I love the fall colors here...not as sharp as up north, but fall nonetheless. We are in an 8" deficit for rain tho. Clicked.
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sumac
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Sun 20 Sep, 2009 09:32 am
I have tried keeping my microwave and toaster unplugged in between uses, but it is such a pain that they are plugged in permanently. But the computer is off in between uses.
September 20, 2009
By Degrees
Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity
By JAD MOUAWAD and KATE GALBRAITH
With two laptop-loving children and a Jack Russell terrier hemmed in by an electric fence, Peter Troast figured his household used a lot of power. Just how much did not really hit him until the night the family turned off the overhead lights at their home in Maine and began hunting gadgets that glowed in the dark.
“It was amazing to see all these lights blinking,” Mr. Troast said.
As goes the Troast household, so goes the planet.
Electricity use from power-hungry gadgets is rising fast all over the world. The fancy new flat-panel televisions everyone has been buying in recent years have turned out to be bigger power hogs than some refrigerators.
The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.
Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.
Most energy experts see only one solution: mandatory efficiency rules specifying how much power devices may use.
Appliances like refrigerators are covered by such rules in the United States. But efforts to cover consumer electronics like televisions and game consoles have been repeatedly derailed by manufacturers worried about the higher cost of meeting the standards. That has become a problem as the spread of such gadgets counters efficiency gains made in recent years in appliances.
In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990.
“Standards are one of the few ways to cheaply go after big chunks of energy savings,” said Chris Calwell, a founder and senior researcher at Ecos, a consulting firm that specializes in energy efficiency.
Part of the problem is that many modern gadgets cannot entirely be turned off; even when not in use, they draw electricity while they await a signal from a remote control or wait to record a television program.
“We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time,” said Alan Meier, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading expert on energy efficiency.
People can, of course, reduce this waste " but to do so takes a single-minded person.
Mr. Troast, of South Freeport, Me., is just the kind of motivated homeowner willing to tackle such a project. His day job is selling energy efficiency equipment through an online business. He was not put off by the idea of hunting behind cabinets to locate every power supply and gadget, like those cable boxes, Web routers or computers that glowed in the dark.
The Troasts cut their monthly energy use by around 16 percent, partly by plugging their computers and entertainment devices into smart power strips. The strips turn off when the electronics are not in use, cutting power consumption to zero.
While Mr. Troast’s experience demonstrates that consumers can limit the power wasted by inactive devices, another problem is not as easily solved: many products now require large amounts of power to run.
The biggest offender is the flat-screen television. As liquid crystal displays and plasma technologies replace the old cathode ray tubes, and as screen sizes increase, the new televisions need more power than older models do. And with all those gorgeous new televisions in their living rooms, Americans are spending more time than ever watching TV, averaging five hours a day.
The result is a surge in electricity use by TVs, which can draw more power in a year than some refrigerators now on the market.
Energy experts say that manufacturers have paid too little attention to the power consumption of televisions, in part because of the absence of federal regulation.
Another power drain is the video game console, which is found in 40 percent of American households. Energy experts " and many frustrated parents " say that since saving games is difficult, children often keep the consoles switched on so they can pick up where they left off.
Noah Horowitz, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calculated that the nation’s gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the Sony PlayStation 3, now use about the same amount of electricity each year as San Diego, the ninth-largest city in country.
Mandatory efficiency standards for electronic devices would force manufacturers to redesign their products, or spend money adding components that better control power use.
Many manufacturers fight such mandates because they would increase costs, and they also claim the mandates would stifle innovation in a fast-changing industry.
The government has never aggressively tackled the television issue because of opposition from the consumer electronics lobby in Washington, experts say. In 1987, before televisions had swelled into such power hogs, Congress gave the Energy Department " which generally carries out the standards " the option of setting efficiency rules for TVs.
But industry opposition derailed an effort in the 1990s to use that authority, according to Steve Nadel of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. A more recent attempt to require home electronics to use no more than one watt of power in standby mode met the same fate. The federal government has moved forward on only two standards for electronics, covering battery chargers and external power supplies.
In the absence of federal action, a few states have moved on their own. The California Energy Commission just proposed new standards for televisions that would cut their power consumption in half by 2013. But that effort has set off a storm of protest from manufacturers and their trade group, the Consumer Electronics Association. (It is still expected to pass, in November.)
