Comments Pangolin has made

I'm going to throw in a plug for your basic longtail cargo bike. I'm a fat guy in a flat town and I can get anywhere in town in a bit over half an hour. I save money on gas, I no longer need a gym membership and I get so much attention on my bike compared to my car or walking that I'm reluctant to go places without it.

Plus I no longer have to worry about whether I can carry whatever the load of the day is home. Groceries, tools, a box of apples, my kid, a ladder, a barbecue, or some lawn chairs for the park; I can carry them. (not all at once) If I had some hills to contend with, a longer range or a bit more speed was wanted an electric hub like BioD's rig would suit.

http://www.metaefficient.com/bicycles/longtail-bikes-a-revie
w-and-buying-guide.html

p.s.-If anybody knows how to embed links in comments could you please IM me with the info?

I would say that it's more than not paying attention. People know when they are stealing from the neighbors woodpile and that is the foundation of western industrial economics. We've got more because we've restricted the access to resources of the people who have less.

I'm laying the basic fault on the dominance of individualism as a organizing principle of our society. We place the individual above marriage, family, country, religion or any other responsibility. A society that has a homeless population and millions of vacant housing units isn't going to manage an abstract threat like global warming, soil degradation or complex bank fraud. It's somebody else's problem.

As long as we view the problems of the guy down the road as somebody else's problem then we will lose as a group.

I feel that eating alone and preparing meals alone is as much of a food security problem as food localization. When I am home alone a much higher percentage of the food I buy ends up as waste than when I am cooking for extended family.

From experiences cooking in restaurant kitchens and cohousing kitchens I can tell you that feeding fourty people is mysteriously only four times the work of feeding four people and not ten times. Food waste goes way down and salad and greens intake goes up also. Clean-up with modern restaurant dishwashing systems takes far less water per dish than a home sink and dishwasher and the comparable trip to the compost bin is managed easier also.

Finally, humans just were not evolved to eat alone and they get sick if they do. People need the company of other people wether in a family or in a local pub to feel integrated in a community. Getting the food is important but sharing it is just as important.

I'm going to show up next year with a [strike]juice can[/strike], rocket stove and kick patootie. Did I read this correctly or did somebody just win $75K for inventing the hay box? OK so it has some aluminum foil, black paint and sheet of acrylic to get the temperature up a bit. A fine improvement over three stone fires on clear days for people otherwise unoccupied.

I get that it will reduce deforestation in extremely stressed areas but rocket stoves would do that and yield small amounts of biochar (see the runner up) that could be used to improve the productivity of kitchen gardens like these people (http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/node/1055) in India. Of course, ultimately feeding people doesn't reduce deforestation because they go and make more people.

Could somebody please explain to me how this is going to prevent the burning of gigatons of coal? Anyone?

Tell us how you really feel Dave; I think you're still holding back.

So what you propose is that we ask the American people to support some increase in their energy prices to be determined by the machinations of insider trading. Plus a bunch of paper-mache green jobs stuff that won't actually amount to a tenth of the economic impact of cap and trade but add weight to paper printout of the bill itself. It sounds like Enron-style energy trading with some sprinkles added to get Congress to swallow it. There's just no way you can tell me there is any public support for a cap and trade bill because nobody but a few insiders pretends to understand it. It's free ponies for Wall Street and manure shovels for the rest of us and we know it.

Since it's well established by now that solar PV, concentrated solar thermal, wind power and ground source heat pumps can break even financially while providing lots of jobs why don't we just fund massive installation of those systems and toss the rest of the bill. We could even tag on a big hybrid-electric vehicle subsidy so we can pretend we're doing something to save the auto industry. A full build out of those items would eliminate far more GHG emissions than the current bill would.

People LOVE the idea of green jobs. Even hard core Republicans can understand that a solar panel produces electricity and somebody local has to get paid to install it. Wind power is more popular in Texas than silly hats. George Bush himself had a ground-source heat pump on the Crawford house. They'll buy green jobs programs. Ask them to agree to another black box trading scheme involving Wall Street and the energy giants and they're going to balk.

The mustache has you beat on this one.

I think politics is the art of avoiding physical realities in order to fashion schemes which will benefit the few at the expense of the many. Since the two party system in the US is dependent upon the campaign contributions of the wealthiest sector of the economy references to objective reality tend to be hung with more political paper-mache than a pickup truck in a parade float.

