Gasoline cost is creeping up again.

Today, $2.59 minus six cents for a checking account debit.

Crude up to $80 per barrel.

Clunkers money was not taxable income to buyer.

Apparently, the "Clunkers $" is not taxable to purchasers. http://www.kjrh.com/content/financialsurvival/tulsa/story/Is-your-tax-for-clunkers-taxable/-zAJabMtrkiD61y18Ysq2A.cspx .... Mary Kay called to tell us she's curious about the federal program that gives folks up to $4500 when they trade in certain gas guzzling vehicles and buy more efficient ones. She asks, "Is the $4500 Cash For Clunkers voucher a free gift from the government, or will it be considered taxable income at the end of the year? If taxable, folks may want to consider what that $4500 may net them after taxes are paid on it." It's a good question. So we got in touch with the Oklahoma Society of CPAs. I'm told it will not be considered taxable income for the person who buys the car, so they won't be paying any tax on it. But the dealer will be taxed on the cash it receives for those clunkers that are turned in. Afterall, CPAs tell us, the money the government gives to dealers for the cash for clunkers program, is considered taxable income for them, but not for the customer.

Cash for clunkers: Early on I came close to buying a PT Cruiser.

http://ww2.startribune.com/user_comments/comments.php?d=asset_comments&asset_id=54400982&section=/business

My newer vehicle is a 2005 Ford Ranger with 18K miles. My "clunker" is a 1993 Chev S-10 4x4 with a max towing package and 177K miles. I could have gotten a 2009 PT Cruiser for $10K even with cash for clunkers. Very tempting. I could have paid for it out of savings. My brother, who is a very good mechanic talked me out of it. He says that mechanically the S-10 is very good and I think he likes having the "max towing" package available.

I read that of the 700,000 cars sold, analyst estimated that 200,000 were "disgressionary" buyers, basically people who have money because they didn't spent it. I'm one and love a bargain but with 18K miles on the Ranger I don't need a new vehicle.

Basically, if we are to do a "cash for clunkers" program the goal should be to "shake the money out from "under the mattresses" so to speak. I would specify that there could be no leases or loan liens on the new vehicles. I would also specify that the current owner must keep the vehicle for a period of three years or more with an early sale pro-rated at (let's say) $100 per month. The only exception to this would be a sale due to the death or disability of the owner resulting in permanent loss of driver's licence. ........

First the no loans or lease. Many people have a lot of debt. Admittedly with "clunkers" discount there is a lot less repo loss but debt or lease is still a debt obligation. A lot of the "savers" have money "in the bank/under the mattress". This is the money a stimulus program should be flushing out. I give the $100 per month penalty for early sale to avoid the "resale loophole" that seemed to exist with the current program. Many of the buyers under my scheme would be elderly so the exclusion for death or medically related drivers licence surrender would reassure them. I would exclude a repay exemption for sale after a licence revocation caused by a DUI or other traffic offenses or non-driving related imprisonment.

How come I can figure this out and those Washington lawmakers and bureaucrats can't?

....I will cross post at my http://fourfiftygas.com

Cost of gasoline in other countries.

Published March 13, 2008. Prices not current but it helps you get the idea. The USA averaged $3.22 at the time.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/Advice/4DollarGasYesItsOnTheWay.aspx?page=2

First page of article:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/Advice/4DollarGasYesItsOnTheWay.aspx?page=1

Global gas prices per gallon

Country	City	Regular	Country	City	Regular
Norway	Oslo	$ 8.42	South Africa	Johannesburg	$ 3.83
United Kingdom	London	8.13	Canada	Toronto	3.71
France	Paris	8.11	Cuba	Havana	3.42
Denmark	Copenhagen	7.70	Pakistan	Karachi	3.28
Germany	Berlin	7.66	United States	National average	3.22
Italy	Rome	7.58	Thailand	Bangkok	3.18
	Hong Kong	7.14	Argentina	Buenos Aires	2.54
South Korea	Seoul	6.63	China	Beijing	2.42
Brazil	São Paulo	5.93	Mexico	Mexico City	2.42
Japan	Tokyo	5.29	United Arab Emirates	Dubai City	1.70
Singapore	Singapore	5.24	Egypt	Cairo	0.89
Kenya	Nairobi	5.16*	Russia	Moscow	0.85
Chile	Santiago	4.80	Kuwait	Kuwait City	0.82
Australia	Sydney	4.76	Saudi Arabia	Riyadh	0.46
India	Mumbai	4.71	Iran	Tehran	0.41
Canada	Montreal	4.04	Venezuela	Caracas	0.12

