We leave others in the dust

By SHOLNN FREEMAN, Washington Post
First published: Thursday, June 29, 2006

When it comes to greenhouse gases, U.S. drivers are getting more of the blame, a study finds.

Americans represent 5 percent of the world's population but contribute 45 percent of the world's emission of carbon dioxide, the main pollutant that causes global warming, according to a report by the nonprofit group Environmental Defense.

Americans own 30 percent of the world's vehicles, drive farther each year than the international average and burn more fuel per mile, the report says. Additionally, the sport-utility boom of the past decade put vehicles on the road that could be spewing carbon dioxide for years to come.

General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have long been the targets of environmentalists and other groups concerned with global warming. Vehicles made by GM, the No. 1 U.S. automaker, produced as much carbon dioxide in 2004 as American Electric Power Co., the nation's largest operator of coal-fired power plants, the report says.

Auto industry representatives declined to comment on the report. Most auto companies have been working to reduce emissions by designing more efficient engines and vehicles capable of running on alternative fuels.

Automakers, though, have generally resisted government restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, saying such limits would force extensive design changes and drive up prices for consumers.

Environmental Defense attempted to quantify how much carbon dioxide is produced by vehicles sold by various automakers. But the group said auto companies should not be singled out for blame, because consumer choices also play a role.

"What we are trying to do is make the connections for people," said John DeCicco, a senior fellow at Environmental Defense and an author of the report.

He said consumers could buy gas-electric hybrids or cars with smaller engines that burn less fuel and they could be more aware of how much they are driving, no matter the gas mileage of their cars. The report points out, for example, that although SUVs may be known as gas guzzlers, smaller cars cause more pollution because there are more of them on the road. The authors also suggest that communities reconsider land use policies because Americans are taking more and longer trips, often to shop.

With the report, the group is trying to build support for government policies aimed at curbing greenhouse gases, including a system that would cap carbon dioxide emissions but allow companies and utilities to trade credits, mirroring Clean Air Act rules that govern sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain. Under such a system, a company would get an allowance for carbon dioxide emissions each year, and if it did not reach that limit, it could sell off the remaining allotment to others.

Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning gasoline in vehicles. Scientists say the atmosphere can absorb a great deal of it, but many worry that people are adding more than nature can handle. They say the gases are building up around the Earth, trapping heat and raising the planet's temperature.

The report considered national statistics on how long vehicles are used and how far they are driven as they age. New and used vehicles were examined.Carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles are disproportionately high in the United States for two primary reasons, the report says: U.S. drivers average 11,000 miles per year, 29 percent above the global average, and U.S. autos consume more fuel, emitting 15 percent more carbon dioxide per mile than the average vehicle in the rest of the world.

Iraq's disastrous 'black oil' swamps

By James Glanz The New York Times

BAGHDAD -An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the area. The suffocating plumes of smoke are carried as far as 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the area described it as a kind of black swampland consisting of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys. The clouds of smoke, said the engineer, Ayad Younis, "were so heavy that they obstructed breathing and visibility in the area and represent a serious environmental danger."

At Iraq's damaged and outdated refineries, as much as 40 percent of what is produced pours forth as this heavy, viscous substance, which used to be extensively exported to more efficient foreign operations for further refining. But the insurgency has stalled government- controlled exports from the area containing Iraq's major northern refinery complex at Bayji, the officials say.

So the backed-up black oil - known to the rest of the world as the lower grades of fuel oil - was sent along a short pipeline from Bayji and dumped in a mountainous area, called Makhool.

A series of complaints handed up the Iraqi government chain were conveyed to oil industry officials, and as of last weekend the fires had at least temporarily stopped, but black oil was still being poured into the valleys, according to Younis, who works in the province's Department of Environment and Health Safety.

With few options for disposing of Bayji's current production of black oil and so much at stake for the Iraqi economy, it is unclear whether the government will be able to hold the line on the burning at Makhool. A U.S. official in Baghdad said last week that Bayji was still turning out about 90,000 barrels a day of refined products, which would yield about 36,000 barrels a day of black oil.

Iraq's refineries will grind to a halt if the black oil does not go somewhere.

