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A Chinese group known as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has bought up 200 acres of land near the town of Milan, Michigan. Their plan is to construct a “China City” with artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens. Essentially, it would be a little slice of communist China dropped right into the heartland of America. This “China City” would be located about 40 minutes from both Detroit and Toledo, and it would be marketed to Chinese business people that want to start businesses in the United States. Unfortunately, this is not just an isolated...

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep-school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s inspector general’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading, and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon investigators have traced an outbreak of norovirus to a reusable grocery bag that members of a Beaverton girls' soccer team passed around when they shared cookies. The soccer team of 13- and 14-year-olds traveled to Seattle for a weekend tournament in October 2010.

Oregon public health officials have traced a nasty outbreak of norovirus infections in a group of soccer players to an unlikely source: a reusable grocery bag contaminated with what some experts are calling “the perfect pathogens.” The incident is raising questions, once again, about the cleanliness of the portable shopping bags that many consumers use to avoid the paper vs. plastic impact on the environment. “We wash our clothes when they’re dirty; we should wash our bags, too,” said Kimberly K. Repp, an epidemiologist with the Washington County Department of Health and Human Services in Hillsboro, Ore. Her work is...

Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, say researchers. British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus. By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs - as a whole - produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually. They suggest the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago. David Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moore's University, and colleagues from the University of London and the University of Glasgow published their results in the journal Current Biology.

One popular climate record that shows a slower atmospheric warming trend than other studies contains a data calibration problem, and when the problem is corrected the results fall in line with other records and climate models, according to a new University of Washington study. The finding is important because it helps confirm that models that simulate global warming agree with observations, said Stephen Po-Chedley, a UW graduate student in atmospheric sciences who wrote the paper with Qiang Fu, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

Loyola University in Chicago is ridding its campus of bottled water. School officials say bottled water will no longer be sold anywhere on campus starting in 2013.

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted. More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well. Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the...

The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. See what they get right. A few years back, I interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. I learned that the "best of the best" tend to share the following eight core beliefs. 1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield. Average bosses see business as a conflict between companies, departments and groups. They build huge armies of "troops" to order about, demonize competitors as "enemies," and treat customers as "territory" to be conquered. Extraordinary...

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 6 administrator Al Armendariz apologized for boasting that the Obama Administration’s approach toward environmental enemies was to “crucify them.” Armendariz attributed his remarks to his misunderstanding of the scope of the President’s authority. “While it is agreed that the President is empowered to kill those he deems a threat, I have been advised by the Attorney General that actually crucifying them would be construed as ‘cruel and unusual,’” Armendariz said. “Only more covert methods are currently approved.” Armendariz acknowledged “the President’s right to impose whatever restrictions he sees fit. After all, he is our ruler....

Cove Point in Southern Maryland has become the latest flash point in the fight between the fossil fuels industry and its longtime foes in the environmental movement. Citing a unique Carter-era agreement, the Sierra Club says it will veto plans by energy giant Dominion to build the first natural gas liquefaction and export facility on the East Coast, a site that would handle booming supplies from the Marcellus Shale and other vast deposits for shipment to Asia and elsewhere. The 1970s legal settlement, the Sierra Club argues, gives it the authority to halt any project that would “change the footprint”...

Over the past decade, alarmists have repeatedly made claims that the Great Lakes were drying up. However, month after month Great Lakes water levels were higher in the 2000s than low level records set in previous decades. Humans have only been keeping consistent Great Lakes water level records for 94 years. In 1918 the Army Corps of Engineers began measuring and recording the lake levels on a monthly basis. This is a very short period in terms of natural history. Yet, with the exception of two summer months on Lake Superior, the monthly measurements of the 2000s didn't even hit...

This is the video that got the maker's twitter account banned. It is very good.

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared. He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over...

Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year – the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee. We can apply this same logic to climate change. We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued*. Let’s...

When Tony Abruzzio and his fiancee were taking their morning walk on the beach Sunday, he saw something he called appalling. “Bottles, broken-up ice coolers, towels — you name it, all over the place,” Abruzzio said. “... It was really unnecessary and unneeded.” In the video, Abruzzio shows a section of the island’s south beach pocked with cups, bottles, other trash and clothing as volunteers clean. “This is why Orange Crush has got such a bad reputation on Tybee,” he says in the video.

