Australia: Here Comes Anthony's 'Big Ugly Sister'

Wild Weather hasn't finished with Australia yet; folks in southern Queensland were still bailing out their homes from the floods of December when Cyclone Anthony, with torrential rains and 150 kilometer per hour winds, hit the remaining northern regions. And now here comes Cyclone Yasi, possibly the biggest Cyclone ever to hit the state- Anthony's "big ugly sister'. Winds are expected to reach 260 kmph, with, yes, extremely heavy rains. Most recent storm track has Yasi hitting a wide front from Cooktown to Townsville, with Cairns in the middle.
-projected storm track
-BBC: Australia prepares for Cyclone Anthony's 'big ugly sister'
-Australia evacuates coastal cities in path of cyclone 



Feb 1: "Do not bother to pack bags. Just grab each other and get to a place of safety."-Queensland Premier Bligh. Wind gusts offshore reported at 200 miles per hour (320kph); Yasi is now a Category 5.  (BBC Report)

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Evergreen Solar Moves to China

NYTimes.com reports on  Evergreen's announcement that it is closing its US operations and moving to China...

"Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.
But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China. "

and there's this- how things change!

"Evergreen’s joint-venture factory in Wuhan occupies a long, warehouselike concrete building in an industrial park located in an inauspicious neighborhood. A local employee said the municipal police had used the site for mass executions into the 1980s...When a reporter was given a rare tour inside the building just before it began mass production in September, the operation appeared as modern as any in the world. Row after row of highly automated equipment stretched toward the two-story-high ceiling in an immaculate, brightly lighted white hall. Chinese technicians closely watched the computer screens monitoring each step in the production processes." (NYTimes.com/Evergreen)

Confronting the Climate Cranks- Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation

"In my journalism I have frequently pointed out the nefarious role the climate cranks have played in our national politics, but I confess I have often wondered how much good this did. I revere the profession of journalism and have long believed that it is best kept separate from activism; each of these callings has its own role to play in the endless struggle to make a better world.

But I am not only a journalist. I am also a father. And as a father who during all of my now 5-year-old daughter's life has been watching governments, especially my own, do next to nothing about the climate catastrophe hurtling toward us, I have come to feel obligated to reach beyond the tools of journalism, vital as they are. Like my colleagues Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell, two journalists and fathers who have also come to embrace climate activism, I now feel compelled to take more direct action. If Chiara and her peers around the world are to have a decent chance of inheriting a livable planet, the status quo cannot stand. We need transformative change, above all in Washington, and we need it quickly..." 
- (read Confronting the Climate Cranks | The Nation)

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of  HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in January 2011.   

www.markhertsgaard.com

Green Energy Opponents Are the Real Job Killers

David Fenton writing for The Nation January 31, 2011:

"Listen to how we discuss clean energy in this country, and you’ll note that the conversation is exactly upside down. To hear the mainstream discourse tell it, clean energy may be a nice idea but it’s prohibitively expensive. Going green, it’s said, will cost jobs and strangle growth at a time when America must do whatever it takes to get our economy and people working again. Environmentalists are going to raise everyone’s energy bills. We’re the “job killers.”
"This framing of the issue runs 180 degrees counter to the actual facts of life in the year 2011. Clean energy transformation is the best—perhaps the only—path to economic and job growth, including rebuilding our industrial base and competitiveness. As British economist Nicholas Stern has said of clean energy, “These investments will play the role of the railways, electricity, the motor car and information technology in earlier periods of economic history.” (read more... Green Energy Opponents Are the Real Job Killers)

Country team Paris recommends...

The Guardian has released a series of State Department cables which show the US Govt bullying European nations into accepting Monsanto's GM 'food' products.

Here is Ambassador to France Craig Stapleton, (who with George W. Bush co-owned the St Louis-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s):

"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.
"The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices."

This is pretty astonishing when you consider this is not the US Chamber of Commerce spending corporate money to influence trade regulations in other countries in favor of American products. This is the US State Department, funded by you and I, the taxpayers, bullying allied countries into accepting, against the wishes of their citizens, the genetically modified organisms of a giant multinational corporation. Needless to say, this is not what the State Department is meant to be doing.
(read the full article at the Guardian)