Die bessere Rede

American political commentators have begun, and will long continue, discussing Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. But from a broader perspective of time and space, of history and geopolitics, Senator Obama's August 28 speech in Denver can rank no higher than the second best oration of this political season. His July speech before an audience of some 200,000 in Berlin's Tiergarten ranks much higher in my estimation.

Addicted to love

As Bill Clinton left the stage at the Democratic National Convention, the musical director summoned a surreal tune:

Yes, that's right. Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love. Modern political conventions are too carefully choreographed and scripted for this musical selection to have been accidental. The DNC's musical director sure has a twisted sense of humor . . . .

The speech itself? Capably delivered:

Survival of the Fittest

Via the New York Times, an object lesson in (1) making money while being environmentally sound and (2) remaining economically viable by maintaining a longer managerial time horizon:

During the glory days of big pickups and sport utility vehicles, one automaker steadfastly refused to join the party.

Despite the huge profits that its competitors were minting by making larger vehicles, Honda Motor never veered from its mission of building fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars like its Accord sedan.

“I remember being at the Tokyo Motor Show in the mid-1990s and talking about the environment,” said Ben Knight, head of engineering at Honda’s North American division. “The reaction was there’s no return on that.”

But in today’s fuel-conscious automotive market, Honda is reaping the rewards for its commitment.

No major automaker in America is doing better than Honda, whose sales are up 3 percent for the first seven months of this year in a market that has fallen 11 percent. By comparison, General Motors is down nearly 18 percent, Ford Motor has dropped 14 percent, and Toyota has slid 7 percent.

While competitors are scrambling to shift their product lineups to build more small vehicles and slash their bloated inventories of trucks, Honda can barely keep up with demand, particularly in the subcompact category.

Sales of its tiny Fit have soared 79 percent so far this year, and interest in the vehicle is so strong that Honda accelerated the introduction of the 2009 model, which will go on sale Tuesday.

The Fit’s four-cylinder engine gets 34 miles per gallon in highway driving, but the quirky little hatchback does not scrimp on creature comforts. The base model — which sells for $15,200, including delivery charges — has a satellite-linked navigation system and safety features like side-curtain airbags.

Honda’s focus on fuel efficiency is paying off on the bottom line as well. The Japanese automaker reported a record profit of 179.61 billion yen ($1.68 billion), during its fiscal first quarter that ended in June, an 8.1 percent jump from the previous year.

By comparison, G.M. and Ford have lost billions this year as the market has moved away from the big vehicles that once generated the bulk of their profits. Detroit is moving radically to downsize its vehicle lineups and, in Ford’s case, to convert assembly plants from making trucks to small cars.

At once word and world together

»  Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer  «

In the hope that homage delayed is not homage denied, I dedicate this post to the first legal academic I ever met. A quarter century of familiarity with that scholar's work lights a path toward understanding the place and the power and the grace and the grandeur of law in a world beyond borders.

Harold J. Berman died November 13, 2007, at the age of 89. I knew him as an advisor and an instructor. I first met him at Emory University in the mid-1980s, where he recommended the study of law. Professor Berman later supervised one of my first scholarly papers in law, which began as an assignment in his Harvard Law School seminar on international business law.

The legal world will long remember Professor Berman for his contributions to Soviet law, legal history, international law, and above all his "integrative jurisprudence" of law in concert with history, politics, and morality. His work reached its apogee in the two books called Law and Revolution. Part I, published in 1983, addressed The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition; part II, published in 2004, explored The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition.

Professor Berman's work informs the global practice of law at multiple levels. In the first instance, his expansive view of law transcends the conventional understanding, often expressed in "international" or "transnational" settings, of law as a product of the contemporary nation-state and of the nation-state, in turn, as a creation of the Peace of Westphalia. To Professor Berman, to think so narrowly would be to party as if it were 1648. The Western legal tradition grew from many sources beyond national authority, including canon law and the law of feudal lords and global merchants.