A spokesman for the industry said that government regulations could not keep up with the pace of technological change.
“Mandates ignore the fundamental nature of the industry that innovates due to consumer demand and technological developments, not regulations,” said Douglas Johnson, the senior director of technology policy at the association.
Mr. Johnson said that California’s limits on manufacturers, which he called arbitrary, might delay or even prohibit some features of new devices. Instead, he praised the government’s voluntary Energy Star program, which he says encourages efficiency without sacrificing innovation.
“Mandatory limits, such as we see in California, threaten to raise prices for consumers and reduce consumer choice,” he said.
Estimates vary regarding how much a mandatory efficiency program for gadgets would cost consumers. For some changes, like making sure devices draw minimal power in standby mode, experts say the cost may be only a few extra cents. At the other extreme, the most energy-efficient of today’s televisions can cost $100 more than the least energy-efficient. (That expense would be partly offset over time, of course, by lower power needs.)
Some types of home electronics are rated under Energy Star, a program that classifies products in more than 60 categories according to their energy consumption. But that program, while a boon to conscientious consumers who buy only the most efficient products, does not prevent the sale of wasteful devices and has not succeeded in driving them off the market.
The lack of regulation of gadgets is a notable contrast to the situation with appliances.
Congress adopted the nation’s first electrical efficiency standards in the 1980s, focusing initially on kitchen and other large appliances. That effort made some steep gains, particularly for refrigerators, which were once among the biggest power hogs in a typical home.
The federal effort lagged during the administration of George W. Bush, and the Energy Department missed a string of deadlines set by Congress. But the Obama administration has vowed to make maximum use of existing law, speeding up the adoption of 26 standards on a host of products that include microwave ovens and clothes dryers. Tougher lighting standards, embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations, are due to take effect in coming years.
But Congress has never granted any administration the authority to set standards for power-hogging electronic gadgets like game consoles and set-top boxes. Even now, when both the administration and Congress are focused on the nation’s energy problems, no legislation is moving forward to tackle the issue.
Experts like Dan W. Reicher, who directs Google’s energy efforts, argue that the United States must do better, setting an example for the rest of the world.
“If we can’t improve the efficiency of simple appliances and get them into greater use,” Mr. Reicher said, “it’s hard to believe that we’ll succeed with difficult things like cleaning up coal-fired power plants.”
September 20, 2009
No Climate Change Leader as Nations Meet
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS " Economists point to powerhouse countries like India to illustrate the hurdles facing some 100 world leaders due to gather in New York this Tuesday for the highest level summit meeting on climate change ever convened.
The Indian government has announced a major commitment to solar power as a renewable means of bringing electricity to more than 400 million people now living without it. Yet the government was pilloried at home last summer for accepting the international goal of preventing a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above present temperatures by limiting emissions. Opposition parties accused it of selling out the country’s future development.
While virtually all of the largest developed and developing nations have made domestic commitments toward creating more efficient, renewable sources of energy to cut emissions, none want to take the lead in fighting for significant international emissions reduction targets, lest they be accused at home of selling out future jobs and economic growth.
The negotiations for a new climate change agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December are badly stalled. With the agreement running more than 200 pages " including what negotiators estimate are a couple of thousand brackets denoting points of differences " diplomats and negotiators fear that the document is too unwieldy to garner a consensus in the coming months.
In convening the meeting, the United Nations is hoping that collectively the leaders can summon the will to overcome narrow national interests and give the negotiators the marching orders needed to cut at least the outline of a deal.
“I have been urging them to speak and to act as global leaders; just go beyond their national boundaries,” Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said Thursday.
On Tuesday, the leaders, including the heads of state or government of most economic powers, are to engage in a series of round-table discussions on outstanding climate change issues that will be less like negotiations than a series of college seminars designed to forge political momentum.
“They won’t do it one by one,” said Robert Orr, the United Nations assistant secretary general for policy planning. “Politically, they all have to jump together, and this is the essence of this summit. We will see if any governments are ready to say, ‘I am stepping through the door now; are you going to come with me?’ That would be a huge break.”
Senior organizers said they had never been involved in such a high-level summit meeting where the outcome was not predetermined. Fundamentally, although limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees Fahrenheit is an accepted goal, there is no consensus on how to get there.
This 2-degree Fahrenheit rise is the equivalent of the original goal of 2 degrees Celsius above the planet’s temperature just before the Industrial Revolution.
