May 12, 2003
The car of the future has already become the relic of the past, now that a growing fleet of General Motor’s electric cars awaits an uncertain fate.
Dozens of the green, metallic blue and bright red futuristic autos are lined up behind a chain-link fence at the edge of a freight rail line in Van Nuys, California. The automobile graveyard is a sure sign that the automaker has pulled the plug on a vehicle it heralded as recently as two years ago as, "the car of the future."
As California retreats from its strict pollution regulation, GM is taking the cars off the road when leases expire because it can no longer supply parts to repair them, according to GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss.
The car of the future has become artifact fare, as the automaker is shipping the cars to museums and universities for preservation, sending them to a research lab in New York, "cannibalizing" them for parts for the few still on the road, or scrapping them altogether.
It’s a long way from a program once touted as the company’s clean-air centerpiece, and it coincides with California fans fighting to keep some electric cars on the road as the state rewrites its "zero emissions" vehicle rule.
To the scores of drivers who embraced the technology, GM’s effort to get the cars off the road is an ominous prelude to the imminent death of the battery-powered vehicle as state air regulators continue to weaken rules that would have required 10% of cars for sale this year to be non-polluting.
It was only after seeing the promise of the first GM electric car in the late 1980s that California struck out on an ambitious zero-emission-vehicle program in 1990 to help clean up America’s smoggiest skies. New York and Massachusetts followed suit and other states are mulling similar regulations and watching to see how California’s rule-making plays out.
Over the past decade, state regulators have succumbed to pressure as automakers vigourously fought at hearings and in court to halt the regulation. Major automakers have stopped production because the vehicles were limited to a range of about 100 miles, required lengthy recharges, and their high cost made them unappealing to a wide group of drivers.
The California Air Resources Board is poised to make changes that reflect that the cars are a commercial failure and to promote more promising technologies that have emerged. The board’s staff has suggested a new plan letting auto companies reach the 10% quota with a combination of low-polluting gas-powered vehicles, gas-electric hybrids, and a few hundred fuel-cell cars down the road.
Automakers would also be able to apply credits for electric cars it once put on the road and electric golf-cart style vehicles that zip through neighbourhoods, office parks, and campuses.
Honda concluded that the limited popularity of the electric car wouldn’t effectively contribute to cleaner air, said Vice President Ben Knight.
"I think it is a small group that is very interested in that particular technology," Knight said.
"Some of our customers would tell us that they did, it took a while, but they did understand why their friends and neighbours weren’t leaning toward leasing a battery electric vehicle."
Hungry appetites don’t recognize organic wheat
Less than a week after German authorities approved test planting of genetically enhanced wheat in the eastern state of Thuringia, Greenpeace sabotaged the site by sowing organic wheat there instead, reports consumerfreedom. com.
Speaking for the environmental giant, Henning Strodthoff told Reuters that Greenpeace’s action was "aimed at ruining trials as it will be impossible to tell the difference between GMO and conventional wheat."
"Funny--we’ve been saying this all along," said consumerfreedom.com. "The human body can’t tell the difference either (amino acids are amino acids, regardless of the order in which they’re arranged). But this may be the first time an anti-technology green group has admitted as much.
Syngenta, which had to undergo a lengthy scientific approval process before planting began, now plans to move its trials to France or the United Kingdom.
"Something tells us that Greenpeace’s travelling road show will be on the same train, just one car back," says comsumerfreedom.com.
High flying Greenpeace has already made an appearance in Iraq. Along with Oxfam, the environmental lobby group, is agitating against the possibility that biotech food aid might be part of the humanitarian effort in that war-torn country. Heaven forbid the hungry might eat the same genetically improved grain Americans have enjoyed for years.
As generous nations like the U.S. struggle to meet the basic needs of millions of post-Saddam Iraqis, Greenpeace would do well to remember what happened when the anti-biotech movement tied to keep food out of the mouths of Zambia’s starving population. In that case, as the food shortage worsened, the hungry people looted grain silos.
Says consumerfreedom.com: "We hope the Iraqi people prefer feeding their children to following (the advice) of environmentalist scaremongers who don’t know what they’re talking about."
Huntingdon’s day in court
Beleaguered Huntingdon Life Sciences finally had its day in court.
Britain’s High Court has issued a wide-ranging temporary injunction against animal rights protesters who have used a variety of methods to target a chemical and pharmaceutical testing company.
In a recent ruling, a judge prevented protesters from coming within 50 yards of the homes of employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences.
Protesters are also banned from "assaulting, molesting, harassing, pestering, threatening or otherwise interfering with" company employees, their families and anyone "setting out to visit them."
Restrictions were also placed on protests outside the company’s headquarters in eastern England. A maximum of 25 protesters will be able to picket the company only once a month.
The injunction was issued against three animal rights groups--Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, the Animal Liberation Front and London Animal Action--and nine individuals. All are prohibited from publishing any identifying information about company employees or their vehicles.
A company spokesman said that Huntingdon was pleased with the ruling.
"We went into court with an objective and we got nearly everything we asked for," he said.