Two of his shorter works, both written roughly a dozen years ago, focus Professor Berman's wide-ranging view of law on challenges facing today's world. In World Law, 18 Fordham Int'l L.J. 1617 (1995), Professor Berman announced: "That humankind, in the aftermath of two world wars, has reached a turning point in its history, that the world has entered a new era of global interdependence, that all inhabitants of Planet Earth share a common destiny, is a historical fact, a political fact, an economic fact, a sociological fact, that has finally penetrated the consciousness of most of the earth's inhabitants." That reality, he lamented, "has had a harder time penetrating legal scholarship or the curriculum of our law schools." As a result, law schools "are still stuck" purporting to separate ""international law from comparative law and . . . both of these from the customary law of communities that transcend national boundaries."

Professor Berman recommended a cure as effective as it is simple: Legal educators and the lawyers they train should approach law as a unitary, coherent body of world law, without reference to nations or the boundaries between them. The relevant frame of reference for lawmaking shares the same geographic scope as the activities law endeavors to govern: the entire world, all at once.

In Law and Logos, 44 DePaul L. Rev. 143 (1994), Harold Berman expressed this universalist sentiment in even grander terms:

Pieter Brueghel de Oude, De toren van Babel (1563)

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells us that at one time all men spoke the same language, but because of their pride God “confused the language of all the earth,” so that men could not “understand one another's speech.” As a result they were “dispersed” on the surface of the earth and could no longer make a “name” for themselves as a single universal community. It is significant that the story attributes the existence of separate nations to a breakdown in communication. Implicit in the story of the Tower of Babel is the story of Pentecost . . . . It tells us that at a place where a multitude of people of different nationalities had gathered to worship, certain of them received from the Holy Spirit the power to speak in “other languages,” so that all the peoples of the earth could hear “the mighty works of God,” “each in his own native tongue.” Thus the story of Pentecost gives hope that human pride can be overcome, and that by translation from one language to another all peoples of the world may, by the power of a higher spiritual truth, share each other's experiences vicariously and become, as they were originally intended to be, united.

Professor Berman hoped that Law and Logos would command a power and a reach beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition from which he drew this vision. I believe that it does. At times today's world seems hopelessly riven by divisions based on race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Driven by fear into separate camps, partisans fueling these ancient rivalries appear to speak fundamentally different moral languages. Indeed, at their worst, the only common element connecting these idioms seems to be mutual hatred and distrust of "the other."

Pablo Picasso, Colombe au rameau d’olivier, visage, main et feuille de chêne (1950)

Hope for truth and reconciliation in such a world surely lies in law. Across moral and religious traditions, across linguistic and cultural differences, across divisions of time and space, basic notions of procedural fairness and substantive justice unite all humanity. Bringing those principles to life, so that the shared dreams of people around the world might indeed lift us all, is the irreducible mission of law. For every Babel law responds in due time and full measure with its own Pentecost, at once word and world together.

Literary Warrant [35]

"—No doubt, Sir—there is a whole chapter wanting here—and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it—but the bookbinder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy—but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it...."

—Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ch. XXV.

• Kevin Brigden, Iryna Labunska, David Santillo & Paul Johnston, Greenpeace Research Laboratories, Chemical Contamination at E-waste Recycling and Disposal Sites in Accra and Korforidua, Ghana (Technical Note 10/2008) (August 2008)
  
  "This study, the first to investigate workplace contamination in areas in Ghana where e-waste recycling and disposal is carried out, focussed on the main centre for this type of work, at the Agbogbloshie scrap market in Ghana’s capital, Accra. One of the numerous similar, though far smaller, operations that take place throughout Ghana was
  also investigated, at the location of a scrap dealer in Korforidua, a smaller city to the north of Accra. At these workshops, e-waste is recycled in a crude way, primarily involving manual disassembly and open burning to isolate copper from plastics. Much of the work is carried out by children, commonly using only rudimentary tools and with no protective equipment."—Executive Summary.


• Claudia Copeland, Specialist in Resource and Environmental Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division, Congressional Research Service (CRS), Terrorism and Security Issues Facing the Water Infrastructure Sector (CRS Report for Congress, Order Code RL32189) (Updated July 28, 2008)
  
  "Across the country, water infrastructure systems extend over vast areas, and ownership and operation responsibility are both public and private, but are overwhelmingly non-federal. Since the attacks, federal dam operators and local water and wastewater utilities have been under heightened security conditions and are evaluating security plans and measures. There are no federal standards or agreed upon industry practices within the water infrastructure sector to govern readiness, response to security incidents, and recovery. Efforts to develop protocols and tools are ongoing since the 2001 terrorist attacks. This report presents an overview of this large and diverse sector, describes security-related actions by the government and private sector since September 11, and discusses additional policy issues and responses, including congressional interest."—Summary.

