The Pickens Plan website and links

T. Boone Pickens is investing in the future, and he would like more Americans to do the same. Here is an excerpt from The Pickens Plan:


America is addicted to foreign oil.


It's an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people.

The addiction has worsened for decades and now it's reached a point of crisis.
In 1970, we imported 24% of our oil.

Today it's nearly 70% and growing.

As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.
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Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.

America uses a lot of oil. Every day 85 million barrels of oil are produced around the world. And 21 million of those are used here in the United States.

That's 25% of the world's oil demand. Used by just 4% of the world's population.

Can't we just produce more oil?

World oil production peaked in 2005. Despite growing demand and an unprecedented increase in prices, oil production has fallen over the last three years. Oil is getting more expensive to produce, harder to find and there just isn't enough of it to keep up with demand.

The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone.

What's the good news?

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power.

Studies from around the world show that the Great Plains States are home to the greatest wind energy potential in the world — by far.



The Department of Energy reports that 20% of America's electricity can come from wind. North Dakota alone has the potential to provide power for more than a quarter of the country.

Today's wind turbines stand up to 410 feet tall, with blades that stretch 148 feet in length. The blades collect the wind's kinetic energy. In one year, a 3-megawatt wind turbine produces as much energy as 12,000 barrels of imported oil.

Wind power currently accounts for 48 billion kWh of electricity a year in the United States — enough to serve more than 4.5 million households. That is still only about 1% of current demand, but the potential of wind is much greater.

A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.

Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.

That's a lot of money, but it's a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it's a bargain.
An economic revival for rural America.

Developing wind power is an investment in rural America.

To witness the economic promise of wind energy, look no further than Sweetwater, Texas.

Sweetwater was typical of many small towns in middle-America. With a shortage of good jobs, the youth of Sweetwater were leaving in search of greater opportunities. And the town's population dropped from 12,000 to under 10,000.

When a large wind power facility was built outside of town, Sweetwater experienced a revival. New economic opportunity brought the town back to life and the population has grown back up to 12,000.

In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, where T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world.

At 4,000 megawatts — the equivalent combined output of four large coal-fire plants — the production of the completed Pampa facility will double the wind energy output of the United States.

In addition to creating new construction and maintenance jobs, thousands of Americans will be employed to manufacture the turbines and blades. These are high skill jobs that pay on a scale comparable to aerospace jobs.

Plus, wind turbines don't interfere with farming and grazing, so they don't threaten food production or existing local economies.
A cheap new replacement for foreign oil.

The Honda Civic GX Natural Gas Vehicle is the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle in the world according to the EPA.

Natural gas and bio-fuels are the only domestic energy sources used for transportation.


Cleaner

Natural gas is the cleanest transportation fuel available today.

According to the California Energy Commission, critical greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas are 23% lower than diesel and 30% lower than gasoline.

Natural gas vehicles (NGV) are already available and combine top performance with low emissions. The natural gas Honda Civic GX is rated as the cleanest production vehicle in the world.

According to NGVAmerica, there are more than 7 million NGVs in use worldwide, but only 150,000 of those are in the United States.

The EPA estimates that vehicles on the road account for 60% of carbon monoxide pollution and around one-third of hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions in the United States. As federal and state emissions laws become more stringent, many requirements will be unattainable with conventionally fueled vehicles.

Since natural gas is significantly cleaner than petroleum, NGVs are increasing in popularity. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach recently announced that 16,800 old diesel trucks will be replaced, and half of the new vehicles will run on alternatives such as natural gas.

Cheaper

Natural gas is significantly less expensive than gasoline or diesel. In places like Utah and Oklahoma, prices are less than $1 a gallon. To see fueling stations and costs in your area, check out cngprices.com natural gas prices at pump.


Domestic

Natural gas is our country's second largest energy resource and a vital component of our energy supply. 98% of the natural gas used in the United States is from North America. But 70% of our oil is purchased from foreign nations.

Natural gas is one of the cleanest, safest and most useful forms of energy — residentially, commercially and industrially. The natural gas industry has existed in the United States for over 100 years and continues to grow.

Domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum. And new discoveries of natural gas and ongoing development of renewable biogas are continually adding to existing reserves.

While it is a cheap, effective and versatile fuel, less than 1% of natural gas is currently used for transportation.

