Coyote Blog

Via Maggies Farm

Related:  the total BS that is the Volt’s 230 mpg rating.

One of the points I make in my climate lectures – global warming panic has sucked the life out of environmental concerns that matter.  Illustration – US sewage plants still making massive untreated dumps.

I know this might sound retro to some readers. But we need to finish what the early 1970s environmental pollution control laws set out to do: clean up all the sources of air and water pollution. The environmental movement has run out of steam and gotten distracted. Get back to the basics.

Agreed.  Another point I often make – we don’t know how to keep growing China without creating CO2, but we do know how to grow China without making the air in cities like Beijing breathable.  Instead of talking to them about CO2 capture, what about air pollution 101 type things like ash bags and exhaust scrubbing?

And while I am on the topic, do we have to keep destroying the Amazon just to clear land to grow more plants for ethanol that in the end does nothing to abate CO2 emissions?

The first thing I do when I buy a shower head is make sure that the design has a flow restrictor ring (put in to comply with US law) that can be removed.  First thing I do after I buy a shower head is remove the ring.

If they want me to use less water, then raise the price beyond the ridiculously low prices we have now, prices that clearly do not match supply with demand.  It is not we consumers in Arizona that are draining Lake Powell, it is politicians who price water below any kind of reasonable supply/demand clearing price to gain some incremental love at the ballot box  (also, politicians prefer command and control legislation of the shower head variety to allowing the price mechanism to work automatically).  More here.

I often conclude my presentations on climate that conservationists will likely look back in 10-20 years on the global warming hysteria as the worst thing that has ever happened to the environmental movement.  While we focus 110% of our attention on a trace, naturally occurring atmospheric gas that our bodies exhale and plants need to live, here is what we are not focusing on.

All the problems in these pictures are ones we demonstrably know how to solve while still allowing for the economic growth that is pulling a billion Asians our of poverty.  The same cannot be said for our current ability to eliminate CO2, and therefore most combustion, without imploding our economy.

This was sent to me by a reader, something called the “Environmental Justice Small Grants Program.”  Over the last 20 years, socialists who realized their message wasn’t selling anymore remarketed themselves under the green “global warming” banner.  Coincidentally, all the exact same things socialists wanted 20 years ago are what we need to do to fight global warming.

It appears that ACORN may be getting a second life using this same strategy.  I can’t bear to read all this leftish public policy psychobabble in the document, but did note this early on:

The primary purposes of proposed projects should be to develop an understanding of environmental and public health issues and to identify ways to address these issues at the local level, and educate and empower the community. The long-term goals of the EJSG Program are to help build the capacity of the communities with environmental justice concerns and create self-sustaining, community-based partnerships that will continue to improve local environments in the future.

There is a well-established scientific consensus that climate change will cause disproportionate impacts upon vulnerable populations. [1] Thus, the program is adding emphasis this year on addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change in communities with environmental justice concerns. The goal is to recognize the critical role of grassroots efforts in helping shape climate change strategies to avoid, lessen, or delay the risks and impacts associated with climate change. An overarching goal of including this emphasis is to help increase the number of underrepresented communities and ensure equitable green economic development in ways that build healthy sustainable communities.

This translates to “we have found a way to hand out government money to leftish groups like ACORN to do things that are impossible to measure and thus bear little accountability by calling it all “Green.”

By the way, the little footnote to prove the statement above is this:

[1]  As stated in the Technical Support Document for the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (April 2009), “Within settlements experiencing climate change, certain parts of the population may be especially vulnerable; these include the poor, the elderly, those already in poor health, the disabled, those living alone, those with limited rights and power (such as recent immigrants with limited English skills), and/or indigenous populations dependent on one or a few resources. Thus, the potential impacts of climate change raise environmental justice issues.”

Given that cap-and-trade is almost certainly going to impose a very large regressive tax disproportionately on the poor, I wonder why no one ever discusses environmental-solution justice issues?  Maybe it really has nothing to do with the poor, but just with power.

Tom Nelson has a pretty funny set of articles on the White House vegetable garden.    Michelle Obama told a group of kids it only cost $180.  Tom links a variety of videos and articles showing:

• Five NPS workers digging in the garden, with a tractor, tiller, and hand tools.
• A job posting for a college grad for the position of “White House Farmer.”
• A job description of an assistant White House chef who currently overseas the garden.