Read the rest of this post . . .

• Emerging Energy Research (EER), US Wind Markets Surge to New Heights (August 14, 2008)
  
  "On the back of three years of consistent growth, the US wind market is poised for a record-breaking surge with cumulative installed wind capacity to surpass 150 gigawatts (GW) by 2020, according to a recent market study from Emerging Energy Research, a leading research and advisory firm analyzing clean and renewable energy markets on a global basis."—Press release.


• Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Wildlife 2060: What’s at Stake for Florida? (August 2008)
  
  "If Florida’s population doubles during the next five decades, as Florida 2060: A Population Distribution Scenario for the State of Florida predicts, about 7 million additional acres of land—equivalent to the state of Vermont—could be converted from rural and natural to urban uses. Nearly 3 million acres of existing agricultural lands and 2.7 million acres of native habitat will be claimed by roads, shopping malls and subdivisions."—Wildlife Need Wild Lands.


• Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, New Orleans Three Years After the Storm: The Second Kaiser Post-Katrina Survey, 2008 (August 2008)
  
  "The results of the new survey—fielded in the spring of 2008—are sobering, suggesting that many New Orleans residents are disappointed by the pace of the recovery effort, that some perceive a lack of opportunity in the city, and that many feel forgotten by their nation and its leaders. The survey finds that the city’s population, while substantially reduced in size, is overwhelmingly made up of people who lived in New Orleans before the storm hit, with nine in ten reporting they are Katrina survivors. These residents knew the city pre-disaster, and not only have that pre-flood city as their baseline but may also have overly high expectations about the power of the rebuilding process to create a “new” New Orleans, one in which pre-existing social problems would be lessened or even erased. The survey provides a sense that these high expectations are not being matched by the reality on the ground. In many ways, in fact, the problems and challenges facing the city are as daunting as they were a year and a half ago, when we first surveyed the population at Katrina’s one-year anniversary. In at least one area—mental health challenges—they seem to have become even more visible."—Executive Summary.


• Leon Kolankiewicz & Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies, Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Backgrounder) (August 2008)
  
  "The findings of this study indicate that future levels of immigration will have a significant impact on efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions. Immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher polluting country. On average immigrants increase their emissions four-fold by coming to America."


• National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Bush Administration to Launch Sneak Attack on Endangered Species Act: Proposed Regulations Would Gut Protections for America’s Imperiled Wildlife (Press release) (August 11, 2008)
  
  "The Bush Administration plans to rollback protections for America’s imperiled wildlife by re-writing the regulations of the Endangered Species Act. According to leaked documents obtained by the National Wildlife Federation, the proposed changes would weaken the safety net of habitat protections that have helped protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years." Includes leaked copy of proposed ESA changes.


• Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (OSHA 3114-07R) (2008)
  
  "Because of the seriousness of the safety and health hazards related to hazardous waste operations and emergency response, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued its Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) standard, Title 29 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Parts 1910.120 and 1926.65 (see 54 Federal Register 9294-9336, March 6, 1989) to protect employees in this environment and to help them handle hazardous substances safely and effectively....
  
  "This booklet provides an overview of the HAZWOPER requirements for each type of work operation and explains each section separately to provide a clearer understanding of the standard. Having this understanding enables employers to protect the health and safety of their employees in these different environments."—Introduction.


• Eileen Salinsky, Consultant, National Health Policy Forum, Strong as the Weakest Link: Medical Response to a Catastrophic Event (Background Paper No. 65) (August 8, 2008)
  
  "Natural disasters and acts of terrorism have placed a spotlight on the ability of health care providers to surge in response to catastrophic conditions. This paper reviews the status of efforts to develop the capacity and capabilities of the health care system to respond to disasters and other mass casualty events. Strategies for adapting routine medical practices and protocols to the demands posed by extraordinary circumstances and scarce resources are summarized. Existing federal roles, responsibilities, and assets relative to the contributions of state and local government and the private sector are described, including specific programmatic activities such as the Strategic National Stockpile, the National Disaster Medical System, and the Hospital Preparedness Program. Opportunities for federal policymakers seeking to strengthen and expedite preparations for medical disaster response are highlighted."—Overview.


