U.S. Commerce Department Announces Launch of i6 Green Challenge to Promote Clean Energy Innovation and Economic Growth

U.S. departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation, support entrepreneurship initiative

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) and its Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship today announced the opening of its $12 million i6 Green Challenge in partnership with the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. ‪

EDA will award up to $1 million to each of six teams around the country with the most innovative ideas to drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in support of a green innovation economy, increased U.S. competitiveness and new jobs. Its partner agencies will award more than $6 million in additional funding to i6 Green winners.

Data provided by U.S. Census Bureau.

Cleveland Sees Plunge in Population, reports the Wall Street Journal today, announcing: "A larger-than-expected exodus from Cleveland during the past decade shrunk the city's population by 17% to about 397,000, according to U.S. Census data released Wednesday." That's right, Cleveland's population has crashed below the 400K floor for the first time since around the start of the 20th Century, which triggers all sorts of unsustainable, shrinking, un-re-imaginable financial and political realities for leadership and citizens here.

Perhaps the only silver lining is that this proof of Cleveland political and leadership failure will have a significant price of leaders' heads. From the Wall Street Journal:

Political observers said the decline could tilt the balance of political power in one of America's most hotly contested swing states.

"Ohio is expected to lose two congressional districts, and this big decline in Cleveland suggests that both could come out of northeastern Ohio," a Democratic stronghold, said John Green, a University of Akron political-science professor.

I just received an email from the EPA announcing it "updated its database that helps Americans understand the health and environmental impacts of electricity generation" and now provides a useful public interface - "Power Profiler is a user friendly online application that uses eGRID data to show air emissions information and the type of electricity generation, such as coal or nuclear, in various regions of the country.  By simply entering a zip code and selecting a utility, users can learn more about where their electricity comes from and what impact it has on air quality and the environment."

Good morning,

The state of the American education system today is unacceptable. As many as one quarter of American students don’t finish high school. We've fallen to ninth place in the proportion of young people with college degrees. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

For the sake of the next generation, and America's economic future, this has to change.

EPA Awards $32 Million to Understand Health Impacts of Air Pollution

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $32 million to fund four new Clean Air Research Centers at universities conducting cutting edge air pollution research. The research will focus on the impacts of air pollution mixtures on people’s health. It is important to understand the health risks associated with exposure to multiple air pollutants because people are exposed to more than one pollutant at a time.“These centers are critical to understanding how to improve air quality and protect Americans’ health from complex mixtures of air pollutants,” said Dr. Paul Anastas, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “The centers will focus on important scientific questions remaining in air research.”

Environmental Justice - It ain't a RACE thing - it's an INJUSTICE thing

As thoroughly documented on realNEO, over a course of many years - and now being thoroughly addressed by the EPA through their courses of action - Cleveland has environmental justice problems to solve.

Right now - through April 8, 2011 - the EPA is asking for your help determining how they carry out that responsibility, as they want public comment on THEIR Guide to Providing Environmental Justice for YOU.

As quoted from the EPA's Interim Guidance on Considering Environmental Justice During the Development of an Action, introduced and linked below: "Environmental justice (EJ) is central to the Agency’s mission and is the responsibility of everyone at EPA".

At the beginning of the 21st Century - a time when the pace of global evolution was certain to be astounding in every way, in accelerating change each day - especially as driven by transformational new Information Technologies (IT) and services - a serious, young college computer science student wrote some historic collaboration software, in his dorm-room, to help his fellow students communicate more effectively in their evolving, un-tethering, socially-networked world, and that software has been helping citizens freely interconnect with greater impact each day since, to save the world.

The early days of this software are beloved, in real geek-lore:

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University students, so two students set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share one of the students' ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired the other student to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after that student moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website on-line so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name...

Sunset over Lake Erie from Whiskey Island, on a nearly perfect Summer's day. Dedicated to Citizen Ed Hauser.

Dear Mr. Wolstein,

Please hold off on using the Forum Architects' plans for your redevelopment in the Flats, as much has improved in the prospects for this city and region since they were conceived - there is new energy, life and opportunity coming into Cleveland that will improve the prospects for this most important historic site that I've been vocal in my disappointment to see go.

