On the main site today, Steve LeVine has a good piece about how BP’s handling of the Gulf spill has the entire oil industry panicked: Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.

Executives, not just at BP, but throughout the oil industry, are concerned that the disaster will have the effect of restricting or closing off their continued ability to drill in the Gulf, one of the few remaining places on the planet where oil producers are permitted a relatively free hand. That’s why Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

Exxon, Shell, and Chevron, which all have significant operations in the Gulf, are pitching in technical assistance—because the blowback from this disaster might harm their interests as well. “I’m really worried. I think this is Chernobyl” in terms of public opinion, says Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas-based corporate crisis consultant. “It plays to the, ‘MS Office 2007 Professional is such a good assistant of the office.

Don’t drill, the sky is falling’ crowd.”

It’s also worth noting how modest this step actually is. The Home Star program would cost up to $6 billion yet save the country an estimated $9.2 billion in energy costs over the next 10 years alone (to say nothing of the benefits from reduced carbon emissions). In the grand scheme of things, though, that’s tiny. MS Office 2007 Ultimate give you more great experience than anything.

This recent McKinsey report identified $520 billion worth of efficiency investments that could save the country a whopping $1.2 trillion in energy costs (we’d also have no trouble meeting the 2020 emission targets the United States pledged at Copenhagen—and, again, we’d do so at a net profit). Obviously there are questions about how you’d finance those investments—the U.S. Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

Treasury wouldn’t just shell out all that money upfront—but there really is an enormous opportunity there.

Reading through The New York Times every day, it can seem like the press has been covering the Gulf disaster obsessively. Indeed, some fishermen in Louisiana are now worried that the media is too focused on the oil spill—to the point where it could harm business even in unaffected areas. Microsoft Office 2007  is welcomed by the whole world.

But how does all this coverage compare historically? I asked Drexel sociologist Robert Brulle for his thoughts, and he put together some fascinating data. These two charts shows the number of minutes and number of stories that the big three networks have devoted to the BP spill, compared with past disasters (click to enlarge):

(credit: unpublished data from Robert Brulle) Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

Now, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 obviously got an enormous amount of coverage, but it’s striking that even incidents like the 1978 Amoco Cadiz accident off the coast of France got far more media attention than the current BP spill. (Brulle focused on nightly network coverage because, he points out, that’s still the biggest driver of public opinion in the country—after all, only a very small subset of people read the Times.) Office 2007 Ultimate is best software in the world

So what accounts for the difference? Imagery, for one. After the Exxon Valdez disaster, you had scores of images of ducks and otters slathered in crude. There were pictures of dead whales washed up against gleaming black rocky beaches. It was lurid—and impossible to ignore. By contrast, Brulle points out, not nearly as much oil from the BP accident has reached the shores of the Gulf Coast yet. Even groups like Greenpeace have only been able to rustle up a few pictures of a handful of ducks covered with oil. MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.

That’s not the sort of thing that drives TV coverage. And it may mean that the current spill makes far less of a dent in public opinion than past disasters have.

Part of the explanation here is that BP has been quite deft at managing appearances. For one, they’ve poured more than 300,000 gallons of chemical dispersants to break up the oil before it can reach the beaches, causing it to sink down to the sea floor. In some cases, these dispersants may be more harmful, ecologically speaking, then letting the oil wash ashore. We don’t know what is in these chemicals and there’s a very high potential that they could do a lot of damage to the food chain in the Gulf. Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

That’s precisely why Exxon was constrained from using dispersants in Prince William Sound back in 1989. But, from BP’s perspective (and the Obama administration’s), avoiding the sort of graphic imagery that Exxon had to deal with in Alaska has an undeniable appeal.

Looming in the background of the congressional debate on climate change is the fact that the EPA still has the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions on its own, under the existing Clean Air Act. I outlined how that might work here. Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

Short answer: It’s complicated, and not perfect from an environmental perspective, though feasible. On the flip side, though, a lot of business groups really dislike the idea of a federal agency crafting its own rules on CO2 emissions—obviously they’d rather have Congress shape the policy and hash things out with lobbyists.