• Slashdot, Mimicking Photosynthesis To Split Water (August 17, 2008)
  
  "An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis, paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionize the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen—touted as the clean, green fuel of the future—cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale."—Press release.


• Slashdot, World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California (August 17, 2008)
  
  "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E." Includes links to New York Times and Scientific American articles.


• Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), World Water Week (August 17-23, 2008)
  
  "The World Water Week in Stockholm is the leading annual global meeting place for capacity-building, partnership-building and follow-up on the implementation of international processes and programmes in water and development. The theme of the week is Progress and Prospects on Water: For a Clean and Healthy World with Special
  Focus on Sanitation."


• Suburban Emergency Management Project (SEMP), DHS Rolls Out "Voluntary National Emergency Preparedness Accreditation Program" for Private Sector Entities (Biot no. 530) (July 30, 2008)
  
  "On July 30, 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) signed an agreement with the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to establish and oversee the development and implementation of the accreditation and certification requirements for a new federal government program, currently titled the
  'Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness Accreditation and Certification Program.' The 9/11 Commission of 2007 recommended this program and the US Congress passed Public Law 110-53 (August 3, 2007) to implement this recommendation, among many others."


• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), Accra Climate Change Talks 2008
  
  "The next round of United Nations climate change negotiations will take place in Accra, Ghana, from 21-27 August. The Accra Climate Change Talks will take forward work on a strengthened and effective international climate change deal under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as work on emission reduction rules and tools under the Kyoto Protocol. This is part of a negotiating process that will be concluded in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. Over a thousand participants are expected to attend the Accra meeting, which is the third major UNFCCC gathering this year."


• United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), World Bank & the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, Climate Resilient Cities: A Primer on
  Reducing Vulnerabilities to Climate Change Impacts and Strengthening Disaster Risk Management in East Asian Cities (June 2008)
  
  "The Primer addresses and answers the question “Why will cities be interested?”
  
  • They will understand the issues and importance of climate change in urban governance, especially in East Asia.
    
  • They will engage in identifying their vulnerabilities to potential climate change impacts.
    
  • They will learn about the 'why' and the 'how' of reducing vulnerabilities to climate changes and natural disasters through illustrative examples from other cities in East Asia and other parts of the world.
    
  • They will understand the requirements and process for moving from theory to practice in adapting sound practices to their particular contexts."


• United States Department of Energy (DOE), Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada (DOE/EIS-0250F-S1) (Final Repository SEIS) (June 2008)
  
  "DOE’s Proposed Action is to construct, operate, monitor, and eventually close a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Under the Proposed Action, spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in storage or projected to be generated at 72 commercial and 4 DOE sites would be shipped to the repository by rail (train), although some shipments would arrive at the repository by truck. The Repository SEIS evaluates (1) the potential environmental impacts from the construction, operations, monitoring, and eventual closure of the repository; (2) potential long-term impacts from the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste; (3) potential impacts of transporting these materials nationally and in the State of Nevada; and (4) potential impacts of not proceeding with the Proposed Action (the No-Action Alternative)."—Abstract.

Ithaka: Legal education as an odyssey

Thalia-Flora Karavia, Portrait of C.P. Cavafy (1926)

Like all other journeys, legal education has a fairly well defined end. Like the best of journeys, legal education at its best does not set its destination in advance, but rather refocuses along the way. Moreover, this is no overnight trip. Although students spend as few as a thousand days at the Law School, the University of Louisville's bond with its graduates lasts a lifetime.

With those thoughts in mind, I am pleased to offer readers of Jurisdynamics, MoneyLaw, and The Cardinal Lawyer a bit of literary inspiration on the first day of classes during the 2008-09 academic year. Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης), better known in the English-speaking world as Constantine P. Cavafy, was a major Greek poet who lived from 1863 to 1933. Among his 154 poems, perhaps the best known and most beloved is Ithaka. This poem makes apt reading for all new beginnings, including the first day of a life in the law.