As you are moving forward in new directions, Cleveland and regional leaders including myself must move forward in many new directions previously inconceivable. As such, planning needs frequent re-visioning - and may in fact be open sourced, real-time and community enabled with world class information technology, which we'll be developing more of in Northeast Ohio in the future.

Most significant, we are in the process of removing from our community the dangerous pollution emitted from the coal burning at FirstEnergy Lake Shore (already decommissioning), MCCO, in University Circle, and Cleveland Thermal, next door to your site (your greatest liability, easily made an asset), and the outrageous environmental injustice from Mittal and some other industrial operations - and the direct and fugitive emissions from the mobile pollution sources servicing them - ships, trains and trucks  - that are just not safe for dense urban neighborhoods, which we must save and restore. There are economically viable solutions to all these challenges - it does not need to be this way!

Dear Mr. Mowry, Chief Information Officer, Cuyahoga County, Ohio:

Welcome Home.

Without a doubt, you hold the most opportune and important office in the region, today, and I wish you great success.

FURTHER demonstrating the leadership of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland are unintelligent, compromised and bad for people's health... read how they define hazards to public health without addressing air pollution and lead poisoning, still again.

CON-MEN, WORKING FOR KOCHS!

The best line in this article is "What Dr. Eric Bieber, chief medical officer at UH, likes about resolution is that it will make it easier for people to do what's right." Yes, that would seem easier to someone who just had his coal power plant shut-the-F-down. That sure as hell wasn't easy on citizens!

Why must all the wrong people live long, healthy lives while we poor victims die of the toxins of their rich? I pray for divine intervention in the lives of these evil leaders here... as clearly they drink too much Tea and huff too many lead and coal fumes to think clearly themselves... especially if they put Cimperman in charge of OUR PUBLIC HEALTH!

Can you say take me to the Mayo Clinic please!

If there are any concilpeople with brains still functioning in Cleveland (Cummins), please bring up the obvious in the Council hearings on our leadership's stupidity - IT'S THE LEAD POISONING AND AIR POLLUTION STUPIDS - or face the consequences!

Apple adicts are the most smug and unsophisticated computer uses on Earth - hooked on over-priced, under-performing, locked-in eye-candy so they may live without thinking about the real world of technology, or anything else that matters, it is confirmed - the I-Me generation funds The Tea Party. While Appleoids tend to think of themselves as hip and cool, they are quite the opposite, streaming their money into the coffers of Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs and their Fox Tea Party agenda against humanity. Didn't know that... perhaps you need to ditch your I-Pad and it's Fox News lock-in and be real...

"In fact, for two men who outwardly have little in common, save for spectacular wealth, Murdoch and Apple boss Steve Jobs are awfully simpatico these days"... "Jobs' strategy of using other people's cheap content to drive sales of expensive Apple devices also dovetails nicely with Murdoch's historic willingness to engage in price wars with competitors he regards as less deep-pocketed, more susceptible to investor pressure, or simply less committed than he"... "Rupert and Steve: a bromance for the ages."

Making Jobs, Apple Computer Corporation and Appleoids partners with Murdoch, the Koch Brothers and their Tea Party in ruining the world... and it is Apple users fault for supporting that with their money... unless they like Tea with their apples...

"While Fox News feeds its rabble the anti-union line, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal columnists front for Koch's Americans for Prosperity and coddle elite investors"... "The informal partnership between billionaire David Koch, whose campaign dollars and astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, have fomented the Wisconsin crisis, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is profoundly ideological -- the ideology being the exponential enrichment of the two men's heirs, all dressed up in the language of libertarianism and free enterprise"... "Ginning up the right-wing rabble is a Fox News specialty. Glenn Beck is more than a talk-show host; he's Rupert Murdoch's community organizer"... "When Rupert Murdoch added the Wall Street Journal to his holdings in 2007, he became the titular boss of Moore, one of David Koch's favorite sons. Perhaps it works like one of those royal marriages of yore. With those bonds, the lord of right-wing media cemented, perhaps, his standing in the realm of the man who would be king of the world."