The GOP, in general, has decided that flat denial of reality is an easier way to sucker dim-witted voters than the Democratic party opposition. They practice a kind of across the board reality denial that leaves Obama's "clean coal" support in the dust. It doesn't matter if you are talking about stem cells, antibiotic resistance, forest management, water supplies, garbage disposal, solar power or nuclear it takes a Republican to be flat wrong on all matters of fact for years on end.

It simply does not bother them to be caught lying on scientific matters. They know they are courting the nitwit vote that couldn't sort it out anyway. Meanwhile the corporate press would tear to pieces any Democrat that strayed too far from the truth unless really major chunks of money were to be made on truth denial. Remember the 2000 presidential election where Al Gore was constantly and incorrectly accused of lying by the media at the same time George Bush was simply constantly lying.

As much as we'd like to pretend otherwise environmental stewardship is a wholly owned operation of the political left. The token voices in the GOP pretending otherwise are simply that; token voices. They have no intention of interrupting any profit stream that they are being paid from.

Sean- It's not that we have to find some new source of capital to make many of the needed changes. A solar energy system that breaks even on costs in 10 years at current costs is likely to be showing income before then. Likewise some of the energy saving programs that require large capital outlays will get past break even in five to seven years. For some reason we can't find or create the financial vehicles to get these installs done outside of Berkeley CA and Gainseville FL.

We have a choice. Purchasing the backlog of Detroit-made SUV's will never produce a single joule in net energy gain. Using those same dollars on rooftop solar systems will. Assuming the money supply isn't infinite (cough) we may not get to have both toys. Anyways, GM is already bankrupt. Likewise that Trillion dollars we gave the banks seemed to go up in a puff of smoke. Those same funds could have installed your energy saving devices on every reasonable application with close to guaranteed returns in net energy and capital.

Massive chunks of money appeared as if from thin air when Wall Street squealed. Fixing the energy balance of the US and then the world might not keep the suits happy but it could do something for our long term ability to grow food. I think we can find the money somewhere; perhaps that same magical sack that fed AIG, BofA and Wells Fargo.

The energy and mineral resources to make the changes are there. Directing those resources is a matter of political will or won't; not a matter of foo-foo economic "laws."

I'm with Maxi on this argument. The point is to get energy saving devices installed ASAP and occupancy permits and the ability to withdraw them does this just as well as any other option. We can bypass all of this with "meet the standard or get shut out" legislation.

This approach doesn't work in all application but then no single approach does. As Joe Romm frequently points out we will have to do everything possible to stay out the really scary consequences of climate change. Since we're probably going to diddle around and do pretty much nothing except destroying the automobile industry for the next few years we're going to have to do that everything in an awful hurry if/when we decide to do it.

Our little "free-market" fantasies aren't going to cut it if that happens. We gotta fix this roof before the hurricane happens because during is going to be a tad dangerous.

Are those breakdown numbers percentages of total GHG emissions or are they percentages of agricultural GHG emissions? If they're percentages of ag emissions where is the rest of it?

Where was the math Paul?

 The game was to show me that you could convert the auto industry from it's current internal combustion engine monopoly to fuel cell electric vehicles cheaper than battery electric vehicles or series hybrids. That would be total conversion and operating costs including replacing or upgrading gasoline stations to provide the same vehicle miles traveled as the current fleet.

You cant' do it can you?

You can't beat the claim the BEV's will get four to one mileage advantage over a FCEV powered by electrically produced hydrogen. Your claim of "trillions" of dollars in infrastructure costs for battery electric vehicles looks silly when most existing BEV conversions are charged with 120 volt extension cords. The outrageous claims of battery costs are belied by home hobbyists producing hundreds of BEVs for every FCEV produced by heavily funded corporate programs.

Nobody can even buy a fuel cell that could power a lawnmower while battery lawnmowers are relatively cheap. Lithium iron phosphate batteries power millions of hand tools and thousands of electric bicycles while fuel cells power what? Nothing your average wage-earner can buy.

I wrote a detailed rebuttal to your post but threw it out. Line by line correction of factoids, plattitudes and speculation doesn't affect the bottom line that fuel cells aren't available and the nearest hydrogen station for many people is several states away. Give it up guy; your parrot is dead.

