Bush Family Pastor, Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, Attacks McCain and Endorses Obama.
Posted by Mole333, Culture Kitchen, AlterNet, August 15, 2008.
 http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/95246…

Seems the Republicans are losing on the “character” and “values” issues. The pastor and spiritual adviser to the Bush family, the very man who presided at Jenna Bush’s wedding recently, has harshly criticized Republican John McCain for his lack of values and poor character and has endorsed Barack Obama.

Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of the Windsor Village United Methodist Church gave the official benedictions at Bush’s inauguration in 2001 and 2005. Although a controversial figure for his first inaugural benediction in 2001 that explicitly excluded non-Christians, and for his inspiration of Bush’s “faith based initiatives,” there is no question that he is in touch with what Republicans mean when they discuss values and character.

Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell just publicly denounced John McCain’s morals and has endorsed Barack Obama.

This seems to have been precipitated by the furor about John Edwards’ affair, leading Caldwell to point out John McCain’s own infidelities. It was also precipitated by John McCain’s offering up of his wife to a topless and rather obscene (keyword: banana) pageant at the Sturgis bike rally last week. I guess John McCain’s behavior is not pleasing Christians interested in true values rather than mere words.

This is not my issue, writes the AlterNet reporter, “Conservative Christian morals are not necessarily my morals. But if John McCain is losing even George Bush’s own pastor to Barack Obama, well, seems he is in really bad shape.”

Oh, and the response of the McCain team? Attack the pastor:  These people are Obama campaign surrogates. These kinds of personal attacks are disgraceful. This absolutely exposes the hypocrisy of Obama’s claim to represent a ‘new kind of politics.’

So, McCain’s own people are saying that George Bush’s pastor is an Obama surrogate. Well, he said it, not us! Seems a pretty solid condemnation of McCain on the values thing. I guess the Republican response if Colin Powell really is going to endorse Obama (a somewhat far fetched but persistent rumor going around) will be to attack Bush’s former Secretary of State.

This is what attracted me to Obama in the first place: his appeal to such a wide range of Americans. It was a Green Party friend who first advocated Obama to me. Now George Bush’s own pastor and possibly (I doubt it, but we will see) Bush’s own Secretary of State are endorsing Obama. This is one of the widest coalitions of American voters I have ever seen coming together behind Obama. That is what unity is and America can use some unity after 8 years of divisive Bush misrule.

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

In a remark that could be interpreted as casting aspersions on his 71-year-old Republican rival John McCain, Ms Merkel told reporters: “I would say that he is well-equipped – physically, mentally and politically,” but then she also said she would not be in Berlin for Mr Obama’s speech, but added: “Maybe I’ll turn on the television.”

Anne Penketh, the Diplomatic Editor of The Independent of London writes: “Mr Obama, who is the favourite US presidential candidate of Germans by a wide margin according to opinion polls, has chosen Berlin as the setting for the centrepiece of his foreign tour. After talks with Ms Merkel in the morning, he will deliver a speech on transatlantic relations, in which he is expected to reach out to Europeans to repair the damage wrought by the Bush administration since the Iraq war. The speech, at the Victory Column in Tiergarten park in the heart of the city, is expected to attract tens of thousands of people as curious Germans flock to see the man who has been described in Germany as the “black JFK”.” Needless to remind our readers that JFK is close to the heart of the Berliners because of his statement in 1963, at the Brandenburg Gate 45 years ago - “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

The Obama trip has proved diplomatically tricky for the German government because of his status as candidate, not president. Ms Merkel vetoed initial plans to hold the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan urged the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall.

Anticipating that she would discuss Afghanistan when Berlin is under pressure from the Bush administration to send in more German troops, Ms Merkel stressed to reporters: “I will make it clear that Germany is not shirking deeper involvement, but also make very clear our limits in the same way as I do with the current president.”

——————

And Obama?

He will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before his public address in Tiergarten Park, which is scheduled for about 1:15 p.m. Washington time.

Although the German government scuttled an early proposal for Obama to speak at Brandenburg Gate, where Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made famous appearances, the Illinois senator will be sleeping quite near that location. The candidate’s hotel stands adjacent to the historic landmark in Berlin.

Aboard his plane early this morning, someone asked what was the high point of the trip so far. “This,” Obama deadpanned, referring to his 15-minute appearance in the back cabin with reporters. “I had to earn it,” he said. “I said, ‘When do I get a chance to go back and talk to the press?’ “

Amid laughter, he was asked for his second-favorite moment. He paused.