Farming is cheap if the serfs (ie US citizens) provide all the labor and equipment for free.

Via the AZ Republic, the excepting of which will probably bring in all kinds of spam code into this post no matter how hard I try to get rid of it:

Arizona wildlife officials are investigating the shooting death of a prairie dog in southern Arizona.

Apparently the state is irritated because this prairie dog was brought to the state as part of a program to bring more plague-infested nuisance rodents onto our land – on purpose!

The prairie dog was one of more than 100 transported from New Mexico in October 2008 in hopes of reintroducing the indigenous species to southern Arizona.

The treaty draft is really hard to read, as it has all kinds of alternate language in brackets.  However, a few folks have already started reviewing the treaty, and what they are finding is less of a climate treaty and more of a blueprint for world socialism.  One example, via Anthony Watt, from page 122 of the draft:

17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:]
(a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;
(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.

Compensating for “lost opportunities?” Isn’t that number just whatever they want it to be? And don’t get me started on lost “dignity.”

I remember the fuss a number of years ago that a disproportionate number of heavily polluting industrial plants were in poorer neighborhoods.  I suppose it is no surprise that companies look to site plants where there are large labor forces and cheap land, which probably means that they are not going to buy of large swaths of Grosse Pointe for their new auto plant.  But there also seemed to be some chicken and egg here – residential land around industrial tracts probably attract residents who can’t afford to live somewhere else.

Anyway, I had never realized just how destructive public policy had become in response to this “problem,” nor how much our current climate czar had to do with it:

Case in point is “Climate Czar” Carol Browner, former EPA chief under Bill Clinton and ghostwriter of Al Gore’s apocalyptic book Earth in the Balance. In the late 1990s, Browner championed the effort to apply Title VII U.S. civil rights law to plant permitting, arguing that locating industrial facilities in majority black cities “disproportionately impacted” minorities and was there “environmental racism.”The policy provoked outrage among those black elected officials across the country who believe it’s a good thing to have jobs available in minority areas.

Some of those officials were in Michigan, where Browner’s green allies tried to use EPA rules to shut down electric power facilities and auto plants. At the time, Browner had already bagged the pelts of two major facilities in Louisiana — a plastics plant and nuclear fuel facility — that would have brought hundreds of jobs to minorities.

As can be expected, African-American politicians who were told it was racist to locate jobs in their communities were not amused:

Horrified by this threat to jobs within poor communities, Detroit mayor Dennis Archer led the primarily Democratic U.S. Conference of Mayors to scrap “green redlining” — so called because the EPA actually drew circles around plants located in minority areas that would encourage lawsuits. The mayors were joined by a rainbow coalition of groups from the National Association of Black County Officials to Republican pols like L.A.’s Richard Riordan and Michigan Rep. Joe Knollenberg.

Addressing the Black Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, then-U.S. Chamber president Thomas Donahue said: “I’m trying to think of a policy that would be more effective in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas — and I can’t do it.”

Apparently, the whole to-do was BS anyway

Mastio’s News investigation further uncovered that Browner’s EPA had suppressed documents finding that there was not a corporate conspiracy to locate polluting industries in black areas (in fact, they are mostly in white areas), and the bipartisan outrage eventually led to a Congressional vote blocking the EPA rule.

The answer is:  Just about everyone who was not in the tank for the Obama Administration predicted this (from my Princeton classmate Henry Payne):

When Congress gave away $3 billion for buyers to trade in their “clunkers” and buy new cars in August, lawmakers thrilled as buyers swamped showrooms to take advantage of the big discounts. “Cash for clunkers has captured the public’s attention . . . (it) has the possibility to truly jumpstart our economy,” said Rep. Candice Miller (R., Mich.). Other, more sober analysts, warned that the clunkers program was only stealing from future sales.

September sales are in, and sobriety can take a bow.

Edmunds.com reports that “September’s light-vehicle sales rate will fall to 8.8 million units . . . the lowest rate in nearly 28 years, tying the worst demand on record. After the cash-for-clunkers program boosted August sales to their first year-over-year increase since October 2007, demand has plunged. In at least the last 33 years, the U.S. seasonally adjusted annual rate has only dropped as low as 8.8 million units once — in December 1981 — with records stretching back to January 1976.”

