Author Archives: Andrew Karolitz

U.S. Delays Decision on Keystone XL Pipeline

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes,

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Codex: Astra Militarum (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hold back the advance of a

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White Dwarf Issue 11: 12 April 2014 – White Dwarf

This issue, the Bullgryns smash into Warhammer 40,000 along with their Ogryn counterparts and the infamous bodyguard Nork Deddog, complete with painting guides in Paint Splatter. We also take the Astra Militarum out for a Battle Report: who will win, humanity’s finest defenders or the marauding Orks? About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop

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Codex: Astra Militarum (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

Codex: Astra Militarum The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hol

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The One-Minute Cleaner Plain & Simple – Donna Smallin

Clean smarter, not harder! That’s Donna Smallin’s motto, and now she shows readers how to do it in just minutes a day. The One-Minute Cleaner Plain & Simple is the perfect handbook for busy people who might never find the time for a top-to-bottom household scrub but do want to keep their homes clean and clutter-free. Room by room, challeng

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The Complete Compost Gardening Guide – Deborah L. Martin & Barbara Pleasant

Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors’ bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less d

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Beautiful No-Mow Yards – Evelyn Hadden

What has your perfect green lawn done for you lately? Is it really worth the time, effort, and resources you lavish on it? Armed with encouragement, inspiration, and cutting-edge advice from award-winning author Evelyn Hadden, you can liberate yourself at last! In this ultimate guide to rethinking your yard, Hadden showcases dozens of inspiring, eco-friendly

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t

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How to Paint Citadel Miniatures: Astra Militarum – Games Workshop

The Astra Militarum is an army of regimentation and proud tradition, with soldiers drawn from across the length and breadth of the Imperium. Their uniforms and iconography reflect this strict adherence to military organisation, and whether it is the Scions of the Militarum Tempestus, the Imperial Guardsmen of Cadia or the tanks of an armoured formation, each

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw

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U.S. Delays Decision on Keystone XL Pipeline

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U.N. report spells out super-hard things we must do to curb warming

Mission not-quite-impossible

U.N. report spells out super-hard things we must do to curb warming

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Hooboy, it’s gonna get hot. A U.N. climate panel on Sunday painted a sizzling picture of the staggering volume of greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere — and what will happen to the planet if we keep this shit up.

By 2100, surface temperatures will be 3.7 to 4.8 degrees C (6.7 to 8.7 F) warmer than prior to the Industrial Revolution. That’s far worse than the goal the international community is aiming for — to keep warming under 2 C (3.7 F). The U.N.’s terrifying projection assumes that we keep on burning fossil fuels as if nothing mattered, like we do now, leading to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere of between 750 and 1,300 parts per million by 2100. A few centuries ago, CO2 levels were a lovely 280 ppm, and many scientists say we should aim to keep them at 350 ppm, but we’re already above 400.

These warnings come from the third installment of the latest big report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by hundreds of climate scientists and experts. (WTF is this IPCC? See our explainer. Feel like you’ve heard this story before? Perhaps you’re thinking of the first installment of the report, which came out last fall, or the second installment, which came out last month. Maybe the IPCC believes that breaking its report into three parts makes it more fun, like the Hobbit movies.)

Here’s a paragraph and a chart from the 33-page summary of the latest installment that help explain how we reached this precarious point in human history.

Globally, economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The contribution of population growth between 2000 and 2010 remained roughly identical to the previous three decades, while the contribution of economic growth has risen sharply … Between 2000 and 2010, both drivers outpaced emission reductions from improvements in energy intensity. Increased use of coal relative to other energy sources has reversed the long-standing trend of gradual decarbonization of the world’s energy supply.

IPCCClick to embiggen.

Of course, we could change our fossil-fuel-burning, globe-warming ways. It’s too late to avoid climate change — it’s already here — but the scientists who collaborated on the latest IPCC report think they know what it would take to keep warming within 2 degrees. It would require “substantial cuts” in greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century “through large-scale changes in energy systems,” and maybe also changes in how we use land and protect CO2-slurping forests. By 2050, we would need to be pumping far less pollution into the atmosphere than we were in 2010 — perhaps 40 to 70 percent less. And by 2100, we would need to stop polluting the atmosphere entirely.

Achieving these seemingly impossible but utterly crucial reductions in greenhouse gas pollution will require international agreement, the report notes. The trans-boundary nature of the climate crisis means no one government or group can fix this problem on its own. So come on, everybody — let’s get to it!


