Andy Plesser: Architect John Hix: Vieques is the "Central Park of the Caribbean"

Our war for energy independence and economic sustainability
That would be an investment more than three times the current size of the entire U.S. economy. In addition, the world would have to construct 38 new Nuclear Power plants each year, and wind-power turbines would have to be increased by 18,000 units annually, Solar Energy output would have to be increased 20 fold every year. Let us not forget as we are increasing the use of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency - the world population is increasing - the demand for energy by advancement in techn...

UK lawmakers: No need to stop deepwater drilling (AP)
LONDON – A major Oil Spill at a deepwater well in the North Sea would be more difficult to handle than the Gulf of Mexico disaster, but a Moratorium on drilling isn't necessary because Britain has tougher safety standards, a committee of lawmakers said Thursday. Legislators also stressed that a ban on drilling would leave Britain too reliant on imported energy as they backed the government's decision not to impose a moratorium. After hearing weeks of Testimony on the U.S. spill from regu...

UK lawmakers: No need to stop deepwater drilling
LONDON - A major Oil Spill at a deepwater well in the North Sea would be more difficult to handle than the Gulf of Mexico disaster, but a Moratorium on drilling isn't necessary because Britain has tougher safety standards, a committee of lawmakers said Thursday. Legislators also stressed that a ban on drilling would leave Britain too reliant on imported energy as they backed the government's decision not to impose a moratorium. After hearing weeks of Testimony on the U.S. spill from regula...

Republicans fight to save the incandescent light bulb (Daily Caller)
In the early days of the 112th Congress, Reps. Joe Barton of Texas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Michael Burgess of Texas, all Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee, will once again step in to attempt to save the incandescent light bulb. Today or tomorrow, the three representatives will reintroduce a bill to Repeal Legislation that would replace the incandescent light bulb with a more energy efficient alternative. The Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, better known as the BULB Act...

Republicans kill global warming committee
Source: The Guardian Republicans kill Global Warming committee Thursday 6 January 2011 Kate Sheppard for Mother Jones The kick-off of the 112th Congress on Wednesday also marked the end of an era in the House – the demise of a committee devoted solely to Climate Change and energy issues. The Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, created by Nancy Pelosi in 2006, has been shuttered under the new Republican leadership. In the final days of the committee, Staffers released a ...

IKEA turns off old-style light bulbs
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- IKEA said Tuesday it has stopped selling incandescent light bulbs in its U.S. home furnishing stores. The Swedish-based company said that it is the first retailer to completely pull the plug on the bulbs, after phasing out incandescent lights beginning in August. Email Print Comment IKEA's move to no longer stock or sell the traditional light bulbs comes ahead of a government-mandated phase-out of the incandescents from 2012 to 2014. The Energy Independence and Secur...

RIP, Select Committee on Global Warming
— Photo by Martha Coakley, via Flickr. The kick-off of the 112th Congress today also marks the end of an era in the House—the demise of a committee devoted solely to Climate Change and energy issues. The Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, created by Nancy Pelosi in 2006, has been shuttered under the new Republican leadership. In the final days of the committee, Staffers released a report on what the committee accomplished in its brief tenure—an epitap...

ABC Meteorologist Due In Court In False-Report Case
NEW YORK (AP/CBS 2) - A Meteorologist on ABC’s local New York station is due in court after police said she concocted claims that a man tried to sexually assault her in Central Park and later harassed her. Heidi Jones has a court date Wednesday in Manhattan. She was told last month to appear in court on a Misdemeanor false reporting charge. Her lawyer has said she will plead Not Guilty. Police say Jones told them on Nov. 24 that a man tried to assault her a month earlier while s...

Best Things To Do In NYC Today, Jan. 5
Five things to do in New York City today. By Carly Petrone. Are you a depressed Dexter fan, left wondering what you’ll be doing until next season? You can get a dose of Jennifer Carpenter as she stars with Pablo Schreiber in Gruesome Playground Injuries, the latest play directed by Scott Ellis. Written by Rajiv Joseph, the production focuses on two childhood friends who rekindle their friendship and eventually form a courtship. After running into each other in a Hospital room they realize ...

Forecaster Admitted Making Up Attack Story: Prosecutors
Stress and a Hunger for attention led a suspended WABC weather woman to make up a story about being attacked, prosecutors said Wednesday. Meteorologist Heidi Jones, 37, used those excuses when she finally came clean almost two weeks after leading detectives on a wild goose chase last month, according to a court document. Jones appeared silently before a Manhattan Criminal Court judge to face two Misdemeanor counts of filing a false report. Her lawyer said that she pleaded Not Guilty and will fig...

Cayman Islans sinking US ship to create reef
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Contractors began Flooding a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship Wednesday to sink it in the clear waters off the Cayman Islands, where officials hope the vessel will attract tourists and fish. Plans called for the USS Kittiwake, a 1945-vintage Submarine rescue ship, to rest on a sandy bottom off Grand Cayman's Seven Mile Beach. The 47-foot-tall (14-meter) ship will be at a depth of 62 feet (19 meters), so the top deck should be close to the Caribbean Sea's surface, making it...

Cayman Islands sinking US ship to create reef
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Contractors began Flooding a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship Wednesday to sink it in the clear waters off the Cayman Islands, where officials hope the vessel will attract tourists and fish. Plans called for the USS Kittiwake, a 1945-vintage Submarine rescue ship, to rest on a sandy bottom off Grand Cayman's Seven Mile Beach. The 47-foot-tall (14-meter) ship will be at a depth of 62 feet (19 meters), so the top deck should be close to the Caribbean Sea's surface, making it...

