Researchers in the UK are developing a rechargeable lithium-air battery that could deliver a ten-fold increase in energy capacity compared to that of currently available lithium-ion cells. The research work, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is being led by researchers at the University of St Andrews with partners at Strathclyde and Newcastle.

Lithium-air batteries use a catalytic air cathode in combination with an electrolyte and a lithium anode. Oxygen from the air is the active material for the cathode and is reduced at the cathode surface. An issue with Li-air batteries can be the accumulation of solid reaction products on the electrode, which blocks the contact between electrolyte and air.

The project addresses a number of the materials issues necessary to realize this high energy storage battery based on a non-aqueous O2 electrode. During the project, the team has so far more than tripled the capacity to store charge in the STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell.

The project is focused on understanding more about how the chemical reaction of the battery works and investigating how to improve it. The research team is also working towards making a STAIR cell prototype suited, in the first instance, for small applications, such as mobile phones or MP3 players.

- from greencarcongress

Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as “the Trade,” performing tirelessly for audiences in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. His songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie. He earned a Grammy nomination for an album he recorded with Ani DiFranco and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance.

The legendary folk musician, peace and labor activist died on May 23rd of this year. He passed away in his sleep in Nevada City. He was seventy-three years old.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips in 1935, he later adopted the name “Utah,” from where he grew up. The son of labor organizers, Utah Phillips was a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In 1956, Utah Phillips joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

In Nevada City, California, he started a nationally syndicated folk music radio show called Loafer’s Glory, produced at community radio station KVMR. He also helped found the Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center there.

When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn’t begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.

Utah Phillips talking:

There’s a whole lot going on in that town. My trade is like being paid to go to schools, and every town is its own teacher. Every town, that’s my university. And there are marvels and wonders. There’s Hobos from Hell, are from Santa Cruz. They’re young people riding on the freight trains, and they’re better at it than I ever thought I would be. You’ve got the Homeless Garden Project. You’ve got just an enormous rich community here.

I was involved some years ago in helping to organize a street singers’ guild in this town, and it—you got to beat the streets and learn from the people, and then you’ve got to get on their stage and, having done that and been with those people, let that audience know that you’re not just doing the show you did in the town the night before, you know. You’re no—you’ve got to know who you’re with and where you are. That’s very important to me. And they’ve got to know that I understand that, that I’m really there for them.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935.

I left home. I went up to work in Yellowstone National Park during high school. I was going to make some summer money. I went up on the freight trains, and for the first time I rode the freight trains. And I worked on a road rating crew. And at that time, I was playing the ukulele and singing ersatz Hawaiian music—Johnny Noble, things like that, “Lovely Hula Hands,” “Malihini Melee.”

The other hands working on that crew, a lot of them were old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs. And late at night, you know, there would be a fire. We would live in these clapboard shanties. They sang old songs, Jimmie Rodgers, and they sang old Gene Autry songs, songs I had never heard, but were much closer to the way I was living right there at that time, certainly a lot closer than as Hawaiian music. So they showed me how to turn my ukulele chords into guitar chords and taught me those songs.

And it’s right about then I started making songs in that mold, making songs of what I saw in the world around me, but using those tune models and those verse models that had endured for so long and will continue to endure simply because they work. So, you know, I’ve been making songs and stories for over fifty years now. It’s a way of life. It’s like breathing.

I joined the Army. Like old—as a string fellow said, some people learn things the hard way, but at least then you never forget it. I joined the Army and then got pipelined for Korea. I was there after Panmunjan, you know, after the treaty, right after the treaty there, the truce. Life amid the ruins—I mean, it was absolute life amid the ruins. Children crying—that’s the memory of Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic imperialism. And the impact of an army of young men given unlimited license for excess of every kind, of violence, sexual, booze, what have you, drugs—a blueprint for self-destruction. And I knew that if I endured that, I would perish, I would simply perish.

It was there in Korea in that situation around those kinds of experiences—and I was up—I was up on the Imjin River, and I wanted to swim in it, because I wanted to wash all that away, all that away. And I was told I couldn’t swim in the Imjin. And it was the young K orean there, Yoon Suk An [phon.], who explained to me why I couldn’t. He said, “When we marry, we move into our grandparents’, in with our grandparents, and—but the place is devastated. There’s nothing growing. It’s all dead. So when the first child comes, somebody has to leave, and it’s the old man. The grandfather will leave and go sit on the bank of the Imjin with a jug of water and a blanket until he dies and will roll down into the water.” He said, “You can’t swim in the Imjin, because those are our elders being carried out to sea.”

Well, that’s when I cracked. You know, that’s when I broke up. I said I can’t do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to change. And the change has to begin with me. It was right then that I decided that the idea of manhood that I had been given, that blueprint for self-destruction, that my father had lied to me about manhood, my drill instructors, my Army sergeants, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor in high school. They had all lied to me about what manhood was, and it was up to me to begin to figure out what it really meant.

It takes a long time to shut up and listen. It takes a long time just to plain shut up and listen. I tell you, what I learned was—I decided that the great struggles, the wars that you’re talking about—it could be the Bosnian War, it could be the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it could be the Korean War, it could be the Iraqi War, whatever, it doesn’t matter—it’s all—every—the thing they all have in common is that it’s young men with guns doing it to everybody else. Women aren’t doing it. Kids aren’t doing it. Old people aren’t doing it. Disabled people aren’t doing it. It’s young people with guns, you know, that are doing it to everybody else. And we don’t have a problem with violence in the world. We’ve got a serious male problem. And I bought into it, so I know. And I’m buying myself out of it, you see. It’s terribly, terribly important for me for people to understand that and begin to shut up and listen. The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what’s going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I’m sure of it.

I was in Korea for eighteen months, and I extended for some months. I made it back to Salt Lake, and I was going into the post office, and there was an old man sitting under the bush out there, taking a water break. Well, that man was Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic Worker, one of Dorothy Day’s people. And Ammon Hennacy had come to Salt Lake to open the Joe Hill House of Hospitality, one of the Catholic Worker houses. And Ammon took me in. And I was there with Ammon for about eight years at the Joe Hill House.

