A New York commission has approved a plan to charge a fee to drivers entering Manhattan during peak hours. The proposal, aimed at reducing traffic congestion and pollution, differs only slightly from what Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed in April; it would charge $8 to drivers entering a certain area between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., and put the funding toward public transit. The plan must now be approved by the city council, Bloomberg, and the state legislature -- where some expect it will hit a snarl.
143 bberg..
The U.S.-led climate talks in Honolulu, Hawaii, ended yesterday without much fanfare and without much progress achieved. By most accounts, it was a closed-door, bureaucratic nothing-fest wherein delegates from the 17 biggest-polluting countries spoke about the need to act, but no one actually did. The United States finally agreed to take part in forming climate-change plans with the rest of the world by 2009, but that concession came only after the intransigent host country's repeated objections, eventually eliciting loud boos from many of the delegates. im Connaughton, the top White House environment official, summed it up nicely, saying, "We like to prepare, plan, and announce. This is what the president has done consistently since 2001; as you can see, it's gaining increasing appreciation."
hmmmm..
The Olympic stadium in Beijing, China, will be dry during the opening ceremony, officials said, but not because the structure has a roof (it doesn't). Instead, Chinese meteorologists claim they can stop rain from falling over the stadium, despite the fact that the games will take place during the monsoon season this August. The process of stopping rain from falling is similar to cloud-seeding procedures that meteorologists around the world have used to try to prompt rain to fall. Stopping the rain involves shooting liquid nitrogen and silver iodide into clouds to force water droplets to shrink in size and, if all goes well, keep the rain in the clouds.
wowzerz..
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