Full article continues at: The Pickens Plan online text


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Congo's Female Victims of Violence Benefit from micro-farming assistance

Small is beautiful in Congo farming

TheStar.com - World

Officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo fear that the food rioting that has wreaked havoc in 30 other countries will break out in theirs, where, in rural areas, people spend 80 per cent of their household money on food. More than a quarter of the population — some 16 million people — are undernourished.

In this war-torn land, helping people feed themselves is a critical weapon against poverty

July 27, 2008
Mitch Potter, Toronto Star European Bureau

KATUBA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — A lone voice sings out in Swahili as the women enter the fields, and the call is answered in unison. Suddenly the tiny valley is alive with a delicate weave of joyful harmonies.

Here is one hopeful sliver in the broken heart of Africa.

The source of glee seems almost meagre, but in the lives of the mostly female growers of Katuba, it is everything: these 500 women are singing in praise of their own private green revolution, a turnaround created with deceptive simplicity – handfuls of carefully selected seeds, a few tools and watering cans, access to just enough credit and food aid to get it off the ground. And the result for many is a tripling of farm incomes in a span of three years through raising fresh-for-market garden produce.

Four dollars a day isn't much, not even here in eastern Congo. But it is an uncommon sum, fully double what an estimated 300 million sub-Saharan Africans – including a quarter of the world's hungriest – struggle to attain. Crucially for Katuba, the bounty of Chinese cabbage, spinach, carrots and subtropical greens from these tiny plots translates into belly-filling food security, with enough surplus to keep kids clothed and in school.

"We eat maybe 10 per cent and we sell the rest – even from these small gardens, it works," says Rebecca Tshidibi, 24, who founded Katuba's Association of Women for Integrated Development on 60 hectares of unworked but arable land, with a hidden agenda to mend a community shattered by five years of regional conflict deadlier than any since World War II.

A third of these women are HIV carriers, others are victims of sexual violence and others still are refugees returning from nightmares untold. Everyone ranks as a survivor of a civil war that claimed as many as five million Congolese, most not from bullets or bombs but from diseases that prey on the acutely malnourished.

"The women with the virus, they were isolated and depressed," says Tshidibi. "They had no direction in life. The best part of what we are building is that today they belong. Now, the women with HIV are the core of our project. The success of our garden is making us a community again."

In Katuba and a dozen similar sites visited by the Toronto Star during a two-week journey into some of the most remote parts of eastern Congo, the same grassroots theme arises time and again: when it comes to African agriculture, small is beautiful. Where there are no roads to speak of – and in many parts of Congo, a 100-kilometre journey can eat up an entire day – dramatic investment in helping the population to feed itself is the obvious way forward.

Only now, as skyrocketing food prices expose the neglected state of farming on the continent, are fledgling local governments and the mandarins of global aid coming to the same conclusion. In the Congo alone, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is unfurling $50 million worth of emergency development projects to help unleash the growing potential of smallholder associations like Katuba's.

"Small is beautiful," says Keith Wiebe, a development economist with the FAO. "It is by no means the only answer. But more and more, people are realizing that the really basic inputs – good seeds and fertilizer, access to a little bit of credit – will go a very long way toward restoring food security for Africa."

"It is heartening to see because in the Congo, where agriculture has suffered from decades of inattention, almost nobody uses fertilizer. There is a huge potential there. But it is going to require a huge effort to realize it. And that effort must come to terms with the fact that while small, localized farming desperately needs encouragement, no one answer is going to be a total solution."

In sprawling Congo, projects like the garden at Katuba succeed because the village is only a short distance by bicycle from the deep pockets of boomtown Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province, where Chinese-led revival of the mining industry has created a market for fresh produce.

Two bush plane flights away, in the easternmost town of Kalemie, a more desperate situation is apparent in the telltale signs of malnutrition – hungry faces, bloodshot eyes, distended bellies and reddish hair. Here, just across Lake Tanganyika from where Stanley met Livingstone, the Threat Assessment Level billboard at the United Nations peacekeepers' barracks says it all – the needle is set at dead centre, demarking a merely moderate danger of 3 out of a maximum 5.

Not quite crazy enough for war journalists, who bypass the occasional Mai Mai rebel attacks around Kalemie for the substantially more volatile North and South Kivu, where the localized remnants of the Congolese civil war are more easily found.

