| April 18, 2007 | - A Stanford study concluded that pollution from ethanol could be a worse health hazard than that from gasoline.
| Source:
San Francisco Gate
|
| January 25, 2007 | - Six teenage girls were arrested on conspiracy charges after a list of 300 assassination targets, including Tom Cruise and the Energizer Bunny, was discovered in a trash can in a rural Tennessee high school. “I was very scared, my friends were scared,” said sophomore Lakyn Ledford, who stayed home after learning that student-athletes were also on the list.
| Source:
AP via SFGate.com
|
| January 18, 2007 | -
Corn prices were at a 10-year high, leading to price-gouging by corn merchants. With more corn going to U.S. ethanol plants, the president of Mexico signed an accord with Mexican supermarket chains and bakers to cap tortilla prices.
| Source 1:
BBCnews.com
Source 2:
BBCnews.com
|
| November 2, 2006 | -
Corn
farmers in the Midwest were resisting bids for their ethanol plants by Wall Street firms.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 22, 2006 | -
Businessman Richard Branson pledged to donate $3 billion to alternative energy development.
| Source:
ABC News via google news
|
| December 10, 2005 | - An increasing number of Americans were heating their homes with corn.
| Source:
IndyStar.com
|
| July 6, 2005 | -
Seattle's new energy-efficient city hall building was found to be using 15 to 50 percent more electricity than its larger predecessor.
| Source:
The Seattle Post Intelligencer
|
| June 6, 2005 | -
Scientists in Los Angeles created a fusion reaction at around room temperature using a pyroelectric crystal.
| Source:
The Christian Science Monitor
|
| May 13, 2005 | - Researchers in Japan developed a fuel cell that runs on blood.
| Source:
IOL.co.za
|
| December 16, 2004 | - and a Minnesota company was building a power plant that will be fueled primarily by turkey droppings.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 3, 2004 | - The United States was planning to develop portable nuclear
power plants, and a
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 22, 2004 | - A highly radioactive nuclear fuel rod was missing in Vermont.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| April 20, 2004 | - Bob Woodward's new book continued to shape the news; it was the source of accusations that the Bush Administration improperly diverted funds to prepare for the conquest of Iraq, and that Saudi Arabia promised President Bush to deliver low fuel prices to help with his reelection.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 3, 2004 | - Swiss Re, the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned that the costs of climate change could be $150 billion a year before long, with insurers facing $30-40 billion in annual claims. "There is a danger," the company said in a report, "that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic system in time."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| February 22, 2004 | - An internal Pentagon report warned that global climate change will soon lead to drought, famine, and widespread warfare as countries begin to fight over scarce water, food, and energy supplies. Climate change, the report argues, "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."
| Source:
Observer
|
| February 12, 2004 | -
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended his duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney and said he did not plan to recuse himself from a case involving the Vice President's shadowy energy task force.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| January 9, 2004 | - O'Neill said that the very first meeting of the National Security Council involved discussions of a "post-Saddam Iraq," peacekeeping troops, and war-crimes tribunals. O'Neill provided the book's author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, with 19,000 internal documents — one of which, from March 5, 2001, was entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" and included a map of Iraqi oil fields listing contractors and countries with interests there.
| Source:
CBS News
|
| January 2, 2004 | - A French magistrate was thinking about indicting the vice president in a bribery case involving a gas liquefication factory built by Halliburton in Nigeria.
| Source:
Nation
|
| December 27, 2003 | - Hundreds of Chinese were killed by poison gas emitted from a natural gas well.
| Source:
Financial Times
|
| December 14, 2003 | - A suicide car bomber blew up outside an Iraqi police station, killing at least 17 people; a gas truck exploded in the middle of Baghdad, and an American soldier died while trying to disarm a bomb.
| Source:
Christian Science Monitor
|
| December 12, 2003 | - The Pentagon accused Halliburton, which recently removed its name from outside its corporate headquarters in Houston, of overcharging for gasoline in Iraq.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 5, 2003 | - In Albany, Georgia, a hair stylist's hair burst into flame while she was standing next to a gas pump.
| Source:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
|
| December 3, 2003 | -
Iraqis were wondering why their gas lines were so long.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 14, 2003 | - Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, suggested that synthetic microbes might someday remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 6, 2003 | - Lawyers at the Environmental Protection Agency announced that they were dropping lawsuits against 50 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act, because newly weakened enforcement rules have undermined the cases.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 2, 2003 | - The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced a settlement with energy companies that benefited from market manipulation in the California
energy crisis two years ago.
The companies agreed to pay about $1 million in fines, or about 3 cents for every Californian, though the energy scam cost the state $8.9 billion, or $250 per citizen.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 20, 2003 | -
Gasoline was scarce in Arizona.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 19, 2003 | -
Al Qaeda's Abu Hafs Brigades took credit for the recent blackout and said that it was a gift to the Iraqi people.
| Source:
MEMRI.org
|
| August 15, 2003 | - The United States and parts of Canada suffered a massive blackout that left millions of people in 8 states without electricity; New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, and Toronto were all affected.