As I informed the Very Reverend Lind, of Trinity Cathedral, I am posting this outreach for the help of her good people to move Cleveland Thermal and so Cleveland beyond coal. Please reach out to these friends of the community with your words of support for a cleaner, safer, healthier, more prosperous Cleveland and NEO for all, beyond coal.

Dear Reverend Lind and supporters of Trinity Cathedral:
Norm Roulet <norm [at] realneo [dot] us>     Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 4:01 PM
To: tlind [at] dohio [dot] org
Cc: Nachy Kanfer <nachy [dot] kanfer [at] sierraclub [dot] org>
Dear Very Reverend Lind and supporters of Trinity Cathedral:

I appreciate your presence and good work in this community, and know you are prominent preachers for goodness, on a good Earth.

It has come to my attention that Trinity Cathedral is a customer of the Cleveland Thermal coal steam plant in the Flats, providing excessively-polluting utilities to your facilities on Euclid Avenue - that is featured on their website at http://www.clevelandthermal.com/services/case-studies

Cimperman for Congress 2008 - Top Donors - featuring Charles Evans from Dominion Cleveland Thermal for $2,000 - I assume the DiSanto, Frederick D. of Ancora Advisors LLC listed here for $2,300 is the same Ancora of Grenwich, Connecticut that bought Cleveland Thermal from Dominion in 2004:

RICHMOND, Va., July 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Dominion (NYSE: D) announced today that it has agreed to sell Dominion Cleveland Thermal to Ancora Management LLC of Greenwich, Connecticut. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2004. Terms of the sale were not disclosed and the sale is subject to regulatory approval.

Look at all the other corrupting industrial and developer scum on Cimpermans buy-list who have been screwing Cleveland... wonder what each one wanted in return for their $1,000s... lucky Cimperman lost by a mile. Time to rid Cleveland of the power of all these self-serving, citizen-killing parasites forever!
 

Top 100 Donations/Contributions in the '08 Election Cycle to
JOE CIMPERMAN FOR CONGRESS

Name/ Location	Employer/ Occupation	Contribution $ Amount	Primary/ General	Date
Adams, Al T. Cleveland, OH 44114	Baker/Attorney	$2,300	P	02/12/2008
Alexander, Anthony Akron, OH 44308	FirstEnergy Corporation/President	$2,300	P	02/28/2008

An ambient film of real NEO people walking, shot from outside the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper headquarters, featuring late afternoon activity in the newsroom as seen from Superior Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, realNEO... "Schism" by TOOL is playing in the background, accompanied by the sounds of realNEO..

I've often wondered why the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been so disrespectful and harmful to me - I believe the following documents will explain - The Cleveland Plain Dealer is a Cleveland Thermal customer and so Cleveland Environmental Justice criminal - I know the Pieces Fit!

Document Record

View Image

Date Filed:  Document Type:  Number of pages:  Case Numbers:  Summary: 

2/5/1997 7:20:03 AM

TX-Text

000012

89-0362-HT-AEC

Alternate energy steam service agreement between Cleveland thermal Energy and The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, filed on behalf of applicant by S. Howard. (12 pgs.)

There has been considerable conflict in industry and government - and Federal courts - over the emissions from large boilers and incinerators in America, and so Northeast Ohio, leading to new Clean Air Act standards for boilers and certain incinerators announced by the EPA today. As all America now acts to implement these new standards, it will be interesting to see what branches of government in Northeast Ohio monitor or even are aware of all the boilers and incinerators in this region - their current emissions and control technologies - which are out of compliance with the new standards - what they need to do to comply - what costs are involved to comply with the new act - what reductions in pollution will result, where - who will see reductions in their ambient and point source pollution - what benefits to public health will result - and how that will improve the value of property in this area. The public should be provided with this information immediately so we may make long term plans about where we live and what property we choose to own.

Battles over such rules are at the root of all evil in industry and America today - the heart of the tea party efforts to corrupt government by the Koch Brothers and their billionaire murderers and fans and followers in industries like coal and oil - The Fossil Boys - and the harm they have caused activists for clean energy, clean social networks like realNEO, the American people, and global climate. Thank you Federal EPA for your good fight for the health of Americans.

