Spain is getting the vast majority of its electricity from carbon-free sources, the country’s grid operator reported on Tuesday.

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Americans who are benefiting from lower gas prices could see some food prices fall, especially dairy and meat products, but the rate of decline will be at a far-slower pace than the recent plunge in the price of gasoline, commodity traders and insiders say.

Just six months ago, oil prices were well above $100 a barrel, partially as a result of unrest in Iraq and fears of supply interruptions. Now, as the U.S. may supersede Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer, concerns over world economic growth (outside of the U.S. economy, which actually appears to be breaking out of a sub-par recovery) oil prices have plunged. West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices for the week ending Jan. 26, 2015, fell to $45.15 a barrel, down 53% from a year ago.

As a result, gasoline prices nationally have fallen 38% from the same period last year, down $1.25 on average, to $2.04 a gallon, for the week ending Jan. 26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Farmers and ranchers benefiting from declining prices for fuel could lower the prices for commodity food items such as milk, eggs, pork and beef, just not right away or commensurate with the fall of gas, said Patrick Sullivan, a commodity trader at Great Lakes Trading Co., in Warsaw, Ind. “It could take a while to trickle through but we could see some lower food prices in six to eight months,” Sullivan said. “If fuel stays where it’s at, it will lower costs of farmers’ production and that could adjust everything down,” he said.
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WASHINGTON — With millions of households across the country struggling to have enough to eat, and millions of tons of food being tossed in the garbage, food waste is increasingly being seen as a serious environmental and economic issue.

A report released Wednesday shows that about 60 million metric tons of food is wasted a year in the United States, with an estimated value of $162 billion. About 32 million metric tons of it end up in municipal landfills, at a cost of about $1.5 billion a year to local governments.

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The report estimates that a third of all the food produced in the world is never consumed, and the total cost of that food waste could be as high as $400 billion a year. Reducing food waste from 20 to 50 percent globally could save $120 billion to $300 billion a year by 2030, the report found.

“Food waste is a global issue, and tackling it is a priority,” said Richard Swannell, director of sustainable food systems at the Waste and Resources Action Program, or Wrap, an antiwaste organization in Britain that compiled the new report. “The difficulty is often in knowing where to start and how to make the biggest economic and environmental savings.”
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Food waste is costing the global economy billions each year, and governments should act quickly to reduce it if they want to save money and scale back their carbon emissions, according to a new report.

The report, published this week by the U.K.-based Waste & Resources Action Program (WRAP), found that if countries made a point of reducing their food waste, the globe could save a total of $120 to $300 billion each year by 2030. Globally, the report states, a third of all food is wasted, an amount that totals $400 billion each year. And that value will only go up, the report warns — if estimates that the world’s middle class will double by 2030 pan out, the yearly value of food waste could increase to $600 billion.

That’s bad news for the environment. In its report, WRAP looked at the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food waste in the U.K., and found that each metric ton of food that’s wasted in the U.K. is associated with 4.0 to 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Previous reports have also found food waste to be a significant factor in global greenhouse gas emissions: in 2013, a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization found that, if global food waste was a country, it would be the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

“Reducing food waste is good for the economy and good for the climate,” Helen Mountford, Global Program Director for the New Climate Economy, said in a statement for WRAP. “These findings should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers around the world.”
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Now here is a novel method to make sure that robots are able to help us out in our lives, making it better through the use of automation technology in order to write its earnings reports. In fact, The Associated Press (AP) claims to have generated 3,000 stories each quarter, which is ten times its previous output. This particular nugget of information hails from Automated Insights, which is the company behind the automation. Apart from that, it is said that these robot-generated stories also carried a whole lot less errors in comparison to the ones written by actual journalists.

The Associated Press started to publish earnings reports with the help of automation technology in July for various companies that include, but are not limited to, Hasbro Inc., Honeywell International Inc. and GE. Each of those stories do come with the addendum which reads, “This story was generated automatically by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Full GE report: http://www.zacks.com/ap/GE.”

In such stories, there are descriptions of individual businesses that contain “forward-looking guidance provided by the companies.” It does seem as though the news cooperative’s customers have been pleased as punch to receive more stories, and such automation has allowed reporters to have more time on their hands to handle the tougher assignments. Not only that, there has been no job cuts resulting from the automated earnings reports. Image courtesy of All Len All.

If Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks wanted to send a message to congressional Democrats with a "symbolic" withholding of donations, they can rest assured it was heard — but not in the way they intended.

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"That kind of swagger is a warning shot," Warren wrote to her supporters. "They want a showy way to tell Democrats across the country to be scared of speaking out, to be timid about standing up, and to stay away from fighting for what's right."

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"Let's send the biggest banks on Wall Street our own message," Warren said in her fundraising appeal last week. "We're going to keep fighting, and your swagger and your threats won't stop us."

Speaking in New York on Monday, Warren drove home the point again in the lions' den.

"You bet I believe it's a serious threat," Warren said of the banks' effort to sway the debate.[font size="+1"] "I got news for them: Bring it on."[/font]
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