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You already know basically what I’m going to say, don’t you?

Well, nothing to report on water quality in the U.S. -- all is hunky-dory these days! Good thing, too, because our energies are elsewhere, restoring what we destroyed doing improvement projects in Iraq. Hey, how's that going?

Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported yesterday.

Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraq's water and sanitation will be finished, with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, the report says.

What? But all the money we're spending on restoring quality of life to the Iraqi people!

The US government will complete just a fraction of the planned massive reconstruction projects in Iraq before $18.4 billion in federal funding runs out next year, according to a government audit released yesterday.

But ... but ... isn't money put aside for specific projects?

Among the obstacles were sharply higher spending for security, strategy shifts in response to the changing Iraqi environment and increased spending to sustain programs when Iraqis take over, the report said.

...

Water resources and sanitation took the biggest hit among the sectors, losing $2.185 billion, or 50.4 percent of its original allocation, the audit found. The next hardest-hit was the electric sector, slashed 22.5 percent to $4.31 billion.

Oh well. So we're bungling the job in Iraq. At least the water's all clean and drinkable here in the U.S. of A. Right, guys? Right?

Fish Passage Center, R.I.P.

Sen. Larry Craig's long-time quest has paid off: The Idaho Republican has succeed in killing the Fish Passage Center, which has monitored salmon stocks for 20 years. By all accounts, the Center did good, non-partisan science, but Craig didn't like "data" coming between him and his political goals.

The Center's duties were transferred to other, presumably more cooperative, agencies today. Lisa Stiffler has more.

Friedman’s fantastical SOTU speech

His overall fitness as a pundit aside, The Mustache is once again beating the green drum in the most prime real estate in print media. This week, he urges Bush to take on energy independence and global warming in the State of the Union speech (ha ha ha ha!):

I Get the Nic Out of You

California deems secondhand smoke a toxic air pollutant Californians may soon breathe a little easier than the rest of us, now that the state has become the first in the nation to classify secondhand tobacco smoke as a toxic air pollutant. In a 6-0 vote on Thursday, the state Air Resources Board put secondhand smoke […]

Kernel Ganders

Ethanol decent on efficiency but not on greenhouse gases, study finds The heated debate over biofuels took another sharp turn this week: New research in the journal Science claims that replacing fossil fuels with corn-based ethanol is energy-efficient (contrary to some previous studies), but doesn’t do much to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. Researchers from UC-Berkeley determined […]

Re-Spent, Ye Sinners

Bush admin plans to fund new dawn for nuclear power Like an atomic Dr. Frankenstein determined to reanimate the corpse of the civilian nuclear-power industry, the Bush administration intends to allot $250 million in fiscal year 2007 to researching new ways to reprocess spent nuclear fuel — technology largely abandoned in the 1970s as too […]

Snowmen march against global warming

The Onion: always funny.

(via Kit Stolz)

LNG island

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is, at least in the minds of many large monied interests, the fuel of the future. But LNG terminals face NIMBY opposition as fierce as the kind that's stymied new nuke plants. What to do?

How about ... a fake island!

A $1 billion plan for a liquefied natural gas terminal on a 53-acre man-made island in the Atlantic Ocean between Long Island and New Jersey was unveiled Thursday by a new company.

Creative.

Science says: Ethanol good on energy, not so much on environment

The "Findings" column on WaPo has this cryptic tidbit:

Ethanol -- alcohol produced from corn or other plants -- is more energy-efficient than some experts had realized, and it is time to start developing it as an alternative to fossil fuels, researchers said yesterday.

Although some critics have said the push for ethanol is based on faulty science and mostly benefits the farm lobby, several reviews and commentaries published today in Science argue otherwise.

"We find that ethanol can, if it is made correctly, contribute significantly to both energy and environmental goals. However, the current way of producing ethanol with corn probably only meets energy goals," said Alexander Farrell of the University of California at Berkeley. [my emphasis]

That sent me to Science, but of course I can't read it without a subscription. It does have this short description of the week's contents:

And it just might save us

This is a great story demonstrating how new technology just might get us out of this mess. Coincidentally, I saw the coolest flashlight in a hardware store yesterday. It had a wind up crank instead of batteries and diodes instead of a light bulb. You wind it up for one minute to get about an hour of really bright light. It also had a red and white flashing emergency mode. I bought two and mounted them on my hybrid electric bike, which now looks like a cheap Las Vegas light show on wheels. Cars pull over to let me pass. (Well, not actually pull over. Or let me pass. But they do see me coming!)