The Humane Society and Big Ag slug it out over animal rights
By Kristen Hinman, The Pitch, Apr 15 2010 [here]
Around lunchtime on February 5 in Vale, South Dakota, a 33-year-old cattle rancher finished a morning of blogging, then stepped outside with a bottle of wine and a video camera.
“Hello, my name is Troy Hadrick. I’m a fifth-generation United States rancher in South Dakota,” he ad-libbed. “I recently found out that Yellow Tail wines is going to be donating $100,000 to the wealthiest animal-rights organization in the world, the Humane Society of the United States — a group who is actively trying to put farmers and ranchers out of business in this country.” Hadrick said he couldn’t support such a company. “This is the only thing I know to do now with this last bottle of Yellow Tail wine that was in our house.”
In his cowboy hat and Carhartt jacket, Hadrick cocked the bottle, flicked his wrist and sent the contents pouring to the snow-covered earth like a stream of piss.
“I hope you will do the same. Thank you for supporting American agriculture and the family farmers and ranchers in this country.”
Five minutes later, with his 54-second “Yellow Tail Fail” clip posted to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, Hadrick finished his chores and headed with his family to the Black Hills Stock Show & Rodeo. Back online that night, he was shocked by the viewing stats for his first Internet video.
First it was 500. Then several thousand. The tally kept climbing. Within two weeks, the Australia-based wine giant announced that it was rescinding the remainder of its $300,000 pledge to the Washington, D.C.-based Humane Society.
A week later, Tennessee-based Pilot Travel Centers announced that it would stop collecting Humane Society donations at its rest stops. Then Dallas-based Mary Kay cosmetics publicly clarified that a personal donation by an employee’s wife to the Humane Society had been misconstrued by the group as a corporate sponsorship.
Hadrick’s social-media sensation represented a tipping point in a battle that has seen food producers playing defense for nearly a decade — farmers vs. activists, agriculture vs. animal rights. … [more]
Note: HSUS does NOT run animal shelters. They are super-litigious animal rights nuts. And they pick and choose which animals to sue about. They have repeatedly sued the UFWS to stymie the delisting of wolves, even though wolves are NOT endangered and are blood-thirsty killers of elk, deer, sheep, cattle, horses, dogs and other animals. Case in point:
HSUS Fundraising Machine Hurts Local Animal Shelters
by The Center For Consumer Freeedom, April 30, 2010 [here]
We have reported how the “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS) uses misleading advertising to make donors believe that contributions to the organization will go to local hands-on pet shelters. On the contrary, HSUS seems more interested in cows and pigs than dogs and cats. The group funnels much of its $100 million annual budget to push a radical anti-farmer agenda. In the meantime, the local pet shelters that actually take care of animals are strapped for cash – and HSUS is at least partly to blame.
Case in point is the Halifax Humane Society (HHS) in Daytona Beach, Florida. In a recent op-ed, the HHS community relations director Michelle Pari discussed the difficulty of trying to raise money in competition with groups like HSUS. Although Pari didn’t specifically cite HSUS, it’s clear that’s who she has in mind.
“One of the biggest problems HHS faces, as a local private non-profit organization, is public misperception about where donations made to large national groups actually go,” writes Pari. “It is difficult to compete with multimillion-dollar organizations that have the financial means to solicit money through television, newsprint, radio and Internet advertising worldwide.” She goes on to add that people are “shocked” to learn that not a penny of the donation they send to the “national organization” ever reaches the local animals in need.
In a speech before the Animal Agriculture Alliance this week, the editor of HumaneWatch.org pointed out that that less than one-half of 1 percent of the HSUS budget goes to pet shelters: “They have about a $100 million budget, $24 million goes into fundraising, $37 million goes to salaries, with more than 30 lawyers on staff.” In addition to funding activism, HSUS believes in taking care of its own. The HSUS pension contributions of $2.5 million are five times greater than the meager grants to pet shelters. … [more]
The $10 Trillion Climate Fraud
Investors Business Daily, 04/28/2010 [here]
Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.
Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore’s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.
“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”
Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special?
Few Americans have heard of either entity. The Joyce Foundation was originally the financial nest egg of a widow whose family had made millions in the now out-of-favor lumber industry.
After her death, the foundation was run by philanthropists who increasingly dedicated their giving to liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.