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Friedman QUOTED Joe Romm!?!

Extensively! In the New York Freaking Times no less and all the papers that pick that up. The most important part is that he's blasting the orthodoxy that says that nations can borrow wealth as a means of doing business.

He's calling this mess the "Great Disruption" which may or may not be better than the "Greater Depression" which has been used on the net for some years. The most important point is that they are questioning the wisdom of debt-financed economics.

An economic system based upon debt will fail. Debt implies that there will be more resources in the future to pay for resource expenditures now. That works out fine if you are purchasing seed corn since 3 grains will yield hundreds of grains but purchases of cars, roads, houses and airplanes require greater resource use in the future not lessor.

Imagine if you were required to purchase 10 years of fuel with a car, 20 years of fuel with an airplane and 40 years of fuel with a house. You wouldn't do it. The price would be too high. Debt economics allows us to deceive ourselves into thinking that we can afford the cars purchase price and that fuel at any cost. The plane and the fuel at whatever cost and the house and a subscription to a natural gas well still not drilled.

The resources aren't there. We don't have the fuel to serve existing cars into the foreseeable future, or planes or houses. We are all betting that somebody else is going to get kicked out of the marketplace while each one of us retains our relative economic standing and access to energy.

It's time to face up to reality. We need a whole new game and a new set of rules. The current monopoly set isn't working.

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Business majors

Little details like physics and engineering get glossed over in business schools where quarterly profit has been king for so long that planning is something of a joke.

Why bother with ten year investments in thermal efficiency when Wall Street's magic boxes could turn that same initial payment into free money. Except that Bernie Madoff and his hedge fund cronies were all running Ponzi schemes.

All you need to know about business majors you can learn from looking at the stock market dive and then comparing it to the happy talk on the WSJ's front page. They don't have a freaking clue what's happening.

The gods of Wall Street still simply refuse to understand that energy flows are the economy. All the games they play with money don't change the amount of energy available to do work until you actually build new energy harvesting systems.

Jimmy Carter was right all along. He was a submarine commander; he understood sealed system economics intimately.

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Oh, why bother.

If Al Gore has the carbon footprint of 687 of me and three or four thousand west Africans that's just fine. He can still ask us to sacrifice and we can still tell him "You FIRST bub."

And....since good old Al shows only vague signs of knocking his direct carbon footprint down to the levels of even the average, overconsumptive, american nobody else in the world should give a rat's hiney what we say. It's what we do that counts.

Might as well book that cruise to watch the last of Greenland's glaciers slide into the sea. There are still no brakes on this train.

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Shoot the dog

Since every function of the dog can be met by non-dog providers who won't turd on your lawn. Sure the security of a thorn hedge isn't as impressive at first as a barking dog but it provides more security with less noise, smell, cost and effort in the long run.

If you're neighbors dog strays onto your lawn shoot THAT too. Maybe offer to buy him some thorn hedge plants when he complains.

When the salesmen for the super-robotic-dog-turd-detection-removal-and-deep-well-injection system shows up....pepper spray him. He's a con man and he knows it. He's also in the pocket of the dog food companies.

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Ad revenues

Print media is dying in part because advertising revenues from car manufacturers and dealers have dried up. Ecology articles that tell people to quit dumping CO2 don't jibe will with a guy who's buying ad space for giant SUV's.

Of course going completely silent on these issues or getting it completely wrong destroys the credibility of the entire paper and kills readership. The know-nothing fraction of newspaper readers has long since faded into history. That leaves a delicate balancing act the paper can't win.

So they "make stuff up." What are they supposed to do? Returning atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm requires net negative emissions. While that might be good science it's lousy for an economic model based upon selling ever greater piles of product to people. The people, have just been told to borrow more money and keep buying stuff; that it's ok, even necessary.

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Ground Fire Bombers

Last summer I had the unusual privilege of watching a fire bomber come off the end of a runway, make it's bombing run, circle around and land. I didn't have to take a step to watch this. I just circled around. The fire didn't much seem to notice.

While these big orange and white planes make macho, loud, noises they don't do a whole lot to prevent forest fires or stop them once they really get going. Once a little fire is a big fire they appear to be there for entertainment value. "LOOKIE, HERE FOLKS!! We're doing something. We've got FIRE BOMBERS."

