EPA doing its job again....NOT!!!

NEW TOWN, N.D. — Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires rise above fields of wheat and sunflowers and bales of hay. At night, they illuminate the prairie skies like giant fireflies.


They are not wildfires caused by lightning strikes or other acts of nature, but the deliberate burning of natural gas by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field and take advantage of the high price of crude. The gas bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil, and with less economic incentive to capture it, the drillers treat the gas as waste and simply burn it.


Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.


The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit, alarming some environmentalists.


All told, 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. No other major domestic oil field currently flares close to that much, though the practice is still common in countries like Russia, Nigeria and Iran.


With few government regulations that limit the flaring, more burning is also taking place in the Eagle Ford shale field in Texas, and some environmentalists and industry executives say that it could happen in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio, too, as drilling expands in new fields there unlocked by techniques like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.


“North Dakota is not as bad as Kazakhstan, but this is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do: to flare off a perfectly good product just because it’s expensive to bring to market,” said Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.


The widespread flaring is a step backward for a domestic energy industry. Most oil and gas fields in the United States have well-developed facilities to gather and process gas.

But the recent rise of shale drilling has changed the economic calculus. Natural gas prices have plunged since 2008 as vast shale fields laden with gas are tapped through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Meanwhile, those same techniques have opened up other shale fields rich with oil.


Regulations on flaring are loose in North Dakota, as they are in most states, and there are no current federal regulations on flaring at oil and gas wells. That is largely because flaring has not been a significant concern since the 1970s, when the federal government insisted that oil companies re-inject gas into Alaska’s North Slope rather than flare it.


The federal Environmental Protection Agency has recently proposed new air emissions standards for fracked wells, and it has also begun to ask oil companies to compile data on greenhouse gas emissions from drilling and other operations.

Environmentalists are also beginning to express alarm. “It’s time for the regulators to take a hard look at the impacts of flaring and make sure that available solutions to the flaring problem are required before there is any further widespread expansion of the practice,” said Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Some of the companies working in North Dakota, including Whiting, are investing $3 billion over the next three years in pipelines and several large processing plants to deliver gas to Midwest markets rather than burn it.


Wayde Schafer, the Sierra Club’s North Dakota conservation organizer, said that the industry needed to slow down development if it could not protect the air. “You can do it fast or you can do it right,” he said.

UAE Sign an on-line petition and death by bunga bunga!!!! (Get Real!!!)

Five pro-democracy activists on trial in the United Arab Emirates returned to court yesterday, two days after the oil-rich Gulf nation held elections for an advisory council that wields no power.

The activists, including a blogger and an academic, were detained in April after they signed an online petition demanding constitutional changes and free elections.
They were charged in July with insulting the country's rulers and using an online
forum to conspire against the state.

Among the five, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, are blogger Ahmed Mansour and economics professor Nasser bin Ghaith, who lectured at the Abu Dhabi branch of Paris's Sorbonne university.

The five activists briefly attended yesterday's closed-door proceedings in Abu Dhabi's Federal Supreme Court.

Four of the defendants, including Mansour and bin Ghaith, walked out of the courtroom after the judges refused to consider their demand to open the hearing to the public and release them from custody on bail.

Political activity is severely restricted in the UAE, an alliance of seven semi-autonomous states, each ruled by a hereditary sheikh. There are no official opposition groups and political parties are banned.

See what one "Oh Shit!" costs in terms of a nuclear mishap.

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.


“Older folks want to return, but the young worry about radiation,” said Harada, whose family ran the farm for 40 years. “I want to farm, but will we be able to sell anything?”


What’s emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima’s $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture’s mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.

The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion ($223 billion), hindering the recovery of the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation.

Bernanke's Uber-Bonds

Betting on Ben S. Bernanke has been the most profitable trade for government bond investors in 16 years, defying lawmakers in the U.S. and abroad who said the Federal Reserve chairman’s policies would lead to runaway inflation and the dollar’s debasement.