Currently, CCX members agree to a voluntary but legally binding agreement to regulate greenhouse gases.
The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration’s cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.
Thanks to Fox News’ Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.
Sandor estimates that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six “greenhouse” gases. … [more]
ICE buying Climate Exchange for over $600 million
By Steve Goldstein, WSJ MarketWatch, April 30, 2010 [here]
LONDON (MarketWatch) — The IntercontinentalExchange on Friday made a bet on the future of emissions trading after reaching a deal to pay around $600 million in cash for the London-based Climate Exchange.
The Atlanta-based ICE had already cleared trades for Climate Exchange, which operates the European Climate Exchange, the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange.
Terms call for ICE to pay 7.50 pounds a share, valuing Climate Exchange at 395 million pounds ($604 million), a premium of 57% to Thursday’s closing price and a 44% premium on the average price over the last three months.
The deal will “slightly” hurt ICE’s earnings for the remainder of the year before increasing them in 2011.
Climate Exchange shares surged 55.9% to 7.45 pounds on the London Stock Exchange. …
The Climate Exchange is the market leader in the world’s largest cap-and-trade market, the European Union, and also has a “significant” share of the main contracts in the U.S.
The ICE however is paying up for the Climate Exchange’s potential — the deal is valued at 58 times Climate Exchange’s adjusted pretax profit for 2009.
Emissions trading legislation has stalled in the U.S. Senate, and the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen produced few tangible results.
Chris Allen, an analyst at Ticonderoga Securities, called the deal a “reasonable long-term bet.”
“Given that the future of emissions trading is dependent on new laws to reduce emissions trading, which look a few years away, this is clearly a long-term bet for ICE. Although it is hard to define the potential size of the emissions market longer-term, we believe that it clearly represents a long-term growth opportunity and is a market that should provide long-term synergies with ICE’s core energy platform,” he said in a note to clients.
Morgan Stanley advised ICE, while J.P. Morgan Cazenove and Kinmont advised Climate Exchange.
Obama’s Climate Change Initiative (Cap and Trade) = Friends In High Places?
Key Obama Climate Change Exchange Being Swayed by Top U.N. Officials
Five members of the Chicago Climate Exchange advisory board are present or former top-ranking U.N. officials — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist in the Oil for Food scandal.
By Edward Barnes, RomanticPoet.com, April 20, 2009 [here]
A greenhouse gases trading system funded with the support of then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, which is likely to play a major role in his $650 million cap-and-trade initiative, lists five present or former top-ranking U.N. officials on its advisory board who’ve had enormous influence over climate change matters — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist.
The most controversial figure of the five, Maurice Strong, was one of former Secretary General Kofi Annan’s key aides at the U.N. for years until the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal forced him to leave. Since then Strong has lived mostly in China. Calls to the exchange for comment about Strong’s role, and that of other U.N. figures, were not returned.
The Climate Exchange, which began operations in 2003, provides trading in carbon emissions and their offsets, along with those of other greenhouse gases, is among a group of companies and institutions that voluntarily participate in the program. It bills itself as the only voluntary, legally binding exchange of its kind in North America. Among its member companies are Ford, DuPont and United Technologies as well as a number of electric utilities; other participants include the City of Chicago and Miami-Dade County.
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Obama’s Goldman game
Perhaps the political collusion goes deeper
By Terrence Scanlon, Washington Times, April 27, 2010 [here]
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, the left’s favorite bank, are more than a little suspect - but not for the reasons you might expect. …
Evidence has surfaced that as Goldman’s attorneys tried to cut a deal with the SEC over the potential charges, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein visited the Obama White House at least four times.
The decision whether to sue the bank was so controversial within the SEC that members split 3 to 2 on filing the lawsuit. Chairman Mary Schapiro, an Obama appointee, and the two Democrats on the commission voted yes, while the two Republicans voted no.
Add to this that Goldman just hired former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, the lawyer who helped President Clinton send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to communist Cuba a decade ago.
Then factor in that Goldman is a creature of the political left and a natural ally of the Democratic Party. It is a big-government lovers’ bank that despises the unbridled competition of laissez-faire capitalism. Akin to Fannie Mae in that it generates private profits but forces taxpayers to cover its losses, Goldman loves bailouts and feeding at the public trough.