Ammon came to me one day and said, “You’ve got to be a pacifist.” And I said, “How’s that?” He said, “Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior.” And I was. You know, I was very angry, very angry person. “And you just act out a lot. And if you brought a lot, you’re not any good at it. You’re the one who keeps getting thrown through the front door, and I’m tired of fixing the damn thing. You’ve got to be a pacifist.”

He had a more fundamentalist way of looking at it. And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, I could give you a book by Gandhi, but you wouldn’t read it. So”—but he said, “You’ve got to look at nonviolence like—your capacity for violence like an alcoholic looks at booze.” Alcohol—booze will kill an alcoholic, unless he has the courage to sit in a circle of people that are like that, put his hand up and say, “Hi. My name is Utah. I’m an alcoholic.” But then you can—once you own the behavior, you can deal with it. You know, you can have it defined for you by the people whose lives you’ve messed with, and it’s not going to go away. Twenty years sober, you’re not going to sit in that circle and say, “Well, I’m not an alcoholic anymore.” You’re going to put up your hand and say, “My name is Utah. I’m an alcoholic.”

He said, “It’s the same with violence. You acknowledge your capacity for violence, you see, and you learn how to deal with it every day, every instant, in every situation for the rest of your life, because it’s not going to go away. But it will save your life.” See, it’s a different way of looking at pacifism. I have to be a pacifist, you see.

So I said, “OK, I’ll do that, Ammon.” And he said, “It’s not enough.” And I said, “Oh.” He said, “You were born a white man in mid-twentieth century industrial America. You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege, economic privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege. You’re going to be a pacifist. You’re not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. Well, you try that.” I’ve been at it—Ammon died over thirty years ago, and I’m still at it. But if there’s one struggle that animates my life, it’s probably that one.

The name come in the Army. I was from Utah, and nobody ever heard of anybody from Utah. Had mail call out in the street, and they holler out “Utah!” and I’m the guy who says, “Here, sir.” So the name, you know, since—it’s like calling somebody Tex if they’re from Texas or calling them Louise if they’re from Louisiana maybe. I don’t know. So that name just stuck.

The “U. Utah”—I’ve always been known as “U. Utah Phillips,” and that comes—I guess I can say that now. That’s been a closely held secret for years. When I was in Utah there first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.

In my union, the Industrial Workers of the World, this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, by the way, my proudest association. It is the only organization I’ve ever been—ever known of that didn’t break faith with its elders.

Well, when I hit the road, when I went out to try to find out who I really was, to reconstruct my life, when I left Utah, I found those elders and I sought them out. I never thought I would be able to say this, Amy, but my—most of my elders, most of my great teachers, were born the century before last. [inaudible] born in the 1890s. And I think of Fred Thompson and the elders that I’ve talked to that went through the First World War as unionists and endured the Espionage Act, endured the enormous persecution, and just kept at it and kept at it. That was an amazing thing, because that was the—one of the effects of the war—and the same thing happened in the Second World War, was to use that super patriotism and to use the enhanced governmental powers to break the back of the labor movement, especially the radical labor movement, the IWW, and pretty damn well, near succeeded. In spite of that, of that terrible oppression and that awful war, we came out of that war with the beginning of the eight-hour day, with mine safety laws, with child labor laws, you know? We were still winning all the time we were losing.

Industrial Workers of the World was started—grew out of the Western Federation of Miners. It started in 1905. The cornerstone of the IWW was the notion that people in the same industry should belong to the same union.

Big Bill Haywood there in Colorado, Big Bill, the true American, he was one of the founders of the IWW. His father rode for the Pony Express. His mother was a forty-niner who got off the wagon train in Salt Lake. Bill was born in Salt Lake. There in Colorado, he’d see how a mine would get struck. So they’d bring in scabs to bring out scab ore, and then it would be transported to the mill on the union train and milled at the union mill. He said all of the people in this industry should belong to one union, because that’s union scabbing.

So industrial unionism was born as an alternative to craft unionism, like the AFL, organized bodies of workers fighting against each other. And it wasn’t just industrial unionism; it was the One Big Union, the OBU, a union of all skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers in one big union, divided up into industrial departments, syndicalists, syndicalism, which would then replace the government; the means of production in the hands of the producers, produced for use instead of profit, create abundance for workers and nothing for parasites; an end to the wage system. Well, like John Greenway called the IWW a banzai charge on capitalism, and that was about right.

Well, of course, the union dwindled, you know, after the First World War, the Palmer Raids, which were so much worse than anything we’re experiencing now, but still survived. And now the union is growing, has been growing for quite a long time now.

Attorney General Palmer, that was the first Red Scare, the first big Red Scare. The Russian Revolution had been accomplished right at the, during the First World War. So the first big Red Scare happened when Attorney General Palmer caused thousands of unionists to be jailed and many, many immigrant workers to be deported without any kind of due process. And it was like an industrial war. And Palmer—they did their best to break up the IWW, but it never succeeded, because we have survived and we have persisted.

Comparing Palmer Raids and the Espionage Act with the time we’re living in now.

I think that we’re being frog-marched into a corporate fascist takeover of the country. And no fooling, I think that we’re in the Weimar Republic. And that’s another thing that I would encourage young people to understand, what—that was Germany before the Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Nazism. Why didn’t people do anything? You know, the big question that young Germans are asking their grandparents: “Why didn’t you do something?” Read about the Weimar, compare the rise of fascism in Germany from the 1920s to what’s happening right here right now.

The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. Listen, you young people I’m talking to, that long memory has been taken away from you. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re not getting it anywhere. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. You know, you can’t remember what happened last week, because you’re locked into this week’s crisis.