Contemplating 1972 predictions of environmental doom, just in time for Earth Day Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth, a report to the Club of Rome, was released with great fanfare at a conference at the Smithsonian Institution. The study was based on a computer model developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and designed “to investigate five major trends of global concern—accelerating industrial development, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.” The goal was to use the model to explore the increasingly dire "predicament of mankind." The researchers modestly acknowledged...

In 1517 Martin Luther set off the Protestant revolution against the Catholic Church that led to the spread of the then-new movement as a response to the corruption of the Church. It took time for it to establish itself as an alternative and was greatly aided by the invention of printing and spread of literacy, but mostly because ordinary people had grown weary of the Church’s extravagance, poor governance, and resistance to change. The selling of worthless “indulgences” as a means to wipe one’s sins clean was the final straw. Environmentalism has become a modern religion and its “cap and...

When environmental organizations pushed Washington voters to approve their renewable energy Initiative 937, they touted biomass energy — incinerated wood waste — as one of their preferred alternatives to fossil fuel. They reasoned that biomass energy plants would help clear forests of flammable wood debris from dead and diseased timber, put idled loggers and millworkers back to work and produce cleaner, more affordable energy. But since voters narrowly approved the initiative in 2006, many of those same activists are battling against biomass projects.

Meteorologist Brian Sussman blows whistle on president's scheme The environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all, according to meteorologist-turned-journalist Brian Sussman. It’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government – and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it, he says. Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism in his explosive brand-new book, “Eco-Tyranny.” He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions...

Sea Ice extent still greater than average (third consecutive week) http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that it will be creating an “environmental justice” unit that will be overseeing environmental regulations, alongside local governments. The unit’s role of enforcing environmental regulations has prompted critics to refer to the new department as the “green police.” The DHS defines environmental justice as “the commitment of the Federal Government … to avoid placing disproportionately high and adverse effects on the human health and environment of minority populations and low-income populations.”

Only months after Coconino County's first major wind energy farm got up and running this winter, the utility buying its power says more wind farms here are unlikely -- at least for now. Cost is the bottom line, with the sun beating the wind on both equipment prices and time-of-day power production. This disadvantage for wind could have some implications for a handful of other big wind projects proposed in Coconino County. A worldwide glut of solar panels produced at lower costs (including from China) has cut solar panel prices to a fraction of their former cost. So Arizona Public...

SAN FRANCISCO — George Lucas' empire is striking back in its long-running battle to build a palatial film studio in the pastoral hills north of San Francisco. Lucasfilm Ltd., the force behind the Star Wars movies, shocked Marin County on Tuesday by announcing that it is abandoning the controversial Grady Ranch project, citing bitter opposition from neighbors and delays in the approval process. The company said it would build its new digital media production studio elsewhere and hopes to sell the historic farmland to a developer interested in constructing low-income housing.

A few days ago I realized that we who are participating on the Agenda 21 thread have amassed an impressive amount of data and links which are quite important for the educating of anyone who is wondering what “Agenda 21” is all about. There is absolutely no question in the minds of any of our participants at this stage that “Agenda 21” is real, and is NOT a tin-foil hat conspiracy. There are quite a number of people on this forum who were way ahead of us, and have been quite patient with us while some (like myself) have played...

le this under “There (almost) goes the neighborhood.” Lucasfilm announced this week that despite many years of planning and investment, the continuing regulatory delays and furious opposition of neighbors has led the company to abandon efforts to build a large production studio in Marin County, north of San Francisco. “We have several opportunities to build the production stages in communities that see us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire, and if we are to stay on schedule we must act on those opportunities,” Lucasfilm said it a statement . . .

Although negotiations over a package of tax increases and a proposed casino collapsed Monday night, the Maryland General Assembly passed a lot of bills this session — 791, to be exact. Of those, 96 percent were passed in the last week, including hundreds in the hours and minutes before midnight on Monday. Here are some highlights from the 90-day session’s last day: STORMWATER FEE The Senate spent much of the session’s waning hours fiercely debating a stormwater fee bill that was on few people’s radar earlier in the session. The bill requires localities to fund projects to reduce polluted runoff...

Sea ice extent has been above average for about two weeks now. No big deal, but worth a mention. Please see the attached link from The Cryosphere Today page, published by the University of Illinois. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

All bets are off for the future of energy in the United States and, indeed, the world, as the price of natural gas plummets to ever-lower values -- thanks to the development of technology that can access gas and liquids trapped in hitherto inaccessible shale rocks.... ....With the pipeline problem solved (at least in the Lower 48), consider the consequences of having huge quantities of cheap gas available. It will make new coal-fired power plants uneconomic, but it will also make new nuclear plants uneconomic.(Coal and nuclear do have an important advantage over gas: the fuel can be easily stored...