If we spent the fire bomber budget on fuels clearance around structures we'd save billions in the long run.

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Lichens maybe

One possibility for the missing carbon sink is lichens. The added atmospheric CO2 and fractional increases in humidity could make that tiny bit of difference in assisting lichens in leaching nutrients from rock surfaces.

I've also seen a fantastic growth in tree beard lichens in recent years. These are the same ecosystems that I've been watching my whole life and I don't remember the trees being so draped in my youth.

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It's the STOVES!!

The problem with cooking in the third world is the same problem we have with air quality here in Northern California; our stoves don't burn all the fuel and then waste most of the heat. If the people of Chad were encouraged to purchase subsidized rocket stoves like the these then they could use 1/3 or less fuel to cook their meals. They could also use fuels like corn stover, cattails, sorghum stalks, acacia and cane that are quick to grow after cutting or are crop residues.

In most of the world the majority of biomass stoves don't do a very good job of efficiently burning fuel. This picture on the BBC website shows a charcoal burner in Chad that is simply a wire basket to place charcoal in. Most of the heat bypasses the cooking pot (tea kettle actually) entirely and provides no benefit. A small rocket stove or kelly kettle would allow these women to heat their water and minimize the risk of burning to themselves and the 10 children they have to care for.  There are solar cooker programs in Chad but obviously they aren't universally available.

If the rural people understood the value of biochar in transforming savannah soils they might be able to convert some of that scrub at the edges of the forest to orchard crops. This could help them establish regenerative cropping cycles to replace exploitive use of the landscape. Ultimately, without reducing the fertility rate of women in Chad from 6.25 (wiki) children born to each woman the country is doomed. Exponential population growth will overwhelm the most thrifty use of resources. On Chad fights charcoal in battle against creeping desert posted 9 months ago 10 Responses

The practical economist

Ultimately economics is about food, water, housing, heat, shelter, health care and clothing. There are mechanical reasons why various processes can be improved to give desired services with less energy inputs meaning greater efficiency.

I have repeatedly seen economists argue against getting more services for less energy, even less money, because the  financing of the transition couldn't be made with current "economic" structures. WTF? It's like we're ignoring physics because it doesn't agree with Grim's Fairy Tales.

If the experiences of the last three months haven't made it clear economists are poor fiction writers when are we going to get it? Why do these people have a voice in how we heat our houses and grow our food?

Could we please find another way of modeling reality that actually works? Could we try physics instead?

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Show me the math

It is anecdotal, my experience speaking w/most scientists and engineers, professors going back over 30 years.  Including our Secretary of Energy.

As far as the other so called "scientists and engineers on this site". I have yet to hear anyone on this subject demonstrate enough knowledge of the facts that convinces me there are scientists or engineers posting on this site.

Paul Staples
h24u@hygen.com

Show me the math that says that conversion of the gas station network to hydrogen pumps, tanks and trucking would be cheaper than wiring charging plugs in homes and charging posts in parking lots.  

Show me the math that says that production of 200 million fuel cells and ultra-high pressure hydrogen tanks will be cheaper than production of batteries and super-capacitors in those numbers.

Don't quote anything you can't produce. No magical hydrogen tanks now in research or the BEV guys can assume magical supercaps.

You can't do it. It doesn't exist. Hydrogen is hype as a motor vehicle fuel and always has been.

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Right JB

Now all we have to do is tear out all our existing backyards and put in ten propane tanks each, massive solar panels, compressors, fuel cells and monitoring equipment at a mere cost of $500K per, 2 person household.

Or....we could throw some solar panels on the roof, connect to the grid and use the batteries in our PHEV as emergency storage. About $25k per household plus another $25k for the new car. Minus gas and maintenance expense saved on the car and no more electric bills ever.

Are conservative really ten times stupider than progressives? We've got the numbers to prove it.

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Climate Jeopardy

Answer all questions in the form of a Cap-and-trade structure please.

Don't even consider a refundable carbon, tax, fee, or charge that could offset higher energy prices that retail consumers will have to face. Don't consider funding, financing or finagling the installation of the millions of retail level conservation measures that would eliminate coal burning. Don't buy solar panels for schools or windmills dedicated to providing stable power prices for local governments. Don't fund enhanced geothermal exploration. Don't mention "rail."