No, turn that off. walk away from that. Walk out your front door. Go find your elders. Go find your true elders. Go find your people that lived that life, who knew that life and who know that history. And get your hands down into that deep rich stream of our people’s history. We divided our culture up into a market for youngers, a market for young adults, a market for young marrieds, a market for older people, you know. It’s not that way. And mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions. That huge river, you know, it’s like tributaries that flow down into the polluted river and purify it and purify it.

I’ll watch television once a year just to get kind of an idea of what is happening to people’s minds, or maybe I want to go see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast that I can’t track it. If I don’t—I don’t have TV, and I don’t like them, so I can’t understand how people can watch them. The frequency of the images is just too fast. I can’t take it all in. we’re thinking differently. Television alters consciousness. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t use it. It’s intended to alter consciousness.

Me, the last TV set I had, I shot. I don’t know what commercial importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got a—had an old Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have not, I haven’t owned one of those foolish things since.

I think that abandoning children, to a television set—children are born with this bridge between world time and dreamtime. They wander back-and-forth over it at will, and you never know which side of the bridge they’re going to be standing at either. You’ve just got to be willing to stand with them at the dreamtime end of the bridge, instead of jerking them over the bridge into world time on the presumption that facts will save your butt. Have they? Well, they won’t.

Kids understand storytelling. They understand stories, and they understand that particular kind of magic. And they also understand innately that all the wonders of the mind need not be explicit. We’re robbing children of their imagination. We just said earlier that the glory of radio is that it unlocks the imagination, as my wife said, and television—because you create your own images—and television gives you the images. Also, television is there to say to these kids, see, kids—you can take a coffee can and turn it into a rocket ship, you see? You create the story. If you have the story and you want to act out, and then you create the object to act it out. Television turns that around backwards and says you can’t have this story unless you buy the object—the exact opposite of what we’re born to do. We have to fight like hell to turn ourselves back to our own best natural selves. And that’s part of what I’m doing.

Myles Horton was the world’s—the best educator the country ever had. And I knew Myles. He was a fine, remarkable man, good preacher, too. The Highlander principle was that any group of people in the community experiencing a problem, if they sit in a circle and spend a couple of days telling each other their life story, will eventually arrive at a solution to the problem. So the Highlander School was created for people to come together and do that.

So there’s food that’s prepared for them, a place to stay. And if you run into a knotty problem and you need a lawyer or you need an expert—and, you know, ex is a has-been, a spurt is a drip under pressure—you need an expert come in there, they’ll come in and tell you what you want to hear, and then they have to leave. You know how a lawyer can take over a meeting. And then you go back and just use the information, because it’s right in the hands of those people to do that.

And that’s where Rosa Parks was. Martin Luther King was there. Remember that billboard during the ’60s that the John Birch Society put up, said Martin Luther King at a communist training school? That was Highlander that he was at.

it was Myles’s idea, an extraordinary idea that works. Myles was a great organizer by himself. Myles Horton told me once, he said he was doing an organizing job in a little, small town, a coal mine job, and the thugs were in town, and they were going to try to break the union, you know, pretty violent. The preacher feared for Myles’s life and gave him a horse pistol to protect himself, but it was broken, and it didn’t have any ammunition. And Myles said he didn’t know how use it anyway.

Myles was looking out the front window down on the street from the rooming house, and a big black car pulled up and these three goons got out. And Myles opened the window and, dangling that pistol out the window, said, “Hey, you down there. Let me tell you something.” They looked up and said, “Horton, you can’t tell us anything.” He said, “Oh, yes, I can. You’ve got to get organized.” They said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re not organized.” “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, now, look. You’re going to come upstairs and try to kill me. You’re going to kick in my door. I’m going to shoot the first one inside the door, and I may get the second one. Third one will get me. But you’ve got to decide which one’s going to come in first. You’ve got to get organized.” Well, they talked to each other for a while and got in the car and drove away. Myles could do that.

One time he—Myles, he did a—he was invited to give a talk on leadership. And he showed up in town, and he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to go. He lost the piece of paper. So he walked up to the main part of town, and he saw a bunch of people going into a hall, so he followed them. And he went in there and saw his name on the reader board, and everybody sat down and he sat down. When they were all sat down, he got up and walked to the front onto the stage and said, “Leadership is finding a bunch of people that look like they know where they’re going and following them, and when they’re all sitting down, stand up and talk to them about leadership.”

Highlander, New Market, Tennessee. There’s a wonderful book about Highlander called Seeds of Change—Seeds of Fire, Seeds of Change. And I highly recommend it. And then, The Long Haul is Myles Horton’s autobiography, and that’s—I think that’s still in print, so… You want to find yourself a hero, folks, you know, read Myles Horton. Now that he’s passed—Ammon Hennacy said to me, “If you got to have heroes, make sure they’re dead, so they can’t blow it.” That’s just good advice.

“One of my favorite people to talk about is Idaho Blackie, Idaho Blackie up there in—I used to cut wood in his woodlot, one of those old Wobblies that I sought out and I like to talk about. He got told to work in the forest. He used to work in the forest for his living. Well, unfortunately, his little holding that he was going to build his cabin on was over there in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Now, Hayden Lake, you may recall, was the home of the Church of Aryan Nations, those neo-Nazis that moved into north Idaho, Reverend Butler and his crowd. Well, his place butted right up against the compound of the Church of Aryan Nations, and that was not a marriage made in heaven.

I went over there to see if he was still alive, and he was out there duck hunting from the front porch, too old to go into the forest. He used to go into the forest when he was young with a case of whisky and a shotgun and get so high he’d go duck hunting with a rake. Well, he was out there blazing away, and he had got the duck, but it fell into the compound of the Church of Aryan Nations. Well, he got up real—got up painfully. He was in advanced stages of crusty old farthood. And he walked around the edge of the fence, and there was the church. These neo-Nazis pretend to be Christians, but then most Christians do. And there was a school, grades one through eight, and the little fascist kids were out there playing with their Klaus Barbie dolls. I don’t make this stuff up.