“You know I really get a kick out of spending time with the troops. Their morale is high, but they really appreciate acknowledgement of what they’re doing,” Obama said. “You know, everywhere we went in Afghanistan and Iraq they were just really eager to tell their story, what they were doing. And it was moving. And it’s neat to see the mix. You have a bunch of 20-year olds and then you’ll get a 40-year old or 50-year old who’s in the Guard; a Missouri banker who’s helping to try to set up a agricultural project. You know, that’s pretty spectacular.”

Very few of the troops wanted to talk politics, Obama said, other than to inquire what life on the trail is like. Did he think the troops gave him an honest assessment of the situation in the war zones? “I think if you get them outside of earshot of their commanding officers or, you know, whoever they’re reporting to, and I think a lot of times you do,” he said.

Obama also had high praise for Ambassador Ryan Crocker, calling him “a real unsung hero” in Iraq. “Very savvy but incredibly humble and self-effacing,” he said.

Obama recoiled when a reporter asked whether the Berlin speech was really going to draw a million people, as some reports have estimated. Other estimates have put the number at 100,000. “Let’s tamp down expectations here,” he said.

He said his staff had just informed him that the space in Tiergarten Park was much larger than he originally realized, and joked that he might have to spend the afternoon hours in Germany trying to build an ample crowd.

“This is one of those where we really have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s sort of a crapshoot. I’m happy with the speech though,” he said..

Initially, Obama balked at talking to us about the speech, but he eventually relented. “It’s not a wonkish policy speech,” he said.

Obama’s aides went to great lengths to say the speech event was not a campaign event. Obama said it was not a political rally “in the sense it’s not designed to get them to the polls.”

“Hopefully it will be viewed as a substantive articulation of the relationship I ‘d like to see between the United States and Europe,” he said.

“There’s no doubt that part of what I want to communicate on both sides of the Atlantic is the enormous potential of us restoring a sense of coming together,” he said.

Was the speech is one aspect of proving himself as a presidential candidate? “No,” he replied. “I’m just giving a speech.”

Exelon Corporation

News Releases

July 15, 2008 - Exelon Unveils Roadmap to Eliminate Equivalent of Current Annual Carbon Footprint by 2020

Contact:

Kathleen Cantillon, Corporate Communications

312-394-7417

Nation’s largest electric and gas utility outlines roadmap to reduce, displace or offset 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 – the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road

Exelon Corporation today unveiled a comprehensive environmental plan that sets the standard for environmental action by a major U.S. energy utility. Called Exelon 2020: A Low-Carbon Roadmap, the plan details an enterprise-wide approach and host of initiatives being pursued by the Exelon family of companies to reduce Exelon’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and those of its customers, communities, suppliers and markets.

“The science is overwhelming – climate change is happening now and human activity is the primary cause,” said John W. Rowe, Exelon chairman, president and CEO. “As an early member of the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders Program, Exelon has already embraced a low-carbon strategy. Now, under Exelon 2020, we are committing to a much broader, deeper and sustained effort that will drive our business activities going forward.”

Exelon 2020 sets a goal of reducing, offsetting or displacing more than 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (in carbon dioxide-equivalent terms) per year by 2020. This is more than the company’s current annual carbon footprint and is equivalent to taking nearly 3 million cars off American roads and highways.

Through Exelon 2020, Exelon is pursuing three broad strategies:

• Reduce or offset Exelon’s own carbon footprint by reducing our energy consumption and operating to the highest environmental standards in every aspect of our internal operations and supply chain.
• Help our customers and the communities we serve reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through industry-leading energy efficiency programs and a diverse portfolio of green products and services.
• Offer more low-carbon electricity in the marketplace by expanding the capacity of our existing low-carbon generation fleet and introducing new low-carbon capacity. This will allow Exelon to displace other, higher-emitting sources of generation and thereby reduce overall emissions in the regions where we operate.

Appropriate public policies are crucial to the success of Exelon 2020. The Exelon companies will continue to advocate for effective federal climate change legislation, workable competitive wholesale markets, federal loan guarantees for new nuclear capacity development, stricter energy efficiency standards, workable renewable resource mandates, R&D funding for renewables and standard practices for offsets.

“Without sound, substantial, appropriate and enabling public policy at the federal, regional and state levels, our industry and our society will not be able to address the climate change challenge as quickly, effectively and economically as is required,” Rowe noted.