Stomach bugs a major import to Canada
Canadians are well aware that traveling to certain parts of the world, especially the sun-and-sand Meccas of the Caribbean so loved by this country, often means putting up with nasty gastrointestinal infections. Little research, though, has been done on just how much travel contributes to stomach infections that are treated here at home. A new Canadian study suggests that going abroad accounts for a surprising proportion of domestic cases. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Travel Medicine...

ITS THE CARNIVAL OF Latin America and the Caribbean.
IT’S THE CARNIVAL OF Latin America and the Caribbean. ...

America's revolution: The king's shilling
Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War. By Thomas Allen. Harper; 468 pages; $26.99. Buy from Amazon.com AMERICANS remember their revolution as an event both epochal and clean. Richard Nixon famously argued that it was not a revolution at all. Some historians, such as Charles and Mary Beard and Howard Zinn, stress its conservative character; others, like Gordon Wood, have insisted on its radicalism. The revolution Thomas Allen presents, in an original and copiously sourc...

Jamaica falls behind schedule to open cruise port
Jamaica's newest cruise ship port will not be ready to host passengers for another month and a half due to the sluggish pace of final preparations, officials with Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. and the government said Tuesday. John Tercek, vice president of new business development for the Miami-based company, said the two-berth cruise port in the north coast town of Falmouth is ready to dock ships but sections of the 32-acre site remain a tangle of scaffolding and unfinished buildings. "To be hon...

Late Night: How Sharper Than a Minnows Gums
In his even younger blog-days, young Ezra Klein supported the Iraq War. Then he stopped supporting the Iraq war. L’Education sentimentale of Ederic Klein is not something I have studied in any particular detail, and damned if I’ll Google it, but I seem to recall that his falling off the pogo stick on the road to Damascus moment had to do with him realizing that he was an idiot to ever think Republicans were anything other than hucksters, loons, and ideologues. Anyway, that was all ...

Ethanol and the 2012 primary
Katrina Trinko details the positions of four midwestern 2012-hopefuls on Ethanol. Her conclusion: John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty and, to a lesser extent, Mike Pence, have all formed close relationships with the industry, and as such, could take heat from national Conservatives who view federal and state assistance to the industry as wasteful. Quick highlights from Trinko's many examples. Daniels: When Mitch Daniels was sworn in as Governor in January of 2005, there was one ethanol pla...

Ezra Klein: A very smart speech by Speaker Boehner
If you spent the afternoon watching C-SPAN, as I did, you heard applause. A lot of it. Over and over again. And when John Boehner took the podium to be sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives, it swelled back up, and stayed there. No one Republican member of Congress wants to be the first to stop applauding the new speaker. Luckily, Boehner did it for them. "It's still just me," he said with a smile. Traditionally, politicians overpromise in these moments. If you look b...

Pelosi's last speech as Speaker of the House
WASHINGTON--Nancy Pelosi wrapped up her historic tenure as Speaker of the House on Wednesday. Her last formal remarks were to the Congressional Black Caucus. Pelosi, who was the first female speaker said on her last morning as speaker: "Yes, I am still Speaker of the House for a short period of time." But one of my last acts as Speaker of the House for the 111th Congress is to come and congratulate the Congressional Black Caucus of the 112th Congress in the short period of time between their s...

$5-a-gallon gas can be good for the environmentif we seize the moment
Former Shell president John Hofmeister's prediction that Gasoline prices could hit $5 per gallon in 2012 represents both an enormous challenge and an important opportunity for Environmentalists working to stop Global Warming, protect our coasts, and to stop the destructive expansion of Canadian tar sands and other dirty fuels. We should seize this moment to launch a major campaign to end our dependence on Oil by investing in new technologies and building the clean transportation alternatives tha...

Report: Sierra Nevada and Bay-Delta threatened by global warming
California's Sierra Nevada mountains and Bay-Delta account for two of the nation's 10 regions most endangered by Global Warming, Environmentalists assert in a new report. The 15-page report by the Endangered Species Coalition amounts to a a rhetorical statement, summing up previous research. The report states that the Bay-Delta's "ecosystem's endangered species won't survive Climate Change without a shift in California's water management." The Sierra Nevada mountains are "heavily impacted by c...

IKEA stops selling incandescent light bulbs
IKEA announced it will no longer stock or sell incandescent light bulbs, effective Tuesday. The world's largest retailer of home furnishings says it is the first major retailer to stop selling incandescents. "IKEA is committed to integrating sustainable practices into our business practices ... and [is] constantly looking at ways to help support our customers with everyday environmentally responsible solutions that will improve their lives," IKEA U.S. President Mike Ward said in a&...

Cape Wind gets permit for work in fed waters
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has granted a long-sought permit to the nation's first offshore Wind Farm, moving it a step closer to starting construction. The decision wasn't a surprise, but the permit was needed for Cape Wind to begin building a planned 130-turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound. It clears Cape Wind to work in navigable federal waters and ensures it's complying with the Clean Water Act. Cape Wind is still waiting for one more permit, from the U.S. Environmental Protection agen...

First Reading: A new debate on private toll roads?
• From the Statesman’s Laylan Copelin: “The Texas Comptroller, not local School Districts, should be in charge of negotiating school Property Tax breaks to businesses to attract large-scale investments such as Manufacturing plants or Wind Farms, a new report by the Legislative Budget Board recommends. The recommendation, if adopted by the Legislature, would end the decade-long practice of businesses negotiating Tax Breaks with School Districts, not the state. Under current law,...