Please discuss this whole problem as a Wall Street commodities market that needs to be designed to make it all better. Focus on making sure the largest corporations get big new cash flows from a problem that might be solved by 3-truck solar, window, door, insulation and HVAC contracting companies.

If you don't have a registered lobbyist your buzzer has a delay wired in it. Just like on TV.

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Throw baby at bathwater

Baby asteroid that is. As several science fiction writers and physicists have pointed out we are just a few thousand tons of rock away from a cooler climate. Of course that rock is a bit far away but there probably aren't any huge technical challenges to getting it.

Just drop a big enough rock into the South Pacific to replicate the Krakatoa event. Instant global cooling and ocean fertilization. Also a quick cull of excess human population as crops failed.

Or we could stop burning fossil fuels and start sequestering atmospheric carbon in soils. I think the asteroid strike is more likely.

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Conservation

The BACT for coal fired power plants is to eliminate the need for their electricity. Take a coal plant find the nearest end user and apply ALL effective conservation techniques. Then go next door and do it again times the 200 million homes offices and workplaces in the US.

The best way to do conservation is to convert whole areas at once. Park the trucks with the parts in the neighborhood and bring in the crews on buses. Since neighborhoods tend to have the same construction details from one house to the next this simplifies the whole process. Anybody who doesn't want their home or business converted to energy efficient alternatives can disconnect from the grid and natural gas lines.

If we did this we'd be closing coal plants instead of trying to repair, retrofit or convert them. If would also provide 10x the economic stimulus of the current stimulus bill.

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Steven...

Fuel cells are a great source of local power for malls, plants, industry or buildings that can use the process heat. Sierra Nevada Brewery in California has several large fuel cells that they use for electric power as well as harvesting the heat for hot water processes. Large fuel cells like this are also much cheaper and much more efficient than trying to create a fuel cell that you can fit inside an automobile. Starting and stopping fuel cells is bad for their health.

I suspect that Honda's strategy was to develop electric car components and systems using hydrogen-vehicle research subsidies and have them on tap for fleet conversion to all-electric or plug-in vehicles. Toss the fuel cell and the hydrogen tanks and install larger batteries and you have an electric sedan. Throw in a small Honda generator and you have a plug-in hybrid. Off the shelf, every bit of it.

The nasty bit from Honda's point of view is that they will sell fewer vehicles. The only thing that could make a Honda more reliable would be to give them electric drive trains. That makes cars more of a long term investment as components would become swap-able. It was best to get all the bits right and wait until they were forced to make the shift.

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Forests? Burn them.

It's not like we aren't familiar with the drill. The three options are:

1. hand cut fire lanes and fuel reduction
2. "natural" wildfires (hot season fires started by man or lightning)
3. cool season "controlled" fires.

Why are you bugging Grist about it anyway? Forest fuels management is a local or regional issue that involves loads of public education to get anywhere. As a global issue it's one of those tsk, tsk, matters like arctic methane release. It can ruin all your tomorrows but there's little you can do today to fix it.

Bug your neighbors who won't clear fire lanes around their houses.

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Sure utility installation

Utility installation eliminates in a brushstroke the opposition argument that this measure will result in profiteering by fly-by-night operators like those that installed thousands of faulty solar hot water systems in the 70's and early 80's.

In addition to the job creation aspect of this program a major benefit will be that money spent on imported natural gas or coal power from out of state. Wage money paid in the LA basin is going to get spent in the LA basin.

IF this program succeeds then having the utility install a thermal sump service to buildings would make far more sense than drilling millions of wells for ground-loop thermal systems. In addition to the job creation THAT would entail Los Angeles would get instantly quieter on summer days as air conditioning fans were traded for quiet-running geothermal heat-pumps.

The simple replacement of the probable millions of aged and poorly functioning air-conditioners and furnaces would take a massive chunk off of California's electric and natural gas loads. Integrating them into thermal utilities would do this cheaper and better than piecemeal installation.

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Critical Mass

The defeat of the financial giants and their nefarious plans is going to be individuals taking small steps on their own. Each time somebody produces a solution that works that they can demonstrate to their neighbors it destroys the foundation of the consumption economy.