The industrialized nations have not agreed on midterm targets. They have made pledges of roughly half the target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a 25 percent to 40 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.
Developing countries have agreed on the need to mitigate their emissions, but have rejected any mandatory limit, and they demand financial and technical support in exchange.
The issue of aid for the poorest countries to adapt to the impact of climate change has been shunted aside. Finally, there is no agreement on what institutions would verify that targets are being met and supervise the finances.
“The mood in the negotiations has been that I should do as little as possible as late as possible and let the other person go first,” said Kim Carstensen, the director of the Global Climate Initiative of the World Wildlife Fund.
In recent weeks, sharp divisions have emerged between the United States and the European Union. The Europeans said that they would donate $2 billion to $15 billion a year for the next decade to help less developed nations adapt to climate change. The Obama administration has not offered anything close.
The Europeans also want binding, near-term targets for developed nations, a legacy of the last significant global climate accord, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration rejected because it did not set limits on emissions from China and other major developing nations.
The European target is a 20 percent reduction of 1990 levels by 2020, still less than the 25 percent recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel, although the Europeans said they would accept 30 percent if everyone agreed.
The American position is that any targets be enforced by domestic laws rather than international treaties, that they be verifiable and distributed equally. A House bill approaches the European target, but the Senate is expected to dilute it.
But the chances of a final bill’s clearing Congress by December are increasingly unlikely, so experts are eagerly waiting to hear what President Obama, who made climate change a key issue in his administration, proposes in his speech on Tuesday.
A speech by President Hu Jintao of China is also widely anticipated, with experts hoping he will announce a significant commitment to renewable energy and emissions reductions in China’s next five-year plan. Mr. Hu is the first Chinese president to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly, where leaders will convene Wednesday.
Between them, the United States and China account for about 40 percent of world emissions, split almost evenly, so if the two reach a consensus it will also provide significant impetus for a global agreement.
The United States also suffers from the “after you” syndrome, with some Congressional leaders demanding that China agree to reductions before the United States agrees to an overall framework, a formula that experts warn will kill progress.
“We don’t want to get hung up on trying to say that the U.S. and China will reduce the same percentage or the same amount,” said Timothy E. Wirth, the president of the United Nations Foundation and a former Colorado senator who has long been involved in climate negotiations.
Blocs of smaller, poorer nations have their own agendas. The island countries of the Pacific and the Caribbean will be pushing for an even lower temperature ceiling because they fear that the rising seas caused by even a 2-degree rise would drown or severely damage them. The Africans are threatening to walk out of the negotiations if they are not promised $300 billion in aid.
New Zealand objects to the fact that the negotiations have basically ignored agriculture, which accounts for 13 percent to 14 percent of greenhouse gases. Developing nations fear that any regulation of agriculture could deepen the severe problems in feeding their populations.
Such issues, while parochial, may be no less important in building an agreement that works across political borders.
“The instinct is a kind of nationalist response that can get it exactly backwards,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We should be viewing this as global problem solving, not as global negotiation.”
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sumac
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Sun 20 Sep, 2009 10:28 am
The entire article is interesting, but the following excerpts give the gist of it:
But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations.
Just a decade or two ago, each boat here could routinely catch three or four tuna a day, fishermen say. Now, they say Oma’s entire fleet of 30 to 40 boats is lucky to bring in a combined total of a half-dozen tuna in a day.
The problem, they say, is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or China. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks. According to local newspapers, there have been repeated incidents of small fishing boats from Oma and other ports intentionally cutting such trawl lines.
....Despite such difficulties, Oma’s fishermen said they preferred their generations-old fishing method because it allowed them to catch just large, adult fish, leaving the smaller young ones to sustain local stocks.
Fishing experts say the overfishing is a result of a broader failure by the Tokyo authorities to impose effective limits on catches in its waters. Indeed, Japan, which consumes some 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of top-grade tuna caught worldwide, has lobbied hard against efforts to limit tuna catches, such as are now being proposed by European countries for the Atlantic Ocean.
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sumac
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Sun 20 Sep, 2009 10:29 am
Stradee? IN today's NYT as an editorial:
September 20, 2009
Editorial
Not There on Salmon
The Obama administration has submitted an amended version of a Bush administration plan to rescue 13 endangered and threatened salmon species in the Pacific Northwest. The fish may be better off under this plan. But under the Endangered Species Act, better off is not enough. The act requires the government to make every effort to ensure a species’ long-term survival.