"Unless we find a way of dealing with the fuel oil, our factories will not work," said Shamkhi Faraj, director of economics and marketing affairs at the Oil Ministry.

The dumping and burning has embarrassed officials in the Oil Ministry and exposed major gaps in the American-designed reconstruction program.

Mussab al-Dujayli, a technical expert at the State Oil Marketing Organization, which he directed until March, said that the disposal defied sound engineering practice.

"The consequences of it are dreadful," Dujayli said. "God forbid."

Still, the complaints that halted the burning, however temporarily, represent something virtually unheard of in a country that has long had few if any checks on pollution by government industries: a backlash by local political and environmental officials.

Last month, motivated by citizen complaints and whistle-blowing employees at Bayji, the elected governor of the province that contains Bayji and Tikrit formed a technical committee that investigated and wrote a report warning of severe environmental consequences if the practice was not stopped.

The governor, Hamad Hmoud al- Qaisi, said in an interview that he was outraged by what his committee had found was happening in the mountains at Makhool. "I call upon the United Nations and the United States administration to make haste in saving the people of Bayji and Tikrit from an environmental catastrophe," Qaisi said.

"The wastes there are untreatable because the terrain is rocky and contains many caves that allow these wastes to slip through and eventually reach the groundwater where nearby towns depend on wells," Qaisi said.

The concerns quickly reached Narmin Othman Hasan, the minister of the environment, who said in an interview that she had written to oil officials complaining of the practice. After that, the fires went out.

Adel al-Qazzaz, manager of state- owned North Oil, which has immediate responsibility for operations in the north, repeatedly declined to respond to questions on the fuel oil after he was reached by phone and e-mail in Kirkuk.

The American official who discussed Bayji's level of oil production said the black oil could be taken out by truck and that one of the state-owned marketing companies had undertaken to do so.

But Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who served two stints as oil minister between September 2003 and January 2006, said that plan probably had not been fully worked through. The roads in the Sunni badlands of the north are dangerous and sometimes impassable. And about 150 large tankers would have to leave Bayji fully loaded every day to remove the current production of black oil. Simply finding that number of working vehicles and loading them in a timely fashion would be challenging under the best of circumstances, Uloum said.

Weird Stuff -- In vitro cultured meat: no cows needed

by Dick Peterson
Source: The Catalyst

He can do it. The technology exists. He can assemble the team of scientists who can make it happen, probably within the next five years. But nobody wants it badly enough to put up the millions of dollars in venture capital Vladimir Mironov, M.D., says it will take to produce in vitro cultured meat. That's meat that never did moo, baa, oink, cluck or quack. It never chewed a cud or pecked the ground, and it certainly never experienced the horrors of a slaughterhouse. It’s edible, nutritious meat grown in a laboratory with the potential to feed the world’s hungry, to open long distance space travel by making in-flight food production a reality, and to ensure a national food supply safe from bioterrorism.

"I have everything in place, but I have no demand," Mironov said. "Unless you have demand, and that means money, you cannot do research."

Dr. Vladimir Mironov, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, displays a vial of turkey myoblast cells which, under the right conditions, can assemble themselves into skeletal muscle tissue, an important item at Thanksgiving dinner.

It's not that Mironov would have it any other way. It's simply the reality of biomedical research. It's been a few months now since national news media descended on MUSC to hear Mironov explain how skeletal muscle cells cloned from livestock can be grown. If they can be grown in the laboratory, they can be grown on an industrial scale to produce hamburger-like meats with precisely controlled fat and protein content.

Mironov said that the media attention-CBS ran a spot on its Evening News Nov. 25- was not something he sought, and he now knows he could have done well without the publicity it generated.

It began with a grant offering totaling $2 million that Mironov was told included food production. "So I built a team,” he said. “One was Dr. Douglas McFarland from North Dakota, who has already defined cell lines from domestic edible animals. The second was John Vournakis from Marine Polymer Technologies who has purified chitosan from algae, which is edible. Some people use it to reduce fat. Number three was Anna Gutowska, who can produce expandable polymers from collagen and chitosan, which is also edible. The polymers create a kind of fitness center to exercise the cells." He explained that skeletal cells attached to a structure will fuse and form and require the mechanical conditioning provided by an expandable chitosan scaffold.

