

Takeo Hayashida signed on with a citizens’ group to test for radiation near his son’s baseball field in Tokyo after government officials told him they had no plans to check for fallout from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Like Japan’s central government, local officials said there was nothing to fear in the capital, 160 miles from the disaster zone.

 

Then came the test result: the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl.

 

The patch of ground was one of more than 20 spots in and around the nation’s capital that the citizens’ group, and the respected nuclear research center they worked with, found were contaminated with potentially harmful levels of radioactive cesium.

 

It has been clear since the early days of the nuclear accident, the world’s second worst after Chernobyl, that that the vagaries of wind and rain had scattered worrisome amounts of radioactive materials in unexpected patterns far outside the evacuation zone 12 miles around the stricken plant. But reports that substantial amounts of cesium had accumulated as far away as Tokyo have raised new concerns about how far the contamination had spread, possibly settling in areas where the government has not even considered looking.

[NorthSideSox72]

GE now signalling that they will go from small-scale experimentation, to big time implementation and manufacturing, in the solar energy market. They apparently now feel that for companies with the right cost structure (i.e. not startups), the time is now ripe for this, even in the states. Article here.

 

This could be a big change, if other larger manufacturers are starting to see that where the startups can't get it done, the big kids can, even at the cost levels they have in the US.

 

[Balta1701]

Can't believe I have to drive around a f***ing Durango this week.

[Balta1701]

An all-electric DeLorean.

I really can't add anything to that description.

[Balta1701]