I know of a local, conservative-christian, engineer who has a windmill and a geothermal heat pump system installed in his new house. They are there because that is the best way for him to guarantee that his family stays comfortable for the best price.

Other people are producing bicycles that can carry groceries easily and electric motor kits that expand the range and utility of those bikes. Still others are planting gardens or sneaking fruit trees onto public rights of way. The paths to freedom from the energy-finance infrastructure are many and never 100-percent but the point is still there.

We can achieve degrees of freedom from wage-slave consumerism and environmental destruction. We don't have to take all of their B.S. In little ways you can break free and help others break free also.

The most important step is to let others know what works for you. If that's your great cargo bike, home-made storm windows or making your own jam brag on it. Haul protesting neighbors into your garden, show them the reduction funny light bulbs made on your bill. Get it out there.

Conservation works better than waste but people have to see it work before they try it out. Be the critical mass needed to push the solutions.

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Ammonia can store solar power for weeks

All you have to do is run an ammonia chiller in reverse. Use solar heat to drive ammonia out of an aqueous ammonia solution and condense it in an on-site tank. When you need power low temperature heat from shallow geothermal or saline tanks pushes ammonia past a turbine to the water tank that absorbs it. A geothermal plant in Alaska uses this cycle actually running large chillers in reverse to create power.

The really sweet part of this is that the high temperatures at the foci of a CSP plant are enough to crack water into hydrogen thermally and then the next step that creates ammonia is exothermic. You still get to use the heat minus some waste. This isn't the most efficient means of power storage but the lag time between solar influx and power output can be months.

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Sell people control

When the ice storm hits the utility decides when the truck is going to get to your neighborhood, string the new lines and turn your power on. Until that happens all the fancy gadgetry in that house is worth bupkiss. A centralized coal plant is worthless for that kind of reliability. It depends upon the grid to get anybody any power at all.

On the other hand, solar panels on your very own roof give the homeowner life-long control over his power pricing and will produce some power on even the gloomiest days. Some power always beats no power all to heck. A ground-loop heat pump requires a much smaller generator to operate than an air source unit with resistance heaters. Double or triple pane windows knock back the heating and cooling needs of the house for a lifetime.

As retirement investments fixed power costs and warmth in the winter beat GM stock all to heck. Changing the tax laws to give energy conservation and solar/wind power installations a deduction from earned income would do wonders to encourage conversion to solar and wind power from coal. The increased labor costs as a percentage of peoples power dollar would put people to work and the eventual savings in fuel costs would feed cash back into the economy.

Right now people are paying the coal company to buy electricity so they can heat their houses with natural gas from Canada and Mexico using electric blowers. Converting to domestic energy sources gives individual Americans and the US as a whole greater control over our futures. Buying coal means you pay what they charge you and if they raise the rate; tough cookies.

Be your own power company.

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Is tritium like radon?

When somebody tells me I shouldn't be concerned about a radioactive gas I get worried.

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Shrubbish!!

Or rather, shruberry, the ownership of by absentee or inattentive property owners and it's proximity to buildings.

What keeps a rat happy is a poorly pruned property with mounds of leaf and shrub litter ideally snug against the foundation. Above ground, tree branches that closely overhang or touch the roof encourage rats to attempt entry into attics and crawl spaces.

A well kept compost pile OTOH, encourages the keeper of the pile to seek out such litter as feedstock to balance the wet waste from the kitchen. Food properly mixed into active compost (instead of dumped on top) is occupied by composting biota in minutes and will be left as "spoiled" by rats and mice.

Anybody who neglects to understand the relationship between the nature outside the walls and his/her personal role in maintaining a healthy balance is going to suffer repeated infestations of rats, mice, ants, roaches, fleas and other opportunists as niches for these creatures require nothing more than simple neglect.

Observe your habitat with an eye to it's place in a food web for other critters and you should be able to keep ahead of the game.

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Let's tax waistlines instead....

After all, if we are looking for something that really costs the government of Seattle and Washington state some bucks large waistlines probably get right up there with cars. Actually the funds needed for roads are probably increased by the extra weight of those extra waistlines. When force=mass X velocity squared and all the traffic is moving at the same speed it's clear that fatties are putting more wear on the roads.

People with large waistlines demand parking spaces in front of their homes and other parking spaces within an easy waddling distance of all their favorite big box stores. Frequently people with large waistlines require special handicapped parking spaces due to the effects of those waistlines on their health. That costs LOTS of extra money.