Source
• Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change IPCC Working Group III Contribution to AR5, IPCC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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U.N. report spells out super-hard things we must do to curb warming

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Contractor That Evaluated Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Keystone XL Report Had Ties to TransCanada

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The contractor that evaluated greenhouse gas emissions for the State Department’s Keystone XL report is the latest company to come under fire for its ties to TransCanada, the prospective builder of the controversial pipeline.

A conflict-of-interest statement from the consulting firm ICF International, submitted to the State Department in 2012, reveals that the company had done other work for TransCanada.

ICF International analyzed greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands oil, the kind that would flow through the pipeline, for the State Department’s supplemental draft environmental impact statement, released in March 2013. Its website states that the firm was hired to compare life-cycle emissions associated with oil derived from Canada’s tar sands to those associated with oil from conventional crude.

The final environmental impact statement (FEIS), released in January 2014, also includes ICF International on its list of preparers, with ICF staffers working on the greenhouse gas and market analysis portions of the report.

The FEIS concludes that the projected 830,000 barrels of oil that would flow through the pipeline every day would add between 147 million and 168 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere annually. But it also says that the pipeline would be “unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.” In other words, the report concludes, those greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands oil would probably be produced with or without Keystone.

The State Department recently posted ICF’s conflict-of-interest forms on its website. Before it was approved to work on the supplemental draft EIS and the final EIS, the company had to make these disclosures.

ICF International submitted a letter dated Aug. 26, 2012, which said that the firm and its Canadian affiliate, ICF Consulting Canada Inc., had done work for TransCanada before. However, the letter said, “we have thoroughly considered the matter and are confident that this work does not represent an Organizational COI conflict of interest based on several important considerations detailed in the attached materials.”

Those earlier services included work as a subcontractor on the first environmental impact statement for Keystone XL released in August 2011, which was produced by the consulting firm Cardno ENTRIX. “This project represents by far the largest body of ICF work paid for by TransCanada,” ICF said in its letter. But it said the work did not constitute a conflict of interest because “the work was actually overseen and directed by the State Department.”

That kind of arrangement is, in fact, normal: A company seeking the State Department’s approval for a project with potential environmental impacts will fund contractors’ work on the EIS–instead of shifting the cost to the American taxpayer–while the department oversees the actual evaluation.

But that was not the ICF’s only tie to TransCanada. Its 2012 letter said that its Canadian affiliate had been retained by TransCanada Pipelines Limited since 2008–and was still doing work at the time of the disclosure–”to provide advisory services related to air emissions issues associated with operations in Canada and the US” Those services included “climate policy analysis and regulatory support.” ICF said that it was paid “less than $300,000” for that work between 2010 and August 2012, which accounted for “less than 0.1 percent” of its total revenues over that period. The company said that it believed the “nature and scale of this work do not represent an Organizational Conflict of Interest,” but that it would take “additional mitigation measures to ensure that no such conflict arises,” a description of which the company said appeared in its conflict-of-interest plans-and-procedures document. The State Department published the plans-and-procedures document, too, but it is heavily redacted and the mitigation steps are not visible.

ICF has also provided services to other oil interests that support the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The firm did consulting work in 2008 for the American Petroleum Institute, evaluating the potential effects on the oil and gas industry from greenhouse gases cap-and-trade legislation then under consideration in Congress. That study concluded that the bill would increase the cost of drilling and operating natural gas wells and would likely lead to a decrease in drilling.

Last year, InsideClimate News noted ICF’s work for pipeline and oil companies generally. The company does not list its clients online.

ICF’s disclosures feed into the allegations that environmental organizations have been making for months about contractors for the Keystone FEIS having conflicts of interest that should have precluded them from working on the report. The State Department’s Office of Inspector General released a report last month concluding that the department had adequately followed its conflict-of-interest procedures in selecting the main FEIS contractor, Environmental Resources Management. Pipeline supporters have said that the inspector general’s report should remove any remaining barriers to approving Keystone.

But the report also noted that the process for selecting contractors requires “very little” documentation and that while those “minimal requirements” had been met, the process “can be improved.” The inspector general had made similar comments about the process in February 2012, in response to earlier conflict-of-interest complaints regarding Cardno ENTRIX.

