Category Archives: evil polluters

Gasoline Prices Hit 4 $$$ A Gallon – We are all going to die

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OK I was wrong. I admit it so there. But I have to admit that I never thought the huge Oil Companies nor the Oil Producers nor the Huge Refiners would ever admit that there is absolutely no relationship between supply and demand either in the price of a barrel of oil, or in the price of gasoline, much less admit that there is no relationship BETWEEN THE TWO of them. But they did. So When I said that Oil would hit 120 or 130 $$$ per barrel next summer my thoughts were mainly on gasoline.  Yet in a world finally gone honest for reasons I do not understand…I must change my prediction about Oil and change it to Gasoline. Who knows what the price of Oil will be next Summer but I predict the Price of Gasoline will be over 3$$ a gallon, and easily could be around 4 $$$ a gallon. Boy would I love to be wrong. We should Tax Gasoline out of existence,

But enough about me:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29210445/

First heard here:

http://www.peakoil.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=46258

Crude oil is getting cheaper — so why isn’t gas?

Energy market has turned upside-down amid U.S. recession

updated 4:50 p.m. CT, Sun., Feb. 15, 2009

NEW YORK – Crude oil prices have fallen to new lows for this year. So you’d think gas prices would sink right along with them.

Not so.

On Thursday, for example, crude oil closed just under $34 a barrel, its lowest point for 2009. But the national average price of a gallon of gas rose to $1.95 on the same day, its peak for the year. On Friday gas went a penny higher.

To drivers once again grimacing as they tank up, it sounds like a conspiracy. But it has more to do with an energy market turned upside-down that has left gas cut off from its usual economic moorings.

The price of gas is indeed tied to oil. It’s just a matter of which oil.

The benchmark for crude oil prices is West Texas Intermediate, drilled exactly where you would imagine. That’s the price, set at the New York Mercantile Exchange, that you see quoted on business channels and in the morning paper.

Right now, in an unusual market trend, West Texas crude is selling for much less than inferior grades of crude from other places around the world. A severe economic downturn has left U.S. storage facilities brimming with it, sending prices for the premium crude to five-year lows.

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Please read the entire article it is full of great information. If you ignore the idiocy above about “it depends on which oil you buy”, the fact is that oil storage is nearing its capacity because everyone is “saving” their oil “til the markets rise”. Yet at the same time there is this huge glut of oil, there is near scarcity and rising prices in gasoline. That is because the Refiners are not buying oil and restricting gasoline supplies to increase price. You then see the real wizard in the machine, or the magician behind the curtains, because as gas prices rise consumption already at market lows will fall further. The point: They can not raise gasoline prices fast enough to make money while they are concurrently scaring the bejeezes out of gasoline, diesel and kerasene (manly airlines and the airforce) users. Then there is the question of what to do with all that stored oil. More on that later! This in from Texas where they love their oil (that’s earl to you):

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2009/02/09/daily38.html

Friday, February 13, 2009

Gas prices rising throughout Texas

San Antonio Business Journal

The nation’s refiners are cutting back on the supply of gasoline in the market, leading to a steady increase in gasoline prices throughout the country, according to AAA Texas.

Retail prices nationwide are inching back toward the $2 mark. The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline is now at $1.95.

In Texas, the average price of gas is currently $1.83 a gallon, an increase of nearly three cents over a week ago.

In San Antonio, average gas prices are also up three cents this week, to $1.80 a gallon.

“The higher gas prices come at a time when crude oil prices remain very sluggish and the Department of Energy and experts say supplies are abundant,” AAA Texas spokesman Dan Ronan says.

“Oil today has been trading on the NYMEX exchange around $35 a barrel, clearly in the lower range of the $30 to $50 pattern it’s been in for the past several weeks,” he says.

What’s driving higher retail gasoline prices are the reductions in capacity many refiners are taking to address a slow-down in demand for gasoline and the recession, Ronan says.