And he went to lay hold of the duck, and out of the back of the church came Reverend Butler himself, no spring chicken himself. He was in his jackboots and his suntans and his sand-brown belt and armband, little 30 mission crush cap with a patent leather bill on it. And he laid hold of that duck and allowed, how as, whatever the Lord chose to deliver up on that patch of ground belonged to the Church of Aryan Nations. They altercated some—fun to watch—and it got to be rancorous, though.

And finally, Reverend Butler drew himself up in all of his Prussian majesty and announced they were going to settle this in the manner of true Aryan gentlemen. I’ll be delicate, because this is radio. He said, “We are going to take turns kicking each other in our magic parts”—each other’s magic parts, you catch my drift—“and the one left standing is going to keep this duck. And you, sir, as it was your shot that felled the bird, will have first crack at it.”

Well, Blackie tottered back three or four feet, reached down into some private recess of his soul for energy hoarded for just this occasion, flew forward, delivered a right smart kick to Reverend Butler’s magic parts, cast him to the ground in a fit of doom and vituperation, flopping around like a fish, blanched out, turning completely white—what he’d been trying to do all his life, anyway. Finally, he dug his heels into the ground, pushed himself up against a tree, levered himself to a standing position, rocking back, heel to toe, preparing to have at Idaho Blackie. Blackie turned to him and said, “It’s OK. You can keep the duck.””

Let’s see, you started out with what media has done to people. You know that better than I do. That’s why you do what you do. See, you’re doing an alternative media. And if we play our cards right and have enough time, then pretty soon it won’t be alternative media anymore. But then, we have a thorough understanding—don’t we, Amy—that they fight with money and we fight with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time. So we’ll just be patient, and you do your work, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll catch up and overtake them.

It’s a damn shame, though, that we have to be alternative. But then, we’re in a capitalist environment, we’re in a capitalist system that’s built on—that’s built on the least commendable features of the human psyche, greed and envy, rather than the best. We in community radio, in pirate radio, in alternative music distribution, we reach for the best in people, you know, we don’t—not lowest common denominators. And we are building a new world within the shell of the old.

I don’t feel pessimistic about that at all. There’s simply too many good people right here in this room, too many good people on the street, close to the street, doing too many good things for me to afford the luxury of being pessimistic. I’m going to—I’ll tell people that tonight, damn it. I’m glad it came up. If I look at the world from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN or—there ought to be a CNN Anon to wean people from that idiocy. If I look at it from the top down, I get seriously depressed. The world’s going to hell in a wheelbarrow. But if I walk out the door, turn all that off, and go with the people, whatever town I’m in, who are doing the real work down at the street level, like I say, there’s too many good people doing too many good things for me to let myself be pessimistic about that. I’m hopeful, can’t live without hope. Can you?

The music industry, the music monster, well, I bailed on them. I was in New York, after I left Utah on a kind of blacklist, and I was a fish out of water. I had to be told I was singing folk music. And I wound up in New York City, and there was a fellow there that was going to manage me and Rosalee Sorrels. We were assured he was the most honest manager in New York City. It took me a year to figure out that “scrupulously honest” in New York City was a jailable offense elsewhere. And I bailed out on that, you know, and I realized that I would no longer own what I do. I was a good Wobbly. You need to own the means of your production. I would have to abdicate most of the creative decisions to non-artists, and I said I’m not going to do that.

I decided that I would learn the trade. The trade is a fine, elegant, beautiful, very fruitful trade. In that trade, I can make a living and not a killing, and that was very important to me, to make a living and not a killing, to live reasonably well. I found a world of folk music. I found folk music societies all over the country, little singer circles, a little program here, Spirit of the Woods, Manistee, Michigan, what have you. And these were people who part of their pattern of social responsibility was being committed to making sure folk music happened in their community, like you might work for United Fund or muscular dystrophy. And so, I would come into town to do a concert as a partner in that effort. So the past thirty-five years I’ve been in this trade, I had no bosses. That’s another part of it: no boss. I make all the creative decisions.

And then, this wonderful glorious movement, the most healthiest one that’s happening in this country, is organized folk music, people turning off those machines and getting together to sharing music and food as a holy activity, singer circles, folksong societies, campouts, things like that, take care of each other’s kids, potlucks. It’s—you find that town, town, city for city, all happening below the level of media notice. And that’s where I happen, that’s where I want to happen, below the level of media notice, off of their radar, and create this world that’s apart, but which, as I say, if we’re patient and continue to build and to do our work in place, we will no longer be the margin. We will no longer be the alternative.

John R. Cash once sent me a—well, no, he called me on the phone. There was a fellow named Paul Milosevich, used to paint a beautiful painting for outlaw country singers down in Austin, Texas. I discovered the difference between outlaw country music and Nashville country music was that in outlaw they had dirty hats and in Nashville they had clean white cowboy hats. And if you wanted to be an outlaw, you had to take it off and throw it under a truck at a truck stop and let it run over four or five times, then you could be an outlaw. I knew that.

Paul Milosevich had taken him a bunch of songs I had made up, and John R. Cash, Johnny Cash, said, “I’d like to record these songs.” And Paul said, “Well, you’d better talk to Utah first.” He could have demanded a license. You know, that’s the way the law is written, copyright laws. If they had already been recorded once, you could demand a license. But no, he’s a gentleman. He called me up and said, “I want to record these songs.” And I said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do that.”

And we talked a good deal about that, you know. I think what I told him, I said, “I don’t want to contribute anything to that industry. I can’t fault you for what you’re doing. I admire what you do. But I can’t feed that dragon. I’m not going to feed that dragon.” And, of course, he and other people said, “Well, think of the money that you’d make. You could put it together in any cause you wanted.” And I said, “Mr. Cash, think about dollars as bullets. And the ragged band of revolutionaries meet on the field with the general of the army, and the general says, ‘We’re going to divide up the bullets. I’ll take seven, and you’ll take three. And then we’ll fight.’ Who’s going to win?” See, so—and a lot of people got on me. Melvina Reynolds was furious with me for not doing that, you know, for not making the deal. And I was on the edge of doing it, you know, any number of times.