*Premium
Source: Associates for International Research

Prava: Global warming will improve global agriculture

http://english.pravda.ru/print/science/earth/107812-global_warming-0

Global warming will improve global agriculture

19.06.2009

Source: Pravda.Ru

URL: http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/107812-global_warming-0

At many times in the past, the earth's climate has been warmer than it is today. During the period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum, global temperatures were about two degrees Celsius, or about four degrees Fahrenheit, higher than they are today. During the Holocene Climate Optimum, warmer temperatures and an associated increase in rainfall facilitated the development of agriculture, village communities, and eventually cities by humankind in many parts of the world. The increased global temperatures of the Holocene Climate Optimum warmed the world's oceans, causing increased evaporation, creating more clouds and storms, and ultimately increasing rainfall throughout the Tropical, Subtropical, and Temperate zones encircling the earth. During the Holocene Climate Optimum, California, the southwestern and southern USA, the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Ukraine, India, China, and northern Africa all recieved more rainfall than they do today. During the Holocene Climate Optimum, the Sahara desert became a lush savannah punctuated with rivers and lakes that supported elephants, giraffes, zebras, hippos, crocodiles, humans, and the cattle the humans had domesticated. During that time, agriculture spread from the Middle East into Europe, rice cultivation spread throughout east Asia, and maize, bean, and squash cultivation spread throughout Central America. The global warming of the Holocene Climate Optimum also caused global sea levels to rise by about two meters, or nearly seven feet. Evidence for that rise in global sea levels has been found in many places, including southern Mesopotamia and in numerous five thousand year-old beaches and coral deposits found throughout the world which are now standing two meters above the present sea level. In the current hysteria about Global Warming, or 'Climate Change', as it is now being called, the emphasis has been entirely placed on the predicted undesirable effects of Global Warming, and the possible benefits of Global Warming are very seldom mentioned. Al Gore, James Hansen, and the other Jeremiahs of Global Warming or 'Climate Change' warn us about catastrophic rises in sea levels which will inundate major cities and about chronic, severe droughts which they claim will dessicate and devastate most of the major agricultural zones of the earth. The geologic evidence from the Holocene Climate Optimum proves that Global Warming will indeed raise global sea levels with catastrophic effects on major cities and low-lying districts throughout the world. However, the evidence from the Holocene Climate Optimum also shows that Global Warming should improve global agriculture by warming and widening the earth's Tropical, Subtropical, and Temperate zones, and by increasing rainfall throughout the world. The loss of some major cities to rising sea levels will certainly be traumatic, but the loss of those cities will be offset by an increase in agricultural production, forestry, and grazing areas throughout the world. The increase in agricultural, timber, and livestock production which would result from an increase of two degrees Celsius of Global Warming is badly needed in our increasingly over-populated world. Plants breathe CO2; they require CO2 to live and they thrive on it. Many professional growers pump CO2 into their greenhouses to increase plant production. Numerous land and satellite-based studies have shown an increase in global biomass during the time period that is associated with Global Warming. According to NASA scientist Ramakrishna Nemani, “Between 1982 and 1999, twenty-five percent of the Earth’s vegetated area experienced increasing plant productivity—a total increase of about six percent.” Al Gore, James Hansen, and the other prophets of Climate Change catastrophe never mention the actual and potential benefits of Global Warming. Why is that? Isn't science supposed to be about objectivity? Al Gore has invested heavily in carbon credit brokerage firms. For Gore, there is a financial profit to be made from promoting Global Warming alarmism. Gregory Fegel

© 1999-2009. «PRAVDA.Ru». When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors.

Letter to CCNet: RE: HOW MANY IPCC SCIENTISTS FABRICATE AND FALSIFY RESEARCH? [edited for text format]