Americans currently are spending $671 million a day on gasoline. This is down from $1.12 billion spent daily on gasoline during January 2008.

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What set all this market transparency off (hahaha I never thought I would say that about an energy market) you might wonder? Well it has to be the speculators. I have always wondered about this concept “the smartest guys in the room”.  Echoed in the earlier movie, Wall Street, where Gecko says “Greed is Good”. Thieves are not very smart. Think about it. How smart do you have to be to take money from the weak and the helpless. I first heard this phrase applied to the “people” at Enron. But their business was just fraud…plain and simple. They did not make any money they just took other people’s money.  Even the Rich are starting to notice and they hardly ever do that:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/gas-week-cents-2303144-county-prices

 

Monday, February 9, 2009

Slowly rising gasoline prices? Forget it

Prices at the pump not finished increasing.

By SERENA MARIA DANIELS

The Orange County Register

Comments 6 | Recommend 1

Orange County gas prices have jumped 10 cents in the past week, a reversal of the trend of slower, more gradual increases.

A gallon of regular unleaded goes for $2.17, up 10 cents since last week, and 27 cents higher than a month ago. Last week and the week previous, prices seemed to be leveling off at $2.07, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California and the Oil Price Information Service.

Prices are still 83 cents less than a year ago, and $2.43 cheaper than the June 19 record of $4.60.

In Los Angeles County, gas goes for $2.18, the Auto Club says.

Orangecountygasprices.com says that the cheapest gas in Orange County can be found for $1.98 at the 76 station at 1201 S. State College Blvd at Ball Road in Anaheim. The most expensive gas is at the Chevron at 26988 Ortega Highway at Del Obispo Street in San Juan Capistrano.

Contact the writer: 714-704-3795 or sdaniels@ocregister.com

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The smartest guys in the room got the ball rolling by creating the housing bubble. But when the big money pulled out of the market well before the crash it had to have “somewhere to go”. So the rocket scientists suggested commodities, in particular Oil. That destabilized what had been an incredibly stable market and the chicanery caused the weak regulatory system to collapse. The see-saws whipped the market and exposed the LIE that was the market justification. What are they going to do with all that oil? Pump it back into the ground, but more likely abandon it. Think about that?>! Yet some people want to live in the nicer world of the 1990s

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http://media.www.dailytoreador.com/media/storage/paper870/news/2009/01/09/News/Local.Gasoline.Prices.Rising.Crude.Oil.Prices.Falling-3582858.shtml

However, he said he would not speculate about the future prices of oil because it could turn into a “guessing game.”

Regular grade unleaded fuel in Amarillo sold for an average of $2.967 per gallon a year ago, according to AAA’s Web site. The same grade of gas was sold Thursday for $1.683 per gallon.

Peter Summers, an assistant professor in the Economics and Geography department, said he thinks most people are taking the increases “in stride.”

“As expensive as oil and gas got last summer, and to see such a huge reversal of that,” Summers said, “not many people were expecting it and maybe people got used to it.”

The increases could be affecting construction around campus, he said, because the increasing prices of petroleum could raise the price of asphalt.

Bolton said he does not feel like lower prices would be a long-term trend, but if prices could stabilize between $2 to $2.50 per gallon, people could afford gas and companies could still profit off gas sales.

The average price for regular grade unleaded fuel was $1.614 in the Austin-San Marcos area and $1.625 in the Dallas area. The national average for regular grade unleaded fuel was $1.762.

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Australia Feeling The Effects Of Global Warming – There is a reason they call it downunder

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In Victoria the temperature has been above 44 degrees all week and they are forecasting another week of 40+ temperatures.  Power is failing, trains have stopped running because tracks are buckling under the heat .  It’s just scorching.  And it seems that the people are not the only ones suffering.
 