Officials soon determined that the outage, the largest in American history, was caused by a failed line in Ohio. "We are a major superpower with a Third World electrical grid," said Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 15, 2003 | - A Greek oil tanker sank off a popular Pakistani beach and dumped at least 12,000 metric tons of oil into the water. People were complaining of dead fish and "pungent smells" as the oil washed ashore.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 21, 2003 | - Mortuary workers in Zimbabwe were renting cadavers to motorists who wished to take advantage of the priority given to hearses in gas-station lines.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| April 22, 2003 | -
A company in Philadelphia was busy experimenting with a thermal depolymerization process that converts turkeys, tires, plastic bottles, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, medical waste, and anything else containing carbon into oil. “There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil,” said a representative.
| |
| January 21, 2003 | -
Ukraine said that workers cleaning up the Chernobyl nuclear site had dumped radioactive material in areas previously uncontaminated by radiation.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | -
Enron, the energy trading company with very close ties to President Bush, collapsed and filed the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | -
Oil prices were dropping.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | -
President Bush was still trying to exploit the terrorist
attacks as an excuse to drill for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - A drunk in Alaska shot a hole in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, spilling 150,000 gallons of oil onto the tundra.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | -
Republicans were arguing that drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was now a matter of national security.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - Vice President Dick Cheney was still refusing demands by the General Accounting Office to turn over records concerning the White House energy plan.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | -
Cheney's aide, Mary Matalin, formerly a television personality, said the energy task force had nothing to hide but would continue to hide it anyway.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | -
Bush Administration officials said that the United States would oppose an international plan to encourage nonpolluting energy sources.
| |
| June 19, 2001 | - Procter & Gamble largely eliminated its line of foods containing Olestra, a fat substitute that failed to catch on with consumers, perhaps because of widespread concerns about “anal oil leakage.” Karl Rove, President Bush's chief adviser, was in trouble because he owned $100,000 worth of Intel stock when he met with the company's CEO, who was in town lobbying for approval of a corporate merger, which followed with celerity.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | - Vice President Dick Cheney announced his energy plan.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | -
President Bush said that his big tax cut was the best way to deal with high energy costs.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | -
California was suffering from rolling blackouts.
| |
| April 24, 2001 | - An oil pipe broke on Alaska's North Slope spilling 92,400 gallons of “produced water,” a mixture of salt water and oil, onto the tundra, making it the largest tundra spill on the North Slope to date.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | -
Scientists found evidence of negative gravity, also known as dark energy and the “cosmological constant,” in a photograph of an exploding star.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | - There were reports that President Bush will try to open millions of acres of public land in the Rockies to oil and gas development.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | - Wildlife in the New York area failed for some reason to notice three separate oil spills.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | - The world's largest offshore oil rig sank off Rio de Janeiro, spilling 400,000 gallons of oil and diesel fuel.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | - The United States government fired a mapping specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey who posted a map on the Internet showing caribou calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where President Bush hopes to drill for oil.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - After a heavy lobbying campaign by the electric industry, President George W. Bush broke a campaign promise and decided not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, humiliating Christie Whitman, his EPA administrator, and effectively killing the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. The President said that he was worried about an energy crisis and that he wasn't entirely convinced that global warming was real.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - OPEC decided to cut production by 4 percent in order to keep oil prices high.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | - The Pentagon announced a new “active denial system” that fires electromagnetic energy at people and creates a burning sensation on the surface of their skin.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | -
President George W. Bush, a former oil man, named Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oil man, to head a special task force to devise ways to increase the profits of oil companies.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | - In response to the continuing energy crisis in California, President Bush continued to affirm that pollution was the solution.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | -
California was forced to impose blackouts for the first time since World War II; George W. Bush said that he was opposed to price caps on wholesale power and suggested that California simply relax its environmental regulations and allow power companies to go full tilt. He recently gave the following analysis: “The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.” Much of California's electricity is produced by plants in Texas.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | - Governor Gray Davis of California threatened to take over power plants if necessary to get the state's electric supply under control; he said that energy
deregulation was “a colossal and dangerous failure.”
| |
| December 26, 2000 | - A group of oil and mining companies agreed to do a better job of respecting the human rights of people in remote areas who do not wish to collaborate in their own exploitation; the accord was nonbinding.
| |
| December 26, 2000 | -
Russia was planning to earn billions for becoming the world's largest nuclear waste dump; the atomic energy minister, Yevgeny Adamov, said the plan would allow Russia, which just announced it might default on its debt again, to avoid “going with a begging bowl to the IMF, which we have done up to now to our shame.” Adamov recently criticized the Ukraine for closing the Chernobyl power station, saying that it was perfectly safe.
| |
| December 5, 2000 | - A tanker ran aground south of New Orleans and spilled about a half-million gallons of oil into the Mississippi River.
| |
| October 24, 2000 | - The U.S. Department of Energy found that it had underestimated the amount of plutonium and other radioactive elements stored in flimsy containers that either are leaking or are in danger of leaking; the actual amount of such waste is ten times higher than previously thought.
| |
| September 26, 2000 | - A new book claimed that anthropologists working in Venezuela in the 1960s deliberately infected the Yanomami people with measles, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in order to test theories about evolution and eugenics; the same anthropologists, who were working in association with the United States atomic energy commission, also injected Americans with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission.
| |
| September 26, 2000 | - At his vice president's request, President Bill Clinton released 30 million barrels of oil from America's emergency fuel reserves in an attempt to lower the price of oil.
| |
| September 19, 2000 | - Protesters prevented the distribution of gasoline in England, causing 90 percent of the country's filling stations to run dry; Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to reduce fuel taxes.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | -
British and American warplanes again bombed Iraq, just a few days after President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela visited the country; the airstrikes destroyed a warehouse used to store food acquired in the U.N. oil-for-food program.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | -
Dick Cheney confirmed that he will receive some $20 million in retirement benefits from his former employer, an oil company.
| |
| August 8, 2000 | -
Chinese protestors set fire to Hong Kong's immigration office, after dousing its lobby with gasoline, injuring fifty.
| |
| August 8, 2000 | -
California was in the midst of a power shortage; residents faced the prospect of rolling black outs and many began, hesitantly, to question the wisdom of energy
deregulation.
| |