Former Goldman employees - including Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s liberal, tree-hugging Treasury secretary - designed the $700-billion-plus “mother of all bailouts” in 2008 and then promptly steered $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the bank. Goldman veteran Neel Kashkari oversaw the doling out of bailout funds.
Goldman funds the left almost exclusively, so, as the left likes to say, follow the money.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Goldman’s employees gave the president $994,795 during the last election cycle, making the employees of the bank the Obama campaign’s largest private-sector financial backer. The nearly $1 million sum is “more than the combined Goldman haul of every Republican running for president, Senate and the House,” according to one report.
In the current election cycle, Goldman’s political action committee and employees have lavished $693,675 on federal candidates and parties, with roughly 70 percent of the total sum going to Democrats.
Goldman has an unfortunate history of caving in to left-wing pressure groups, such as Jesse Jackson’s Citizenship Education Fund and the extremist Rainforest Action Network. Its corporate foundation’s donations go exclusively to the left, according to a study that appeared in the August 2006 issue of the Capital Research Center’s newsletter, Foundation Watch.
In 2004, the Goldman Sachs Foundation shelled out $35.5 million to liberal nonprofit groups, mostly to environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society. There were no recorded contributions to conservative or free-market public-policy organizations. None.
Note: Henry Paulson is not only a former Goldman Sachs executive, he is a former President of The Nature Conservancy. The current President and CEO of TNC is Mark Tercek formerly managing director at Goldman Sachs.
TNC owns or controls more than 17 million acres worldwide. Total assets are over $5.6 billion. Revenues in 2009 were over $600 million, of which $127 million came from government grants. An additional $115 million in revenues came from land and conservation easement contributions. An additional $186 million came from sales of land to the government [here].
TNC buys low and sells high. TNC acquires real estate for free by donation or at below market prices and resells to the government at exorbitant prices, collecting finder’s fees and government “charitable” donations besides. Often TNC purchases options on land parcels for a pittance and collects enormous profits while risking only pennies, if you could call it risk — in essence the government uses TNC as a real estate agent, with special benefits.
TNC also sits on the highest councils of Federal land management agencies and is one of the architects of the Fed’s Let It Burn program. Burned out private land can be had for a song and resold for windfall profits to captive government agencies.
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Swedish expert says CO2 is not the main cause of global warming
Note: Special thanks for the news tip to Gordon F. who writes, “This article is from the China People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Although their English grammar is not perfect, their grasp of climate science is close to perfect thanks to Swedish scientist, Fred Goldberg, PhD. How is it possible that a Communist Party newspaper (with all political controls firmly in place) does an excellent job of discussing climate science when our own media (that pretends to be free of political controls) is essentially hopeless?”
By Xuefei Chen, China People’s Daily Online correspondent in Stockholm, April 22, 2010 [here]
Swedish climate expert Dr. Fred Goldberg has said that carbon dioxide is not the main cause of the global warming. The climate change is not affected by human action, but mainly by the solar activities and ocean currents such as PDO (Pacific Decadal oscillations). He even predicts that the earth is going to experience colder winters in the following years or even decades.
Goldberg stressed that man should separate the concept of climate change from environmental issues. He holds that climate change is natural and caused by the sun activity, but the urban heat island effect and environmental problems are mainly caused by human activities and behavior. In an exclusive interview with People’s Daily Online, Goldberg explained his ideas.
History of climate on earth
“We could have an ice age any time,” Dr. Goldberg says, “Over the past one million years, we have experienced eight ice ages. Eighty percent of the last million years was ice age. We are lucky to live in this short inter-glacial period.”
“If we go down to the last 4000 to 3500 years in the Bronze Age period, it was three degrees warmer than today on the northern hemisphere at least,” Goldberg explained.
“Two thousand years ago, during the Roman period or during China’s East Han Dynasty, the temperature was two degrees higher than now,” he said.
During the Viking era a thousand years ago it was one degree Celsius warmer.
Goldberg said there is a nearly 1000 year cycle in climate change but there is a downward trend indicating that we are going towards a new ice age within 4000 years.
During the Viking era or the medieval Warm Period it was warm enough to grow grapes and cereal in England, he said.
“We had a new peak in high temperature in 2002 after a solar activity maximum, now the temperature is going down again. So we are heading into a cooling period.”
“If you look at the last 150 years, we had a warming period from 1910 to 1940 and then a cooling period from 1941 to 1977. Then it was a warming period from 1977 to 2002,” Goldberg said. This shows a 60 year cycle correlating to the ocean current PDO in the Pacific Ocean.