Check out these photos of a little Koala which just walked  onto  a  back porch looking for a bit of heat relief.   The woman filled up a bucket  for it and this is what happened!

bears.JPG

Kinda dark but:

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Getting better:

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About right:

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But see this is actually the effects of Global Warming. We are burning the animals and plants off this planet UP.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900

australialsta_tmo_2009025.jpg

For those who track their local temperatures using the Celsius scale, 40 degrees is a daunting number. In early February 2009, residents of southeastern Australia were cringing at their weather forecasts, as predictions of temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) meant that a blistering heat wave was continuing.

This map of Australia shows how the land surface temperature from January 25 to February 1 compared to the average mid-summer temperatures the continent experienced between 2000-2008. Places where temperatures were warmer than average are red, places experiencing near-normal temperatures are white, and places where temperatures were cooler than average are blue. The data were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. While southern Australia was scorching, a similarly large area of northern and central Australia was several degrees cooler than it was in the previous nine years. The cool anomaly across that region is probably linked to the above-average rainfall the area has received during this year’s wet season.

Land surface temperature is how hot the surface of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location. From a satellite’s point of view, the “surface” is whatever it sees when it looks through the atmosphere to the ground. That could be the sand on a beach, the grass on a lawn, the roof of a building, or a paved road. Thus, daytime land surface temperature is often much higher than the air temperature that is included in the daily weather report—a fact that anyone who has walked barefoot across a parking lot on a summer afternoon could verify.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) called this heat wave “exceptional,” not only for the high temperatures but for their duration. One-day records were broken in multiple cities, with temperatures in the mid-40s. In Kyancutta, South Australia, the temperature reached 48.2 degrees Celsius (118.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Many places also set records for the number of consecutive days with record-breaking heat.

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It will only get worse.

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Energy Consumption And Water Consumption Go Hand In Hand – Throw it away throw it awa….

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Only contrary to the new environmental mantra there really is an “away” to water. Once its befouled (I love that word), then un-befouling it is difficult. Take for instaces what is happening to the bulk of the fresh water in the world, the Artic and the Antartic ice sheets. If we are going to melt them off we would be better off trying to transport that water to some storage location like a dried up lake bed(s), than let it melt into the sea. Because then it is really hard to get it to be fresh water again. Same with pollution, once you dump contaminates into water then it is very hard to clean up. We have been doing that in a big way for 300 years.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5562906.ece

January 22, 2009

Ecologists warn the planet

is running short of water

Leo Lewis in Tokyo 

A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind’s expanding “water footprint” could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.

The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term “peak ecological water” — the point where, like the concept of “peak oil”, the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.

The world is in danger of running out of “sustainably managed water”, according to Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.

Humans — via agriculture, industry and other demands – use about half of the world’s renewable and accessible fresh water. But even at those levels, billions of people live without the most basic water services, Dr Gleick said……..

A glass of orange juice, for example, needs 850 litres of fresh water to produce, according to the Pacific Institute and the Water Footprint Network, while the manufacture of a kilogram of microchips — requiring constant cleaning to remove chemicals — needs about 16,000 litres. A hamburger comes in at 2,400 litres of fresh water, depending on the origin and type of meat used:}

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Why Are We Doing All This Home Improvement Anyway – Well to save money of course but..

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To save our grandchildren as well..

 http://www.livescience.com/environment/090121-antarctica-warming.html#comments

Antarctica Is Warming:

Climate Picture Clears Up

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer

posted: 21 January 2009 01:04 pm ET

 

Warming temperatures in Antarctica
This illustration depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years, with the dark red showing the area that has warmed the most. Credit: NASA

The frozen desert interior of Antarctica was thought to be the lone holdout resisting the man-made warming affecting the rest of the globe, with some areas even showing signs of cooling.

Some global warming contrarians liked to point to inner Antarctica as a counter-example. But climate researchers have now turned this notion on its head, with the first study to show that the entire continent is warming, and has been for the past 50 years.

“Antarctica is warming, and it’s warming at the same rate as the rest of the planet,” said study co-author Michael Mann of Penn State University.