Yet not quite calm enough for many foreign diplomats and aid workers, including the Canadian contingent, who remain grounded at the other end of the country, in Kinshasa, until such time as Canada is satisfied the Congo has an air carrier that can be trusted not to fall out of the sky.

Outside the town's underused airstrip, a faded sign still proclaims this to be Albertville – the name it wore 50 years ago, when Kalemie was under the especially brutal rule of colonial Belgium. Walking through the main road that binds Kalemie's 109,000 souls together, one is struck with the impression that not much else has changed since then.

One encounters an especially grim scene at the Kalemie Nutritional Centre, where mothers and babies arrive at the rate of 50 a month, often on the verge of death. Under mosquito netting, the children drink medicated milk delivered by UNICEF, while the mothers are fed by the World Food Program. Outside, the parents who survive attend an FAO-sponsored gardening school while their infants recuperate.

"It is revelation to me that in just three weeks you can raise something to eat from the ground," says Guylane Fatuma, 45, a widowed mother of six, as she harvested fistfuls of amarante, a bitter African green similar to spinach.

Fatuma will leave the centre after 30 days with 40 grams of seeds – enough to grow 2,000 plants, along with a watering can and a machete. But she is circumspect about her prospects for making a go of it.

"I have learned not to hope for too much," she says. "During the war the soldiers stole our animals, and we were down to eating the peels of the cassava. We had to send the older children out to find food even when it was dangerous, to keep from starving."

A similar story is told by Georgette Mwaijuma, 32, a mother of seven, who was resettled in a village near Kalemie after spending seven years in the bush with the Mai Mai militia. Her job was to make fetishes – good luck charms worn about the waist as protection against bullets.

"We would tie them around our bellies – they were authentic, they worked," she remembers with pride. Today she is assigned to a single-room, mud-brick hut without water or electricity, scrounging to feed her seven children. She has four goats and a small patch on which to grow.

"My life is unhappy. It is still very difficult. I have many children, and they are in bad shape. If God wants, things will get better, but I don't know if God is going to bless us."

Pierre Mwambe, 28, joins the conversation, offering a variation on the theme. He spent five years in the bush with the Mai Mai rebels, but as a captive forced into battle. And when the militia group discovered he was able to read and write, Mwambe was placed "in charge of administration." His ordeal ended with a bullet from a competing militia. He wasn't wearing any protection – "I don't believe in fetishes," he says. Others nearby nod knowingly, as if this explains all.

"I did administration for the Mai Mai," continues Mwambe, who is raising goats and produce on his small patch. "Now I would like to go back to school and study public administration to help the government. I can see our country needs good administrators."

In Kinshasa, government officials readily acknowledge their moral responsibility to pay more than lip service to the farming sector. Only by sheer accident has the Congo managed to thus far avoid the food riots that have wreaked havoc in some 30 other countries, according to Thomas Emboli Jejune, the country's deputy minister of agriculture.

Full story continues at: HIV carriers and rape victims in Congo become successful farmers

NUMBERS TELL STORY OF AFRICA'S ECONOMIC CHALLENGES

50.73
Estimated average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa as measured by the UN Population Division. That represents a longevity increase of 4 per cent from five years ago.

5
Percentage share of total aid to Africa that is channelled into agricultural development.

2
Factor by which $1 of agricultural growth reduces poverty compared to $1 of growth in non-agricultural sections, according to the 2008 World Bank Development Report

50
Poverty rate, in percentage, among inhabitants of sub- Saharan Africa, a figure unchanged in 10 years and that today represents 228 million people, World Bank estimates.

25
Productivity, in percentage, of Africa's neglected farming sector, which employs more than half the workforce, compared to global average.

96
Percentage of African agriculture dependent entirely on annual rainfall, a figure that is driving an emphasis toward drought-resistant-seed science.

50
Percentage of sub-Saharan Africans who live in small, landlocked countries, where transportation costs for imported food are 50 per cent higher than for coastal residents.

575
Cost to Japan, in millions of dollars, to host the Group of Eight summit. Oxfam estimates this would translate into a year's worth of treatment for 4 million HIV sufferers.


How to help Congo's women? Visit: Youreworthit.org - Congo Women Rebirth Through Healing


Peace 2 All!

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Music Promotes Peace in Palestine

Overture to peace in the West Bank
Article from TheStar.com -

Visiting musicians help give Arab youth the power of music at `Violinist' camp

July 05, 2008
Oakland Ross, Middle East Bureau
The Toronto Star

AL-FARA, West Bank–Take a limestone prison that once held Palestinian political detainees, add about 100 Arab children, furnish them all with musical instruments, sprinkle in 23 music teachers, most of them Europeans.