During the depression period 1929-1933, the production of CO2 went down by 30 percent. But due to the increase of the global temperature, the CO2 increased in the atmosphere because of the heating of the oceans thereby emitting CO2.
Praising Arizona (In Border Battle)
Investors.com, 04/26/2010 [here]
Immigration: Arizona moves to protect its citizens from a raging border war, and the administration and its activist supporters cry racism. Why is antelope protection more important than protecting American lives?
‘We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said Friday after signing a tough new immigration law giving police more power in dealing with illegal immigration. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation.”
Arizona’s new law is a reminder that the states formed the federal government and not the other way around. One of the federal government’s functions was to provide for the security of the new country against foreign enemies and intruders. At this, and particularly under this administration, it has failed miserably.
There are 460,000 illegal aliens in Arizona, a number that increases daily, placing an undue burden on the state’s schools, hospitals and law enforcement. Arizona has a window seat to an illegal invasion and on the escalating and violent drug war in Mexico that has put American lives and society at risk.
On March 27, the consequences of a porous and unprotected border claimed the life of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz after he radioed his brother that he was checking out someone he believed to be an illegal immigrant.
Incredibly, his murderer escaped to a pronghorn antelope area that the Interior Department of Secretary Ken Salazar had placed off-limits to U.S. Border Patrol agents.
So unserious is the administration about protecting the border that it has allowed a bureaucratic turf battle between Interior and Homeland Security to let 4.3 million acres of wilderness area become a haven and highway for illegal aliens, drug smugglers, human traffickers and potential terrorists. … [more]
Fannie Mae owns patent on residential ‘cap and trade’ exchange
By Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, April 20, 2010 [here]
When he wasn’t busy helping create a $127 billion mess for taxpayers to clean up, former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines, two of his top underlings and select individuals in the “green” movement were inventing a patented system to trade residential carbon credits.
Patent No. 6904336 was approved by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office on Nov. 7, 2006 — the day after Democrats took control of Congress. Former Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., criticized the award at the time, pointing out that it had “nothing to do with Fannie Mae’s charter, nothing to do with making mortgages more affordable.”
It wasn’t about mortgages. It was about greenbacks. The patent, which Fannie Mae confirmed it still owns with Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary CO2e.com, gives the mortgage giant a lock on the fledgling carbon trading market, thus also giving it a major financial stake in the success of cap-and-trade legislation.
Besides Raines, the other “inventors” are:
* Former Fannie Vice President and Deputy General Counsel G. Scott Lesmes, who provided legal advice on Fannie Mae’s debt and equity offerings;
* Former Fannie Vice President Robert Sahadi, who now runs GreenSpace Investment Financial Services out of his 5,002-square-foot Clarksburg home;
* 2008 Barack Obama fundraiser Kenneth Berlin, an environmental law partner at Skadden Arps;
* Michelle Desiderio, director of the National Green Building Certification program, which trains “green” monitors;
* Former Cantor Fitzgerald employee Elizabeth Arner Cavey, wife of Democratic donor Brian Cavey of the Stanton Park Group, which received $200,000 last year to lobby on climate change legislation; and
* Jane Bartels, widow of former CO2e.com CEO Carlton Bartels. Three weeks before Carlton Bartels was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, he filed for another patent on the software used in 2003 to set up the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The patent, which covers both the “cap” and “trade” parts of Obama’s top domestic energy initiation, gives Fannie Mae proprietary control over an automated trading system that pools and sells credits for hard-to-quantify residential carbon reduction efforts (such as solar panels and high-efficiency appliances) to companies and utilities that don’t meet emission reduction targets. Depending on where the Environmental Protection Agency sets arbitrary CO2 standards, that could be every company in America.
The patent summary describes how carbon “and other pollutants yet to be determined” would be “combined into a single emissions pool” and traded — just as Fannie’s toxic portfolio of subprime mortgages were. … [more]
IPCC’s River Of Lies
Editorial, Investors.com, 04/27/2010 [here]
Global Warming: Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.
It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment.
After fraudulent claims about Himalayan glaciers, African crop harvests and Amazon rain forests, plus a 2007 assessment report based on anecdotal evidence, student term papers and nonpeer-reviewed magazine articles, the panel’s doomsday forecast for Bangladesh has been exposed as its latest hoax.
