“According to Amanda Levy at the Springfieldbase newspaper the State Journal Register: You can help stop the BURNING in Darfur and save lives too”…(http://www.sj-r.com/News/stories/14658.asp)
Among other steps, he said, people can check whether their mutual funds support the Sudanese government and they can chip in to buy solar cookers for refugees.
The Springfield Jewish Community Relations Council and the Never Again! Save Darfur Coalition hosted the event, which was designed to promote the sale of such cookers for refugees in Darfur and Chad.
At least 3.5 million people have been displaced since the genocide broke out in Darfur in 2003.
Solar cookers were on display Monday and information was provided on how to purchase them as part of the Solar Cooker Project, which is sponsored by Jewish World Watch. The initiative aims to give the cookers to refugees in the Iridimi and Touloum camps in Chad.
Lindy Seltzer, founder of the Never Again! Save Darfur Coalition, said most refugees are female, because most boys and men have been killed in village attacks.
Seltzer described the cookers as ingenious and simple to use. Though she didn’t have exact figures, Seltzer said many of those attending Monday night wrote checks to provide cookers.
What they don’t say is when the woman go out to look for wood for a fire they are raped and maimed…yikes!
“As a companion piece::
How to donate solar cookers
To purchase solar cookers for Darfuri women in refugee camps. download a donation form at
www.jewishworldwatch.org/donate/solarcookerproject.html.
Area contributors are asked to put “Springfield Solar Cooker Project” in the memo of their checks so the funds raised locally may be calculated.
According to Jewish World Watch, solar cookers offer many benefits to refugees:
They reduce need for frequent firewood collecting, decreases the risk of violence toward women and girls.
Two solar cookers can save one ton of wood each year.
There is no need to tend a fire, so women are free to do other tasks.
Manufacture of the solar cookers provides income for female refugees.
The breakdown for donations is:
$30 buys two stoves for one family
$150 buys 10 stoves for five families
$300 buys 20 stoves for 10 families
$900 buys 60 stoves for 30 families
$2,700 buys 180 stoves for 90 families
“On another note even Nicholas Kristof is willing to admit that Dick Cheney and the BURNING crowd are full of crap.”
Conservation a technology deal, not a sacrifice deal
Conservation a technology deal, not a sacrifice deal
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Published Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Saving energy doesn’t have to mean shivering in the dark. Dick Cheney once scoffed that energy conservation can be a “personal virtue” but is no basis for an energy policy.Growing evidence suggests he had it exactly wrong.
Concern about greenhouse gases and reliance on imported oil usually leads to a focus on the supply side of the energy equation, particularly exotic sources such as wind, solar, waves and hydrogen. The coolest car in history is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle I once drove on a GM test track: It could go 100 miles per hour and nothing came out the exhaust but water vapor.
Cheney’s image seems to be of a dour stoic shivering in a cardigan in a frigid home, squinting under a dim light bulb, showering under a tiny trickle of (barely) solar-heated water, and then bicycling to work in the rain. If that’s the alternative, then many of us might be willing to see the oceans rise, whatever happens to Florida.
“Of course what we can do is BURN LESS”
But new research has shown that improvements in energy efficiency often pay for themselves, actually leaving us better off.
“This is not a sacrifice deal,” Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says of conservation. “This is a technology deal. After all, we’re twice as energy efficient now as we were in the 1970s, and at the same time our economy has more than doubled.”
James Woolsey, an energy expert and former director of the CIA, puts it this way: “People have radically overestimated the sacrifice and dramatically underestimated the opportunity.”
McKinsey & Co., the business consulting company, suggests embracing energy-saving measures that pay for themselves with at least a 10 percent rate of return. McKinsey says that if this approach – at no cost to economic growth – were put into effect worldwide, by 2020 the annual savings would be 1.5 times the current U.S. annual energy consumption.
McKinsey Global Institute put out a 290-page book in May detailing the steps necessary. These include better insulation and high-efficiency heating in new homes; low-energy light bulbs; high-efficiency appliances; and higher fuel economy standards for vehicles. To drive a mile in the U.S. typically takes 37 percent more gas than in Europe.
“The sheer waste of it all, when other countries have shown another path, is incredible,” notes Diana Farrell of McKinsey Global Institute. “The opportunities here are tremendous.”
Besides the Ruling Elite who else does he blame?
I can’t help feeling that we in the news media are part of the reason that steps to battle climate change aren’t on top of the national agenda. We’re good at covering things that happen on any one day – like a tornado or hurricane – but weak at covering complex trends, like climate change. And we tend to cover disputes by having a dutiful quote from each side, without always explaining where the scientific consensus lies.
Climate skeptics say that we don’t know how serious climate change will be, and they’re right. But isn’t it prudent to address threats even when we’re unsure of them? We don’t expect to be caught in a fire, but we still believe in fire escapes and fire departments.
Suppose we had political leaders who snorted that fires are nothing new, that the science of firefighting is unclear, and that we can’t impose a burden on business by establishing fire departments – while brightly adding that citizens can extinguish fires on their own out of “personal virtue.”
Why, we would think those leaders were nuts.
And its not just Energy Policy that Cheney lies about!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I
chipper