I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A U.S. Dept. of Agriculture program that pays up to $45 per ton to companies that bring wood waste to energy facilities could end up hurting the businesses that use wood waste to make products such as particle board and furniture, the Washington Post reports.
Though many renewable materials can be converted into energy, very little land is devoted to production of biomass crops, and federal biomass incentives encourage sawmills and lumber companies to send their wood shavings and sawdust to energy companies.
The biomass subsidy program could “wipe us out,” said T.J. Rosengarth, the vice president and chief operating officer of Flakeboard, the largest composite panel producer in North America. “You can say, ‘I’ve made more alternative energy,’ but at what expense?”
The much larger pulp, paper, packaging and wood products industry, which ranks among the top 10 manufacturing employers in 48 states, is just as worried. The American Forest and Paper Association sent a letter to OMB on Oct. 27 warning that the biomass program “could have the unintended consequence of jeopardizing the forest products industry and the many jobs it sustains, as well as the significant quantities of renewable energy it produces.”
Michigan currently has six biomass energy plants, and several more have been proposed since Michigan passed energy legislation requiring utilities to get 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2015.
In December the state Department of Environmental Quality issued an air permit for a 10 megawatt wood-fired biomass power plant at Northern Michigan University in Marquette.
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