According to the 2007 report, melting glaciers and polar ice would lead to rising sea levels and just a three-foot rise would flood 17% of the low-lying country of Bangladesh by 2050 and create 20 million refugees.
Now comes a study from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) that says the IPCC forgot to factor in the 1 billion tons of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers such as the Ganges and the Brahmaputra into Bangladesh every year.
CEGIS director Maminul Haque Sarker told AFP that “studies on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, including those quoted by the IPCC, did not consider the role of sediment in the growth and adjustment process of the country’s coast and rivers to the sea level rise.” Even if sea levels rose according to IPCC predictions, Sarker says, natural sediment deposits would cancel the effect of any rise.
Apocalyptic changes forecast by climate change alarmists, according to Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, are not in the cards. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.”
If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10 cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 cm.” … [more]
AGW Eco-Theology Absurdity
by Ronald D. Voisin, Climate Realists, April 27th 2010 [here]
Did you ever wonder where those clockwork CO2 spikes come from? After all, they accompany every interglacial.
Note: see Soils, CO2, and Global Warming [here]
A helpful hint: 99.5% comes from natural sources.
In the above referenced web-article, these scientists have bumped their estimated current microbial contribution to atmospheric CO2 from 85 to 98 petagrams. Our anthropogenic contribution is less than a tenth of that at ~6 to 7 petagrams. The total of all natural emissions is estimated at some 2,000 to 2,200 petagrams. Now in this article they seem to suggest that our 6 to 7 petagram (<0.5%) contribution has unfortunately and deleteriously triggered this microbial increase of 13 petagrams (from 85 to 98). In fact, most all studies regarding soil respiration engage the very same broken blame-game.
However, if we humans were never here at all, the consequently expanded microbial contribution can be roughly estimated to become 127 petagrams. Microbes would have geometrically filled our void for an increase of ~42 petagrams. And expanded proliferations of insects and mammalia would have contributed to a yet much larger delta. So what would these Theologians suggest this far greater contribution would have “unfortunately and deleteriously triggered?”
Well, regarding any prior interglacial, they would have to say this greater level would have triggered yet more proliferation of life. What an irony it is that our under-contribution of Vitamin C(O2) to this interglacial is what has negatively impacted the current levels of bio-diversity. However, for this interglacial, their theological position is that we sinners are here, and even though our presence has likely lowered the total level of atmospheric Vitamin C(O2), the Earth-Carbon-Cycle now contains a poisonous 0.5% contribution from us that must be stopped! … [more]
Rehberg reminds USFS: Only Congress can create wilderness
by Jed Link, Clark Fork Chronicle, April 27 2010 [here]
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) is opposing a move to have wilderness study areas managed as de facto wilderness through bypassing current law that gives authority to designate wilderness areas to Congress.
“It seems some in the House have forgotten why they are in Congress,” said Rehberg, a member of the House Appropriations Committee. “The Wilderness Act clearly requires Congress to designate new wilderness, yet some are trying to bypass the law, the will of the American people, and the checks and balances of the Constitution to reward their special interest group friends.”
Rehberg joined a large group of House Members including Doc Hastings (WA) and Rob Bishop (UT) in sending a letter to U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell opposing the request. The letter is a direct response to an effort within the House Committee on Natural Resources to have the Forest Service issue new guidelines to manage Recommended Wilderness Areas as de facto Wilderness Areas. The move would place severe limitations on public access, restrict job-creating and energy-producing activities, and decrease the ability to respond to fires and emergencies.
Citing the Wilderness Act, the group wrote, “The law is crystal clear that the power to designate wilderness rests squarely and solely with the Congress. It is a baseless, twisted reading of the law to suggest that Congress intended to allow an agency to administratively declare an area as recommended for wilderness designation and then to manage that area exactly as if Congress had taken action to make such a designation.”
“This is a rather blatant attempt to bypass laws and the public process and pursue an extremist agenda without any regard for what the American people want,” said Rehberg.
The full text of the letter appears as follows:
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Forestry trend is putting Oregonians out of work
by Mickey Bellman, Salem Statesman Journal, April 26, 2010 [here]
Another logger is out of work today. Actually, it is Jamie the loader operator, Rex the hook tender, Don the chaser, Jerry the truck driver and a half dozen other men, all with names and families. Last week they were taxpaying citizens; this week they will begin collecting unemployment checks and food stamps.