Read this item in its entirety at The Cardinal Lawyer.

Prospettive su Pluto e Proserpina

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Pluto e Proserpina (1621-22) This exquisite piece of Baroque sculpture graces the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Its sensuality, especially when portrayed from unusual angles, has maddened the authors of blogs as diverse as Glendale Figure Sculpture, Kym Lardner, Noodnik, and Jurisdynamics.

From Red Lion to Red List: The Dominance and Decline of the Broadcast Medium

Herewith my most recent SSRN manuscript, From Red Lion to Red List: The Dominance and Decline of the Broadcast Medium, 60 Admin. L. Rev. 793 (2008):

This essay proposes a little housecleaning in the law of communications regulation. Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 369 (1969), deserves to be transferred in its entirety from the realm of doctrine to that of history. Defenders of Red Lion and the discourse-based model of free speech jurisprudence symbolized by that decision seek to preserve one communicative niche where the public at large does absolutely nothing besides watch or listen. Appeals to civic republicanism and other lofty ideals notwithstanding, what Red Lion privileges above all else is sloth, the idea that there should be one form of mass communication that all citizens, without regard to wealth or power, can access solely by virtue of buying a receiving device and turning it on.

For four decades Congress and the FCC have imposed mandatory carriage obligations on cable and broadcast satellite operators for the benefit of conventional television stations. The emergence of intermediate constitutional scrutiny in those decisions has effectively confined Red Lion's deferential standard of review to structural regulation of the broadcast industry itself. Sustained resort to mandatory carriage schemes has reduced conventional broadcasting from a pervasive medium into the legal ward of byzantine regulatory systems designed to leverage the greater dominance of subscription-based platforms for delivering multichannel video programming.

Toilet to tap

Indirect potable reuse? Toilet to tap? Whatever you call it, the recycling of sewage into drinking water is today's reality in Orange County, California. It may be tomorrow's inevitability in a world of soaring demand, depleted aquifers, and galloping climate change.

Literary Warrant [34]

Another grey image: Hurricane, Miami

• Center for Public Integrity, Perils of the New Pesticides (July 30, 2008)
  
  "Pyrethrins, extracted from the chrysanthemum plant, and their synthetic relatives, pyrethroids, have exploded in popularity over the last decade. They are now used in thousands of consumer products from Hartz Dog Flea & Tick Killer to Raid Ant and Roach Killer. These chemicals are found in bug-repellant clothing, flea collars, automatic misting devices, lawn-care products, and carpet sprays. Manufacturers developed them as safer alternatives to a class of compounds, derived from Nazi nerve gases, called organophosphates, found in products such as Dursban. The chemicals were widely used in American homes as recently as the late 1990s but are no longer approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for indoor use."—Introduction.


• Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), Pork Alert: Interior and Environment (June 30, 2008)
  
  "Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released its preliminary analysis of the House version of the Fiscal 2009 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. There are 247 projects, costing taxpayers $134.9 million."—Press release.

Read the rest of this post . . .

• Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy (DOE), International Energy Outlook 2008: Highlights (Report no. DOE/EIA-0484(2008)) (June 2008) (full report available August 2008)
  
  "The International Energy Outlook 2008 (IEO2008) presents an assessment by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the outlook for international energy markets through 2030. U.S. projections appearing in IEO2008 are consistent with those published in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2008 (AEO2008), which was prepared using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS)."


• Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) & of the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), Evaluation of the Role and Contribution of UNDP in the Environment and Energy: Executive Summary (DP/2008/46) (July 14, 2008)
  
  "The report argues that environment and energy are central to the core UNDP mission of poverty reduction, and makes recommendations about how to improve the UNDP programming."—UN Pulse (August 6, 2008)


• Henry Lee, William C. Clark & Charan Devereaux, Biofuels and Sustainable Development: An Executive Session on Grand Challenges of the Sustainability Transition (Summary Report) (May 2008)
  
  "The report stems from a two-day workshop in May 2008 hosted by Harvard Kennedy School, in cooperation with the Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea Protection of Italy and Venice International University. The workshop convened 25 of the world’s top experts on biofuels, economic development and ecology. The purpose of the two-day session was to explore the actions needed to foster the sustainable development of biofuels investments while simultaneously mitigating the impacts on food prices and the environment."—Press release (July 29, 2008)