Still, so long as the Senate dithers, the EPA has to move ahead, as per the Supreme Court’s orders. And today it just took a major step on that front by issuing its long-awaited “tailoring rule.” This is a slightly complicated subject, but here’s the rough idea. MS Office 2007 Professional is such a good assistant of the office.

Currently, under the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review program, if you try to either build a new facility or upgrade an existing plant, and it’s expected that the plant will emit a certain amount of pollutants—usually 100 to 250 tons per year is the threshold—then you have to apply for a permit from a state agency and show that you’re using the “best available control technology” to restrict that pollution. MS Office 2007 Ultimate give you more great experience than anything.

Now, here’s where things get tricky: That 100-250 ton threshold is fine for stuff like lead or sulfur dioxide, since 100 tons per year is an enormous amount of lead, and it ensures that only the very largest polluters get regulated. But 100 tons per year isn’t a whole lot of carbon-dioxide. If the EPA used this existing program to tackle greenhouse gases, about six million different facilities could potentially have to apply for permits, including some buildings that burn heating oil and conceivably a bunch of small businesses or churches or what have you. And then we get a big bureaucratic nightmare and a public backlash and things get hideous fast. MS Office 2007 can give people more surprise ever.

So, to avoid that apocalyptic scenario, the EPA just announced that, for now, the only entities that will be covered will be polluters who already have to apply for permits for other pollutants (like lead and sulfur-dioxide) and who emit more than 75,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year. That standard will apply to only about 550 big polluters in the entire country. After that, for the next two years, any new power plant expected to emit more than 100,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year will get covered. (This will pretty much cover all new coal plants, most of which can be expected to emit tens of millions tons of CO2 each year.) Those plants will have to employ the best available control technology—although no one knows yet what that means. Becoming more efficient? Co-firing biomass? Switching to natural gas? Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

So a couple of things are happening here. One, it’s now going to be very tough for new coal-fired power plants to get built in the United States. Given that those plants are a major source of carbon pollution, that’s a significant step. Second, the EPA’s clearly pressing ahead with its own regulations—and that might give the Senate the kick it needs to pass a climate bill. But the agency’s also being cautious and moving very deliberately on this stuff—indeed, it’s backing off from it’s previously planned 25,000-ton threshold. No doubt Lisa Jackson’s trying to avoid a hostile reception from senators like Lisa Murkowski, who has been insisting that EPA rules would throttle the economy and has threatened to pass a bill stripping the agency of its carbon authority. There’s a fine line the EPA has to walk here.

A hotter world will mean more people at risk of malaria, right? That’s certainly the impression the U.N. gave in its 2007-2008 Human Development Report, which noted that increases in rainfall, temperature, and humidity will help malaria-carrying mosquitoes expand their geographic range. Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

That report estimated that as many as 400 million people could be at risk—and this is a disease that already kills one million people per year.

 But the science on this subject has never been so clear cut. MS Office 2007 Professional is such a good assistant of the office.

If you look at what the IPCC concluded in the “human health” chapter of its 2007 report, there was a lot of hedging: MS Office 2007 Ultimate give you more great experience than anything.

Despite the known causal links between climate and malaria transmission dynamics, there is still much uncertainty about the potential impact of climate change on malaria at local and global scales, because of the paucity of concurrent detailed historical observations of climate and malaria, the complexity of malaria disease dynamics, and the importance of non-climatic factors, including socio-economic development, immunity and drug resistance, in determining infection and infection outcomes.

In other words, yes, changes in humidity and temperature can affect the travel patterns of mosquitoes, but there are so many other social factors at work—from access to health care to prevention strategies—that it’s never so simple. And, in fact, there’s a new study out in Nature by Oxford’s Peter Gething that concludes that, over the past century, we’ve been able to fight malaria much, much faster than a warming climate has been able to spread it around, and there’s plenty of reason to think that will continue to be the case: MS Office 2007 can give people more surprise ever.

First, widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.

Second, the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures.

That’s certainly good news. Though two caveats: One, as Kevin Lafferty of the U.S. Geological Survey points out, climate change will still help malaria spread into new areas, even as the overall global picture improves. So it will still create plenty of headaches for public health authorities.