Judge James A. Redden of Federal District Court in Oregon will decide whether the plan meets that requirement. We do not believe that it does. Judge Redden has already rejected two federal plans for restoring salmon, one from the Clinton administration and one from the Bush administration. He was on the verge of ruling on a second Bush plan when the Obama administration asked for time to review it and strengthen it where necessary.
The administration has added several enhancements. It offers $100 million a year to improve salmon habitat; pledges new efforts to control invasive species and other predators; and promises to monitor the potential impacts of climate change, which could create serious problems for cold-water species like salmon.
Yet the plan does little to address the chief cause of fish mortality: the eight dams that the salmon must navigate on their way to and from the sea. Nor does it propose major changes in the way those dams are operated, like additional water flows over the dams to help the salmon move downstream.
It outlines a series of contingency plans that would be triggered when fish populations “decline significantly” " including, as a last resort, removing four dams on the Lower Snake River, an option the Bush administration rejected. But the fish, already endangered, would have to be in truly terrible shape before these plans could be triggered.
In his written instructions to the Obama administration, Judge Redden made it clear that he wanted a plan that put the salmon on a trajectory toward recovery " one with clear standards by which to measure success, not “triggers” that only measure failure. Judge Redden has been the salmon’s strongest defender, and he may be the salmon’s last hope. He should send this plan back to Washington and insist on something better.
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Stradee
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Sun 20 Sep, 2009 02:42 pm
@sumac,
True, new appliances wreck havoc on the electrical curcuits if used simultaniously, so its either the microwave or the toaster oven - not both. Breakfast is a timed event anymore.
Thread - I need advice: I saw a beautiful young (about a year) malamute fitted with a seeing-eye-dog harness, dragged by a chain around his neck by a subway fraudster pretending to be blind in order to beg on the subway, hopping from one car to the next. I stayed on that damn subway following that fraudster and the poor dog for over an hour until I finally saw a policeman. He took down the man's name and the dog's rabies tag number, and made a note of the fact the man admitted he's not blind and the dog isn't a seeing eye dog. I got the policeman's name.
Where do I write? Is the mayor the right addressee? Copies? Any ideas / suggestions appreciated. I'm haunted by the eyes of the malamute who figured out I'm following, and kept turning back mutely to look at me plus trying to resist getting dragged by that chain. Thanks.
Hoft, you can call the SPCA and report the incident to them, and also give them the name of the cop.
Who knows why the police did nothing more than get information from the guy, but if the dog has tags, and didn't have signs of obvious physical abuse, then they wouldn't confiscate the animal. If the guy is homeless, it will be difficult to track his whereabouts for an animal rescue investigation. If the police were given a legitmate address, then they will also give that information to animal control (if they decide to pursue an inquiry)
Poor doggie indeed. If you have the information hoft, I would call the local humane society. If the cop is the only one with the information, I would try to reach the cop to get it for yourself.
Here is an instance of a coal-firing plant trying to bury the CO2.
September 22, 2009
Refitted to Bury Emissions, Plant Draws Attention
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NEW HAVEN, W.Va. " Poking out of the ground near the smokestacks of the Mountaineer power plant here are two wells that look much like those that draw natural gas to the surface. But these are about to do something new: inject a power plant’s carbon dioxide into the earth.
A behemoth built in 1980, long before global warming stirred broad concern, Mountaineer is poised to become the world’s first coal-fired power plant to capture and bury some of the carbon dioxide it churns out. The hope is that the gas will stay deep underground for millenniums rather than entering the atmosphere as a heat-trapping pollutant.
The experiment, which the company says could begin in the next few days, is riveting the world’s coal-fired electricity sector, which is under growing pressure to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. Visitors from as far as China and India, which are struggling with their own coal-related pollution, have been trooping through the plant.
The United States still depends on coal-fired plants, many of them built decades ago, to meet half of its electricity needs. Some industry experts argue that retrofitting them could prove far more feasible than building brand new, cleaner ones.
Yet the economic viability of the Mountaineer plant’s new technology, known as carbon capture and sequestration, remains uncertain.
The technology is certain to devour a substantial amount of the plant’s energy output " optimists say 15 percent, and skeptics, 30 percent. Some energy experts argue that it could prove even more expensive than solar or nuclear power.