This finding, detailed in the Jan. 21 issue of the journal Nature, has implications for estimating ice melt and sea level rise from the continent, which is almost entirely covered by ice that averages about a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick. The revelation also undermines the common use of Antarctica as an argument against global warming by contrarians, Mann said.

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For more see the rest of this article and:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/4307829/Antarctica-is-warming-faster-according-to-scientists.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE50I4G520090120?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

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Never mind this:

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/01/21_seasons.shtml

Summer peak,

winter low temperatures now arrive 2 days earlier

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 21 January 2009

BERKELEY — Not only has the average global temperature increased in the past 50 years, but the hottest day of the year has shifted nearly two days earlier, according to a new study by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

July
Map of average distribution of global temperatures for JulyFebuary
Map of average distribution of global temperatures for FebruaryThe average distribution of global temperatures for July and February. Because the sun is further north in July, the warm bulge of high temperatures is shifted into the northern hemisphere in that month. In the Northern Hemisphere, warm temperatures extend farther north on land than over ocean in the summer and cold temperatures extend farther south on land than on the ocean in the winter. (Image by Alexander R. Stine/UC Berkeley; data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia )

Just as human-generated greenhouse gases appear to the be the cause of global warming, human activity may also be the cause of the shift in the cycle of seasons, according to Alexander R. Stine, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science and first author of the report.”We see 100 years where there is a very natural pattern of variability, and then we see a large departure from that pattern at the same time as global mean temperatures start increasing, which makes us suspect that there’s a human role here,” he said.

Although the cause of this seasonal shift – which has occurred over land, but not the ocean – is unclear, the researchers say the shift appears to be related, in part, to a particular pattern of winds that also has been changing over the same time period. This pattern of atmospheric circulation, known as the Northern Annular Mode, is the most important wind pattern for controlling why one winter in the Northern Hemisphere is different from another. The researchers found that the mode also is important in controlling the arrival of the seasons each year.

Whatever the cause, Stine said, current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models do not predict this phase shift in the annual temperature cycle.

Details are published in the Jan. 22 issue of the journal Nature.

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Why Call Them Landfills? They are dumps, eyesores, middens and disgraces.

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 When has it been ok to urinate and defecate in a drinking water source. But Humans world wide do it every day. Some of us purify those byproducts before they actually get to the river or the lake or the aquifer, some of us don’t. When has it ever been OK to put food products let alone industrial products (lets take the buy out of byproduct) in a drinking water source yet we have done it for 200 years. What did we think? That there would be no results?

Yet we go further. We stack our garbage in the most inappropriate places like we are PROUD of it. Heh look our garbage pile is bigger than yours.  Like the garbage dump that you can see from SPACE.

http://gothamist.com/2003/09/30/fresh_killpark.php

Fresh Kill…Park?

Mayor Bloomberg announced the city’s plans to turn the closed Fresh Kills landkill into a park. The Times points out that the landfill is “a garbage dump site that is so large it can be seen from space,” which is why it’s a sensitive and important issue for Staten Islanders…especially Staten Islanders who can vote. Reporter Michel Cooper describes the city’s renderings of a Fresh Kills Park as “Monet using Photoshop” or Andrew Wyeth-like. Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro called the announcement was “the final nail in the heart of Dracula,” as people have been speculating the dump might reopen since it closed in 2001. The Post says the proposal from Field Operations, the landscape company that won the competition to transform Fresh Kills, includes “bird-nesting island, public roads, boardwalks, soccer and baseball fields, bridle paths and a 5,000-seat stadium.

Of course, all of this is also an effort to keep his approval numbers from slipping any further, although at this point, it’d be in the negative territory…people would just claim ignorance when asked about Mayor Bloomberg.

More information about Fresh Kills.

2003_9_freshkills.jpg

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What the heck have we ever been thinking?

 http://naturecalendar.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/fresh-kills-earning-back-its-name

fk2.jpg

by Erik Baard

 

Not so many years ago, if you told people that you were getting up early on Saturday morning to rush over to Fresh Kills on Staten Island, they would have thought you were crazy or a highly-paid union worker. Today, a few savvy folks might peg you for a naturalist.