Let these ingredients simmer for five sunny summer days in the West Bank – and what do you get?

A somewhat wobbly performance of a Mozart Divertimento, followed by a properly wistful rendition of Pachelbel's Canon, all accompanied by a passel of earnest but happy young Palestinian faces, not to mention a proud parent or two.

In other words, you get just what Ramzi Aburedwan was hoping for.

"To bring them all together – this is really something," said Aburedwan, 29, prime mover behind a five-year-old Palestinian artistic endeavour called Al-Kamandjati, Arabic for The Violinist. "This year, the evolution has been tremendous."

This year, Aburedwan brought his summer music camp for impoverished Palestinian kids to this former political prison in Al-Fara, a small town outside Nablus in the northern West Bank.

An accomplished violist, Aburedwan recruited nearly two dozen musicians from various countries – including the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Italy – who are donating time and talent to help raise the level of music in a part of the world more closely associated with bombs and political bluster.

The instructors included an oboist and a flautist from L'Ensemble Orchestrale de Paris, a violinist formerly of the London Symphony Orchestra, an Australian conductor who now teaches music in Italy, and a German musicologist currently resident in Marseille.

You could call them Musicians Without Borders.

"These kids in five days of lessons are going to get farther than they would in 12 weeks of one-lesson-a-week," said Peter Sulski, a Boston-born violinist who divides his time between Massachusetts and London – and now the West Bank.

"I'm a community activist when it comes to music. I've long believed in music as a force for good."

In fact, all the children – who range in age from 7 to 16 – study music year-round, enrolled in programs Al-Kamandjati offers at a newly renovated building in Ramallah, de facto capital of the West Bank. The organization also offers music training in the Gaza Strip and in Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon.

In the West Bank alone, about 300 youth study music in ongoing programs offered by Al-Kamandjati, which also distributes musical instruments without charge, thanks to funding from a variety of donors, both Palestinian and foreign.

Only the most highly motivated of those students were invited to the camp at Al-Fara, which unfolded within the low-rise, stonewalled chambers and courtyards of what used to be an Israeli jail and is now a recreational facility operated by the Palestinian Ministry of Sports and Youth.

Aburedwan said his father once was incarcerated here, and he remembers coming to visit, accompanied by his grandmother. But that was then, and this is music.

"It has been great, beautiful," said Rasha Dolani, 14, from the West Bank city of Jenin. "I want to be a great pianist."

Maybe she will be, although few, if any, of the children who study at Al-Kamandjati are likely ever to earn a living from their instruments.

That is not the point.

"Mostly, it's something else," said Sulski. "The idea is to strengthen their minds, their sense of cultural history, so that they can become a force for the future."

Still, it may seem odd that Arab children – heirs to a rich musical legacy of their own – should be schooled on Western instruments in a Western musical tradition.

Franz Dartmann, a German musicologist who is working on a new curriculum for Al-Kamandjati, said the distinctions between different musical styles are less important than the power of music itself.

"It's a bridge," he said. "It's another kind of music they can learn, and they learn it with pleasure."

That they do, as was apparent during an open-air concert the students performed on the final afternoon of their five-day summertime adventure.

Gusts of wind played havoc with the sheet music, but the players soldiered on, performing in ensembles, duets or individually for an audience of family, teachers and friends.

For a time, it was almost possible to forget the concert was taking place in the Middle East, home to what might well be the world's most stubborn conflict.

"If we all have something in common, it is music," said Aburedwan. "I just want to bring some hope and share something that I believe in so much."

Full article at Palestine Music program Promoting Peace


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Toronto Star reports on Endangered Species currently at risk in Ontario

Hanging On - Endangered Species in Ontario

TheStar.com - GTA - Hanging on

The province has identified the Jefferson salamander as a "threatened" species. The vulnerable Jefferson salamander just one of several species threatened by exemptions in protection act

July 04, 2008
Nick Kyonka, The Star.com
Staff Reporter

The Jefferson salamander is one species caught between the good and the bad of the new Endangered Species Act.

The first act in North America to protect both endangered species and their surrounding habitats, the act, which came into effect Monday, allows temporary exemptions from its guidelines for resource-driven industries.

