Homeowners desperate to avoid the soaring costs of heating oil are stocking up now with firewood for next winter. Dealers have already sold all their seasoned wood and are now selling green wood at $250 a cord, up from $185 last year.

To make things worse, paper mills have converted to biomass and are buying wood in bulk, creating even more demand. Plus, there’s a shortage of loggers.

People there are getting scared. Will next winter force a choice between heat or food?

“People are asking themselves, ‘Will things go back to the way they were, or is this a fundamental change?’”

Tip: Peak Energy

No Comments »

AP says that since insurgents now longer control entire cities that the US is winning. But in the next breath they admit.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years

That’s not a win, that’s continued guerrilla warfare. But is what we’re seeing a lull?

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Well, bribery is a time-honored method except it guarantees neither loyalty nor victory.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ah. So the war hasn’t really ended at all. The other side is just switching to another battlefield.

But if they want to say we’re winning, great. As the antiwar Senator Aiken (R-VT) once said about the Vietnam War, let’s just declare victory and bring the troops home now. Works for me.

2 Comments »

Braving toxic fumes and oily, black water, 11 Greenpeace activists entered Syncrude’s Aurora tar sands operation, targeting the same two-kilometre wide tailings pond just north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, that made international headlines in March after 500 ducks landed on the pond and drowned in the sludge.

Rockport Missouri: First 100% wind-powered US city.

Data centers that follow the sun and chase the wind.

Wind-powered ships, the old-fashioned kind, are again shipping cargo across the Atlantic.

First commercial scale biowaste-to-ethanol plant ok’ed for Los Angeles.

Lexmark turning recycled print cartridges into building material.

Waste heat into electricity.

Party power: Generate electricity from dancing on a piezo floor.

No Comments »

Joe Nocera of the NY Times after investigating rumors that Steve Jobs has serious health problems.

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter”— and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

(Jobs then said he’d explain his health issues off the record. Nocera can disclose that they are not minor but also not life-threatening and not cancer.)

No Comments »

Craig Murray is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned after his protests about US / UK complicity in torture there were ignored.

In this post he responds to a complaint “from Darren who objected to my rather strong and personal attacks on [Labour Party members] Margaret Curran and Doug Hoyle” in a previous post.

(I don’t usually quote this much, but Murray is eloquent in his ferocity.)

I used to be one of the most civil and orthodox people you might meet. Then I came across the hideous torture in Uzbekistan. I could give hundreds of examples. Two men were boiled alive, a woman was raped with a broken bottle, my neighbour was held down while a truck was driven over her legs, the teenage grandson of Professor Mirsiadov was abducted from outside his home and tortured to death while I was inside eating dinner with his grandfather. And I found that our government not only supported the regime that was doing this as part of the “War on Terror”, but was knowingly and repeatedly receiving and using the intelligence reports that arose from these hideous torture sessions. I then discovered we were doing this not just in Uzbekistan, but all over the world, in support of “extraordinary rendition”.

We have actively caused the deaths in agony of hundreds of thousands. And yet I found that my colleagues in the diplomatic service were carrying on politely as though none of this had happened - just as those who loaded prisoners on to cattle trucks for Auschwitz were nice people with wives and kids. And I found that at home we were supposed to conduct the charade of party politics in the normal way, as though our government’s actions were not causing screaming deaths in agony. Well. I sincerely hope that the worst that ever happens to Margaret Curran is that I called her a shrew-faced bitch. Compare her distress to that of a mother watching her children die crying with their guts hanging out. Margaret Curran is a lot better off than thousands of very real women, who were just as human as her, and whose lives the illegal wars of New Labour have destroyed.

So think about it, Darren. And fuck the politenesses of politics.

2 Comments »

Then get it out NOW, says Mish. Big red flashing warning sign include a soaring credit default swap rate above that of Bear Stearns when it collapsed and huge amounts of put option buying at the 3 strike price (Yes, 3.)

Translation: The credit markets and some deep pocket players think WaMu is going down.

No Comments »