The real popularity of the program was always due to the fact that the government was throwing money away and people rushed to pick it up.  Edwards.com estimated the Feds purchased vehicles with average blue book values of just under $1500 for $3500 to $4500.  That means that the government purchased cars that blue booked at just over a billion dollars for three billion.  I you suddenly offered to buy all of your neighbors’ cars for three times what they were worth, you’d be popular too.   It was a $2 billion giveaway, and people rushed to pick the cash up like one of those money drops in the outfield of a minor league baseball game.  In doing so, the government made a trivial change in the overall fleet fuel economy, in the process overpaying for Co2 reduction by a factor of 20.

Update: The study linked above shows the government paying over $400 per ton of Co2 reduced in the Clunkers program.  The 20x factor cited was based on an estimated clearing price of a tone of Co2 in a future cap and trade system.  This is hypothetical, as currently a ton of Co2 offsets trades right now in the US at 20 cents.  At this price, the program overpaid by a factor of 2000.  To be fair, this reflects both estimated pricing as well as a discount for the likelihood of a cap and trade bill passing.

The World Wildlife Fund made an ad showing hundreds of planes zeroing in on the World Trade Center to highlight…um…I’m not sure what.  Somehow this is linked with tsunamis and pandas, but most of the world has just linked it with the WWF being idiots.   Print and video ad shown at the link.

The post title refers to this.

Sometimes, greens and organic-proponents act as if the only point of chemicals is to … uh… I don’t know what they think.  They act as if the chemicals are added simply as an evil conspiracy by corporate America to both make the product less efficacious and simultaneously more expensive and complex to make.  Somehow this behavior is all driven by the profit motive, though the logic sort of escapes me.

Well, at least one green seems to be starting on a voyage of discovery:

Good news and bad news at the dentist this morning. The good news is, my teeth are fine. The bad news is, the dentist told me I should give up Tom’s of Maine and Nature’s Gate in favor of Crest and Colgate.

I pressed him on it because I know sometimes people have knee-jerk reactions about green products, and he insisted that he’s only come to the conclusion after observing many people’s teeth. In fact, he went so far as to say that I’d be better off brushing my teeth with just water. He said the big C’s of dental care have “lots of artificial ingredients in them that are great for your teeth.”

Really?   I am sure that if we get Obamacare the government will be willing to provide him some Tom’s of Maine all natural homeopathic cancer remedy should he ever contract that dreaded disease.  What?  Don’t tell me homeopathic remedies with one molecule of active ingredient in a glass of water don’t work either.

In case you weren’t sure what progressives were after:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has issued a call for the suppression of economic growth in the U.S. and Western nations. Under questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the August 5, 2009 “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said “the lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model.

Excerpt from NotEvilJustWrong.com: “Leipold told the BBC that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.”

“We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold told the BBC.

“If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary,” Leipold explained.

Left unexplained by Leipold is how environmental conditions in the US have improved substantially over the last 100 years, not just coincident with but because of economic growth and growing wealth.   Our country looked like China 100 years ago, but growing wealth gave us the ability not only to produce, but to produce much more cleanly.   On virtually every metric you can name, the US is cleaner than it was even 30 years ago.  On many key metrics, like water quality and sulfur dioxide production, we are cleaner even than Europe and certainly cleaner than most Third World nations.

By the way, if you really want to tick someone off at Greenpeace, you should observe that the person most responsible for saving the whales was not anyone at Greenpeace, but was John D. Rockefeller.  Greenpeace may have saved a few by jumping their boat in front of some Japanese or Russian harpoons, but Rockefeller made whaling unprofitable.

Which brings us full circle to the “growth killing the planet” issue.  I made fun of this static view of man and technology here when  I wrote a hypothetical 1870 post on the Peak Whale Theory

As the US Population reaches toward the astronomical total of 40 million persons, we are reaching the limits of the number of people this earth can support.    If one were to extrapolate current population growth rates, this country in a hundred years could have over 250 million people in it!  Now of course, that figure is impossible – the farmland of this country couldn’t possibly support even half this number.  But it is interesting to consider the environmental consequences.