"My job was to pull the team together and create a bioreactor," Mironov said.

The grant never materialized. Other attempts to obtain funding from both commercial and federal sources failed to rouse any interest in Mironov’s proposals, "So I tried to forget about it," he said.

But while disinterested funding sources encouraged him to forget, emerging media attention seemed to be taking on a life of its own with an apparent obsession to keep the memory alive. Especially intriguing to one reporter was the notion that in vitro cultured meat just might lure vegetarian taste buds to their forbidden fruit. If not hamburger, why not take a biopsy of her muscle tissue and grow it, she offered.

"I’m not a U.S.-licensed M.D., I told her, and I don’t want to participate in high-tech cannibalism," Mironov said. "And I think it is a very bad marketing tool."

One foundation which does not like animal killing contributed a relative pittance to the idea and demanded results.

"So they want me to publish a paper, but I could not publish a paper that I create hamburger. I have no data," Mironov said. What he could do, he said, was publish a conceptual paper about how it could be done.

Despite refusals from legitimate funding sources and Mironov’s reluctance to deal with fringe groups whose money offers were meager at best, word of his proposal to produce lab-grown meat captured one imagination after another, including that of Jason Matthew. Matthew, a student in Maryland, built a Web site promoting the same idea that Mironov repeatedly portrayed as dated technology put to a new use, meat production instead of growing organs for transplant.

The president of the tissue engineering society Mironov belongs to refused to call his concept tissue engineering, but a member of the society’s board, who advocates expanding the field and is editor of the society’s journal, gave it the push it needed to be published.

"And what’s happened. Unbelievable," Mironov said. "The media hype. BBC. CBS Evening News. They make a movie, and it's all show, because I haven't done a thing. All this from four years ago.”

For a few days the media requests came in, demanding that Mironov accommodate them and Mironov half expecting the publicity just may spark interest and better yet shake loose some capital to get him started on this new end product for tissue engineering.

But before the dust could settle, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. As quickly as they arrived, the media left, leaving a measure of destruction in their wake.

"It was all show, because I am not doing anything, actually. They get all this information and then nothing.”"He said the experience has left him embarrassed and has made him look like all he wanted was publicity. The CBS Evening News spot featuring Mironov aired on Thanksgiving Day in the Western time zones but was preempted in the East by televised football games.

Despite the huge commercial potential for tissue engineering, a potential apart from organ transplantation, Mironov realizes that without a demand that spawns venture capital he cannot proceed. "I decided that if I received just one call from a venture capitalist, then we have demand. But not one call. And that for me was most disappointing, because I have put my reputation on the line and I am suffering from all this media hype.

"At least I can create an awareness about this technology.” Mironov said that food is but one spin-off from tissue engineering. Leather is another. And clothing. And what is fur, but skin with hair, he asked. All it takes is demand, money and someone to do it.
Meanwhile Mironov will focus all his energy on his first passion, bio-printing. That’s using printing processes to build human organs for transplant. It’s research in its infancy, but like the vision he has for cultured meat, Mironov has a vision creating organs for transplant.

He said he takes heart from Harvard researcher and specialist in anticancer antiangiogenic therapy Judah Folkman who told his audience at a lecture at MUSC, "If you live long enough and stick to your original message again and again, then people start to listen and finally understand you."

"Folkman introduced his concept of antiangiogenic anticancer therapy in 1971 and was originally treated as a charlatan," Mironov said. “In 2004, the first FDA-approved antiangiogenic drug for the treatment of cancer generated a billion dollars for Genentech, the company that developed it."

Mironov strongly believes that tissue engineered meat, "charlem," as he calls it, is inescapably part of humanity’s future. As he put it, “It is a matter of social demand and not so much a matter of technology. Incubation time for commercial exploitation of a new technological idea is difficult to predict. The only way to predict the future is to build it.

"What makes me very excited," Mironov said, "is I am Russian, but I am now in the process of inventing new English words. I invented (the words) organ printing, bio-printing, bio-ink. And now a name for tissue engineered hamburger—“charlem.” I name it for Charleston, because I love it here and em for engineered meat. What do you think?"