Now the ICF disclosure is renewing environmentalists’ criticism of the FEIS report. Ross Hammond, a senior climate and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the disclosure is further evidence that the FEIS was “hopelessly compromised” and that the conflict-of-interest screening procedures “are a complete and total joke.”

“If there’s one thing that the oil industry and environmentalists agree on, it’s that Keystone XL is critical to developing the Canadian tar sands,” said Hammond. “By hiring a known TransCanada contractor to reach the opposite conclusion, State Department bureaucrats have proven that they simply cannot be trusted to oversee an objective and unbiased review of this controversial pipeline.”

Steve Anderson, ICF International’s senior director of public affairs, referred questions to the State Department.

“These documents were submitted to the State Department pursuant to our rigorous guidelines on selection of third party contractors,” said a State Department spokesperson in an email to The Huffington Post. “Every document submitted is thoroughly reviewed by the Department. The Office of Inspector General found that our processes not only avoided conflicts of interest, but were more rigorous than required.”

Environmental groups say that how much the pipeline will contribute to greenhouse gas emissions is a fundamental question for the Obama administration to consider as it decides whether to approve Keystone XL. While the FEIS concluded that the pipeline’s impact would be minimal, another recent study, from the group Carbon Tracker, argues that the State Department report fails to adequately consider the degree to which the pipeline would facilitate more rapid development of the tar sands because shipping the oil by pipeline is cheaper than shipping by rail. The Carbon Tracker study found that “KXL-enabled production” of tar sands oil would create as much as 5.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050.

President Barack Obama said in his climate change speech last June that Keystone should be approved only if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” The emissions question, he said, will be “absolutely critical to determining whether this project will go forward.”

“At this point, it’s no surprise to find yet other questionable consultant on the State Department’s Keystone XL environmental study. And it’s not surprising that an oil pipeline consultant that’s currently working for TransCanada would say there’s no conflict of interest,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “But what’s really important to keep in mind is that State’s study, compromised as it was, found that Keystone XL would create a significant amount of climate pollution–the equivalent of nearly 6 million automobiles–and that the final decision rests with President Obama.”

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Contractor That Evaluated Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Keystone XL Report Had Ties to TransCanada

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Windows That Generate Electricity?

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Windows That Generate Electricity?

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Cuba is finally embracing solar power

Cuba is finally embracing solar power

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Even Havana might one day get solar power.

Cuba has been slow to catch on to the clean energy trend, but it’s now giving solar a go. The Communist nation’s leaders know they need new energy options “after four failed attempts to strike it rich with deep-water oil drilling and the death of petro-benefactor Hugo Chavez,” the AP reports.

The country’s first solar power plant opened in the spring, and six more are in the works. More from AP:

The solar farm now generates enough electricity to power 780 homes and had saved the equivalent of 145 tons of fossil fuels, or around 1,060 barrels of crude, through the end of July. Peak capacity is expected to hit 2.6 megawatts when the final panels are in place in September.

That’s just a drop in the energy bucket, of course.

Cuba gets about 92,000 barrels of highly subsidized oil per day from Venezuela to meet about half its consumption needs, according to an estimate by University of Texas energy analyst Jorge Pinon.

But hopes are high that solar can be a big winner in Cuba, which enjoys direct sunlight year-round, allowing for consistent high yields of 5 kilowatt-hours per square meter of terrain.

Cuba currently gets just 4 percent of its electricity from renewables, so there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Source

Cuba’s 1st Solar Farm A Step Toward Renewables, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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U.S. and World Bank might stop financing dirty coal plants

U.S. and World Bank might stop financing dirty coal plants

Hunter Hogan

Coal processing in China.

The World Bank says it cares about climate change, so why is it providing loans to help developing countries build coal power plants? Same goes for America’s support for coal plants abroad.

In recognition of this glaring climate policy disconnect, both the World Bank and the Obama administration appear to be finally backing away from  financial support of such dirty energy enterprises.

From Bloomberg:

The World Bank plans to restrict its financing of coal-fired power plants to “rare circumstances,” according to a draft strategy that reflects the lender’s increased focus on mitigating the effects of climate change.

The Washington-based lender will help countries find alternatives to coal, according to the draft obtained by Bloomberg News which lays out the bank’s policy on lending to its member countries. The paper, which is subject to revision, describes universal access to energy as a priority for the World Bank’s mission to help end poverty.