When people with large waistlines have heart attacks they frequently call upon emergency medical services to attend to them increasing the workload on fire departments and county hospitals. They are more frequent visitors to medical clinics and require extra members of the police force to subdue them when they get in trouble.

I'm not saying we should tax every waistline; just those over 32 inches. One-hundred dollars per inch of excess yearly would be a good start. I can't help wondering how much waistline tax Mr. Vesely would pay; probably more than his car's registration.

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Roads don't work

Jabaillo latest rant about how wonderful all the new development that the roads and the private automobile allow ignores the net cost of those roads and that sprawl. Just for starters most city, county and state governments are struggling to maintain the roads that already exist.

There simply is not enough money coming from gasoline taxes to pay for the maintenance of existing roads while new development creates more road miles and dumps the maintenance costs on local governments. Call your local alderman and discuss the potholes with him and this is exactly the story you will get. Many counties are converting asphalt roads to gravel since they can't afford maintenance on the asphalt.

What this widespread network of paved roads replaced was whistle-stop, interurban railways that served trackside towns. The high density of these towns, condensed around railroad stations, encouraged business growth and such towns prospered in ways they haven't since. All over america there are towns with grand old downtowns full of half vacant but extremely well built buildings from the rail era surrounded by miles of ugly strip malls.

While there is such a thing as strip-mall culture it tends to be exemplified by the cult movie "Clerks." Slackers hanging out in front of the Kwik-E-mart offering home-grown herbals. Nobody stages a parade or a jazz band at a strip mall if they can help it.

Cheap roads subsidized wasteful, ugly, cheap strip-malls that spread business and services all over the place and made many of them no-go zones to those without cars. People drive in circles for days trying to achieve tasks that once occupied a morning downtown.

There are many books about these phenomena; some well documented. Others, notable those by James H. Kunstler, well larded with colorful language describing the torture of car culture on American life. One thing I'm sure of is that cheap asphalt roads were NEVER truly cheap.

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To do: grow gills, buy catamaran

There are whole libraries of books about solutions to the energy issue. I've been collecting them since the early '80s. None of this is rocket science except for the bit about using Google:Earth to spot energy hog buildings.

The people who pretend that we have to research some super-solution are simply stalling for time while their investments mature. Concentrated energy sources are easier to skim profits from than alternative energy.

Since the human race seems to be unable to un-stupid itself as a group it does seem that screening Waterworld and looking for survival tips might actually end up being a sane option.

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Punter dog opposition

The GOP and their media lapdogs are going to be barking circles around Obama's heels every time he freshen ups his coffee cup.

Compared to the across the board failure of Republican economic policies a program of home weatherization is frankly, conservative. It's a proven jobs builder and creates long-term economic value that liberates money from imports for uses in the larger economy.

Only a total pinhead could find fault with this. Even the NEA grants at least get some visible value from taxpayer monies. How much of the TARP money or Iraq war funds have been "lost"; hundreds of billions at a minimum. Katie's crickets on THOSE issues isnt' she.

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Nice Hack!

I personally prefer the mini-tent that you sew up from old polyester bedsheets that you get at the salvation army. Tent off exactly enough space for you to sit at your desk/workbench. Light with a short string of christmas lights. Heat with a pot of water on a hot plate under the desk.

Don't forget to glue a sheet of foil backed foam to the basement wall and floor; foil facing towards you to bounce body heat back at you. Another sheet of foam covering the floor at your feet covered with a scrap of plywood will keep the feet warm. I once tried sitting on a cushion of double-layer bubble wrap insulation that they sell for wrapping water heaters but the local heat wave created an excess of moisture.

Trying to heat a basement with your 60-watt sitting body heat won't work. Trying to heat a tent sized space with two or even three surfaces insulated (think corner) and a convection barrier (sheet) covering the other surfaces might. Add the heat of your computer tower and about 40 watts of hot plate and things will heat up fine.

This "little tent inside the house" strategy is used in Mongolia and was the whole purpose of four-poster beds. The bed curtains were for warmth. Making a little refuge tent tent for a reading nook or at your computer desk could be a way to save power provided you are comfortable enough to turn the heat down and actually use it.