 

The world’s largest dump (actually, the world’s largest manmade structure, of sorts, in that it exceeded the volume of the Great Wall of China) is quietly transforming into the city’s second largest park, after Pelham Bay Park. You can witness the process yourself by signing up for a free tour now through November through this link. Don’t fret the competition to get a ticket – the tour I joined this weekend wasn’t booked up. Besides, you have, oh, a few more years of chances. The park officially opens in 2036.

 (the site has four large ones mounds, ranging between 140? and 200? tall)

At the moment the trash is being digested by microbes, which will actually cause the mounds to shrink a bit. But not before they’ve earned their keep! The methane (“natural gas” in daily parlance), organic chemicals, and carbon dioxide produced are tapped via long pipe networks (see the methane taps in the foreground of the above photo by Emmanuel). The natural gas is purified and sold to Keyspan (now part of National Grid), which in turn sells it to heat up to 10,000 homes at a time. I can imagine a “green” dry cleaner using the CO2 to spiff up designer suits for the local gentry.

 

Less immediately marketable is the leachate goo that landfills produce when water jazzes up microbial and fungal activity. That’s dried and shipped out to another landfill in West Virginia. As a side note, the five boroughs now send trash to Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. Remember, the primary insight of environmentalism is that when things are thrown away, there is no “away.”

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Please read both articles if you have a strong stomach.

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Why We Throw Things Away? Everything has value.

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Isn’t throwing things away basically throwing money on the ground and walking away? Some people assert that discarding behavior originates in our time, historically, spent in the trees.  In other words a primate swinging in the trees with no pockets throws everything away, even if its valuable sometimes. In fact if it is valuable and it lands on the ground and there is a predator around it could be lost forever.

Other people say that our discarding behavior is based in our hunting techniques. Once we figured out that we could kill other meat sources by throwing rocks and sticks then it was a simple step to throw other things away as well. But middens are an archaeological constant.

Still other people have pointed out that discarding behavior was probably a fact of our nomadic lives. They argue that for us to retain “things” we would have had to carry them. So there would be a point where a thing, like a broken spear, or a pot would no longer possess enough value that would make it worth carrying on to the next campsite.

But will that explain all of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill

Landfill

A landfill, also known as a dump (and historically as a midden), is a site for the disposal of waste materials by burial and is the oldest form of waste treatment. Historically, landfills have been the most common methods of organized waste disposal and remain so in many places around the world.

Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites (where a producer of waste carries out their own waste disposal at the place of production) as well as sites used by many producers. Many landfills are also used for other waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling).

A landfill also may refer to ground that has been filled in with soil and rocks instead of waste materials, so that it can be used for a specific purpose, such as for building houses. Unless they are stabilized, these areas may experience severe shaking or liquefaction of the ground in a large earthquake.

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That hill is a garbage dump on an island in Florida. Or is this worth it?:

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

The world’s rubbish dump:

a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

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INDEPENDENT GRAPHICS

 

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

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Please see this article…it is really really really scary.

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Archer Daniels Midland And Greenwash – They profess green but consistenly pollute

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We are going to trust these folks with our watershed?

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646

Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret

by Sasha Lilley, Special to CorpWatch
June 1st, 2006

The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a “City of Power and Progress.” If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. The agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the largest U.S. producer of ethanol, which it makes by distilling corn. ADM also operates coal-fired plants at its company base in Decatur, Illinois, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is currently adding another coal-powered facility at its Clinton, Iowa ethanol plant.

That’s not all. “[Ethanol] plants themselves – not even the part producing the energy – produce a lot of air pollution,” says Mike Ewall, director of the Energy Justice Network. “The EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has cracked down in recent years on a lot of Midwestern ethanol plants for excessive levels of carbon monoxide, methanol, toluene, and volatile organic compounds, some of which are known to cause cancer.”

