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NBC and ABC each filed follow-up explainer features to elucidate a pair of widely-covered stories. For ABC's Kitchen Table series, Betsy Stark looked into why it is usually hollow advice for homeowners that they should renegotiate mortgage loans to forestall foreclosure. On NBC's In Depth, Anne Thompson debunked the idea that biofuels, such as ethanol, reduce levels of greenhouse carbon in the atmosphere.
NBC's Thompson picked up on studies in the journal Science that clearing land for agriculture to grow crops for biofuels removes "nature's carbon absorbers, soil, trees, shrubs, grasses." In Indonesia and Malaysia, land is cleared so that palms can be planted for biofuels; in Brazil, soybeans and sugar canes; in the midwest of this country, corn.
ABC's Stark called it "mystifying" that homeowners are told to contact their lenders at the first sign of payment trouble: "Mortgage servicers are the front line in the homeowner's quest for help. They are the middleman who sends out monthly bills and processes payments." Yet the servicers are not only "undertrained and overwhelmed," they actually have an incentive not to help, since late fees and default fees are a prime source of revenue.
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