Letter to CCNet: RE: HOW MANY IPCC SCIENTISTS FABRICATE AND FALSIFY RESEARCH? [edited for text format]
Dear Benny,The measured global temperature record which started around 1856 shows that the Earth was in a warming cycle until around 1880. The CO2record shows that CO2 was increasing by about 0.21ppmv/year over this period.During the cooling cycle which followed from 1880 to 1910, the CO2 concentration increased at a rate of about 0.30ppmv/year.The next warming cycle from 1910 to 1942 saw a dramatic increase in global temperature, but the rate of increase in CO2 concentration only grew to 0.33ppmv over this time period.The well documented global cooling period from 1942 to 1975 that had the world concerned about an impending return to the equivalent of the Little Ice Age, had a contemporaneous rise in atmospheric CO2 that equated to 0.63ppmv/year; almost twice the increase in CO2 of the precious warming cycle.During the warming that took place from 1975 to 1998, the rate of CO2 increase took another dramatic jump to 1.54ppmv/year, but this was followed by an increase to 1.91ppmv/year that we are currently experiencing during the present ongoing cooling cycle.Each successive cooling cycle has had an increase in the rate of CO2 growth over the previous warming cycle, indicating that there is no possible correlation of CO2 with global warming.In 1988 Hansen et al published a paper "Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three-Dimensional Model" in the Journal of Geophysical Research that introduced a "CO2 forcing parameter".This parameter had no actual physical basis, but was merely based on the assumption that a 100ppmv increase in CO2 was directly and primarily responsible for the measured increase in global temperature of 0.6 °C that had been observed over the past century.This assumption ignored the fact that over this time period there was both cooling and warming concurrent with rising CO2 concentration, and considering that this paper was published just 13 years after a 33 year cooling trend that also had a concurrent increase in CO2 concentration there is no possible valid rational for this assumption. Essentially in the 46 year period from 1942 to when the paper was published in 1988, there were 33 years of cooling and only 13 years of warming concurrent with increases in CO2, yet the models used a forcing parameter that directly related only warming to CO2 concentration increases.With no basis in fact, this parameter is entirely a fabrication, and the projections of climate models that are based on this fabricated parameter are also meaningless fabrications.In addition to the fabrication, there is a bit of scientific fraud in the creation of this CO2 forcing parameter.The Earth had been warming since the Little Ice Age at a rate of about 0.5 °C/century. The temperature value that went into determining the CO2forcing parameter was 0.6 °C, with the difference from the 0.5 °C/century value likely due to the urban heat island effect. Even if this difference was directly due to CO2 increases, the difference between the observed temperature and the natural warming since the Little Ice Age is only 0.1 °C but the full 0.6 °C was used to fabricate the forcing parameter.It seems that one fabrication leads to another, and when it became obvious that the natural warming of 0.5 °C/century since the Little Ice Age demonstrated the obvious deficiency in this forcing parameter of the climate models, the MBH98 temperature proxy also known as the "hockey stick" was fabricated to remove the Little Ice Age and allow the full 0.6 °C temperature increase to be related to CO2 increases.Considering that the climate models are the only support for the AGW premise, and the AGW premise is the only support for the climate models, exposing this simple fabrication is all that needs to be done to put an end to this circular argument that forms the basis for the entire climate change lunacy.Norm KalmanovitchCalgary Canada

$67 Billion carbon tax proposal.

Think "Four fifity gas" in the future.   

http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/02/26/the-energy-tax-budget/

The Energy Tax Budget - “Not one dime,” said President Obama in his address to Congress, referring to how much extra tax people earning under $250,000 a year will have to pay in his budget. Unfortunately, even if you don’t have to pay extra tax, you will have to pay extra fees for your energy, which are passed on to the government via energy companies. That’s the effect of the President’s cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions, an important part of his new budget. Energy companies will have to pay the government for permits for each ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent they emit in the generation of power. They will pass on these costs to the consumer, as has happened everywhere a cap-and-trade scheme has been tried. The Administration will split the revenues between $15bn for alternative energy pork and about $52 billion per year to help pay for the Making Work Pay tax cut/welfare check of $800 for “95 percent of all American workers.” By raising the price of fossil fuel energy and thereby making expensive alternative energy more competitive, the program is also aimed at reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted. (Iain Murray, Cooler Heads)

Why a Tiny Alabama Town Wants a $375 Million Chunk of the Stimulus

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/stimulus/2009/01/08/why-a-tiny-alabama-town-wants-a-375-million-chunk-of-the-stimulus_print.htm

Why a Tiny Alabama Town Wants a $375 Million Chunk of the Stimulus

By Amanda Ruggeri

Posted January 8, 2009

At first glance, the town of Edwardsville, Ala., with a population of 194 people, might raise a few eyebrows with its bid to receive $375 million from theeconomic stimulus package being assembled by Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress.

The tiny town, located near the Georgia border and 26 miles from the nearest "big city" of Anniston (population: 24,276), added 33 proposals—about two thirds of them related to "green" energy—to the list of "ready- to- go" projects assembled by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Total sum: $375,076,200.

That comes out to nearly $2 million per Edwardsville resident, although E. D. Phillips, the town's representative to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says the projects would affect a wider region that comprises about 80,000 people. That number includes residents of nearby rural areas that aren't already incorporated into towns, along with the residents of Talladega Springs (population: 124), which partnered with Edwardsville and local municipal utilities on the projects.

