BBC News - Surviving the worst winter in the world

High up on the Antarctic Plateau - the world's largest desert - we have endured hypoxia that comes from being located at 3800m equivalent altitude, the coldest temperatures on Earth falling below -80C (-100C with the wind-chill), and each other. Nothing survives outside in such harsh conditions - no fauna and no flora.

Obama’s stimulus package was a ginormous clean energy bill, says Michael Grunwald | Grist

It contained the biggest clean energy bill in U.S. history alongside equally significant measures on infrastructure, education, science, and manufacturing. It was epochal, a burst of activist government of a scale not seen since FDR.
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The energy stuff wasn’t just big, it was ginormous. It’s hard to get people twice as excited about $90 billion as they would be about $45 billion, or 10 times more than they would be about $9 billion, but even $9 billion would have been ginormous. Ten years earlier, [President] Clinton pushed a five-year, $6 billion clean energy bill that went nowhere; at the time it was seen as preposterous and unrealistic, and it was. And here, 10 years later, $90 billion in the guy’s first month in office. Plus it leveraged another $100 billion in private money.
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A. The $90 billion includes high-speed rail too. And there was about $25 billion for energy efficiency, which as you know is the killer app of the energy world. There was energy efficiency for America’s largest steel plant, America’s largest hospital. There was $5.5 billion through the [General Services Administration] to green federal buildings and the federal fleet, which will save taxpayers huge money in the long run. And they had $5 billion for low-income weatherization, which is like gold. You’re solving every problem: You’re helping poor people, you’re putting guys with caulk guns to work, you’re saving energy, you’re saving money, you’re reducing our dependence [on foreign oil], etc. The program got off to this horribly slow start, though, partly because of dated rules and a bunch of other stupid regulations.
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A. It wasn’t all Obama. Obama had this green team on his transition team, led by Carol Browner. David Sandalow was on the team and he loves electric vehicles, so suddenly there’s $2 billion for batteries. And Dan Reicher was on the team, he loves geothermal, hot rocks, so that got $400 million. And then when it hit Congress, Congress was like, we have a few ideas. Harry Reid had some stuff he wanted about transmission, and he liked the hot rocks too, that’s big in Nevada.

Scrap carbon tax, says Taxpayers Federation

B.C.'s carbon tax should be scrapped because it hasn't accomplished its environmental goals, is costing people too much, and is hurting the province's competitiveness, says the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Food Lobbying Group to Ask EPA to Trim Ethanol Mandate - Bloomberg

The main lobbying group for food producers plans to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce requirements for the use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline as a drought boosts the grain’s price to records.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) and Kellogg Co. (K), today will ask the EPA to reduce the requirement for how much of the biofuel must be sold this year, said Louis Finkel, the Washington-based group’s executive vice president of government affairs.