I peruse the news for youse

Cargo cult, American style. There is nothing good about this new jumbo jet unless it's flying means an equivalent tonnage of less fuel efficient planes are kept out of the air. All this adulation and excitement is a tad shortsighted. I was a youngster attending the Reno Air Show when the Boeing 747 took one of its debut flights for the crowd. It was impressive, forcing ooo's and aahh's when we finally exhaled. It was especially impressive when the pilot rolled the monster on its back an streaked across the sky upside down. Nice. But have you any idea how many million tons of carbon that line of planes have enshrouded our planet with in the years since that flight? How incomplete is the thought of markets! Fuel consumption This one's based totally on comparisons that may be tough to imagine. The plane is said to consume about four litres of fuel per passenger for every 130 kilometres it flies. Airbus claims given its size and the number of people on board, it's actually as fuel efficient as a filling up an "economical family car." If the claimed fuel efficiency of the new plane is no better than that of a car, and that automotive efficiency is what brought our planet to its current overheated condition, what's to celebrate? Since its something I am good at, let me do the math for you: My Honda Civic Hybrid, loaded with 4 adults, gets at least 40 mpg. That makes 4*40 = 160 person-miles/gallon. Your Airbus-for-elephants gets 130 passenger-km/4 liters or (130 * 3.785liters/gallon)/ (4liters * 1.60934km/mile) = 76.4366 person-miles/gallon The take-away for innumerate: Airbust sucks my Honda's tailpipe....and it will suck the air out of our skies.

Filthy rich people don't have any climate problems Big voices and Little voices like mine, the Gray Lady, more specially informed voices like Shokai's, Real Climate Authorities, Career climatologists and most science journalists in any area of geoscience have been sounding this alarm for years so there is nothing whatsoever new in this news except for the high rank of bush bum that is confessing it. A chieftain in the oil tribe whom Bush thought would be the best upholder of the science of air quality has confessed to snipping up the science that came across his desk: THE Bush administration diluted scientific evidence of global warming, one of its former high-ranking officials has admitted. Philip Cooney, an oil industry lobbyist now working for Exxon Mobil, conceded during a congressional hearing yesterday that while he was chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality he watered down reports on the adverse effects of man-made emissions on the planet's climate. "My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his administration," Mr Cooney told the house government reform committee.... Documents released by Democrats yesterday revealed that in 2003 Bush administration officials made at least 181 changes to a plan to deal with climate change that were aimed at playing down the scientific consensus on global warming. There were another 113 changes that made less of the human causes of climate change, and even changes made to herald potential benefits to higher temperatures. "These changes must be made," according to a note in Mr Cooney's handwriting. "The language is mandatory." That coverage is from The Australian but most papers had coverage that surfaced in Google news. NYTimes stuck to the facts and that is damnation enough, but you should read the journals like New Scientist. One publication that is loosely labled and losing millions a year as a newspaper chose to cover only Hansen's testimony and then treat it as suspect and just one man's belief. The Washing Times can't launder out the stain of politics or spin away the tampered science. They see no cover up and report as if only Hansen sees it. If there were a god, as the owner of the washing times profess, the mention of "liberal bias" in that ink wasting article would have brought down at least a bolt of lightning. That rag is a harmful and clumsy propaganda organ if used for anything but paper training your puppy. [And I would suggest that sort of warpped coverage and the late exposition by most outlets of how extensively our government has lied to us is why you NEED to be reading TruthOut or any of a dozen green blogs.]

Abu Gonzales gets the "yer doin' a heckuva job" call There are about 1000 straight forward reports that Google finds on the web this morning concerning Gonzales state of knowledge and involvement in the firings and retentions of US attorneys based on their adherence to political agenda. Many of them top off with the report that the sonofabush has just given a call of "firm support" for his embattled Atty General. Its interesting then, that even Google puts a Wonkette post on the matter at the top of the page. When the sarcasm rings more like the truth than do the facts, whose fault is that? [And I would suggest that sarcasm is not coming from the sources who first asked the questions with which Congress is now battering DoJ, but the from the bizarre discrepancies in the emerging answers.]