A sampling of programs under Exelon 2020 includes:

• An initiative to reduce energy consumption across our portfolio of buildings by 25 percent.
• An effort to engage suppliers on environmental initiatives and seek voluntary disclosures of their GHG emissions and energy consumption. Exelon was the first North American utility to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Leadership Collaboration, and is leading an industry alliance that will set environmental standards for suppliers to utilities.
• The implementation of a $250 million, three-year energy efficiency plan by ComEd and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. In accordance with 2007 Illinois energy legislation, the program targets residential and commercial energy savings through more-efficient lighting, heating and cooling, appliance recycling, weatherization and energy audits. In Pennsylvania, PECO is working with policymakers to craft a similar plan that would reduce overall electricity consumption as part of the state’s new energy policy.
• An expansion of green product and service offerings to wholesale and retail customers.
• The potential development by Exelon Power of a 600-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas power plant in Pennsylvania that will displace higher-emitting generation.
• The growth of our portfolio of solar, wind, biomass and landfill-gas generation.

The American utility industry accounts for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Exelon was one of the first companies in the utility sector to publicly recognize the threat posed by global warming and is a member of the U.S. EPA’s Climate Leaders Program. In 2005, the company made a voluntary commitment under the Climate Leaders Program to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 8 percent from 2001 levels by the end of 2008 and is on track to exceed that goal. Exelon’s environmental performance has secured its place on the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index since 2006 and Carbon Disclosure Project Climate Disclosure Leadership Index since 2005. In 2007, Exelon was the top-ranked utility in the Leadership Index.

Exelon 2020: A Low Carbon Roadmap is available at www.exeloncorp.com

###

Exelon Corporation is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities with nearly $19 billion in annual revenues. The company has one of the industry’s largest portfolios of electricity generation capacity, with a nationwide reach and strong positions in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Exelon distributes electricity to approximately 5.4 million customers in northern Illinois and Pennsylvania and natural gas to 480,000 customers in the Philadelphia area. Exelon is headquartered in Chicago and trades on the NYSE under the ticker EXC.
This news release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, that are subject to risks and uncertainties. The factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include those discussed herein as well as those discussed in (1) Exelon’s 2007 Annual Report on Form 10-K in (a) ITEM 1A. Risk Factors, (b) ITEM 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and (c) ITEM 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data: Note 19; (2) Exelon’s First Quarter 2008 Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (to be filed on April 24, 2008) in (a) Part II, Other Information, ITEM 1A. Risk Factors and (b) Part I, Financial Information, ITEM 1. Financial Statements: Note 13; and (3) other factors discussed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Exelon Corporation, Exelon Generation Company, LLC, Commonwealth Edison Company, and PECO Energy Company (Companies). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this presentation. None of the Companies undertakes any obligation to publicly release any revision to its forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news release.

But You do not see that it owns 19 nuclear reactors at 11 nuclear plants as per Wikipedia something that the Exelon 2020 advertising campaign, that was started July 15, 2008, lacks in its minimum of disclosure department:

Exelon Corporation (NYSE: EXC) is an electricity generating and distributing company headquartered in Chicago. It was created in October, 2000 by the merger of PECO Energy Company and Unicom, of Philadelphia and Chicago respectively. Unicom owned Commonwealth Edison. Exelon has 5.2 million electricity customers and, in the Philadelphia suburbs, 460,000 natural gas customers.

In June, 2005 Exelon had full or majority ownership of 19 nuclear reactors in 11 nuclear power plants.

On June 30, 2005 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the merger of Exelon and Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a New Jersey utility. Under this merger, Exelon would have become the largest utility in the United States.^[1] The two companies later broke off the agreement^[2] due to pressure put on the NJ Board of Public Utilities by public interest groups, including New Jersey Citizen Action.^[3]The merger sat pending in front of the NJBPU for nineteen months before Exelon concluded that they were fighting a losing battle.^[4]

A shareholder resolution filed by one Exelon shareholder for the Company’s 2008 annual meeting criticizes executive pay levels at the Company.(see [1])

Opinion: “The Death of Reaganomics.”
Thursday 10 July 2008

by: E.J. Dionne, Truthdig.com
 http://www.truthout.org/article/the-deat…

{The article starts with a photo of “Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) asks for rethinking the impact of free-trade.” (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP) But the meat for the bait comes from the Hudson Institute.}
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.
  You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”
  The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.
He notes that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a looser set of banking rules, “we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation.” This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.
While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”
Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.
This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early ’80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What’s becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.
   What’s striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.
“You have to have the person who’s writing the risk bearing the risk,” he says. “That means a whole host of regulations. There’s no way around that.”