The bank “will cease providing financial support for greenfield coal power generation projects, except in rare circumstances where there are no feasible alternatives available to meet basic energy needs and other sources of financing are absent,” according to the report. Greenfield is a term for a new facility. …

The World Bank, which lends to the developing and emerging economies among its 188 members countries, committed $8.2 billion to finance energy projects in the 12 months through June 2012, according to its website. Of that, $3.6 billion was for renewable energy.

But agreement on the proposal by the bank’s board is no sure thing, The Washington Post warned:

In the past, proposals to restrict coal finance have been blocked by countries like China. But the vision fits with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s push to address climate change. The lender hasn’t funded a coal project since offering South Africa a $3 billion loan in 2010 to build a large power plant near Johannesburg.

The Post points out that Obama’s recent climate change speech included a little-noted reference to a similar policy shift in the U.S. From the same article:

“Today, I’m calling for an end to public financing for new coal plants overseas unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity,” Obama said in his speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday.

Those restrictions will most heavily affect the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a government-backed lender that acts to boost American sales overseas. Over the past five years, the bank has provided aid for a handful of large coal plants, including $805 million for a 4,800-megawatt plant in South Africa and $917 million for a 4,000-megawatt facility in India. The lender said each of those loans helped support hundreds of American jobs, from engineers to coal miners.

And there’s at least one coal project currently in the pipeline: The Ex-Im Bank has been reviewing a proposal for a 1,200-megawatt plant in Vietnam.

Environmentalists have long criticized the federal government for providing billions to finance fossil-fuel projects overseas, particularly at a time when the United States has pledged billions in foreign aid to help developing countries deal with climate change.

The U.S. is taking important steps to cut its use of coal, but those efforts could be overshadowed unless coal use is curbed in India, China, and the rest of the world.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

AAAARRRRGGGHHHH North Korea and nuclear bombs and other countries and stuff!!!!

Americans are less concerned about this climate change thing than other people around the world.

The Pew Research Group this week released the results of a worldwide survey of 37,653 residents of 39 countries, revealing that just 40 percent of Americans view global warming as a major threat to their country.

Across all countries surveyed, by comparison, 54 percent view global warming as a major threat. Concern was highest in Latin America and lowest in the U.S., with concern among Middle East residents nearly as low as those in America.

From the survey’s findings:

Concern about global climate change is particularly prevalent in Latin America, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian/Pacific region, but majorities in Lebanon, Tunisia and Canada also say climate change is a major threat to their countries. In contrast, Americans are relatively unconcerned about global climate change. Four-in-ten say this poses a major threat to their nation, making Americans among the least concerned about this issue of the 39 publics surveyed, along with people in China, Czech Republic, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

It’s not that Americans aren’t sitting around worrying about stuff. We’re plenty worried. But what’s keeping us up at night is Islamic extremist groups, nukes in North Korea and Iran, and the growth of China’s power and influence.

Here is a summary of the survey results:

Pew Research Global Attitudes Project

Click to embiggen.

Is it weird that we’re more worried about North Korea than about global climate change? Oh well, at least we’re more likely to fret about climate change than about America’s power and influence.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages

Mother Jones

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On March 14, 2009, 31 weeks into her pregnancy, Nina Buckhalter gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. She named the child Hayley Jade. Two months later, a grand jury in Lamar County, Mississippi, indicted Buckhalter for manslaughter, claiming that the then-29-year-old woman “did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence.”

The district attorney argued that methamphetamine detected in Buckhalter’s system caused Hayley Jade’s death. The state Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case on April 2, is expected to rule soon on whether the prosecution can move forward.

If prosecutors prevail in this case, the state would be setting a “dangerous precedent” that “unintentional pregnancy loss can be treated as a form of homicide,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, a staff attorney with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a nonprofit legal organization that has joined with Robert McDuff, a Mississippi civil rights lawyer, to defend Buckhalter. If Buckhalter’s case goes forward, NAPW fears it could spur a wave of similar prosecutions in Mississippi and other states.

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Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages

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Tesla turns a profit, mulls driverless feature

Tesla turns a profit, mulls driverless feature

John UptonTesla roadsters charging in the parking lot at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Electric-car pioneer Tesla just reported its first ever quarterly profit, jolted into the black by strong sales of its all-electric sedans and by a form of carbon trading under California’s clean-cars program.

And with that achievement under its belt, the Californian company is moving on to conjuring another type of magic. Tesla is in talks with nearby Google to develop a car that can run not only without any gas in the tank, but without anybody in the driver’s seat.

