More than a movie, HOME is a major event all over the globe : for the first time ever, a film will be released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format : movie theatres, TV, DVD and Internet.

HOME official website, www.home-2009.com.
PPR is proud to support HOME, www.ppr.com.
HOME is a carbon offset movie, www.actioncarbone.org.
More information about the Planet, www.goodplanet.info.

Watch the FULL film on YouTube.

What will happen to your drinking water?

The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly “sustainable” practice, he has piggybacked this water project onto a windmill project pitched as an alternative to oil.

Pickens’ scheme is a perfect demonstration of why it’s worth asking cui bono — who benefits — from regulatory and environmental initiatives. Last week, this column pointed out that Pickens, before his current lobbying blitz for increased federal support of wind power, built the largest wind farm in the world.

I received dozens of responses from environmentalists and Pickens fans objecting to my implication that Pickens’ profit from expanding wind subsidies ought to cast suspicion on his call for more wind subsidies. “Why should I care if someone’s getting rich?” was the general gist, “windmills are good, and we need more of them.”

This objection is grounded in a good instinct: The profit motive, far from being evil, is the driving force behind most of our society’s advances. But, especially when it comes to government plans involving your tax dollars, asking cui bono helps us unearth less desirable aspects of the scheme.

Amid all the hype Pickens’ windmill plan has gotten, the interesting part — the water part — has been mostly ignored, except for an excellent Business Week story by Susan Berfield and a column by Steve Milloy.

Roberts County, Texas, sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir that stretches all the way to South Dakota. It’s in Roberts County that T. Boone Pickens set aside eight acres from his ranch for drilling deep into the aquifer.

Then he turned this parcel into a town, basically, with only two eligible voters — both of whom were his employees. (This required a change in Texas law in 2007 — a change facilitated no doubt by his $1.2 million in campaign contributions to Texas legislators in 2006).
Then there was an election in this district, in which both voters voted to make this 8-acre municipality a special fresh-water district. – Read the rest of the article here.