And you thought the tea party was actually about ending gays, abortion and unions! It was always all about the right to pollute and kill Americans! Time to end the party and fix America, everyone!

EPA Establishes Clean Air Act Standards for Boilers and Incinerators  

Sensible standards provide significant public health benefits while cutting costs from initial proposal by nearly 50 percentWASHINGTON – In response to federal court orders requiring the issuance of final standards, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is issuing final Clean Air Act standards for boilers and certain incinerators that achieve significant public health protections through reductions in toxic air emissions, including mercury and soot, but cut the cost of implementation by about 50 percent from an earlier proposal issued last year.

Mercury, soot, lead and other harmful pollutants released by boilers and incinerators can lead to developmental disabilities in children, as well as cancer, heart disease, aggravated asthma and premature death in Americans. These standards will avoid between 2,600-6,600 premature deaths, prevent 4,100 heart attacks and avert 42,000 asthma attacks per year in 2014.

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for coming to Cleveland to bring attention to environmental injustice in Northeast Ohio.

I assume EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has briefed you that, in addition to being the most lead poisoned big city in America, we are one of the most polluted, unhealthy, and so undereducated places on Earth.

As you ride into Downtown Cleveland - the most lead poisoned big city in America (the world?) - you pass one of the most environmentally unjust industrial facilities in America - Arcelor Mittal's Cleveland Works steel production and processing superfund site (AKA the Cuyahoga River Valley) - and, as you meet with Ohio taxpayer-funded business development agents here, you sit in the shadows of the privately-polluting Cleveland Thermal district coal plant (owned by some shadow out-of-state investors, it appears) immediately downtown... providing excessively polluting heat to the very Wolstein Center where you shall hold your small business conference today... "Cleveland Thermal’s largest customer is Cleveland State University (CSU)" (and they don't care).

Don't breathe too deeply here.

EPA Administrator Jackson and Department of Energy Director Chu may certainly tell you there are better ways to make steel and warm citizens, business development agents and the President of the United States of America than burning coal within 100s of yards of homes, offices and you.

Bill Moyers: America Can't Deal With Reality -- We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts
Many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign. - February 14, 2011

History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.

Thanks to all of you for your welcome - and for the chance to be here among so many kindred spirits. Your dedication to factual broadcasting, to our craft and calling; your passion for telling stories that matter; for connecting the present to the past, has created a community whose work is essential in this disquieting time when "what is happening today, this hour, this very minute, seems to be our sole criterion for judgment and action." It is a sad world that exists only in the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here. As Milan Kundera’s insight reminds us, the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He's the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko's in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko's, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history "backwards" to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don't know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the "now" of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today's news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne's thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.

MCCO near complete - next steps

Norm Roulet <norm [dot] roulet [at] gmail [dot] com>     Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 12:40 PM
To: Chris Ronayne <Cronayne [at] universitycircle [dot] org>
Cc: hershel daniels <hersheldanielsjunior [at] gmail [dot] com>

Chris,

I'm pleased to see posted to the MCCO site that they are now committed to shutting down their coal boilers and will add no more. You should feel great satisfaction for this - 1,000,000s of lives will be bettered in very few years - and I appreciated your help accomplishing this.

While I believe we do a good job of keeping spammers from contaminating realNEO, we do not have a way we verify the identity of users and so may be exposed to "sockpuppets". But members of realNEO attack and kill them upon discovery. On the other hand, a poorly managed online world like Cleveland.com is certainly fully occupied by such evil forces. Now you may know, for a fact, those "people" you are interacting with, when you discuss important issues to you, on these poorly managed portals like of your monopoly newspaper in Cleveland... or that silly little Facebook of yours... are aliens from another universe.

Denier-bots live! Why are online comments’ sections over-run by the anti-science, pro-pollution crowd?

Posted: 20 Feb 2011 06:38 AM PST

I’ve been reposting the ThinkProgress exposé on the head-exploding tactics of Chamber of Commerce hacks (henchmen?), like Aaron Barr who heads the private security firm HB Gary Federal (see “Chamber lobbyists solicited firm to investigate opponents’ families, children.”  Daily Kos has a stunning post on HB Gary’s tactics that I reprint in below, since it involves:

creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other.