A single ADM corn processing plant in Clinton, Iowa generated nearly 20,000 tons of pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds in 2004, according to federal records. The EPA considers an ethanol plant as a “major source” of pollution if it produces more than 100 tons of any one pollutant per year, although it has recently proposed increasing that cap to 250 tons.

Sulfur dioxide is classified by the EPA as a contributor to respiratory and heart disease and the generation of acid rain. Nitrogen oxides produce ozone and a wide variety of toxic chemicals as well as contributing to global warming, according to the EPA, while many volatile organic compounds are cancer-causing. Last year, Environmental Defense, a national environmental group, ranked the Clinton plant as the 26th largest emitter of carcinogenic compounds in the U.S.

For years, ADM promoted itself as the “supermarket to the world” on major U.S. radio and television networks like NPR, CBS, NBC, and PBS where it underwrites influential programs such as the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Now, as it actively promotes its ethanol business, ADM has rolled out its new eco-friendly slogan, “Resourceful by Nature” which “reinforces our role as an essential link between farmers and consumers.”

Despite the company’s attempts at green packaging, ADM is ranked as the tenth worst corporate air polluter, on the “Toxic 100” list of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. The Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency has charged the company with violations of the Clean Air Act in hundreds of processing units, covering 52 plants in 16 states. In 2003 the two agencies reached a $351 million settlement with the company. Three years earlier, ADM was fined $1.5 million by the Department of Justice and $1.1 million by the State of Illinois for pollution related to ethanol production and distribution. Currently, the corporation is involved in approximately 25 administrative and judicial proceedings connected to federal and state Superfund laws regarding the environmental clean-up of sites contaminated by ADM operations.

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Even The Right Wing Doesn’t Like Archer Danieals Midland -How Often do I agree with the Cato Institute?

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To date once:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-241.html

Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study In Corporate Welfare

by James Bovard

James Bovard is an associate policy analyst with the Cato Institute. His most recent book is Shakedown: How the Government Screws You from A to Z (Viking, 1995).

Executive Summary

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30

One of the most politically charged debates in Washington revolves around business subsidies known as “corporate welfare.” A number of policy organizations have published studies examining the corporate welfare phenomenon: what qualifies as corporate welfare, how much it costs taxpayers, and how much it damages the economy. This study examines the dynamics of corporate welfare somewhat differently by investigating ADM as a classic case study of how those subsidies are obtained, how the welfare state encourages such “rent seeking,” and how such practices fundamentally corrupt the political life of a nation. Congress’s expressed desire to foster a free marketplace cannot be taken seriously until ADM’s corporate hand is removed from the federal till.

Introduction

ADM is certainly the nation’s most arrogant welfare recipient. And it is one of the few welfare recipients that spend millions of dollars each year advertising on Sunday morning television shows populated and watched by politicians. Chairman Dwayne Andreas’s and ADM’s success in farming Washington represents the rational result of contemporary government policies that turn elections into “an advanced auction of stolen goods,” as H. L. Mencken quipped. Thanks to its multi-million-dollar hustling in Washington, a company that lives and dies on the generosity of the American taxpayer has managed to get itself revered as a great public servant. Although ADM is not the only corporation with its hand out in Washington, it is easily one of the most successful beggars on the block.(1)

Andreas recently told a reporter for Mother Jones, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”(2) Andreas’s comment about “no free markets” is like the old joke about the son who murdered his parents and then asked for the court’s mercy because he was an orphan. ADM champions political control over markets and then invokes that control as an excuse for its continued political manipulation. Andreas has exerted his influence in Washington to ensure that the U.S. form of “socialism” resembles 1930s’ Italian corporate statism: the government plunders the citizenry for the benefit of politically connected corporations. And, though Andreas does not like to admit it, there are many markets in the world for agricultural products that are not controlled by politicians.

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I know it is from 1995 but what has changed in the past 13 years? They have gotten a whole lot bigger.