And finally I said I’ve got to resolve this. I got a call from Santa Rosa. They were going to open a peace center, and they asked me if I’d come and sing. And I said, “Well, I think I can get there.” And they said, “By the way, Father Daniel Berrigan will be there.” I said, “OK,” and I went over there so I could do the show, but also so I could ask him, Father Berrigan, say, “What do I do in this situation? Would you have any advice?” And so, I told him the story backstage, and Father Berrigan said—all he said was “Oh, yeah. They’ll always tell you how much good you can do with dirty money.” And he walked away. So, OK, you know, I called and said, “No, no. Don’t do that.”

What I wound up doing was turning around, since there is mandatory licensing, is telling people who want to record those songs I make up, even if you’re a little label or you’re self-produced, you know, folk legacy, something like that, go ahead and do it, I just won’t sue you. And if somebody does demand a license, you know, and gets it, like the industrial-strength performers, I set up a non-sprinkling trust called the busker’s fund. And the money, I don’t even see it, just bypasses me and goes into there for people for medical relief for over-the-road folkies who can’t get health insurance.

I don’t want to make money writing songs. There are people who make money writing songs; I can’t fault that. I’m an anarchist. I don’t make rules for other people. I make rules for myself. And it’s also a kind of penance for what I saw and felt when I was in Korea. And that’s where we started, isn’t it?

I ran for the US Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom ticket, took a leave of absence from state service—I was a state archivist—and ran a full campaign, twenty-seven counties. We took 6,000 votes in Utah. But when it was over, my job would vanish, and I couldn’t get work anymore in Utah.

So I hung on for about a year living on a cot in the back of a warehouse, keeping a little draft resistance center going. And, of course, by that time, we were dealing with deserters that didn’t want to go back to ’Nam, rather than, you know, the resisters. And I did some work with the Utah Migrant Council, started the Joe Hill House again, because Ammon had moved to Phoenix because he was too old to run it.

Finally, I had just run out of moves. I couldn’t find work, and that’s when people, friends like Rosalee Sorrels, suggested I leave Utah and try to make a living telling stories and singing songs, which seemed criminal or somehow unthinkable in Utah. But that’s when I went out and found—discovered this whole world.

I was an archivist, yeah. I handled 75,000 cubic feet of public records. For an information junkie, that’s heaven. Yeah, I loved studying archival science, and I still have a library in my home that I curate, my own little research library of popular antiquities. And that’s where my mind lives when I’m at home.

Archival science is in a serious—a serious crisis, and that’s because of electronic media, electronic storage and retrieval. A lot of hotshot, fancy, high-tech salesmen have gone to a lot of archives and archivists and sold them some bogus hardware and software. How many books has the Library of Congress lost? Millions of books, because the images have vanished, whatever the storage system is, electronic storage system is. It’s degraded to the point where the stuff is no longer usable.

In the Utah state archives, the best and most durable records are on paper, from the 1800s, the old Mormon Governor Brigham Young’s papers. Why? Because there was potassium in the water they used to make the paper in their own mill, and that’s a natural paper preservative. And that’s true, I think, of any archive in the country. You talk to the archivists; they’ll say the most durable resource they have is still on paper.

Well, what’s the shelf life of a CD? Is it about ten years, ten, twelve years? Congress won’t accept tape for archival purposes, because after about ten, fifteen years, it bleeds through, you see? That it—paper. You know, LPs, I have, what, over 150 John McCormack 78s from the early 1900s—my favorite singer, John McCormack—and I can play those and listen to those. Same with my LPs. The whole information is becoming more and more temporary. And you’re absolutely right. You know, it is terribly threatening to every archive to be bullied by technocrats into going that route.

Ammon never went to the polls, but you couldn’t tell him you hadn’t voted. He did vote. Ammon’s body was his ballot. And he cast it in behalf of the poor around him every day of his life. And he paid a terrible price for that. You couldn’t tell him he hadn’t voted. He said, “Yes, I did vote. I just didn’t assign responsibility to other people to do things. I accept responsibility and saw to it that something got done.” It’s a different way of looking at voting, isn’t it? And you can do that all the time. You could have your life. And that’s the way I live my life. My body is my ballot. It’s a lesson I learned from Ammon. That’s my way. That’s the vow I took, and I’m not going to break it. Right?

Given that, I can’t, of course, ask people to do something that I wouldn’t do, you know, but it does appear to me that these fascists that have taken over have got to get—we’ve got to get rid of them. They’re not Republicans, and they’re not Democrats up there. You know, they’re something else. They’re corporate fascists. And they got to be out of there. And the only organized force on the planet—in the country that I know of that can do that is the Democratic Party. God help us all. You know, it’s like buying a seat on the Titanic, the Democratic Party, but they’re the only force, organized force, that has the ability to do it. So it’s imperative that the entire progressive movement come together, like they did in the Great Depression at the time of the CIO.

Every progressive force in the country came together, gave them the window of opportunity, Roosevelt’s second term, and put their differences on the shelves, stopped hammering on each other. In the Great Depression. And we came out of that with Social Security and workmen’s compensation and a minimum wage, you understand? The whole progressive movement, from animal rights to the feminist movement to anti-nuclear—I don’t care what permutation—have got to saying, “This is my issue, this is my issue,” and join forces and once again create the united front, total united front, and take over the Democratic Party, and that’s the only way we’re going to be able to do this, to pull this off. We can’t do that—then, when we’ve done it, go back and hammer on each other, OK, but for right now, all the difference has got to be pushed aside. I am absolutely appalled at these Democratic candidates hammering on each other, you know, not recognizing the direness of our situation.

It is long since, since those people should have sat down in a room together and decided which one could be elected and put everything they had into that person. Time has long since passed. They’ve got to do it. And otherwise, we’re in for very much serious, more serious times than we’ve got now. It’s not that time has run out. It’s going to make it a lot harder on everybody else to try to make it better.

