On saturday, March 29, 2008, around the globe, people acknowledge Earth Hour by turning off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. Cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, hold events to display their commitment to energy conservation.

It seems a striking/alarming coincidence that several major GMO seed manufacturers have joined hands with the Gates foundation to create a doomsday seed vault while other GMO giants are promoting monstrosities like "Roundup Ready" crop seeds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault located in a mountain near Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen in the remote Svalbard island group of Norway is constructed with meter thick steel reinforced concrete walls and double blast-proof doors, and will contain up to three million varieties of seeds from around the world, "so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future," according to the Norwegian government. While gene giants like Du Pont/Pioneer Hi-Bred and Syngenta join the Norwegian government and major sponsors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR in funding the vault, Monsanto is busy promoting what is being called "Roundup Ready" seedstock touted to farmers as using Roundup as “the only weed control you’ll ever need.” According to University of California Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology J. B. Neilands, “the quantities of Roundup Monsanto is planning to apply to their proprietary Roundup Ready cultivars humbles the imagination.” The levels of Roundup used on Roundup Ready crops was noted to create Roundup residues in crops so greatly exceeding the allowable limits that the FDA tripled the allowable limits. Glossy brochures urging farmers to use Roundup Ready seedstock boast of "clean fields" - clean of anything but the chosen crop, and practically devoid of any other lifeforms - read dead soil.

In search of an answer to the enormous potential threat of losing the American domestic honeybee population in the near future, scientists have discovered that many of the bees studied were suffering an assortment of disorders, pointing towards a general weakening of the bees ability to fight-off disease. No definitive source has been named as the main cause for the bees weakened condition.

28 years after Popular Science Magazine featured this idea for creating "green power", Sea-Wave Generated Electricity is currently emerging as mega-serious investment. Two large-scale power plants are now proposed off the Mendocino Coast by two big players involved in the issue globally — Chevron and PG&E.
The milestone effort to responsibly determine jurisdiction over this vast resource has summoned such notables as activist George Reinhardt of Fort Bragg, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which asserts that it is far better equipped to protect the interests of the ocean than a regulatory agency like FERC. PG&E's filing off Fort Bragg, and an application by Chevron for a wave energy plant off Mendocino represent legal claims to develop those waters.

1. Agency filing: PG&E
   Date filed: Feb. 27, 2007
   Buildout: 4 megawatts in first stage, up to 40 megawatts in second
   Study area: Off Fort Bragg and reaching north; an area 17 miles north to south by 4 miles wide, starting about one half mile offshore
2. Agency filing preliminary FERC permit application: Chevron California Renewables
   Date filed: July 2, 2007
   Buildout: 2 to 60 megawatts
   Study area: Off the town of Mendocino, north to Point Cabrillo, south to a point halfway between Little River and Albion, about one half mile from shore to 3 miles offshore.

According to the current popular scientific theory, winds create currents which cause an upwelling of nutrient-rich oxygen-poor water from a huge reservoir deep in the ocean. The increase in nutrients creates a rapid increase in plankton organisms whose dead then fall to the near ocean floor to be consumed by bacteria which further deplete the oxygen level during their metabolic processes. The dead zone in Oregon is located between the towns of Newport and Florence, and is now 4 times the size it was when first detected in 2002 and involves an area of approximately 1,235 square miles. Another dead zone appears to exist between Kalaloch and Westport, Washington, with tribal fisheries noting massive fish die-offs on the beaches. Dead crabs are being reported on the beaches stretching between both zones. Oxygen levels in the Oregon dead zone have been measured by Oregon State University researchers. Their results showed oxygen levels as low as 0.55 milliliters per liter at 180 feet and 1 milliliter per liter at 45 feet deep. Levels below 1.4 milliliters per liter are considered hypoxic and deadly to many fish, crabs, and other marine organisms. According to a recent 4 year study of the world's oceans published in the journal Science, by 2050 there may be no fish, prawns, crabs, or other wild sea creatures left to eat.

According to AP: as of December 2007, the U.S. government is now straining just to pay the interest on the national debt which stands at $9.13 trillion, that's 9,130 Billion Dollars, up $3.43 Trillion from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001. 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion. In other words, by end of 2007, President Bush Jr. added more to the national debt during his term in office than both his father and Bill Clinton combined.

As U.S. war spending continues to rise, one author, David Swanson gives a comprehensive analysis of the complex multibranched stream of dollars flowing to the US war machine.

Various population studies for 2006 state that approximately 35,813,305 people in The United States of America, or 12%, live below the poverty line. The funds appropriated for the Iraq war in fiscal year 2007 could have provided a life improving $90 per week for each man, woman, and child living under the poverty line if disbursed directly. Though not a large sum of money, this is almost 4 times the monthly allotment given for food stamps, and enough to cover average rental expenses for a living space in most areas. Therefore; this money which is, as most experts attest, being thrown away on a lost cause could serve to IMPROVE THE LIVING STANDARDS OF ALL THE POOR IN AMERICA!

Looming petroleum costs will most likely have the effect of forcing the nations most affected into hastening their development of alternative energy resources and technology. And, in the end, without a radical departure from the policies currently in effect, the United States may be destined to become a dinosaur, left bankrupted by enormous war spending and without a forseeable economic means of extracting itself from its own predeterminedand global irrelevancy.

At the 2007, 23rd Electric Vehicle Symposium and Exposition (EVS-23) in Anaheim, Calif., Exxon Mobil will unveiled a super-thin plastic sheeting the company says can improve the power, safety and reliability of lithium-ion batteries for use in automobiles.

• Whaddya Think You're Doin?
• Deckside Cruisin' - original jazz guitar instrumental by M.K.