  While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn’t one of them. But he is highly critical of “the process that produces inequality.”
“I don’t like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars,” Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. “A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me.” He argues that “the preservation of the capitalist system” requires finding new ways of “linking compensation to performance.”
Frank takes a similar view, arguing that CEOs “benefit substantially if the risks they take pay off” but “pay no penalty” if their risks lead to losses or even catastrophe - another sign that capitalism, in its current form, isn’t living by its own rules.
Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization “is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital.” Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. “If you’re dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can’t, you have the advantage.”
“Free trade has increased wealth, but it’s been monopolized by a very small number of people,” Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of “the most vulnerable people in the country.”
In the presidential campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. “Reality has broken in,” says Frank. And none too soon.
——–
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is postchat(at aol.com.

Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN - Anxious in America.

Published: June 29, 2008

Just a few months ago, the consensus view was that Barack Obama would need to choose a hard-core national-security type as his vice presidential running mate to compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience and that John McCain would need a running mate who was young and sprightly to compensate for his age. Come August, though, I predict both men will be looking for a financial wizard as their running mates to help them steer America out of what could become a serious economic tailspin.

I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker.

I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue. It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed.

Up to now, the economic crisis we’ve been in has been largely a credit crisis in the capital markets, while consumer spending has kept reasonably steady, as have manufacturing and exports. But with banks still reluctant to lend even to healthy businesses, fuel and food prices soaring and home prices declining, this is starting to affect consumers, shrinking their wallets and crimping spending. Unemployment is already creeping up and manufacturing creeping down.

The straws in the wind are hard to ignore: If you visit any car dealership in America today you will see row after row of unsold S.U.V.’s. And if you own a gas guzzler already, good luck. On Thursday, The Palm Beach Post ran an article on your S.U.V. options: “Continue to spend upward of $100 for a fill-up. Sell or trade in the vehicle for a fraction of the original cost. Or hold out and park the truck in the driveway for occasional use in hopes the market will turn around.” Just be glad you don’t own a bus. Montgomery County, Md., where I live, just announced that more children were going to have to walk to school next year to save money on bus fuel.

On top of it all, our bank crisis is not over. Two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs analysts said that U.S. banks may need another $65 billion to cover more write-downs of bad mortgage-related instruments and potential new losses if consumer loans start to buckle. Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.

“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

We used to try harder and do better. After Sputnik, we came together as a nation and responded with a technology, infrastructure and education surge, notes Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. After the 1973 oil crisis, we came together and made dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. After Social Security became imperiled in the early 1980s, we came together and fixed it for that moment. “But today,” added Hormats, “the political system seems incapable of producing a critical mass to support any kind of serious long-term reform.”

If the old saying — that “as General Motors goes, so goes America” — is true, then folks, we’re in a lot of trouble. General Motors’s stock-market value now stands at just $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota’s $162.6 billion. On top of it, G.M. shares sank to a 34-year low last week.

That’s us. We’re at a 34-year low. And digging out of this hole is what the next election has to be about and is going to be about — even if it is interrupted by a terrorist attack or an outbreak of war or peace in Iraq.

We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started.

Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.

————-

Senator Obama has obviously sworn allegiance to the Democrats, while Senators McCain and Bob Dole have their allegiance to the Republicans. Obama and Dole come from Corn States, while McCain does not. Actually the seven Mid-West Agricultural States account for 14 US Senators, and they voted en-bloc when it came to dish out subsidies to US agriculture. McCain did not have such a constituency - so he may have thought of himself independent from the agricultural interests. Without understanding these realities, the US Corn Dance looks as if it were a 20th century witches dance. If one is ready to try objectivity - then it was Senator Bob Dole who 30 years ago pushed for making ethanol an Archer Daniels Midland product. It was their product, because they had an integrated production system that would not just make ethanol, but also corn syrup, fructose, animal cake as animal feed, corn oil, various chemicals - in effect the joke in Washington was that their “Corn Refinery” uses all parts of the corn except the sequel of the pig. The result that no-one could compete with ADM and the amount of ethanol produced in the US, in spite of all those subsidies,  was thus determined by ADM. Senator Bob Dole also made sure that no foreign ethanol could undersell them (read Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol was kept out by imposing duties - so - to the hell with national interests when it comes to ADM profits - and tax imports of ethanol but not imports of petroleum. Senator Percy of Illinois, also a Republican,  on his way out from US Senate, saw the need to allow imports of sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil - for national security reasons - and also in order to help eventually enlarge the size of the market for US corn-ethanol or sugar-beet ethanol. If Senator Obama, on his way in, decided that the State of Illinois is helped by continuing the pro-US-corn-ethanol agriculture policy, that was his way of reacting to his home-State. If Senator McCain is for removing the tariff from the Brazilian ethanol so it can enter the US - he is right on this and just remember that very little corn is grown in the Arizona desert.