"The major part of this is not protests at the site," he said. "In fact the most successful tactic from the protesters’ point of view has been home visits, where protesters show up outside the residence of our employees. These tactics are extremely threatening and intimidating."
Huntingdon Life Sciences became the target of protesters after a 1997 television documentary featuring secret footage from inside the company offices led to two employees pleading guilty to animal cruelty charges.
Since then, activists have used a variety of methods--from peaceful protest to violent tactics--in an attempt to shut down the company and put pressure on other firms that Huntingdon does business with.
Several company employees, along with chief executive Brian Cass have been physically assaulted. The company lost its financial backing in Britain in 2001 and was sold to a U.S.-based firm, Life Sciences Research, in a deal backed by the U.K. government.
Earlier this year, accountancy firm Deloitte & Touche resigned as the company’s auditors.
A spokeswoman for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) said that the group would continue to protest the company.
"We take it as a compliment as to the effectiveness of our campaign the fact that the company has sought this injunction," said spokeswoman Heather James.
James said the group would "work around" the court order.
Green religion cashing in on tax breaks
It didn’t take long for the new phenomena known as religious groups with environmental agendas to complicate matters in the American senate. Private-property supporting Conservatives fear President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative will extend federal grants to religious groups with agendas that are anything but religious.
Provisions in the bill will open the way for green groups to purchase land to restrict development, courtesy of large tax breaks.
"This is…a disgraceful hijacking by environmentalists," said Mike Hardiman, legislative director of the American Land Rights Association (ALRA) in an interview with CNSNews.com." This faith-based bill is heading off the rails before it becomes law," he said. ALRA is a grassroots, property-rights advocacy group.
President Bush proposed his faith-based initiative to stop what he called "the unfair treatment of religious charities by the federal government." When the federal government gives contracts to private groups to provide social services, religious groups should have an equal chance to compete, he said in a December speech.
Land rights activists and at least one U.S. senator are upset about another provision in the current Senate bill that would give environmental land trust organizations a special tax break when buying property.
Wealthy environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy, which purchases land to protect it from development, stand to benefit from such tax-break provisions, because property owners would be attracted by the tax break.
"The Nature Conservancy already has the huge comparative advantage of almost $3 billion in assets and $700 million in annual revenues, much of it from the taxpayers in the form of direct grant money. Why does it need further benefits?" Harriman asked.
Return of the mosquito
The AIDS epidemic, which infected an estimated 20%of Uganda’s population a decade ago, seems to be under control.
But the population of Uganda is now being haunted by anther plague--malaria.
"Today up to 40% of the country’s outpatient care goes to people who are infected by malaria, according to the Washington Monthly. "The bottom line is that last year 80,000 people in Uganda died of malaria--half of them children under the age of five."
Jim Muhwezi, Uganda’s Minister of Health, launched a new campaign against the epidemic using Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. To Muhwezi, DDT--a pesticide widely proscribed in Europe and banned in the United States since 1972--was a cheap, effective weapon against malaria for a poor country with minimal public health resources, the publication states. "And in South Africa, the recent reintroduction of DDT spraying had reduced malaria rates by 75% over two years. ‘ Instead of sitting back and watching our people die of malaria and lose in economic terms,’ Muhwezi proclaimed ‘an all-out war against the disease must be waged.’
"Uganda is but one of many African countries suffering from malaria epidemics. Africa already accounts for 90% of the 2 million deaths and 300 million infections around the world each year, and it costs the continent 1.3% in annual growth per year, according to the economist Jeffrey Sachs.
"Mosquitoes are increasingly resistant to the main insecticide put into use to replace DDT; and the parasite that causes the disease, has, in recent years, become increasingly resistant to the cheapest and most common medical treatment, a drug called chloroquine. Yet most international aid agencies, development agencies, and lending institutions have moved away from funding spraying projects in general, and DDT use specifically. Without assistance, African governments cannot afford spraying programs, leaving them bereft of a safe, effective, and cheap defense. Which means that aid agencies and governments opposed to DDT may end up costing Africa millions of needless deaths.
"Over the years, mainstream scientific opinion has absolved DDT of many of its supposed sins. Indeed, the Stockholm Convention partially backfired because it brought to light a slew of studies and literature reviews, which contradicted the conventional wisdom of DDT. But when it comes to the kinds of uses once permitted in the United States and abroad, there’s simply no solid scientific evidence that exposure to DDT causes cancer or is otherwise harmful to human beings.
"Not a single study linking DDT exposure to human toxicity has ever been replicated."
What a contrast to rich provinces like Ontario, where the health ministry is contributing $7 million to help all its municipalities with their mosquito control efforts. That contribution comes with the provision that it will be up to local medical officers of health to decide how far they need to go in terms of larvicide and spray programs.
Pat Vanini, executive director of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, predicted that if the West Nile threat spreads, "there could be 446 debates in 446 municipalities about larviciding and spraying.
Last year, West Nile virus killed 3 people in Ontario and was linked to the deaths of 14 others.