While it has for the most part disappeared from mainstream view, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is anything but over. In fact, the situation in Japan has gone from bad to worse. Bottom line: There is no way to contain the radiation. Even more alarming is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other agencies have warned that the nuclear storage pools (the containment units that are being used to cool the nuclear fuel) have been damaged and may collapse under their own weight. Such an event would cause widespread nuclear fallout throughout the region and force the government to...

The House passed the administration’s offshore wind power bill Friday amid accusations Gov. Martin O’Malley secured votes on the House Economic Matters Committee with disparity grants to committee members’ districts. “Those of you who have been here longer than two weeks know there’s a lot of complicated pressures that go into making a bill pass or fail,” said House Minority Leader Anthony O’Donnell. “Sometimes it takes a little nudge, sometimes it takes a carrot, and sometimes it takes a stick.” The disparity grant program in Maryland provides subsidies to jurisdictions with income tax receipts that fall below 75% of the...

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be "treated", according to an Oregon-based professor of "sociology and environmental studies". Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master's and PhD in sociology.

The Obama administration is surging forward with a first-of-its-kind EPA rule for new power plants, in what Republicans and industry groups say will inflate electricity prices and possibly kill off coal, the preeminent U.S. energy source. The EPA announced the rule Tuesday, with a goal to curb carbon dioxide emissions by imposing strict regulations on new coal-fired plants, including a limit that caps plant emissions to not more than 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour of energy generated. "Right now there are no limits to the amount of carbon pollution that future power plants will be able to put...

A federal judge slammed an Obama administration gambit to revoke mountaintop mining permits Friday, saying the EPA invented authority where there was none. “EPA resorts to magical thinking” to justify nullifying permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Arch Coal Inc.’s Mingo Logan mine in West Virginia, wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C. Berman Jackson said the EPA’s effort to revoke permits already issued by the Army Corps lacked the backing of any statutory provision or regulation. “It posits a scenario involving the automatic self-destruction of a written permit issued by an entirely...

Most people have no idea that the United Nations has been drafting an environmental constitution for the world that is intended to supersede all existing national laws. This document has a working title of "Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development" and you can read the entire thing right here. Work on this proposed world environmental constitution has been going on since 1995, and the fourth edition was issued to UN member states on September 22nd, 2010. This document is intended to become a permanent binding treaty and it would establish an incredibly repressive system of global governance.

A fundamental shift in the Indian monsoon has occurred over the last few millennia, from a steady humid monsoon that favored lush vegetation to extended periods of drought, reports a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study has implications for our understanding of the monsoon’s response to climate change.

The U.S. government is embarking upon, and partly financing, a series of groundwater remediation initiatives in China -- despite the fact that China already plans to pump (USD) $5.5 billion of its own money into such actions through 2020. According to a Scope of Work (SOW) that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor has located, the U.S. Trade & Development Agency (USTDA) initially will fund what is known as a "definitional mission," or DM, to China (#RFQ-CO201261140). The agency will outsource this preliminary endeavor to a private contractor, who would then travel to Beijing and two other cities that the Chinese...

WASHINGTON — A first round of tests showed no evidence that water at 11 homes in a small town in Pennsylvania near natural gas drilling operations had been polluted to unhealthy levels, U.S. environmental regulators said on Thursday. The Environmental Protection Agency said in January it would perform tests at about 60 homes in Dimock where residents have complained since 2008 of cloudy, foul-smelling water after Cabot Oil & Gas Corp began hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for gas nearby. Sampling results from the first round of 11 homes "did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern,"...

President Obama begged voters to back his vision of an oil-free future for America. “There will come a day when we will wean ourselves from this fuel of the past,” Obama proclaimed. “Reliance on oil-based fuels has lulled us into lives of gluttony and waste. We have gotten soft because we drive when we should walk. We have gotten lazy because it’s easier to turn up the thermostat than to put on a sweater.” “There are environmentally-friendly ways for us to live,” the president continued. “I see a future when mighty vessels powered by the wind carry goods and people...