- from democracynow

Nearly 370 farms in Britain are still restricted in the way they use land and rear sheep because of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident 23 years ago, the government has admitted.

Environmentalists have seized on the figures as proof of the enormous dangers posed by nuclear power as the UK moves towards building a new generation of plants around the country.

Dawn Primarolo, minister for health, revealed 369 farms and 190,000 sheep were affected, but pointed out this was a tiny number compared with the immediate impact of radioactive fallout from Ukraine.

“This represents a reduction of over 95% since 1986, when approximately 9,700 farms and 4,225,000 sheep were under restriction across the United Kingdom. All restrictions in Northern Ireland were lifted in 2000,” she added.

David Lowry, a member of Nuclear Waste Advisory Associates, said the figures demonstrated the “unforgiving hazards” of radioactivity dispersed into the environment, whether from Chernobyl in Ukraine, thousands of miles away and 23 years ago, or over decades from the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland.

“Any breach of containment accident at Sellafield’s high activity liquid radioactive waste storage tanks would release many times the radioactivity released in the Chernobyl accident. And these tanks had an under-reported loss of coolant a month ago, so we have been warned,” he added.

The Ukraine explosion and fire was the biggest nuclear accident ever. In its aftermath 237 people suffered from acute radiation sickness, of whom 31 died within the first three months. Accurate statistics on the wider health problems have been hard to ascertain because the Soviet authorities of the time refused to provide details.

More than 130,000 people were resettled from the immediate area and experts say there should be no farming there for at least 200 years. The Food Standards Agency said the release of radiocaesium-137 in upland areas of Britain is still able to pass easily from soil to grass and accumulate in sheep.

The European Commission imposed a maximum limit of 1,000 becquerels per kilogram (bq/k) of radiocaesium in sheep meat affected by the accident to protect consumers. Under a “mark and release” scheme in the restricted areas, a farmer wishing to move animals out of the area must have them monitored by a hand-held device.

Revelations about the continuing impact of the Chernobyl accident come weeks after three different sites were bought in auction by EDF and other power companies for building new atomic plants in Britain. The sites at Bradwell in Essex, Wylfa in Anglesey and Hinkley Point in Somerset were auctioned for £400m by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

A similar process is expected to start shortly for land near the huge Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria, as the government moves to put in place new electricity generating plants to provide relatively low-carbon power and bolster domestic energy sources at a time when old atomic stations are nearing the end of their lives.

- from guardian

1. It’s easier to finance a new bicycle than a new car. Thanks to the recession, auto loans are hard to find these days — even if you have good credit. But for the price of a single car payment, you can buy a well-made bicycle that should outlast most cars. Add a few hundred dollars more for rain gear, lights, and accessories, and you have all-weather, anytime transportation.
2. A bicycle has a tiny manufacturing footprint when compared to a car. All manufactured goods have environmental impact, but bicycles can be produced for a fraction of the materials, energy, and shipping costs of a car.
3. Bicycles produce no meaningful pollution when in operation. Bikes don’t have tailpipes belching poisonous fumes into the atmosphere. They also eliminate the oil, fuel, and hydraulic fluids dripped by automobiles onto the road surface — which means less toxic runoff into local waterways.
4. Bikes save taxpayers money by reducing road wear. A twenty pound bicycle is a lot less rough on the pavement than a two-ton sedan. Every bicycle on the road amounts to money saved patching potholes and resurfacing city streets.
5. Bicycles are an effective alternative to a second car. Perhaps you’re not in a position to adopt a bicycle as primary transportation. But bikes make great second vehicles. You can literally save thousands of dollars per year using a bicycle for workday commuting and weekend errands in households which might otherwise be forced to maintain two cars.
6. Using a bike for transportation can help you lose weight and improve your overall health. The health benefits of regular aerobic exercise are well known. Depending on your riding style and local road conditions, you could easily burn 600 calories an hour through brisk cycling. Most bike commuters report losing 15 to 20 pounds during their first year in the saddle without changing their eating habits.
7. You can store a dozen bicycles in a single automobile-sized parking place. Parking lots have enormous environmental and financial impact, particularly in urbanized areas. The more bikes you can get on the road, the fewer parking spaces you need to build.
8. Bicycles don’t burn gasoline. Fuel is cheap compared to last year, and the economic downturn is likely to keep a lid on petroleum demand for a while. But we’re not producing any more oil today than we were when it was more than $100 a barrel. A healthy bike culture will help ease pressure on supply once demand returns.
9. Bicycling may be faster and more efficient than taking a car. We’re not talking about the crazy — and illegal — antics of New York bicycle messengers. But bikes are often faster than cars in urban areas, especially when city designers have set aside proper bike lanes. There’s nothing more satisfying as a bicycle commuter than breezing past a long line of gridlocked traffic.
10. Bikes cost much less to maintain and operate than automobiles. You’ll never throw a rod on a bicycle, and dropping a transmission on a bike usually means replacing a bent derailleur hanger or worn-out chain. Bicycles do require service, but you can learn to perform most of it yourself. Even if you have a shop do things for you, costs will be trivial compared to a car.
11. Bicycles provide mobility for those who may not qualify or afford to drive. Not everyone can get a driver’s license (or wants one), and the cost of purchasing, insuring, and maintaining a car is out of reach for a lot of people. Almost everyone can afford some sort of bike. Other than walking, bicycles are the most cost effective transportation on the planet.
12. Studies show that bicycle commuters are healthier, more productive, and require less time-off at work. This is why most enlightened employers are eager to accommodate commuting cyclists. Healthy workers are better workers — and that’s good for the bottom line. Bikes are smart business.

May is Bike to Work Month. May 14 – 18 is Bike to Work Week. And May 18 is Bike to Work Day.