Take the issue of transportation.  Currently there are over 11 million horses in this country, the feeding and care of which constitute a significant part of our economy.  A population of 250 million would imply the need for nearly 70 million horses in this country, and this is even before one considers the fact that “horse intensity”, or the average number of horses per family, has been increasing steadily over the last several decades.  It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that so many people might need 100 million horses to fulfill all their transportation needs.  There is just no way this admittedly bountiful nation could support 100 million horses.  The disposal of their manure alone would create an environmental problem of unprecedented magnitude.

Or, take the case of illuminant.  As the population grows, the demand for illuminant should grow at least as quickly.  However, whale catches and therefore whale oil supply has leveled off of late, such that many are talking about the “peak whale” phenomena, which refers to the theory that whale oil production may have already passed its peak.  250 million people would use up the entire supply of the world’s whales four or five times over, leaving none for poorer nations of the world.

Post title from here (lyrics here)

I almost never publish links posts.  But I was really stuck when I read Radley Balko’s Saturday Morning Links post because every one was awesome.  Balko is not only one of the best bloggers out there, but a great journalist as well in a field of us pundits who put on pretensions of being pajama-clad investigators.  So here are all of his morning links:

Why there are 60 minutes in an hour

Bloomberg takes the next step down the road toward anti-tobacco hysteria.

Zimbabwean newspaper prints billboards on paper made from the country’s worthless currency.

Legless frogs epidemic probably not caused by pollution, but by dragonfly nymphs with a jones for frogs’ legs.

Obama administration will support indefinite detention of terror suspects without a trial; drops the news late in the evening on a summer Friday.

TSA detains man for comic book script. Kicker: Scropt was about a guy who gets wrongfully harassed by the government for writing fiction about terror attacks that came true.

I have generally rejected comparisons of global warming activism to religion as unproductive.  But I give up.  Apparently global warming activists are digging into the Catholic playbook and stealing shamelessly.  Not satisfied with token acts of faith (e.g. sorting the recycling), indulgences (carbon offsets), and refusing to tolerate heresy, they have now adopted meat-free days of the week, switching only the day, from Friday to Monday.   I can see the Catholic bumper sticker now –  “the Catholic Church:  Fighting Global Warming Since the Year 858″.

OK, I am an engineer-geek but I think the video below, of a ship leaving the Houston Ship Channel at night, taken with time lapse photography, is really cool.  If your eyes are sharp, you can catch the San Jacinto monument on the right (which Texans went out of their way to make taller than the Washington Monument) and the refinery where I once worked on the left, just before the third bridge (the only suspension bridge).  Via Tom Kirkendall.

I had the sound off when I watched it.  I can do without the techno-jazz soundtrack, but ymmv.  I will confess parts of it look like a scene from Blade Runner.

I have an innate confidence in technology.  For example, while I understand solar to be uneconomic for powering my house today, I fully expect that to change.  I look forward to the day, not that far in the future, when I can take my Arizona house off the grid, at least during the day.

In contrast, though, it may be that wind power can’t be fixed, in large part due to its inherent unpredictability.  Sure, solar has a problem as well, in that it doesn’t work at night.  But at least the times when solar is off here in Arizona (ie when it is dark) are predictable and coincide with lower load periods.  Wind is utterly unpredictable and variable, and its peaks and troughs are unrelated to peaks and troughs in electricity demand.

So, if the grid is to reliably supply sufficient power to meet demand, wind must have a backup.  And there is the rub.  Because just about every technology that might currently be used as a backup takes a really, really long time to start up.  Small gas turbines can be producing electricity from a cold stop pretty quickly, but a large coal-fired power plant can take days to go from a cold stop to producing electricity.  This is in part because there are a series of steps where A has to precede B which must come before C to start plants up, and partially just because immediately heating the whole system up would cause the plant to blow up just from the thermal stresses.

So, to back up wind power, traditional fossil fuel plants have to be kept warmed up with turbines spinning.  This means that fossil fuels are burned but no electricity is produced.  I mentioned in a previous post that the largest utility in Germany estimated that 48,000MW of wind capacity was in fact allowing the shut down of just 2000MW of traditional fossil-fuel powered capacity.

A recent article in the National Post argues the Danes are seeing absolutely no substitution from their substantial investment in wind.

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark’s largest energy utilities) tells us that “wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.” The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that “Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram,” and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character.

It probably comes as no surprise that the Danes have the highest electricity costs in Europe.  The article goes on to call wind power in the US a “huge corporate welfare feeding frenzy.”