First, the financial news. From CNNMoney:

The electric-car maker announced its first-ever quarterly profit on Wednesday, blowing past analyst estimates.

That’s no small feat in the challenging electric-car business. California-based carmaker Coda filed for bankruptcy last week, and fellow Tesla competitor Fisker appears near bankruptcy as well, having laid off most of its employees last month.

The ten-year-old Tesla said last month that it was expecting to finish in the black for the first quarter, but its results still came in better than expected.

Electrifying. Tesla has taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to business growth, which has drawn criticism from some impatient pundits, by first offering exclusive products to well-heeled consumers. It initially sold high-performance roadsters for more than $100,000 apiece. Then it released the Model S sedan, which has won a number of industry awards and costs $70,000 and up — although federal incentives can bring that price down by $7,500. Within a few years, the company says it aims to start selling vehicles for as little as $30,000. It also develops and produces components for other auto manufacturers, and it is trading in a form of carbon credit. Again from CNNMoney:

Tesla’s earnings were also boosted by its sales of zero-emission-vehicle credits to other automakers, which generated $68 million in revenue for the quarter.

The credit system was set up by the California state government to push automakers to produce environmentally friendly vehicles. Manufacturers of gasoline-powered vehicles can purchase the credits accrued by green-car producers like Tesla.

Now, from the good news to the fun news. Tesla is joining the rush of automakers looking to equip their vehicles with driverless technology. The idea isn’t so much that you clamber out of the driver’s seat, sprawl out in the back, sip on some Bacardi and rum, and take in the scenery as you barrel down the Pacific Coast Highway. Rather, the technology Tesla is looking at is meant as a driving aid, ready to take control away from the driver as needed. From Bloomberg:

Elon Musk, the California billionaire who leads Tesla Motors Inc., said the electric-car maker is considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles and discussing the prospects for such systems with Google Inc.

Musk, 41, said technologies that can take over for drivers are a logical step in the evolution of cars. He has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system.

“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self-driving,” Musk said in an interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Tesla turns a profit, mulls driverless feature

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Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

Mother Jones

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p.mininav-header-text background-color: #000000 !importantMore MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings


How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong “Terrorist”


READ: Here Are the Federal Charges Against Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did


What We Know About the Tsarnaev Brothers’ Guns


What These Tweets Tell Us About Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Stunned Reactions From Former Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Did Boston Bombing Suspect Post Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube?


Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Charged With Using WMD

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Boston Marathon bombing is that it happened at all. While we’ve seen all manner of terrorist bomb plots since September 11—the Times Square bomber, the underwear bomber, even the guys who fantasized about destroying the Sears Tower—all have been thwarted by the FBI, the perpetrators’ own bumbling, or both. If one or both of the suspects in last week’s attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were motivated by radical Islamic beliefs, then they will have the dubious distinction of being the first domestic jihadists to have set off a bomb on American soil since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed. Between September 11, 2001, and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 people in the United States in four separate incidents during this time, according to data collected by journalist Peter Bergen and the New America Foundation. All four of these incidents involved guns, including Nidal Hassan’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, which killed 13 people. In contrast, right-wing extremists killed 29 people during those 11 years.

The jihadists’ record as bomb makers would probably be even worse if not for the FBI, which has reeled in dozens of would-be terrorists with its controversial informant program. Of the 203 jihadist terrorists counted by the New America Foundation, just 23 got their hands on explosives or materials to make a bomb; more than half of those obtained the components (often nonfunctioning) from federal informants or agents as part of a sting. Of the 174 nonjihadists, 51 right-wing terrorists and 5 anarchist terrorists tried making bombs. Only five of the right-wing terrorists got their bomb-making supplies via sting operations.

Using a slightly different methodology than Bergen, Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation also found that “homegrown” jihadist terror plots have had little success. Most post-9/11 plots, he writes, most “never got beyond the discussion stage, and most of those that did were stings in which the FBI provided fake bombs.” A Mother Jones examination of the cases of more than 500 defendants charged in terrorism-related cases after 9/11 found that 31 percent were nabbed in a sting, while 10 percent were lured by an informant who controlled the conspiracy. Perhaps one reason the Tsarnaev brothers’ alleged plot went as far as it did was that they did not seek out collaborators, avoiding tipping off the FBI—which had already checked out Tamerlan but apparently decided not to investigate him.

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Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

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