wavey’s Recent Comments

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  David Graves

  No, biodiesel is not a good alternative! It has been good as a cute way of making a point about the diesel we get out of the ground (climate change, peak oil, etc.) However, a quick look at how much diesel we burn (and don't forget the close cousin heating oil) versus how much say soybean oil comes from an acre, (minus fossil fuel used for fertilizer, farming and harvesting the stuff, etc.) and one quickly realizes this is no solution to anything. Then we read in the Wall St. Journal about clearing of irreplacable tropical forests in places like Borneo for oil palm plantations, and one becomes resistant to the idea that promotion of biodiesel is anything but a giant distraction, with some downside.On Once subsidies and tariffs are removed, watch out posted 2 years, 9 months ago 7 Responses

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  TXU

  What are other Texas utilities up to? Texas is famously "off the grid" in the sense that it is its own place as far as electricity generation and consumption are concerned. Where does conservation fit into the Texas scheme? Peaking power? Seems like a great opportunity wasted....to enrich a few utility executives. The state government seems to be in the thrall of a bent version of a free-market ideology. Don't they know the carbon dioxide they release in Corpus Christi just ends up in New York City (with apologies to Tom Lehrer)?On New coal plants like accelerating toward a wall posted 2 years, 9 months ago 2 Responses

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  Organic raspberries air-freighted from Chile

  You mean that the Whole Foods product listed above is not a really good idea? My friends all ooh and ahh about them. When I load them into the Lexus SUV that gets 15 mpg, everyone knows I am really cool.On Tesco will offer carbon labels posted 2 years, 9 months ago 1 Response

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  Roberts and Red Bull

  Lay off that stuff, man. It's not a good thing in the long run. And get some rest, You look all in.On SOTU hangover posted 2 years, 9 months ago 6 Responses

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  There is no free ethanol

  In his commentary on the rush to biofuels, Robert J. Samuelson over at the Washington post does some very useful basic arithmetic on biofuels. (Re: blindness--Bob, we aren't supposed to drink the stuff!) The 51 cents a gallon tax credit and the import tariffs are  a potent brew going into the '08 election cycle. Bob rightly sounds the boondoggle alarm. Brazil uses less oil to make a barrel's worth of etanol than we do. Why not let all the countries currently shut out of the US sugar market by protectionist quoatas into our ethanol market? The quotas protect a few wealthy US sugar producers and help destroy the Everglades. Post-Castro Cuba could make lots of ethanol.
  High corn prices here will cause an unsustainable (from environnmental, economic and green house gas points of view) boom in planting. The effect on other uses of corn will ripple through the economy. When one reads of tropical forests (think big carbon sink--the Wall St. Journal piece on Dec. 5, '06 is chilling if it weren't about global warming) cleared for oil palm plantations in Borneo, it is impossible to avoid the reality that market signals for more biofuels production will have vast unintended bad consequences and not go very far to solving the economic, environmental and geopolitical problems of petroleum demand. The hugely harder work is in actually figuring out ways to reduce demand, not shift the source of supply.On Oil manipulation bad, corn manipulation good posted 2 years, 9 months ago 1 Response