- from lighterfootstep

UQM Technologies, Inc. announced that Proterra’s EcoRide BE35 battery-electric transit bus will be equipped with a UQM PowerPhase 150 propulsion system.
The 35-foot BE35 battery-electric transit bus is being showcased on a four city California clean bus tour which began in San Jose on February 6th. After San Jose, the bus will make stops in selected California cities including Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

Proterra’s 35-foot EcoRide transit bus seats 37 passengers and features a lightweight composite body. The UQM® PowerPhase®150 electric propulsion system produces peak torque of 650 N-m and peak power of 150 kW (201 horsepower).

The system has a continuous torque rating of 400 N-m and a continuous power rating of 100kW (134 horsepower). The system also features optimized four-quadrant performance, dynamic torque, speed and voltage control, regenerative braking and system energy efficiency of over 90 percent across substantially its entire performance regime.

- TerraVolt Energy Storage System – the industry’s only system that can be fully charged in less than 10 minutes; and the longest lasting energy storage system available for heavy duty applications;
- Flexible ProDrive and vehicle control system that can operate in battery-electric mode or with any small auxiliary power unit (APU) to extend vehicle range when needed;
- All-electric components optimized through vehicle management systems to reduce energy usage throughout the vehicle’s operating cycle;
- Regenerative braking system utilizing the UQM® PowerPhase®150 that enables the EcoRide BE35 to recapture over 90% of the vehicle’s kinetic energy available during braking;
- Sophisticated battery management system operates at the ‘cell’ level to optimize energy efficiency and system life.

- from puregreencars

FII took 500 million dollar from indian market. We dont know whether that money is took by US Fii or Mauritias Fii. We dont know whether its pention fund or hedge fund. FIIs are not homogenious. they are coming from 75 different countries. But we dont have any idea of them. And we are analysing the market without these knowledge.

Participatory Notes become 60% of the total FII money. The money in PN can be drug money, terrorist moeny. Oct 2007 SEBI tried to put some restrictions on PN to find source of the money. Reserve bank of india asked for a complete ban on PN. But finance ministry overruled that. PN is not transparent.

FII and FDI are different. FII is the floating money in the stock market. It did not create job or industry. FDI is direct investment from foreign investon in indian industry. It generates jobs.

FII can come with black money and pour it into our stock market. But an Indian citizen should have all the the documents about source of the income and tax paid etc to enter into market. This is a double rule on the stock market.

In PN the “non disclosed investers” number come down in last two years. One reason is that people who take domestic money by havala and put that money as PN in the market do not have faith in the market. So thay are not putting money into market. When the market goes up then the PN number will rise again.

SENSEX took 2 years to rise from 10000 to 21000 in early Jan 2007. Nine months after it collapsed to 10000. Again it started rising again in 2009. SENSEX is mirroring the way FIIs are pumping money.

in 2007 FII pumped 17.5 billion US dollars. in 2008 it withdraw 14.5 billion US dollars. in 2009 again FII pumping the money into the market.

Now fundamentals are not affecting the market. There is no justifiable reson why market went to 10000 to 21000 or why it crashed from 21000 to 8000. The fundamentals of the economy did not changed.

Stock exchange holds only 4% to 12% total saving of indians for the last few years. total number of investers are 3% of the india’s pupulation.

- Loksabha TV

Violence flared last week after Israeli riot police forcibly evicted some 250 settlers from a disputed Palestinian-owned home that the settlers had occupied last year. Tensions have been high ever since an Israeli High Court ruling last month that ordered the settlers to vacate the building.

Following Thursday’s eviction, settlers from the nearby Kiryat Arba settlement went on what the Israeli press has described as a “rampage” against Palestinians. They shot at Palestinians, set fire to homes, cars and olive groves, and defaced mosques and graves. Hebron resident Hosni Abu Seifan was among the Palestinian victims of settler gunfire.

HOSNI ABU SEIFAN: [translated] The settlers attacked us at the house and fired live bullets on us. With a handgun, they shot my father. Then, later, they set the house on fire. There was only a few meters between us, maybe one or one-and-a-half meters, and he probably had his hand on the gun, too, when he shot my father.

The shots fired by the settlers at Hosni Abu Seifan and his father were captured on video. The footage shows a settler firing a handgun at the two Palestinian men at close range. The video was shot by a family member of the injured men. He was using a camera distributed by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that has given more than a hundred video cameras to Palestinian families across the West Bank so they can record violence by settlers and the Israeli army.

The settlers caught on camera have reportedly turned themselves in to the Hebron police. But the footage caused a minor stir inside Israel, and outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert condemned the settlers’ actions, saying they constituted a “pogrom.”

Shooting Back is a project that B’Tselem has been running for the past two years. It’s basically a video distribution—camera distribution project. B’Tselem give out small video cameras to Palestinian civilians living in what they call hotspots, that is, next to settlements, next to checkpoints, next to military installations, next to the so-called separation barrier, basically areas where they know there are frequent human rights violations, but which usually go undocumented.

And the basic idea is to be able to inform the Israeli public, first of all, but also the international public, of what is happening in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. The success of this project can be measured at a time like this when a video clip filmed by one of the family members of the three Palestinians who were shot, Jamal Abu Seifan, he filmed the clip himself and was able to reach local media in Israel and international media.

The problem that the settlers are living in the heart of the city, that means they are living between, arround, 200,000 Palestinians who are living very close to the settlers. And the settlers, they don’t like the Arabs, who are very close to them. And the settler—the Palestinians, they see those settlers are occupying Hebron. So around, now, 500 settlers are living in all the city of Hebron. They are occupying some houses there.

The army are closing many roads because the settlers are there.

Many Palestinian houses, they use a ladder to go to their homes, because the main door is welded by the army. Many other Palestinian houses and families, they need to pass four or five checkpoints in 100 meters to go into their homes. So the daily life there, it’s very, very hard.

The people are suffering daily from the settlers’ presence in the city. They are not against a Jewish presence, but they are against the radical and the fanatic settlers who are living and declaring Hebron as an Israeli city.

There are two laws in Hebron. The Israeli government, they implement the military law on the Palestinians, and they civic law on the settlers, which means double standard.