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CES Is Not The Only Organization Critical Of Archer Daniels Midland – They can be so wrong in so many ways

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http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/cms/page1662.cfm



Download this page as a pdf
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More on ADM
*Corporate welfare and greenwashing
*Corporate snapshot
*Take actionMore info on ADM from Rainforest Action Network
Forests burn in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations.
Forests burn in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations.
© Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

First the good news: burning ‘biodiesel’ fuels emits less global warming pollution than burning standard, oil-based gasoline.

Now the bad news: producing biofuels creates tons of global warming pollution – easily enough to offset any global warming benefits gained at the tail end of the process.

At least that’s the case when it comes to Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and its business partners that manufacture and trade in Indonesian palm oil.

ADM is an agribusiness giant, and they’re a big player in the biodiesel business. A large part of the business relies on clearing Indonesia’s woodsy wetlands, or “peatlands,” to create palm plantations. The result? A whole lot of palm oil and a whole lot of resulting global warming pollution.

A 2007 Greenpeace report found that clearing, draining and setting fire to Indonesian peatlands emits 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That’s about four percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly half of Indonesia’s peatlands have already been destroyed, helping Indonesia achieve a dubious ranking as the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind only China and the United States.[1]

But if this palm oil can be used instead of standard gasoline to fuel our cars, isn’t it worth it? Sadly no. Not by a long shot. According to Rainforest Action Network, “Producing palm oil, one of the most popular sources of biodiesel, entails so much deforestation that, over its lifecycle, palm-based biodiesel can emit up to ten times more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline.”[2]

ADM and its partners’ rampant destruction of Indonesian peatlands also threatens the existence of endangered species like the orangutan; a close relative of ours that scientists say could be wiped out by 2012 .[3]

Corporate welfare and greenwashing
ADM is a major player when it comes to influence in Washington, DC. Indeed, one of ADM’s largest supporters is the American taxpayer; the biofuels behemoth rakes in massive tax credits to subsidize its ethanol sales.[4]

Meanwhile, ADM is bending over backwards to present itself to the public as a friend of the environment. ADM’s company slogan is “Resourceful by Nature”, and its website extols its efforts to “develop nature-based alternatives to the world’s finite stores of fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, one of its alternatives is destroying an ecosystem and accelerating global warming.

Corporate snapshot
Founded in 1902 and incorporated in 1923, the Decatur, IL-headquartered ADM is one of the world’s largest processors of agricultural crops and a “world leader” in biodiesel fuels. [5]

According to Greenpeace, “global commodity traders including ADM-Kuok-Wilmar (ADM’s business alliance operating in Indonesia), Cargill, Golden Hope and Sinar Mas have commanding control over the entire palm oil supply chain – from plantations in Indonesia to refined vegetable oil or biofuel [processing facilities]. The alliance brings together Wilmar, the ‘largest palm biodiesel manufacturer in the world’, and ADM, the ‘world leader in renewable transport fuels’.
The ADM-Kuok-Wilmar alliance have ‘rapid expansion plans’ in relation to biodiesel. Between early 2006 and mid-2007, the ADM-Kuok-Wilmar alliance gained control of more than 1.4 million acres of peatland.[6]

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There is a whole lot more. Please read the entire article and see who ADM pals around with in the rest of the Corporate Hall of Shame.

If Evolution Is True Why Doesn’t ADM Evolve – (creepy voice) Because it’s not alive!

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16347-review-iwhy-evolution-is-truei-by-jerry-coyne.html

Review: Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

10:16 05 January 2009 by Rowan Hooper

T he first “why” that struck me on seeing Why Evolution is True was why do we need yet another book on evolution? There are lots of good ones out there already and nothing less than a mountain of evidence to support the reality of evolution by natural selection.

But we do need another, insists Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Chicago, because creationism is spreading.

And he’s right – creationism is all over the place, not just in the US, where it often gains huge amounts of publicity. In December, a UK poll found that 29% of science teachers thought that creationism should be taught in science classes alongside evolution; a state of affairs that Richard Dawkins called “a national disgrace”. It is also on the rise in Islamic countries.