• Jeffrey Logan & Stan Mark Kaplan, Specialists in Energy Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division, Congressional Research Service (CRS), Wind Power in the United States: Technology, Economic, and Policy Issues (CRS Report for Congress, Order Code RL34546) (June 20, 2008)
  
  "Rising energy prices and concern over greenhouse gas emissions have focused congressional attention on energy alternatives, including wind power. Although wind power currently provides only about 1% of U.S. electricity needs, it is growing more rapidly than any other energy source. In 2007, over 5,000 megawatts of new wind generating capacity were installed in the United States, second only to new natural gas-fired generating capacity. Wind power has become 'mainstream' in many regions of the country, and is no longer considered an 'alternative' energy source.
  
  "Wind energy has become increasingly competitive with other power generation options. Wind technology has improved significantly over the past two decades. CRS analysis presented here shows that wind energy still depends on federal tax incentives to compete, but that key uncertainties like climate policy, fossil fuel prices, and technology progress could dominate future cost competitiveness."—Summary.


• Robert J. Meyers, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator, United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Air and Radiation, Letter to the Honorable Henry J. Waxman, United States House of Representatives, Chairman, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (July 23, 2008)
  
  "In response to Chairman Waxman’s inquiry, EPA provided analyses EPA had conducted of reductions that would be necessary from the transportation sector to meet a range of global warming goals."—News release (August 5, 2008)


• National Science and Technology Council, Executive Office of the President, Two New Reports on Climate Change (2008)
  
  Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States and Revised Research Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.


• Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Biodiversity Indicators, Postnote, n.312 (July 2008)
  
  "The UK is committed to a demanding European target to halt biodiversity loss and a less stringent global target to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Biodiversity indicators measure progress towards these targets. This POSTnote explains the different suites of indicators that will be used and looks at issues surrounding them."


• PhysOrg.com, Dutch Town Tests 'Air-Purifying' Concrete (August 6, 2008)
  
  "A road in the small Dutch town of Hengelo is to be paved with air-purifying concrete in a trial that could lead to a breakthrough in the fight against rising pollution, scientists said Wednesday."


• United States Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2009 (A Report by the Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, A Supplement to the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2009) (July 2008)
  
  "The document describes a wide range of activities including examples of CCSP’s contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as significant progress in understanding Earth system components of the global climate system, how these components interact, and the processes and forces bringing about changes to the Earth system. It provides details on progress towards understanding the ongoing and projected effects of climate change on nature and society, such as the relationship between climate change and shifts in storm tracks and how this may affect water availability in the southwestern United States. The document also describes how observational and predictive capabilities are being improved and used to create tools to support decisionmaking at local, regional, and national scales to cope with environmental variability and change. The report also describes the program’s 21 scientific synthesis and assessment products and its recently completed Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States. To date, eight of the synthesis and assessment products have been completed and the remaining products will be completed in the coming months. These products are being widely disseminated and briefed to stakeholders, including Congress. They are also providing important input to CCSP’s ongoing strategic planning."


• United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP) (July 31, 2008)
  
  "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released today the National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP) to address gaps and determine solutions so that emergency response personnel at all levels of government and across all disciplines can communicate as needed, on demand, and as authorized. The NECP is the nation's first strategic plan to improve emergency response communications, and complements overarching homeland security and emergency communications legislation, strategies and initiatives."—Press release.


• United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Inspector General, Hurricane Katrina Multitier Contracts (OIG 08-81) (July 2008)
  
  "We initiated this audit in response to Congressional concerns that, in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, multitier subcontracting (1) increased costs to the government, (2) limited opportunities for small and local businesses to participate in response and recovery efforts, and (3) resulted in layers of subcontractors being paid profit and overhead while adding little or no value to the work performed under the contract. Our objectives were to determine the validity of these concerns, as well as to determine the potential effect Section 692 of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 could have on future disaster contracting.
  
  "It does not appear that multitier subcontracting, as an isolated factor, caused significant increases in costs to the government, nor did it reduce subcontracting opportunities for small and local businesses. The prime contractors subcontracted a significant amount of the value of their contracts to small and local businesses."—Executive Summary.