 
Dear Fellow Ohio Sierra Club Members,

At the start of this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally began using its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Already, however, powerful forces in Congress--including some Democrats--are working to strip that authority away or delay its long-overdue implementation. We need to make sure Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown stands firm in defense of EPA's authority to cut greenhouse gas pollution right away.

EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases is the only tool we have right now at the national level to start combating climate change. Taking it away--or delaying it after all these years of inaction--is absolutely unacceptable.

We all need to call Senator Brown today with a single message:

DOE Requests $3.2 Billion for Renewable Energy, Efficiency in FY 2012

President Obama called for more clean energy in his 2011 State of the Union Speech and continued his support in his new budget proposal.
Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

President Obama unveiled on February 14 a $29.5 billion budget request for DOE covering fiscal year (FY) 2012, including $3.2 billion for DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The budget request for EERE represents a 44% increase over the current FY 2010 appropriation of about $2.2 billion. The proposed budget aims to strengthen renewable energy sources, boost clean energy research, and cut expenses as the United States pursues the president's vision of generating 80% of its electricity from clean sources by 2035. Overall, the DOE budget would grow 12% over 2010 levels while cutting a number of programs and administrative costs. (FY 2010 numbers are used here for comparisons because Congress never passed an FY 2011 budget, and the federal government is running on a stopgap budget resolution reflecting 2010 levels).

Environmental Justice leader/victim speaking to panel at First White House Forum on Environmental Justice

As I've reported on realNEO: "In what I consider the most important positive environmental development in America in the 21st Century, on December 15, 2010, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley convened the First White House Environmental Justice Forum, where leadership of the recently-reconvened Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJ IWG) met with over 100 environmental justice leaders (typically long-suffering EJ victims), in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, at the White House complex, to develop new federal interagency strategies and interactions with citizens to right current EJ wrongs in America, in anticipation of worse to come as results of climate change."

The next step in furthering the EPA's Plan EJ 2014 is a Quarterly Environmental Justice Community Outreach Call, which will take place on February 17, 2011 at 3 p.m. (Eastern Time). The purpose of these calls is to provide information to participants about the Agency's EJ activities and maintain an open dialogue with EJ advocates. As EPA continues to advance Plan EJ 2014, the Agency hopes that these calls will better inform the public about EPA's EJ work and enhance opportunities to take advantage of federal activities. See call-in information below.

Location

Does Egypt hold any lessons for climate hawks?

February 12, 2011

And above all, we saw a new generation emerge — a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears, a government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations.

… it was the moral force of non-violence….

That’s Obama speaking Friday.  I’ve been asked by a couple of ClimateProgress regulars if there are any lessons for climate hawks in the incredible Egyptian revolution.

For instance, the 25-year-old Ian of “What should Ian do with his life?” fame asks

I’m just wondering if you think it would be worth discussing Egypt in the thread this weekend. I could be very wrong but it seems like it might give people hope to change things here in the states. Maybe its possible to focus some of that energy into grassroots efforts on climate change. Huge, sustained, passionate rallies seem like they work now. Is that possible in regards to action on climate change?

Watch Al Jazeera's live reporting on the situation in Egypt below - video not optimized for mobile devices (audio may be in slo-mo):

15 Day Extended Weather Forecast for Cleveland, Ohio - February 10-24, 2011

Following the warmest year in the recorded history of mankind on our planet, Earthlings should certainly expect more of the same... meaning after suffering through brutal Winter storms caused by intense climate change in the Arctic, we shall experience unseasonably warm weather for much of the month of February.

What may July have in store... when we must grow the crops that must feed and fuel the world?!?!

Some food for thought, from Climate Progress, for those balmy Cleveland February evenings to come...

UN food agency warns severe drought threatens wheat crop in China, world’s largest producer it is - FAO also warns floods and heavy rains in Southern Afria "threaten food security"

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 09:45 AM PST

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert Tuesday that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and was even resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years and said Tuesday that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

World wheat prices are already surging and have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.