Image: www.gonatgas.com

Natural gas exec Murry Gerber and his wife are taking a cross-country trip in a natural-gas-powered Hummer H3 to tout the fuel - and rip on electric and compact cars along the way.

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A Pittsburgh natural-gas exec and his wife will donate $2,500 to a central Phoenix school on Friday as part of their cross-country trip in an alternative-fuel-powered Hummer H3, which they say pollutes less than a Smart Car.

Murry Gerber served as CEO for EQT, a major natural-gas producer in Pennsylvania, for 12 years, boosting the company's value for shareholders by a devilishly good 666 percent during his tenure, according to a 2010 Pittsburgh business news site. Now he's promoting the compressed version of the gas as an alternative to gasoline while on the road trip with his wife, Cindy.

If you'll recall, Arizona had an up-close-and-personal experience with natural gas for vehicles about 10 years ago: The financial disaster known as the Alt-Fuel Fiasco. The debacle stymied interest in alternative-fuel-powered cars here for years, but the problem wasn't due just to the unaffordable state subsidies given to vehicle buyers. As we noted in our 2008 article about alternative fuels, various problems with the alt-fuels and the alt-fuel industry have meant that consumers (including government and business vehicle fleets) have been moving away from, not toward, them.

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Image: www.azbordertrash.gov

The state has launched a new Web site to bring attention to the trash dumped by border crossers in southern Arizona.

​A new Web site launched by the state of Arizona emphasizes the problem of litter from illegal border crossers and seeks volunteers for cleanups.

AzBorderTrash.gov was funded by state and federal money, according to the site, leaving one of our Facebook friends to wonder why Arizona considers trash-dumping by illegal immigrants to be more important than dumping by citizens.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, which manages the new site, has Web pages devoted to illegal dumping in general, but nothing with its own domain name, like the border-trash site.

True, illegal dumping is a major problem everywhere in the state, says Mark Schaffer, spokesman for ADEQ. But the Border Trash site was an initiative from the Governor's office.

With Governor Jan Brewer at the helm, signer of the infamous "papers, please" law, no further explanation is needed. Illegal immigration is her defining issue.

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​Hundreds of people called Maricopa County this year to complain about people violating restrictions on wood-burning.

Despite the Valley's ongoing problem with bad air, though, those calls resulted in almost no action by the county.

The county's Air Quality Department announced 11 no-burn days in 2010, and received 559 complaints based on those days, says Cari Gerchick, county spokeswoman.

In response, the county issued a grand total of four notices of violation.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

​Nobody can label the folks over at Maricopa County's Air Quality Department a bunch of Scrooges.

After a warning last week that no-burn days on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day would be enforced, exactly zero warnings and citations were issued, a county official says.

Oddly, all this non-enforcement happened despite the efforts of teams of inspectors. The county dispatched four inspectors and a supervisor on Friday and five inspectors and a supervisor on Saturday to look for violations.

You'd think even Inspector Clouseau could handle the job: You just look for smoke coming out of chimneys.

But from the sound of it, these crack teams from the county only added to the pollution problem by driving all over the Valley, doing nothing.

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www.bigoo.ws

This type of behavior will not be tolerated at the new Chandler City Hall.

​If you see a toilet in Chandler's new City Hall, fight the urge and don't drink from it. Seems fairly obvious, but if you forget, the city's been kind enough to post signs as a reminder.

In almost every bathroom in the new, uber-"green" facility are signs saying "Urinals and Toilets are served with gray water. Do Not Drink."

Check out a photo of the new signs -- compliments of Arizona IndyMedia -- after the jump

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www.solarnavigator.com

​In the past week, two judges have ruled against the Green and Democratic parties' requests to have several Green Party candidates removed from the November ballot.

The two parties feel the candidates are "sham" candidates getting used by Republicans to lure liberal voters away from voting for Democrats.

Some of those candidates reportedly are homeless people, who were recruited by ex-candidate Steve May and Representative Jim Weiers, and some switched party affiliation to the Green Party just days before the deadline to file as write-in candidates.


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www.solarnavigator.com

​Green Party candidates -- who the New York Times claims are "homeless" and who were dubbed by Arizona's Green Party as "sham" candidates -- can remain on the November ballot as the party's nominees for several offices, a federal judge ruled.

 

This despite complaints that they're being used by Republicans to lure liberal voters away from voting for Democrats.

U.S. District Court Judge David G. Campbell ruled last night that the nine candidates in question can remain on the ballot as Green Party candidates for the November election.

 

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Image: Ray Stern

SRP released 217 billion gallons of water through the Town Lake from January to May due to excessive rain and snowmelt

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This is a desert. Nobody likes to see a billion gallons of water flushed down a hole in the middle of summer, which is what happened July 20 after one Tempe Town Lake's inflatable dams popped.

But let's keep this in perspective, folks -- something today's Arizona Republic article about refilling the Town Lake does not do.

Nowhere in the article is it acknowledged that our nice, wet winter this year delivered waaaaay too much water for our manmade reservoirs to hold. The overabundance meant SRP, which controls the reservoirs (the main one being Roosevelt lake), had to release megatons of water over the dams.

From mid-January to late May, more than 668,000 acre-feet of water was released, says the utility. An acre-foot contains 325,851 gallons.

Doing the math, we find that more than 217 Town Lakes worth of water spilled down the Salt River bed in those few months.

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​One of the principals behind a company that claims to be bringing a 175-megawatt solar plant to southern Arizona was accused in the 1980s of running a bogus gold-mining scheme.

Christopher E. Pannos, one of his brothers, James, and two other people were among those charged by the Federal Trade Commission in 1988 of misrepresenting barren desert north of Phoenix as a rich gold deposit.

Now Pannos is coming back to Arizona with a different brother and a whole new set of amazing claims.

Pannos' Las Vegas company, Matinee Energy, is reportedly teaming up to build two large solar plants with the world's largest shipbuilder, Hyundai Heavy. We were among the first to report on the deal, inked in New York City last week, and have been trying to learn more ever since.

Today we talked with Chris Connell, a vice president with Matinee, who tried to assure us that everything is on the up-and-up. 

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Maricopa County is celebrating Earth Hour this year by shutting off "non-essential" lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday.

We decided to spend part of our Friday afternoon bugging county officials about this feel-good event, because our past research shows it typically costs governments and big companies more than it saves -- in other words, it's just more wasted energy.

Richard de Uriarte, the county spokesman who sent out the news release on the event, couldn't tell us much about it.

Facilities Management Director Janet Palacino had no idea how much the event would cost the county, or who authorized it.

Finally, we reached Jonce Walker, the county's sustainability manager, who told us that Facilities Management signed off on the project. 

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