King is setting a dangerous precedent. The government has no business examining any peaceful religious group because a handful of adherents have broken the law. If it did, it would be past time to look into the Roman Catholic Church, which clearly was – or maybe still is – concealing the sex crimes of priests and others.”
“In this country, much of the internal threat comes from a very small number of addled young men whose incompetence is often just plain awe-inspiring. They no more represent the American Muslim community than some randy priest does Peter King.

Read on at the Washington Post.

They also ask, “What would be the impact on the middle class if the Republicans continue to hold the entire tax bill hostage in order to provide a windfall tax cut for millionaires and billionaires?”

So today we’re trying out something new to cut through the political back-and-forth you are hearing every day. We are breaking down an issue affecting American families into simple, understandable terms. The table below shows the actual impact on a married couple filing jointly for various income levels. It is based on taxable incomes, which are typically thousands or even tens of thousands less than gross income.

As you can see, the impact of the Obama tax plan for a family earning more than $300,000 is less than 1% of gross income; for families who earn from $400,000 up to $1,000,000 a year, it is less than 2%.

If the Republicans continue to hold the entire Obama bill hostage to the wealthiest Americans as they are threatening, the impact on the working poor families will be almost 3% and approximately 5% on middle class families.

This Republican effort is an attempt to give a tax break of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to millionaires and billionaires. We simply can’t afford to give the wealthiest Americans these big tax cuts that would add $700 billion to the deficit. According to non partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), this would be one of the least effective ways to grow our economy and just about the worst way to help create jobs.

Assumptions:
- Taxable income is after all deductions and exemptions but not tax credits (ex: solar energy tax credit)
- The Obama proposal includes an increase of 3% on top two existing tax brackets (ex: top bracket becomes 38% for married couples filling jointly with taxable income above $373,000 but only on the amount exceeding $250,000)

By Hugh Parkhurst
I spent almost two months without a car earlier this summer, getting around by bike, the Long Island Rail Road and rides from friends. During this time, I put around 300 miles on an old Schwinn 3-speed bicycle, gathering local census information and doing grocery shopping and other activities. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this experience.

300 Miles on a 3 Speed Schwinn

In early spring I began working for the Census Bureau as an enumerator, going door to door to obtain information necessary to complete a comprehensive picture of America’s population. A week into the fieldwork, my car began to operate erratically. Fortunately the census work was local. Out came my trusty old 3-speed Schwinn. I adapted quickly to going door to door with the bike and in many respects, the bike proved more convenient than the car. For example, the bike took me closer to mail boxes and I was able to go by more slowly, without holding up traffic, while I looked for addresses. In addition, I also was able to park quickly and exactly where I needed to be. The weather cooperated and I completed the remaining six weeks of census work on the bike.

Buying groceries was another important task. I had a set of panniers—bags, like saddlebags, which fit on either side of a carrier rack on the rear of the bike. Using them and a small knapsack, I was able to carry a week’s necessities from my favorite grocery store, a round trip of approximately 13 miles. I could have shopped closer, but I came to enjoy the trip. Frozen vegetables doubled as “ice” to help keep meat cool. Fruits and vegetables were strongly preferred over snack food. The snack foods contained empty calories and simply took up too much valuable space. During this period, I lost over 10 pounds, which I attribute to the increase in exercise and a healthier diet.

The bike was also used for 9 mile round trips to my allergist, running to pick up parts for the car and even a couple of scouting trips for a newer car, with most of the distance covered by the LIRR. I live in Greenlawn on the North Shore just east of Huntington and traveled as far southwest as Merrick (23 miles each way) and as far southeast as North Bellport (27 miles each way).

What happened to the car? Eventually it was fixed, without any apparent long-term damage to the engine, so the hunt for a newer car was called off.

During the time I was without the car. I saved 8 weeks worth of gas and avoided leaving a carbon footprint of over 200 pounds of CO2. It also felt good that I had reduced my petroleum consumption during the BP oil spill. I was also pleased and grateful that friends shared rides.

Riding a Bike

To me, the three most important rules for riding a bike are:
1. Know the roads on which you will be traveling and do not ride anywhere you don’t feel comfortable. For a beginner, start by considering where you can ride your bike as you walk or drive around the neighborhood.
2. Always wear a helmet.
3. Observe all motor vehicle laws, especially the requirement to drive WITH the traffic.

Lots of other good tips are available at http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/better/.

If you use the bike to run errands, so much the better. For a run to the local drugstore, supermarket or library, a simple knapsack can easily accommodate prescriptions, numerous books, a few odds and ends, several grocery items or even a half-gallon of milk or OJ.