But above is just a fraction of the real story - that part that keeps Senator McCain nailed to his Republican roots deep in the oil-well. So, the Renewable Fuels Association, friends of the US corn-growers, are right in pointing out that if the ethanol would be pulled off the US fuel market this would now be a disaster because it would throw the US even more into the arms of the petroleum-merchants. The trick is thus to find a way how to allow the continuation of the US production while also to open the door to Brazilian ethanol. If the US move across the fuel pool for a composition of 90% gasoline - 10% ethanol mix - the size of the market would be so large that it would accommodate all interests - and while using the ethanol in that mixture as the octane enhancing additive of choice (yes - mandated by the government like Senator Frank Church of Idaho, a Sugar-beet State, was asking in his 1978 US Senate bill - that would decrease the reliance on oil not just by 10%, but actually by 16% by negating the energy intensive process of making the octane component of gasoline by changing the molecular structure of the hydrocarbons from oil. But then - no interest in Washington has come out recently with this sort of thinking - not the two contenders for the Presidency, nor the agricultural lobby.

We write this because of the following two articles - one from the New York Times resident correspondent in Brazil, and the other one from reports on the Midwest floods. Our suggestion is thus - lay off from Obama, continue the present US corn-ethanol production, but do not enlarge on it. Instead - open the door to the Brazilians. That would be the best for all except the merchants in oil. We will separately report also on the Brazilian Energy Conference that brought also today, some of the most important forces from Brazil to New York for an 8:30-13:30 conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City.

The articles are:

Obama’s Corn Dance. By Larry Rohter, the NYTimes resident correspondent in Brazil, June 23, 2008. “And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country’s second largest corn-producing state, [Sen. Barack Obama] delivered a ringing endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel [when VeraSun Energy inaugurated its new ethanol processing plant last summer in Charles City, Iowa]… When it comes to domestic ethanol… [Obama] also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry… [His] lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with [former Majority Leader Tom] Daschle [from South Dakota] and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. Not long after arriving in the Senate, Mr. Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland… the nation’s largest ethanol producer… based in his home state… Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government [ethanol] subsidies… As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the U.S. slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce… Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax… He also supports the tariff.”

and

Flooding Muddies the Push for Ethanol. By David Shepardson, Detroit News, June 23, 2008. “Massive flooding in the Midwest has ruined millions of acres of crops, spurring record corn prices and raising serious questions about whether the U.S. can meet new requirements for using corn-based biofuels… A sweeping federal energy bill signed into law in December requires the production of 9 billion gallons of biofuels this year, nearly all of it corn-based ethanol, up from 6.5 billion in 2007… [although] a backlash is emerging… The damage to the corn crop — as much as 4% of total U.S. corn production, or 3.3 million acres, could be lost — is pushing up ethanol prices… The wholesale price… rose 40 cents a gallon in the last month as corn prices have doubled in the past year to an all-time high of nearly $8 a bushel. Some energy analysts now say the government may have to suspend the biofuels mandate because at those prices it’s not profitable to make [the fuel], and because 400 million gallons of production has been lost because of the floods. [But] Bob Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, said ethanol is still a good deal. ‘Abandoning our commitment to ethanol and biofuels… would absolutely force the price of gas through the roof and require the import of more record-high foreign oil.’ [Besides,] Congress isn’t likely to pull back on the biofuel mandates in an election year, despite the continuing rise in food prices and the challenges that now exist because of the floods. Additionally, support remains strong in farm states to leave the mandates in place.”

From:    mweldon at civic-exchange.org

Hong Kong-based public policy think tank Civic Exchange has released a new report -
Green Harbours: Hong Kong and Shenzhen - Reducing Marine & Port-Related Emissions

This report, which was based on extensive consultation with stakeholders from both government and the private sector, highlights the fact that many private sector port operators and ship-owners have already taken voluntary measures to improve environmental performance, and are willing to do more. However, there is a need for the Government to create a level playing field for all, so that slow implementers do not reap competitive advantage from non-action. The report also outlines case studies of best practice from European and US ports and proposes a framework for the Governments of Hong Kong and Shenzhen to take the lead in setting strategies for emissions reductions.

A full copy of the report can be downloaded from the Civic Exchange website:
 http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload…

A copy of the presentation can also be found on the website at :
 http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload…

Related reports

Marine Emission Reduction Options for Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region
 http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload…

A Price too High: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in South China
 http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload…

Lessons for Hong Kong: Air Quality Management in London and Los Angeles
 http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload…

Apologies for cross posting

Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. If you would like or further information on Civic Exchange’s ongoing and planned research programmes, please do not hesitate to contact our new Environmental Programme Manger Mike Kilburn ( mkilburn at civic-exchange.org) or visit our website at www.civic-exchange.org.