Chavez's free heating oil program on hold: Rural Alaska | adn.com

The program that gives roughly two months of free heating oil to families in rural Alaska each year is on hold, and nonprofits say they don't know how long the freeze will last.

Over the past two years, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez gave village families more than $16 million worth of heating fuel through his country's government-owned oil company, Citgo Petroleum. In November, a Citgo official told the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council it expected to continue the program this winter.

He may have spoken to soon.

Citizens Energy, the Boston-based nonprofit that oversees the program, announced Monday that the free fuel is on hold as Citgo tries to recover from sinking oil prices and a wounded world economy.
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A proud socialist, Chavez is a frequent critic of capitalism and of the United States. He once called President Bush "the devil" before the United Nations.

As a result, the free fuel always came with political baggage, and some villages refused to take it.

Politics aside, Monday's announcement arrived amid a punishing cold snap and painful fuel prices. It is rotten news for villagers who were counting on hundreds of dollars of free heating oil to offset the winter's crippling fuel costs.
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For the 56 Western Alaska tribes represented by the Association of Village Council Presidents, village heating fuel costs as much as $8 a gallon, said acting vice president Patrick Samson.

The Citgo program provided enough heating oil to last up to two winter months, he said.

"Right now we're battling no running water and cold and frozen pipes and 40 below windchill."

Congrats to Harold Ambler for scoring a perfect 100 on Daily Kos' "Inhofe Scale"

A feather in Harold Ambler's cap.

A Siegel posts at Daily Kos regarding Ambler's climate realist post yesterday at HuffPo:

The New Year began with a bang over at the Huffington Post: the explosion of a new poster with a diatribe meriting a solid 100 on the Inhofe scale in terms of [allegedly] misleading statements re Global Warming science and reality.