Update: Well, the Danish wind industry certainly seems to be in good hands (via Tom Nelson):

Ditlev Engel, president and chief executive of the Danish wind-energy company Vestas, said anecdotal evidence about birds being caught in turbine blades and other environmental horror stories do not usually hold up under scrutiny.

“Do people think it’s better all those birds are breathing CO2? I’m not a scientist, but I doubt it,” said Engel, whose company is expanding its U.S. manufacturing and distribution operations. “Let’s get the facts on the table and not the feelings. The fact is, these are not issues.”

LOL – Nothing like a paragraph that simultaneously includes the phrase “Let’s get the facts on the table” with the hypothesis that a couple hundred ppm increase in CO2 concentrations hurts birds.  By the way, from the same article, a lot of discussion of the environmental impact of renewables due to their out-sized use of land.  Clearly an issue for solar and wind, and possibly for others:

One of the biggest challenges renewable-energy projects pose is that they often take up much more land than conventional sources, such as coal-fired power plants. A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.

I am always amazed at the number of environmentalists that laud the Brazilian ethanol push, given the out-sized effect that industry has had in carving up the Amazon rain forest.  As a disclosure, I am a member of the Nature Conservancy, and wild land preservation is my environmental interest of choice, though I prefer to pursue it through private means (ie via private purchases of land for conservation purposes).  The Nature Conservancy used to spend most of its money for this purpose, though of late it has diverged, as so many environmental groups have, into lobbying government to force people to achieve its ends for them rather than to pursue these ends through non-coercive means.

You start to get a sense of why green reporters might not make it in the actual value-creation world when you read stuff like this.  Is it really possible that someone is so pareto challenged that in a bid to make the world a cleaner place, they focus on … excercise balls?  It is utterly unsurprising after reading this that when Bjorn Lomberg approaches environmental improvement from a prioritization perspective (ie where can we get the biggest improvement bang for the least bucks), greenies look at him like he is from Mars (or worse, Hades).

Via the NY Times:

As David Myers scans the rocky slopes of this desert canyon, looking vainly past clumps of brittlebush for bighorn sheep, he imagines an enemy advancing across the crags.

That specter is of an army of mirrors, generators and transmission towers transforming Mojave Desert vistas like this one. While Whitewater Canyon is privately owned and protected, others that Mr. Myers, as head of the Wildlands Conservancy, has fought to preserve are not.

To his chagrin, some of Mr. Myers’s fellow environmentalists are helping power companies pinpoint the best sites for solar-power technology. The goal of his former allies is to combat climate change by harnessing the desert’s solar-rich terrain, reducing the region’s reliance on carbon-emitting fuels.

Mr. Myers is indignant. “How can you say you’re going to blade off hundreds of thousands of acres of earth to preserve the Earth?” he said.

Terry Frewin, a local Sierra Club representative, said he had tough questions for state regulators. “Deserts don’t need to be sacrificed so that people in L.A. can keep heating their swimming pools,” Mr. Frewin said.

Somthing that all-too-seldom gets attention — when it comes to water pollution, most of the worst private offenders were brought in line decades ago  (at least for point sources, like a particular factory;  agriculture and runoff are still issues in some areas).  Many or even most of the worst water pollution offenders in the US are actually municipal authorities, who dump raw sewage into open waters.  I remember that when I lived in Boston, there was this digusting spot in the bay where the sewer pipe ended.  They sort of fixed the problem ..  by making the pipe longer to dump further out into the bay.

Even in the Bay Area in these environmentally sensitized times, some egregious environmental practices remain in place, with little public scrutiny.

It’s bad enough that there are cancer-causing chemicals in the bay. And Marin recently had a 500,000-gallon sewage leak into the body of water. But did you know that when it rains, the area’s sewage treatment plants are designed to overflow into the bay?

The leaky pipes in drainage systems take in more than the system can handle. In last week’s storms, Richmond loosed 890,000 gallons of untreated water into the Bay, about 10 percent of which—or 8,900 gallons—was pure, unadulterated sewage.

You mean government exempts itself from its own rules?  No way!

This bit of eco-goofiness got me thinking

I ran into a friend at the corner drugstore the other day. This friend happens to have both beautiful looks and powerful progressive politics. She was standing in the cosmetics aisle looking bewildered. Which products might be best for the planet and healthiest for her face?