Everyone knows Mitt Romney has been running from the liberal RINO (Republican In Name Only) image that stood him in good stead in Massachusetts, the ultimate Blue State. He has been running as fast as he can from his RomneyCare healthcare program in Massachusetts, which was a prototype for ObamaCare. He’s also running from his Greenie record, pushing the idea that he’s the man to take on the enviro-extremists that are preventing America from drilling for oil and digging for coal. [snip] However, observers at both conservative and liberal websites are pointing to indicators that, if elected, Romney is likely...

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu testified today before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power on the department's FY2013 Budget Request. Chu was asked if he drove a Chevy Volt, a car he praised during the hearing, but claimed he didn't own a car 'at the moment'

Ottawa’s giant skating rink on the Rideau Canal was closed in February due to thin ice caused by unseasonably mild temperatures. Yet, at the same time, ice blocked the canals of Venice for the first time in recent memory as temperatures in the exquisite Italian city dropped to -10C for more than a week. In the Netherlands, canals were closed to commercial boat traffic because ice made them unnavigable — another unusual development. Also in early February, fountains in southern France froze over. Polish rail lines were chocked with metres of snow. Swiss villages were cut off by record accumulations...

A COALITION of environmental activists has developed an extraordinary secret plan to ruin Australia's coal export boom by disrupting and delaying key projects and infrastructure. The strategy includes mounting legal challenges to up to a dozen key mines and exploiting the Lock The Gate movement against coal-seam gas to put pressure on governments to block mining. A funding proposal for the Australian anti-coal movement, obtained by The Australian, declares that 2012 and 2013 are critical years to stop tens of billions of dollars of investment and says the aim of the strategy is to "disrupt and delay" projects "while gradually...

WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline)- The Justice Department announced Monday that it published its first annual progress report on environmental justice. According to the communique, the report ...

During WW2, defeatists were prepared to sacrifice all of Australia north of Brisbane to the advancing enemy. Green extremists have established a New Brisbane Line whereby Northern Australia is abandoned to weeds, ferals, trees, kangaroos, government boffins and park rangers. Every green policy seems designed to rid the north of all signs of human activity. Green Party Leader, Bob Brown's dream to close every coal mine, gas producer and carbon fuelled power station is well known - this should rid central Queensland of all those pesky little towns like Collinsville, Glenden, Blair Athol, Moranbah, Dysart, Saraji, Blackwater and Moura and...

Last week, steam shot out of my head as I read an e-mail press release that came here to the radio station. It was followed a day later by a glowing story in our local newspaper. It was the proud announcement of an award from the U.S. Green Building Council being given to a housing development in our Mississippi Gulf Coast city of Ocean Springs. Apparently this new housing development has met all the criteria to be praised as “green” and “sustainable,” and an example of so-called “smart growth.” What’s wrong with that? Well, just everything. And, what makes me...

We noticed years ago that global warming not only was caused by everything we do, according to the alarmists, but that global warming caused nearly everything – including oddly enough, global cooling. We came across this news clipping today at Creative Minority Report, which dubbed it the “Greatest Global Warming Headline … Evah!” We have to agree: . . .

I've called the judicially-imposed drought in California's Central Valley --- the Dust Bowl Congress created --- through its creation of the Endangered Species Act, invoked in this case by the Delta smelt, a fish that's not suitable for eating. Once a breadbasket for the nation, the cutoff of irrigation water to the Central Valley has destroyed agriculture and tens of thousands of jobs as a tradeoff for the endangered fish. Now, however, voices of sanity in Congress have begun to speak on the man-made economic and agricultural disaster, as Rep. Devin Nunes builds support for his Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability...

In 2010, as a direct result of environmental concerns, NIMBY activism, and a sluggish permit-granting process, there were 351 energy projects that were being delayed, postponed, or outright terminated. This is according to a study published by the Chamber of Commerce entitled Project No Project. Together, these projects were estimated to be worth $1.1 trillion and expected to create 1.9 million jobs. The overriding lesson from the report was that, given America’s byzantine permit system, opponents of any project can find a violation somewhere within the mountains of paperwork a firm is required to submit. This lesson is still...

Misinformed fluoridation promoters falsely assure unquestioning and confused legislators that fluoride-laced water is safe for everyone and no credible evidence proves otherwise. However, hundreds of studies and an abundance of evidence prove them wrong. Here's what happened in 2011 1) U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommends lowering water fluoride levels due to fluoride's harmful dental effects For over 6 decades, HHS assured Americans that artificially fluoridated water was safe for everyone to drink. But they were wrong. About 50% of U.S. adolescents have fluoride-ruined teeth or dental fluorosis – white spotted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth. So...