To name a girl

The match has started. And there she is, supporting the Brazilian soccer team. Our girl is very active, enjoys music, practices yoga, exercises at the beach.
However, she does not have a name yet. We need suggestions. Let us know what you think, send a name suggestion.

A Quick Fix for the Gas Addicts

by Thomas Friedman [source: Radical Left Blog]

Is there a company more dangerous to America's future than General Motors? Surely, the sooner this company gets taken over by Toyota, the better off our country will be.

Why? Like a crack dealer looking to keep his addicts on a tight leash, G.M. announced its "fuel price protection program" on May 23.

If you live in Florida or California and buy certain G.M. vehicles by July 5, the company will guarantee you gasoline at a cap price of $1.99 a gallon for one year — with no limit on mileage. Guzzle away.

As The Associated Press explained the program, each month for one year, G.M. will give customers who buy these cars "a credit on a prepaid card based on their estimated fuel usage.

Fuel usage will be calculated by the miles they drive, as recorded by OnStar, and the vehicle’s fuel economy rating. G.M. will credit drivers the difference between the average price per gallon in their state and the $1.99 cap." Consumers won’t get any credits if gas prices fall below $1.99.

"This program gives consumers an opportunity to experience the highly fuel-efficient vehicles G.M. has to offer in the mid-size segment,” Dave Borchelt, G.M.'s Southeast general manager, said in the company's official statement. Oh, really?

Eligible vehicles in California include the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban (half-ton models only), Impala and Monte Carlo sedans, G.M.C. Yukon and Yukon XL S.U.V.'s (half-ton models only), Hummer H2 and H3 S.U.V.'s, the Cadillac SRX S.U.V., and the Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick Lucerne sedans.

Eligible vehicles in Florida include the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet Impala and Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick LaCrosse.

Let's see, the 6,400-pound Hummer H2 averages around nine miles per gallon. It really is great that G.M. is giving more Americans the opportunity to experience nine-miles-per-gallon driving.

And the hulking Chevy Suburban gets around 15 miles per gallon. It will be wonderful if more Americans can experience that too — with G.M.-subsidized gas.

Our military is in a war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan with an enemy who is fueled by our gasoline purchases. So we are financing both sides in the war on terror. And what are we doing about that?

Not only is GM subsidizing its gas-guzzlers, but not a single member of Congress, liberal or conservative, will stand up and demand what most of them know: that we must have some kind of gasoline tax to compel Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and to compel Detroit to make them.

Where are the presidential aspirants on this issue? I have yet to hear John McCain, Mitt Romney, George Allen, Al Gore or Hillary Clinton support at least a $3.50 floor price for gasoline, so that it will never fall below that level and the alternatives can really flower and spread.

But if you go to G.M.’s Web site, here’s what you will see: an ad with a young African-American boy saluting an American flag, above the following offer for U.S. military personnel:

"In appreciation of your commitment to our country, G.M. extends a $500 exclusive offer to active duty military and reserves when you purchase or lease select 2005, 2006 or 2007 G.M. cars, trucks and S.U.V.'s — just show your military ID!"

That's really touching. First G.M. offers a gasoline subsidy so more Americans can get hooked on nine-mile-per-gallon Hummers, and then it offers a discount to the soldiers who have to protect the oil lines to keep G.M.’s gas guzzlers guzzling.

Here's a rule of thumb: The more Hummers we have on the road in America, the more military Humvees we will need in the Middle East.

You want to do something patriotic, G.M., Ford and Daimler-Chrysler? Why don't you stop using your diminishing pools of cash to buy votes so Congress will never impose improved mileage standards?

That kind of strategy is why Toyota today is worth $198.9 billion and G.M. $15.8 billion. G.M. is worth just slightly more than Harley-Davidson, the motorcycle company ($13.6 billion).

President Bush remarked the other day how agonizingly tough it is for a president to send young Americans to war.

Yet, he's ready to do that, but he’s not ready to look Detroit or Congress in the eye and demand that we put in place the fuel-efficiency legislation that will weaken the forces of theocracy and autocracy that are killing our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan — because it might cost Republicans votes or campaign contributions.

This whole thing is a travesty. We can't keep asking young Americans to make the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan if we as a society are not ready to make even the most minimal sacrifice to help them.

Thomas Friedman @ NYT