What would be the worst-possible green product, from a financial perspective?  I finally settled on this one:  Low carbon handgun ammunition, for the progressive Bay Area resident who is worried that her concealed carry Glock 9 is creating too many greenhouse gasses down at the firing range.

Postscript: Because I almost never post much on gun topics, I will take the opportunity to plug my friend’s new product, a barrel stabilizer for a Ruger mini-14.  It looks great, it works, and it is about half the price of other solutions.  His web site for the Mo-rod mini-15 barrel stabilizer is here.

I have often criticized any number of recent Presidential administrations, in particular the Bush administration, for their various power grabs that attack the spirit, if not the letter, of Constitutional separation of powers.

One issue I have never really thought about, mainly because I really can’t stand thinking about political strategy and am not very good at it, is just how bad use of executive power can be in carrying off an ideological agenda.

I think many folks have become aware that there is a short list of executive orders that are the routine first step of any administration when the party in office has shifted.  I can’t remember them all — they include some abortion funding issues and some union rules issues — but Obama, like Bush before him and Clinton before him, issued them as one of his first acts.  Most of these aren’t world-shattering issues, and they act as a quick sop to the ideological base, but the whole point of the rule of law in this country was that we didn’t have to do the constant bob-and-weave people had to go through with Medieval kings or modern banana republics to adjust to the new ruling clan.

But it is pretty clear that the Republican’s strategy over the last 8 years of letting Bush take the heat on tough ideological issues by trying to tackle them with executive action rather than legislation is a complete flop.   Much of the Republican Congress probably agreed with Bush’s environmental regulation philosophies, but were content to let Bush try to implement them through regulatory policy (or non-policy) rather than legislation.   Now, though, much of Bush’s position has been thrown out in court, and the remainder will likely be changed by Obama.

Seriously, looking back on it, did the Republican Congress between the ’01 tax cuts and prescription drug disaster and when they were tossed in ’06 leave any kind of legislative footprint behind?  Jeez, Republicans are whining now about all kinds of stuff, but what were they doing for 6 years?  Offshore drilling is a classic example.  They whined about the Democrats blocking more drilling last year, but what did they do about it the previous years when they controlled Congress and the White House?  I honestly think they were waiting for Bush to do something by executive order and take away any political responsibility off their shoulders.

How can you get free power?  Well, one way is to steal it from other people.  And if you steal it in small enough bites from a lot of people, they may never notice.

This seems to be the basic idea in this article in the Guardian, whose author clearly attended lots of journalism classes while studiously avoiding any class that might have made mention of the first law of thermodynamics.

“Green” speed bumps that will generate electricity as cars drive over them are to be introduced on Britain’s roads. The hi-tech “sleeping policemen” will power street lights, traffic lights and road signs in a pilot scheme in London that could be rolled out nationwide.

Speed bumps have long been the bane of motorists’ lives, but these will capture the kinetic energy of vehicles.

Peter Hughes, the designer behind the idea, said: “They are speed bumps, but they are not like conventional speed bumps. They don’t damage your car or waste petrol when you drive over them – and they have the added advantage that they produce energy free of charge.” An engineer who formerly advised the United Nations on renewable energy sources, Hughes added: “If it [the energy] wasn’t harnessed by the speed bumps, it would go to waste.”

The ramps – which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size – consist of a series of panels set in a pad virtually flush to the road. As the traffic passes over it, the panels go up and down, setting a cog in motion under the road. This then turns a motor, which produces mechanical energy. A steady stream of traffic passing over the bump can generate 10-36kW of power.

OK, I am willing to believe that you might be able to recover some net energy from a system with this kind of dynamic speed bump replacing an existing static bump  (but I am skeptical, and would want to see the math).  Of course, if you really have a road with a speed bump and so much traffic that it will generate this much power and repay a large investment, then you probably have a road/traffic design issue.

But the article seems to be positing that towns could install these as flat devices –”virtually flush to the road” –  that drivers would hardly notice.  Power from these devices would help the town power its lights and other devices.  But unless these guys have invented the perpetual motion machine, there is no free energy to be had here.  In fact, due to that nasty old spoil-sport, the second law of thermodynamics, there has to be a total system loss.  The device might only steal the equivalent energy of a thousandth of a gallon of gas from each driver, so the driver of each car won’t really notice, but the total system expenditure of the thousands of drivers who power the device will still be there, just hidden.  This is a new stealth tax on drivers, dressed up in green clothing.