Careful persuasion

Creationism, Coyne tells us in this wide-ranging, beautifully written account, is like a roly-poly clown that pops back up when you punch it. But he resists the temptation to punch. He seeks to persuade, by carefully leading the reader through the overwhelming evidence, that evolution is a fact.

The audience is those who are uncertain about explanations of life’s diversity. The book is not aimed at people who hold faith-based positions – Coyne considers them to be lost causes – but you have to wonder how many people who are “uncertain” will be won over.

Coyne describes, for example, giving a talk on evolution versus intelligent design/creationism to a group of rich Chicago businessmen. You would think that people in the business world might think that evidence for something is worth taking into account, but this was the response Coyne got from one audience member after his lecture: “I found your evidence for evolution very convincing – but I still don’t believe it”.

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So you would think that Archer Daniels Midland will evolve in this new Green World and “get it” that polluting the environment needs to stop. That their by-products as they call them must be put to a use. Like growing algae for a fuel source or making cement. But NO, they want to pump it underground. Like that’s not polluting. Why don’t they quit? Because as the man above said, “They don’t believe.”


illinois environmental protection agency

1021 north grand avenue east, P.O. Box 19276, springfield, illinois 62794-9276 -( 217) 782-3397 james R. thompson center, 100 west randolph, suite 11 -300, chicago, IL 60601 – (312) 814-6026

rod R. blagojevich, governor douglas P. scott, director


UNDERGROUND INJECTION CONTROL (UIC) FINAL PERMIT DECISION

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency provides notice pursuant to 35 111. Admin. Code 705.201(c) that a final UIC permit was issued to Archer Daniels Midland Company of Decatur, Illinois on December 23, 2008. The Agency’s response to comments, the Response Summary and Attachment 1, are available at the Illinois EPA web site at the following link: http://www.epa.state.il.us/public-notices/general-notices.html (Scroll l/3 of the way down the page to select documents posted concerning the Archer Daniels Midland project.)

Specific information must be submitted to the Agency as either permit modification requests or as supplemental information for review and approval prior to ADM’s use of the injection well. Please review the lists of these data requirements on page 2 of the Response Summary.

The applicant may petition the Illinois Pollution Control Board to contest this permit decision pursuant to 35 111. Adm. Code 705.212. Third parties also have appeal rights pursuant to 35 111. Adm. Code 705.212. Appeals must be filed within 35 days of the decision date. The deadline to appeal the Illinois EPA permit decision is January 27, 2009. For additional information on the permit appeal process, please contact the Illinois Pollution Control Board (312-814-3620).

To receive a paper copy of the final UIC permit for ADM or the Illinois EPA Response Summary and Attachment 1, please contact:

Mara McGinnis

Illinois Environmental Protection Agency 1021 North Grand Avenue East Springfield, Illinois 62704-9276

Mara.McGinnis@illinois.gov 217/524-3288

rockford – 4302 North Main Street, Rockford, IL61103 -(815)987-7760 • des PLAINES-9511 W. Harrison St., Des Plaines, IL 60016 – (847) 294-4000

elgin – 595 South State, Elgin, IL 60123 – (847) 608-3131 • PEORIA-5415 N. University St., Peoria, IL 61614 – (309) 693-5463

bureau of land- peoria-7620 N. University St., Peoria, IL 61614 – (309) 693-5462 • champaign – 2125 South First Street, Champaign, IL 61820-(217) 278-5800 springfield – 4500 S. Sixth Street Rd., Springfield, IL 62706-(217) 786-6892 • collinsville – 2009 Mall Street, Collinsvilie, IL 62234-(618) 346-5120

marion – 2309 W. Main St., Suite 116, Marion, IL 62959 – (618) 993-7200

printed on recycled paper

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Guess What? There isn’t a single environmental group in Illinois that is going to protest it.