Kevin Drum asks why China’s visitors are invariably blown away by the changes taking place in the country: “China is big on a macro scale. It’s big on a statistical scale. It’s growing fast. But on a ground level scale? It’s just a place. It’s no bigger or denser or busier than lots of other places. So why is everyone always so awe-stricken about it?” Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

Having been in China for a few days, I’d say the size of the place is less impressive than the sheer rate of change. I last visited Shanghai in the early ’90s and for the most part it was a sleepy, slightly dreary city surrounded by lots of bland farmland, a place where everyone piddled around in bicycles. Now? It’s a full-blown metropolis, decked out in blazing neon, and the downtown is, in many respects, indistinguishable from a place like Tokyo. All that farmland is now paved over by dense city. And that all happened in a tiny span of about 15 years. Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

Another example: Earlier today we visited the Xi’an High-Tech Development Zone in Shaanxi Province. Xi’an itself isn’t all that staggering; it’s a city about the size of Chicago. Fine. But the development zone—a sort of Silicon Valley-esque hub on the edge of the city—is impressive to consider. This is an area that didn’t exist at all in the early ’90s, and is now home to some 480,000 people, thick groves of high-rise residential buildings, sprawling office parks, the works. We’re talking about a city the size of Milwaukee that sprung up out of nowhere in less than two decades. Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.

And it’s still swelling: Walk down any street, spin around 360 degrees, and there are giant cranes in every direction, hauling up (literally) hundreds of new 30- and 40-story skyscrapers. It’s almost like watching one of those fast-motion Discovery Channel videos of an oak tree climbing up out of the ground. Maybe the only real comparable change in the United States over the past decade has been the evolution of the Internet. Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

In its dollar magnitude, it’s almost certainly the biggest case of financial mismanagement in U.S. history. While a final tally is years away, in part because of suspiciously lost or missing documents, there’s good reason to think that the dollar figures will dwarf WorldCom’s $9 billion. It’s a scandal that crosses partisan lines and reaches into high levels of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. And it’s got nothing to do with Wall Street. Microsoft Office 2007  is welcomed by the whole world.

The shameful mishandling by the federal government of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund–created to manage the proceeds from leases of Indian land–encompasses 300,000 accounts and 56 million acres, spans more than 100 years, and involves amounts of money estimated at between 10 and 100 billion dollars. MS Office 2007 can give people more surprise ever.

The class-action lawsuit Indian landowners have filed against the Department of Interior–currently named Cobell v. Norton–has been going on for nearly seven years, though knowledge of trust-fund mismanagement dates back much further than that. Robert Rubin, Bruce Babbitt, and Gale Norton, along with assorted deputies, have all been held in contempt of court by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. And yet, thanks to a combination of convoluted detail, media bias, and ideological blindness, most Americans have never even heard about it.

In 1887, thanks to the Dawes Act, tribal lands were broken up into individual lots (the policy was known as “allotment”) and assigned to individual Indians as property. Quickbooks 2010 is another huge development in the world.

This was done in a combination of good and bad faith. Since the Founding there had been many in the American government–prominently including Thomas Jefferson–who wanted to encourage Indians to take up individual landownership as a way of increasing Indian agriculture and wealth. But, on the frontier, allotment was chiefly understood as a way to make it easier for outsiders to buy Indian lands at bargain prices.

Having carved up the land, the federal government took the authority to grant resource leases on those new lots–leasing out mining, drilling, and lumbering rights without the consent of the new landowners, who were presumed to be incapable of managing such affairs themselves. (That, and they might have had an inconvenient lack of interest in granting the leases at all.) The royalties from those leases were–and are–collected by the government. Quickbooks Pro 2010—many people love the software very much.

They are supposed to be paid into the relevant IIM accounts, and then paid out to individual Indians on a regular basis. The money at stake, in short, isn’t government revenue. The government claims to be operating as a trustee, and to be administering a trust fund on behalf of Indian landowners.

The federal government–specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the Department of Interior–has botched that task hopelessly for decades and admits it can’t begin to provide an accurate historical accounting of who has or hasn’t been paid what they’re owed. Office 2007 Pro is great! Many people like it!

It appears that for most of the trust fund’s history, there was scarcely even a pretense of running it according to principles of fiduciary responsibility: Some checks came in, some checks went out. Where there should be records, there are none.