Next up:  Britain proposes to put windmills on the roofs of electric cars as a power source.  After all, when you are driving at 60 miles per hour, all that wind energy coming past your car is just lost, right?  Once you got the car up to speed, it would just generate its own electricity.  LOL.  I shouldn’t laugh, there is probably a billion or so for this in Obama’s stimulus bill.

via Tom Nelson.

This article from Climate Resistance about the sustainability movement is terrific.  I want to excerpt a relatively long chunk of it:

It is our belief that Oxfam’s increasingly shallow campaigns reflect the organisation’s difficulty in understanding development and poverty, and the relationship between them. In other words, it seems to have lost its purpose. This is a reflection of a wider political phenomenon, of which the predominance of environmentalism is a symptom. We seem to have forgotten why we wanted development in the first place. It is as if the lifestyles depicted in Cecil’s painting were to be aspired to, were there just a little more rain. Development is a bad thing. It stops rain.

If we were to add a city skyline into the background of Cecil’s painting it might ask a very different question of its audience. Why are people living like that, with such abundance in such proximity? Of course, in reality, many miles separate the two women from any such city, but the question still stands; there is abundance in the world, and there is the potential for plenty more. Yet Oxfam have absorbed the idea from the environmental movement that there isn’t abundance. This changes the relationship between development and poverty from one in which development creates abundance into one in which development creates poverty; it deprives people of subsistence. But really, the city (not) behind the two women could organise the infrastructure necessary to irrigate the parched landscape, the delivery of fertiliser, and a tractor. The field could be in full bloom, in spite of the weather. The two women could be wealthy.

Oh no, says Oxfam. That’s not sustainable….

The myth of sustainability is that it is sustainable. The truth is that drought and famine have afflicted the rural poor throughout history – before climate change was ever used to explain the existence of poverty. Limiting development to what ‘nature’ provides therefore makes people vulnerable to her whims. Drought is ‘natural’. Famine is ‘natural’. Disease is ‘natural’. They are all mechanisms which, in the ecologist’s lexicon are nature’s own way of ensuring ‘sustainability’. They are checks and balances on the dominance of one species. To absorb what Hitler called ‘the iron logic of nature’ is to submit to injustice, if famine, drought and disease characterise it. We can end poverty, but not by restricting development. Yet that seems to be Oxfam’s intention. That is why we criticise it.

Hat tip:  Tom Nelson.

Via TJIC:

Harvard plans to sharply reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in the
next eight years, Drew Faust, the university president, said.

The initial, short-term goal for the university will be to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from a 2006 baseline by
2016, Faust said yesterday in a statement.

In the winter of 1990, my Harvard-owned apartment had its heating fail.  I called the administration for weeks before anyone would show up to look at it.  By this time, I actually had ice on the inside of my window panes.  Walking into my freezing apartment, a maintenance guy placed a thermometer in the center of my room, and then just stood there staring at it for 5 minutes.  At this point he had not asked me about my problem, nor looked at anything remotely connected with the heating system.

He suddenly sprung into action, looked at the thermometer, and started to walk out of the room.  "Wait," I said.  "What is wrong?  Do you know how to fix it?"  The Harvard maintenance guy says "Your room is only 53 degrees — by state law we don’t have to do anything unless it is below 50.*"  And then he walked out, with me screaming at his back.  Only when I sent a letter to the University, copied to the fire marshal, explaining that all was well because I found the room stayed pretty warm if I kept the oven on "broil" 24 hours a day and left the oven door open all the time, did I get any action to fix my heating.

It is scary to think that a university so reluctant to spend any money on heating rooms even 20 years go now wants to reduce its energy use by 30%. 

Of course, we all know how these things work:  creative accounting.  The Enron guys were saints compared to the accounting games played in the carbon accounting and offset world.  Harvard will probably say that "Well, we were planning to build a massive coal-powered electricity plant right in the middle of Harvard Yard, and by cancelling the project, we have reduced our emissions 30% over what they would have been and therefore made our goal.  Don’t laugh – the UN and EU are doing EXACTLY this every day.

* Note that I cannot remember the exact legal standard quoted to me, but I think it was 50.