And the settlers in Hebron, they are mainly armed with guns or with weapons. And it’s very, very important, you know, from the international world and from the Israeli people to say something about the settlers’ weapons. It’s very, very important to take off the weapons from them, especially because they are very, very violent people, and they believe in violence.

Issa Amro and Mich’ael Zupraner talking with Anjali Kamat and Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Issa Amro, B’Tselem field worker.
Mich’ael Zupraner, works with B’Tselem’s Shooting Back project and runs an experimental internet/TV channel called HEB2.

- from democracynow. 10 Dec 2008.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached an agreement last week with Subway, the third largest fast-food chain in the world and the biggest fast-food buyer of Florida tomatoes. Subway now joins other fast-food giants—McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King—that have all agreed to pay farm workers at least another penny per pound of tomatoes they harvest and improve working conditions.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders hailed the agreement with Subway, describing it as “yet another blow to the scourge of slavery that continues to exist in the tomato fields of Florida.”

Coalition members are in New York this week for their Northeast Fair Food tour and will be honored tonight by the Small Planet Fund on the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

This agreement has an incredible importance for Coalition of Immokalee Workers movement, because it started as an idea to bring the biggest fast-food corporations to the table in order to improve the conditions that workers face in the fields every day, conditions that go from stagnant wages to slavery, in the most extreme conditions. And right now, with this agreement with Subway, workers could say that the most important representatives of the fast-food industry have already given their position on the situation, and they are in favor of a change. So now the question is for the supermarket industry and the providers of food to schools, like Aramark and Sodexo, that continue to benefit from the misery of communities like Immokalee Workers.

Basically, today, a farm worker has to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes in order to make only the equivalent to the minimum wage of Florida. But that’s picking by piece. The tomato bucket of thirty-two pounds gets paid from forty to forty-five cents. That’s without any type of benefits nor protections. We work from ten to fourteen hours in a normal day, seven days a week, if there’s work, without receiving overtime pay.

Farm workers in most of the states of this country are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act that gives workers a right to organize. That’s why the agricultural industry have not paid attention to the demands that we had in the past. And asked questions, like, who’s benefiting the most from their poverty? How could they change the way that the agricultural industry, the corporate agricultural industrial, exists today in the United States? And it was by focusing on the big buyers, that are the ones who get more profit than anybody else.

the Tomato Growers Exchange is an entity that represents about 90 percent of the growers in Florida and goes to Tallahassee or D.C. to lobby on their behalf.

And what has happened ever since, more or less, we reached the agreement with McDonald’s is that the Growers Exchange has come out strongly opposing these agreements, first saying that they were un-American or saying that they’re possibly illegal, just saying that they didn’t want their members to participate in them. And so, they actually implemented a $100,000 fine against any of their own member growers who would be willing to fully participate in these agreements and allow the extra penny per pound to get through to the workers.

There are growers who are willing to do that, because for a couple of years after workers reached agreement with Taco Bell in 2005, the penny per pound passed through was working completely fine. It wasn’t until the growers put up this resistance that that was halted.

Today, one of the major corporations that workers have agreements with remain fully committed to carrying out those agreements. They’re still paying the extra penny per pound, but it’s going into a sort of neutral escrow account instead of getting to the workers. The money from that account will be disbursed to the workers very soon, possibly starting with this season.

Marc Rodrigues and Gerardo Reyes talking with Anjali Kamat and Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Marc Rodrigues, Co-coordinator of Student/Farmworker Alliance. That’s the national network of students in partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
Gerardo Reyes, Farmworker and member of Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

- from democracynow. 10 Dec 2008.

A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.

The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems — also known as the doldrums — lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.

Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.
In June the 151ft brigantine Kaisei (Japanese for Planet Ocean) will unfurl its sails in San Francisco. Project Kaisei’s flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler armed with specialised nets.

The UN’s environmental programme estimates that 18,000 pieces of plastic have ended up in every square kilometre of the sea, totalling more than 100 million tonnes. The North Pacific gyre — officially called the northern subtropical convergence zone — is thought to contain the biggest concentration. Ideal conditions for shifting slicks of plastic also exist in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North and South Atlantic, but no research vessel has investigated those areas. If this exploratory mission is successful, a bigger fleet will depart in 2010.

- from timesonline. 2 May 2009.

Car adverts should carry prominent climate change “health warnings” akin to those on cigarette packets, according to a Labour MP who is critical of the government’s progress on climate change legislation.

Colin Challen MP, who is chair of the all-party climate change group, said that government warnings on car ads might force car companies to be more “honest”. He said many cars are promoted as being “greener” when they are actually environmentally damaging.

He said the car industry was spending £800m a year on UK advertising prior to the recession, while the government’s public education campaign ActOnCO2 cost just £12m over three years.

He added that it is “wholly counter-intuitive to expect people to change their behaviour when most of the daily messages they receive tell them it’s business as usual”.

Car promotions should carry climate change message, said Challen, who is a member of the Commons Energy and Climate Change select committee. “You maybe have 25 or 35% of the space of any promotional material given over to a health warning. These warnings would be graded depending on the emissions from the vehicle, with the worst gas-guzzlers carrying the most severe warnings. “It would have to counter the impression given by some manufacturers that their vehicles are greener,” Challen added.

The warnings would be based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment report, regarded as the foremost authority on the state of climate change science. The warnings would highlight the consequences of dangerous climate change such as sea level rise, increasing deaths, species extinctions, food and water security, and heightened regional conflicts.

Challen said he favoured a personal carbon trading scheme to get on top of emissions in which every citizen has an annual carbon allowance. Those who went beyond their carbon budget would need to buy carbon credits from people who had not. “It would be no more difficult to operate than a Nectar card,” he said, “Good behaviour would be rewarded. Bad behaviour would have to be paid for.”

- from guardian. 5 May 2009.

Actually we have to charge tax on car adverts too. Say some 25%. And use that money to improve public transport systems.