For more experienced riders, a reasonable pace is 10 to 14 miles per hour, depending on the type of bike, trip distance and strength and endurance. 10 miles round trip is a reasonable distance and generally adds 10-30 minutes travel time. Scout the route first, looking for the side streets you can take and shoulders you can use on those main roads you can’t avoid. Google Maps provides a tool for planning bike routes. Another handy feature of Google Maps is that it gives both instructions and distance to the destination.

One company that is taking that challenge seriously is Calera. Calera has developed a technology that will sequester the carbon from power plant emissions and use it to make green cement. The process has been in testing mode for a couple of years and a full scale pilot will start this year. Will it work? I can’t say. The challenges are significant, especially scaling up the process to handle the enormous quantities of carbon that must be processed and the even larger quantities of sea water (or other saline solutions) that must be pumped to make the process work. IF it works it sounds much more stable than other alternatives such as injecting carbon into the ground, creating huge underground reservoirs of carbon rich gases that some fear could escape in the future or cause unforeseen side effects.

Cement is a major component of concrete, the world’s most widely used man-made material, an integral part of roads, bridges and buildings. But making cement requires heating limestone and other materials to very high temperatures, a process that releases into the atmosphere large amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, a leading cause of global warming.

Brent Constantz is working to fix that problem with an environmentally-friendly cement that actually captures CO2 and locks it away.

At his California company, Calera, scientists mix air and water to create the cement powder and aggregate pebbles that are the basic ingredients of concrete. But while traditional cement, called Portland cement, adds CO2 to the atmosphere, Calera’s green cement takes the greenhouse gas out of the air – a lot of it. For every unit of carbon that Portland cement adds to the air, Brent Constantz says his green cement removes three units.

To read the rest of the article see Voice of America.

“BOSTON — After nine years of regulatory review, the federal government gave the green light on Wednesday to the nation’s first offshore wind farm, a fiercely contested project off the coast of Cape Cod. The long-running struggle over the project underscores how divisive even a “clean” energy project can be in the United States. But the decision is expected to give a significant boost to the nascent offshore wind industry in the United States, which has lagged far behind Europe and China in harnessing the strong and steady power of ocean breezes to electrify homes and businesses.”

Read the full article at The New York Times.

The waste-to-energy plants in Europe meets the threshold question of primary pollutants by strictly controlling pollutants with various filtering mechanisms. The result are facilities so clean that they emit less pollutants, such as dioxin, than backyard barbecues or fireplaces. In addition, waste-to-energy facilities have significantly less impact on global warming than state of the art landfills that collect and utilize methane gas, while waste-to-energy facilities produce nine times as much energy as the best landfill operations.

The US has lagged in implementing waste-to-energy facilities, not because of technical issues, but for other reasons. Currently, landfills in the USA are very abundant and out of sight in such places as Pennsylvania, so garbage can be shipped out and forgotten about. State and local officials are reluctant to be supportive of new waste-to-energy facilities because they could disrupt recycling plans, and most importantly, residents do not want one in their backyard, or in Long Island’s case, in their Town or County.

Long Islanders are faced with the potential of a new facility to process household waste, this time in the Town of Freeport. Hopefully we can get past labels and debate the issues without the name calling and divisive tactics which unfortunately became the norm for contentious issues during the health care debates.

Pieces like this NY Times report provide valuable information which will be used to inform the discussion and increase the understanding of the debate. “Think globally but act locally”. In this case if we help ensure that state of the art technologies are used we can have it both ways, a win-win for both local and global pollution.

Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL – Published: April 12, 2010
HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.
Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.

Continue reading @ The NY Times.

By Peter Barnes, The Grist – As U.S. climate legislation creeps forward, Senators now have two frameworks to choose from. One is from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.); the other is from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Both begin with descending carbon caps that, along with supplementary policies, promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at roughly the same rate, and both protect domestic industries by imposing fees on carbon-intensive imports from countries that don’t limit emissions. But from there the two approaches diverge markedly.

Read full article at the Grist.

NY Times Op-Ed by Thomas Freidman

I am sitting with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who, along with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, is trying to craft a new energy bill — one that could actually win 60 votes. Graham’s approach to bringing around his conservative state has been simple: avoid talking about “climate change,” which many on the right don’t believe. Instead, frame our energy challenge as a need to “clean up carbon pollution,” to “become energy independent” and to “create more good jobs and new industries for South Carolinians.” He proposes “putting a price on carbon,” starting with a very focused carbon tax, as opposed to an economywide cap-and-trade system, so as to spur both consumers and industries to invest in and buy new clean energy products. He includes nuclear energy, and insists on permitting more offshore drilling for oil and gas to give us more domestic sources, as we bridge to a new clean energy economy.

Read Thomas Friedman’s entire Op-Ed at NYTimes.com.

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

Read the rest of Al Gore’s Op-Ed at NYTimes.com.