To the greenies, this is good news. Fewer trees will be harvested, and that’s what the zealots have wanted all these long decades. They have protested and litigated forest plans and timber sales for every real, theoretical and whimsical reason they could conjure up. Please don’t ever complain about the price of toilet paper, lumber or new houses in the future.
More sympathetic readers may sadly wag their heads and talk about how those loggers should have seen it coming. The company should have bought new equipment to embrace forest health and bio-energy. Nice theory, except the new equipment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars with no guarantee there will be any work for it.
Banks won’t loan money to distressed homeowners, let alone to loggers who are viewed with disdain.
After 27 years of impeccable credit and financial solvency, the bank suddenly canceled the credit line and bank accounts of this logging company because it was deemed a “bad risk.” How’s that for stimulation? … [more]
Judge Molloy Sets Court Date For Wolf Delisting Lawsuit
by Tom Remington, Black Bear Blog, April 27, 2010 [here]
Federal court judge, Donald Molloy, has set June 15, 2010 as the date in which he will hear arguments from both sides in the gray wolf lawsuit initiated by EarthJustice, et. al. Last year the laundry list of environmental groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking an emergency injunction to stop the removal of the gray wolf from federal protection. An emergency injunction would have put a halt to wolf hunts scheduled to take place in Idaho and Montana. That injunction was not granted and the wolf hunts ensued.
It’s really anybody’s guess as to what Judge Molloy will rule. Science is not followed, precedence is cherry picked and perhaps we would not be having another lawsuit at this level had the USFWS gotten its act together and appealed the first ruling when Judge Molloy blocked the fed’s attempt at delisting.
In short, Molloy will do pretty much as he darn well pleases, as has been the case in past wolf court cases. The courts have shown American citizens that federal promises mean nothing; that actions such as this one to introduce wolves into the Northern Rocky Mountains resembles nothing remotely similar to the plans and promises laid out by the USFWS. … [more]
Researchers Find Rare Giant Worm Doesn’t Live Up to Its Billing
By JIM ROBBINS, April 27, 2010, NY Times [here]
HELENA, Mont.— Once feared extinct, the giant Palouse earthworm, reputed to grow up to three feet long and smell like lilies, has been found alive.
It turns out though, experts say, the worm is not a giant, nor does it have a lilylike scent.
Researchers thought the translucent worm with the pink head, last seen in the 1980s, might be extinct because its habitat, the Palouse prairie region of Idaho and Washington, is almost gone. On March 27, however, Karl Umiker, a University of Idaho research support scientist, working with Shan Xu, a graduate student from Chengdu, China, discovered two giant Palouse earthworms, a juvenile and an adult, on a small patch of native prairie near Moscow, Idaho.
As it turns out, the worms are bigger than night crawlers but not giant. The two specimens, the adult of which had to be killed and dissected to determine it was indeed a giant Palouse earthworm, were about seven inches long when they came from the ground.
“But when we stretched it out and relaxed it, the adult earthworm got bigger,” said Jodi Johnson-Maynard an associate professor of soil and water management and Mr. Umiker’s supervisor. “It’s between nine and 10 inches.”
She admits that’s a far cry from earlier claims of three-foot worms. “We tried to track that story down,” Ms. Johnson-Maynard said, and discovered that many years ago there was one giant specimen. “Apparently some boy was swinging it in the air like a rope and it stretched.” … [more]
DNR seeks to lift protections on gray wolves
By Lee Bergquist, Journal Sentinel, April 27, 2010 [here]
As the wolf population continues to grow, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said Tuesday it is once again asking federal authorities to remove the gray wolf from a list of federal endangered species.
The agency said it has asked the U.S. Department of Interior for permission to reclassify the status of the wolf so state authorities would have more flexibility to control a burgeoning wolf population.
Wolves have historically been a flash point of controversy, and in recent years the gray wolf has been the subject of a series of court fights that has changed its protective status several times.
If the request is approved, problem wolves could be killed.
The decision could take months, or more, and in the interim, the DNR on Monday asked authorities for more authority to use lethal controls on wolves that have killed livestock and other animals.
See also:
New DNR study hopes to settle debate surrounding deer predators [here]
Minnesotans Sue to Delist Wolves [here]