Treasuries due in 10 or more years have returned 28 percent in 2011, exceeding the 24.4 percent gain in all of 2008 during worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. Not since 1995, when the securities soared 30.7 percent, have investors done so well owning longer-dated U.S. government debt.


The rally continued last week, driving yields to record lows, as the Fed said it would exchange $400 billion of short- term Treasuries for those maturing in more than six years. The move, dubbed Operation Twist by traders, is designed to lower borrowing costs and keep the economy growing. Previous Fed efforts unlocked credit markets and helped ward off deflation.


Bonds are producing “monster” gains, said Mitchell Stapley, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based chief fixed-income officer for Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion, in a Sept. 19 telephone interview. “I’m dealing with a Federal Reserve with an unlimited balance sheet that is desperately looking for something to do to revive the economy.”

Russia doesn't need Putin part II; it doesn't need a dictator

Vladimir Putin says he stands for stability, but his critics say his return to the Kremlin next March could ultimately bequeath an era of stagnation and even turmoil in Russia.

The prime minister, who announced on Saturday he would seek a new term as president, prides himself on bringing order after the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But prominent critics, from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, say his return could undermine stability unless he can shake the country out of inertia and torpor.


Even Putin's protege, President Dmitry Medvedev, said there was a danger of stasis in Russia in a speech to the ruling party on Saturday, just minutes before he suffered the humiliation of proposing Putin take back the presidency from him next year.


"Formalism and bureaucratization are very dangerous: they lead to stagnation and the degradation of the political system," Medvedev told a congress of Putin's United Russia party.

Saudi Arabia: Women given the right to vote but not just yet....how about 2015.

Saudi Arabia's king announced on Sunday women would be given the right to vote and stand in elections, a bold shift in the ultra-conservative absolute monarchy as pressure for social and democratic reform sweeps the Middle East.


It was by far the biggest change in Saudi Arabia's tightly-controlled society yet ordered by the 88-year-old Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who took power six years ago with a reformer's reputation but has ruled as a cautious conservative.

In practice, the measure will do little to change how the country is run: Saudi Arabia's rulers allow elections only for half of the seats on municipal councils which have few powers. Only men will vote at the next elections which will take place next week; women will be allowed to vote in 2015.

The king did not address broader issues of women's rights in a country where women are not allowed to drive and require a male relative's permission to work or leave the country.

But the announcement was hailed by liberals and activists who said it raised hopes that other demands for greater democratic and social rights might one day be met.

Strap in to your 1,000 hp Electric Vehicle!!! From Detroit...noooo...Croatia!

With most, if not all, major car manufacturers already selling or developing electric cars, one was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show which bucks the trend. This is the brainchild, not of a multi-national but Munich's Technical University - designed to cost the same or less than a comparable petrol model, while performing and looking good too, says the research group's Michael Graf.


MICHAEL GRAF, MUNICH TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY SAYING: "This should be an affordable vehicle that is designed especially for the urban area." Designed, built and tested at the university. It weighs in at 500 kg, achieved through a special lightweight frame made of a combination of aluminium and plastics. The car will cost less than 10,000 Euros and the academics are also working on innovative options for financing the switch to electric cars that could see buyers leasing batteries.

At the other end of the budget spectrum comes Concept One. An electric car from Croatia, capable of nought to 100kph - 62mph in under 3 seconds - due to a revolutionary propulsion system, says designer Mate Rimac.

RIMAC, CONCEPT ONE DESIGNER, SAYING: "The special thing about our car is our propulsion system. So, the drive chain is divided into four units. Each unit contains one motor controller and reduction gear box. Every of these units is completely independent of the other, so we can control each wheel separately and the that allows whole new possibilities for driving the (unclear word) in corners we can allow each wheel to slip a little bit and that can deliver very fast times in tracks and also on the every day use it is very safe and everyone can drive a 1000 horsepower car." The independent drive units allow the wheels to slip a little as the car takes corners at speed - which Rimac says increases safety. A lightweight carbon body and battery give it a range of up to 600km or 375 miles. The company plans to make just 88 of the cars at a price yet to be announced.