And as with any new technology, even the engineers are unsure how well it will work: will all of the carbon dioxide stay put?
Environmentalists who oppose coal mining and coal energy of any kind worry that sequestration could simply trade one problem, global warming, for another one, the pollution of water supplies. Should the carbon dioxide mix with water underground and form carbonic acid, they say, it could leach poisonous materials from rock deep underground that could then seep out.
Given the depths to which workers have drilled, they also fret that the project could cause earthquakes, although experts at the Environmental Protection Agency discount the risk of catastrophe.
More broadly, some environmentalists argue that the carbon storage effort could give corporations and consumers another excuse to drag their heels in supplanting coal dependence with an embrace of renewable energy sources like the sun and wind.
“Coal is the drug of choice of a major industry with a lot of political power,” said David H. Holtz, executive director of Progress Michigan, an environmental group.
Instead of adopting carbon capture, which Mr. Holtz likens to a methadone cure for addiction, he argues that the industry would do better to go cold turkey.
“There’s no evidence that burying carbon dioxide in the earth is a better strategy than aggressively pursuing other alternatives that clearly are better for the environment and will in the long run be less costly,” Mr. Holtz said.
But power company officials say the effort is the energy industry’s best hope of stanching carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades.
“I really believe, in my heart of hearts, that coal is going to be burned around the world for years to come,” said Michael Morris, chairman and president of American Electric Power, which owns the plant here. “Retrofitting is going to be essential.”
American Electric Power is the nation’s largest electricity producer, with a coal-fired grid stretching across 11 states.
If all goes smoothly, this week engineers will begin pumping carbon dioxide, converted to a fluid, into a layer of sandstone 7,800 feet below the rolling countryside here and then into a layer of dolomite 400 feet below that.
The liquid will squeeze into tiny pores in the rock, displacing the salty water there, and assume a shape something like a squashed football, 30 to 40 feet high and hundreds of yards long.
American Electric Power’s plan is to inject about 100,000 tons annually for two to five years, about 1.5 percent of Mountaineer’s yearly emissions of carbon dioxide. Should Congress pass a law controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the new technology proves economically feasible, the company says, it could then move to capture as much as 90 percent of the gas.
For now the project consists of the two wells and a small chemical factory. In the factory, smoke diverted from the plant’s chimney is mixed with a chilled ammonia-based chemical. The chemical is then heated, releasing the carbon dioxide, which is pumped deep into the wells.
American Electric Power is spending $73 million on the capture and storage effort, which includes half the cost of the factory. Alstom, the manufacturer of the new equipment, paid for the other half of the factory, hoping to develop expertise that will win it a worldwide market. Alstom would not say what it spent, but public figures indicate that the two companies are jointly spending well over $100 million.
For energy planners, a crucial question is how much this technology would cost if refined and installed on a bigger scale. The answer remains elusive.
Still, many scientists emphasize that Mountaineer is within a dozen miles of four other big coal plants with a combined capacity of 6,000 megawatts, a concentration so great that industry insiders have nicknamed the area Megawatt Alley. If the technology spread to all of them in a cost-effective way, many say, it could have a broad impact on the coal industry.
S. Julio Friedmann, leader of the carbon management program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, calls this corner of the Ohio River Valley a “must win” region for carbon dioxide storage.
Robert Socolow, a Princeton University engineering professor, echoed that sentiment. The nation’s fleet of coal-burning plants “completely dominates our national emissions,” Professor Socolow said.
It is also far easier to corral several million tons flowing from a single chimney than a comparable amount coming from tens of millions of car tailpipes or home heating systems, experts point out.
Far larger projects for capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground have been under way for several years in Europe and North Africa. In North Dakota, the Great Plains Synfuels plant, which converts methane to natural gas, takes the leftover carbon dioxide and pumps it through a pipeline to Canada to stimulate oil production there. But Mountaineer is the world’s first electricity plant to capture and store carbon dioxide.
A state permit issued to American Electric Power limits the pressure it can use to inject carbon dioxide into the rock. This is to reduce the risk that the injection will crack rock layers above that engineers are counting on to keep the carbon dioxide in place.
A nonprofit research group, Battelle Memorial Institute, has installed monitoring wells around the rock that will measure changes in pressure and temperature. Engineers can also send energy pulses through the earth between the wells and measure how fast these travel, as a guide to how the carbon dioxide is spreading.