There's certainly no denying that Edwardsville has big ambitions. Through the various proposals, which include a renewable energy museum, scenic railroad, and vineyards, these small Alabama communities envision themselves becoming a cutting-edge demonstration project for energy sustainability and a hub for tourism.

"I know we look like some little Podunk town, and by the census, we are," Phillips says. "But we really think we've done some amazingly progressive things in the past two years."

The town's proposals began to develop more than two years ago, when Phillips and another town official became intrigued by the argument that renewable energy could create a rural renaissance. If any community needed economic revival, it was Edwardsville—even before the recession. At 28.7 percent, the town's poverty level was nearly equal to that of Nepal and more than twice the national average, according to the 2000 census.

Along with the more traditional proposals to replace streetlights with solar-powered lights (cost: $3,479,200), to install solar panels on the town hall (cost: $77,000), and to build solar-powered recharging stations for electric golf carts and vehicles (cost: $620,000), Edwardsville and Talladega Springs have assembled a set of even more far-reaching projects.

An outlay of $50.4 million, for example, would go toward installing water pipelines beneath roads to soak up the sun's rays, transferring heat. That technology is currently being used in the Netherlands, which found that while the cost of installation was double that of normal gas heating, the system halved the amount of energy required.

With big dreams, however, come big price tags.

"Do you know how hard it is to fund some of these projects when your tax base is so low?" Phillips says. "So we just breathed this sigh of relief when we found out about the stimulus package . . . especially when it had a focus on renewable energy."

Not everyone shares the sentiment.

"This really exemplifies the problem. Why are we buying light bulbs for a local community?" asks Tom Schatz, president of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. "If a municipality wants to save money, [it can] go out and buy the light bulbs. There is no reason the federal government should buy them."

One of Edwardsville's biggest proposed expenditures is for a "renewable energy museum and information dissemination center." Phillips envisions exhibits, audio tours, seminars, a research center, and a satellite lab run by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

To fund the museum, Edwardsville is requesting $32.1 million. That makes the facility the fourth most expensive museum proposed on the U.S. Conference of Mayors list—following facilities planned by Miami, Las Vegas, and Scottsdale, Ariz. (Some of those facilities have drawn their own controversy: Las Vegas's proposal for a $55 million "mob museum," for example, was used by Sen. Mitch McConnell this week as a prime example of pork spending.)

Some might wonder how many people a renewable energy museum in rural Alabama could attract. And there are other routes for museum funding, like the Institute of Museum and Library Services. If a project can't get funding through competitive grants, Schatz says, perhaps it shouldn't get funding at all.

"Clearly, no one else has been interested in funding this, so why should we be doing it now?" he asks, referring to all the projects on the U.S. Conference of Mayors list that are using the stimulus as a last-ditch funding effort. "Why should the federal government be doing something now that you couldn't do yourself?"

But with city and state budgets tight, says Ford Bell, the president of the American Association of Museums, it's small wonder that many are turning elsewhere. And, he adds, just because a museum is rural doesn't mean it's doomed to fail, noting the success of a living history museum in Fishers, Ind.

The energy museum speaks to Edwardsville's larger hope: becoming a tourist destination. The town has requested $37 million for a solar energy-enhanced "scenic railroad line." It's also asking for $9 million to go toward establishing an eventual 640 acres of vineyards, 160 acres of which would be launched first. Each of the four vineyards would be designed around the theme of a different European country and, in a bid for weddings, dotted with gazebos and chapels.

To some, the vineyards, in particular, seem dubious. The Southeast is subject to a disease that puts traditional European grape varieties out of reach, usually limiting vineyards to the muscadine grape. Partly as a result, vineyards haven't exactly been the region's strong suit. Georgia has just 1,100 acres of vineyards, while Mississippi has 400. (Compare that with California's 800,000 or even Pennsylvania's 12,000.) The 640 acres for vineyards that Edwardsville ultimately wants to establish would nearly double the vineyard acreage of the entire state of Alabama, which is currently at 650.

Funding more than "a fraction of the scope" of neighboring states' vineyards with public money, therefore, would distort the market, says Bill Nelson, president of WineAmerica, the National Association of American Wineries.

It's not yet known whether Edwardsville will get any money from the stimulus package at all. There's no guarantee as to how many projects, if any, on the mayors list will get federal funding. And although $375 million may seem like a lot of money, it's also a fraction of the $96,638,419,313 requested by all the towns on the list.

But for Edwardsville, that money—whether seen as "pork" or not—would make a fantasy come true.

"We would love to be the poster child for rural America, for attempting to change through concern for the environment and clean energy," says Phillips. "We think if anyone can do it, we can."

Read more stimulus news.