The Jefferson salamander has been identified by the province as a "threatened" species, as opposed to "endangered." Under the old legislation, it would not have received full protection, but it is now one of 10 "fast-tracked" species to be fully protected as of next June.

In the meantime, however, the tiny amphibian is considered one of the species most vulnerable to the act's exemptions. The forestry industry has a one-year exemption, and there are three-year exemptions in place for the pits, and quarries and development industries. All threaten to destroy the salamander's woodland habitat across the province, environment groups say.

"It's been a bit of a poster child for development versus species protection," notes Caroline Schultz, executive director of the group Ontario Nature.

While the Jefferson salamander used to feature prominently in the GTA and across the province, years of development have stripped the species of much of its habitat. Pollution and predators have also slowly picked away at its numbers, and it now exists only in isolated pockets across the province.

Other species are in similar predicaments.

Yesterday we looked at seven endangered species that no longer can be found in the GTA. Today, we examine the GTA's nine currently endangered species.

AMERICAN COLOMBO

NATURAL HABITAT: Dry soil in deciduous forests, forest edges and thickets

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: One known population remaining

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: The plant's sweet roots and vulnerability to invasive plants threatens its survival. Its roots can also be manipulated to resemble those of the popular American Ginseng, giving them value on the black market.
AMERICAN EEL

NATURAL HABITAT: North American freshwater lakes connected to major waterways

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Unknown but dwindling population in Lake Ontario and its tributaries

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Much of the GTA's American eel population has been killed in large hydro turbines while travelling to and from the Atlantic Ocean to breed. Once a thriving species, as much as 99 per cent of its population has disappeared. For the first time ever, the American eel is listed as endangered across the province under the new act. ACADIAN FLYCATCHER

NATURAL HABITAT: Deciduous woodlands near creeks or wetlands

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Fewer than five pairs

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Deforestation and fragmentation of woodlands have stripped the birds of their breeding grounds. Once a flourishing species in Ontario, an estimated half of the province’s remaining Acadian Flycatchers now live in protected areas, like provincial and national parks. AMERICAN GINSENG

NATURAL HABITAT: Large, moist deciduous forests

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Several hundred plants in scattered forests across Durham, Halton and Peel regions

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Human consumption has been the biggest killer of American Ginseng in Ontario for generations as its roots are used in homemade medicinal tonics. Experts fear that if the few remaining patches of the plants are discovered, they will likely be wiped out quickly. KING RAIL

NATURAL HABITAT: Shallow freshwater marshes

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Reported in three separate GTA wetlands

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: The King Rail has paid a high price for development in the GTA, as construction from urban sprawl has wiped out the birds' habitat. For generations, the marshes they call home have been drained to make room for people. Pesticides are also suspected to have played a role. RED MULBERRY

NATURAL HABITAT: Moist, deciduous forest in the Carolinian forest zone

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Five trees in the Niagara Escarpment in Burlington

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Natural and conventional destruction of habitat has all but eliminated the red mulberry in Ontario. The increased presence of the white mulberry — found naturally in Asia — has played a significant role in the tree’s gradual decline, as hybrid mulberries take over anywhere both trees are found. PURPLE TWAYBLADE

NATURAL HABITAT: Oak savannahs, woodland openings

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: One small cluster population in King Township

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Due to their vibrant purple tips, these orchids are popular garden items and are often dug out in clumps by collectors. Urban development has also depleted their stocks, as has the orchid's inability to grow in shade. AMERICAN CHESTNUT

NATURAL HABITAT: Deciduous forests

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: One known population remaining

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Ontario's American Chestnut population never recovered after an outbreak of the Chestnut Blight fungus in the 1970s. Though nearly 99 per cent have been wiped out by the fungus over the past 30 years, the trees remaining are believed to be resistant, giving rise to the hope of a future partial recovery. BUTTERNUT

NATURAL HABITAT: Deciduous forests

HOW MANY LEFT IN THE GTA: Hundreds of trees in scattered populations all across the GTA, but not for much longer

WHY THEY ARE AT RISK: Most of Ontario's butternuts are slowly dying due to a fungal infection called butternut canker, which spreads spores across the tree and attacks the tree from the inside out. An efficient killer of the species in the U.S. for decades, the fungus first reached Ontario in the early 1990s. A provincial exemption under the new ESA allows for the removal of the dying infected trees.



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