Asked whether the injections of carbon dioxide could increase the frequency or magnitude of the small earthquakes that are common in the area, an E.P.A. official said it seemed unlikely.
“With proper site selection and good management, we should be able to implement this safely,” said Dina Kruger, director of the agency’s climate change division. Ms. Kruger also emphasized that the carbon dioxide would be monitored to see if it was seeping.
Some local residents are skeptical.
“It doesn’t matter to me if a scientist says it may or may not leak,” said Elisa Young, an anti-coal activist who lives nearby on the Ohio side of the river. “That’s not going to stop it from leaking when push comes to shove.”
At the same time, many others in this coal-dependent region suggest that the notion that carbon dioxide is a menace has been overplayed.
Charles A. Powell, the manager of the Mountaineer plant, who has worked there since it opened three decades ago, pointed out that the gas is given off by every human and animal.
“You are breathing out?” he asked a visitor dryly.
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sumac
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Tue 22 Sep, 2009 04:37 am
This is at the heart of a lot of our problems - the courts giving corporations the same rights that it gives to humans.
September 22, 2009
Editorial
The Rights of Corporations
The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited " far less than those of people.
This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights " based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.
Now the court is considering what should be a fairly narrow campaign finance case, involving whether Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had the right to air a slashing movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary season. There is a real danger that the case will expand corporations’ rights in ways that would undermine the election system.
The legal doctrine underlying this debate is known as “corporate personhood.”
The courts have long treated corporations as persons in limited ways for some legal purposes. They may own property and have limited rights to free speech. They can sue and be sued. They have the right to enter into contracts and advertise their products. But corporations cannot and should not be allowed to vote, run for office or bear arms. Since 1907, Congress has banned them from contributing to federal political campaigns " a ban the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld.
In an exchange this month with Chief Justice Roberts, the solicitor general, Elena Kagan, argued against expanding that narrowly defined personhood. “Few of us are only our economic interests,” she said. “We have beliefs. We have convictions.” Corporations, “engage the political process in an entirely different way, and this is what makes them so much more damaging,” she said.
Chief Justice Roberts disagreed: “A large corporation, just like an individual, has many diverse interests.” Justice Antonin Scalia said most corporations are “indistinguishable from the individual who owns them.”
The Constitution mentions the rights of the people frequently but does not cite corporations. Indeed, many of the founders were skeptical of corporate influence.
John Marshall, the nation’s greatest chief justice, saw a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible,” he wrote in 1819. “Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence.”
That does not mean that corporations should have no rights. It is in society’s interest that they are allowed to speak about their products and policies and that they are able to go to court when another company steals their patents. It makes sense that they can be sued, as a person would be, when they pollute or violate labor laws.
The law also gives corporations special legal status: limited liability, special rules for the accumulation of assets and the ability to live forever. These rules put corporations in a privileged position in producing profits and aggregating wealth. Their influence would be overwhelming with the full array of rights that people have.
One of the main areas where corporations’ rights have long been limited is politics. Polls suggest that Americans are worried about the influence that corporations already have with elected officials. The drive to give corporations more rights is coming from the court’s conservative bloc " a curious position given their often-proclaimed devotion to the text of the Constitution.
The founders of this nation knew just what they were doing when they drew a line between legally created economic entities and living, breathing human beings. The court should stick to that line.
BILLINGS, Mont. - A federal judge in Montana restored protections yesterday for an estimated 600 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, citing in part a decline in their food supply caused by climate change.
After bouncing back from near-extermination last century, grizzlies were declared recovered in 2007, when they were stripped of their threatened status under the Endangered Species Act.
But in a 46-page ruling, US District Judge Donald Molloy sided with environmental groups that argued the bruins remain at risk.
Among other factors, he cited a decline in whitebark pine trees - a key food source for many bears that has been disrupted by climate change, forest fires, and other factors.
Government researchers have made similar links, but that research was downplayed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in its 2007 decision.
“There is a disconnect between the studies the agency relies on here and its conclusions,’’ Molloy wrote in his ruling. “These studies still state that there is a connection between whitebark pine and grizzly survival.’’
The greater Yellowstone area of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming has the second-largest grizzly bear population in the lower 48 states. Four other populations with a combined estimated population of 900 animals have never lost their threatened status.
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Called techie doc... 