Sci Fi writer Fritz Lieber wrote up the ultimate cold room hack titled "A Pail of Air."

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Nice thermal mass demo

I'm very much in favor of metal roofs because in my hot local climate a lightweight roof is going to have much less thermal mass. This means that the roof dumps less heat into your house after the sun goes down or can shed extra heat faster should a cloud provide a moments shade.

I house I had with cement tile roofs sometimes wouldn't cool down until 7 am when the thermostatically controlled attic fan would kick off. That was a "cool"  ninety-five degrees.

In this case the thermal mass of the snow on a well-insulated roof was able to reach some sort of plastic equilibrium. You can tell the houses with poor attic insulation because their roofs defrost first on cold shady mornings.

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Economists

Economists appear to truly believe that you can drop two of them in the middle of the Gobi with no supplies where they could trade sand to each other at a mutual profit. Realities of food, water, heat and shade not intruding one whit.

Peak oil is either here or past. Since oil companies refuse to release honest figures about production the point is moot. Insert the Export Land Model of oil consumption by oil exporting nations and Peak Oil is a practical reality now. Lowered prices doesn't make more available.

Peak grain has past. World grain stocks have declined year-on-year for some years now as production has not kept up with demand. If we don't get more snow here in California somebody's going hungry. Any day now Malthus gets a field test.

Peak soil has two aspects; mineral soil and organic biomass. It's pretty hard to build organic biomass if erosion has washed the clay downstream leaving you with sand, rock or hardpan. There are areas locally where the soil is just centimeters over lava hardpan. Good luck building THAT up; the deep soil has houses on it.

The really sad thing is that we seem to have left peak reality behind us some years ago. The human race has to live on solar income without reducing existing resources someday. We're destroying that resource base at a furious rate.

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Optimists, I say.

Ok, he's waving a black shirt on a foggy night at a train with a dim headlight and a drunk engineer. Since he's here at all instead of the digitized land of infinite fun and distraction I'd have to say that he's trying.

Laying down on the track doesn't help none either nor does hanging out at the local bar talking about switching the train to the siding; if there was a switch and a siding, which there isn't.

Somebody on the Titanic manned the pumps all the way to the bottom. It didn't help but it could have. No way of knowing unless you try.

Dude's an optimist.

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Some power beats none!

All of the naysayers might want to think that rooftop solar panels that are only going to run your fridge, 2 lights and the laptop beat the snot out of no power at all. That could be medicines and frozen foods during a summer outage or just enough to run the well and the ground-loop geothermal in a winter outage.

If your other option is wearing all your clothes at once and playing frozen pipes bingo with vodka shots I'm guessing a few solar panels trumps. Other options available for buildings are combined heat and power using natural gas or on-site methane digestors  (like my local brewery uses) and flywheel batteries that store more energy cheaper than chemical batteries do.

A local power outage last year had people coming from 3 counties to look for generator gas because their local gas stations couldn't run their own pumps. Like that song says: "A little bit is better than nada. You get a little bit; or nothing at all."

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Frustration

Gar- It's reasonable to be frustrated and Dog knows I share that frustration but you're bailing the ocean with a colander at this point.

The political options are:

1. A carbon tax and rebate scheme that attempts to shift relative costs of fossil fuels. Not very likely considering our current, mostly corrupt Congress.
   
2. A cap-and-trade scheme designed to provide some improvement in carbon emissions and a profit channel for political contributors and certain big environmental groups.
3. A "green jobs" program that leverages government money to produce conservation and retail-level solar and wind installation. This is likely as it's cheaper than unemployment or relief in the long run.
4. Do nothing. The status quo.

Of the current options #3, green jobs, is a shoe in on some level. Option #1 isn't going to get much support as it benefits the poor at the expense of the wealthy and upper middle class. Option #2, cap-and-trade is going to be the political football.

My personal take is that a crippled cap-and-trade bill will be pushed through as a stopper to prevent a solid bill from happening in the future. It's becoming less profitable to oppose as buy-in is achieved by proponents. Throw sand at the gears but don't lay down if front of this train.

Supporting a strong and solid "green jobs" program will do more to reduce CO2 emissions since the real work has to be done on the retail level anyway. Better lighting, ground-loop HVAC and solar rooftops will close coal plants far faster than cap-and-trade can hope to. Pushing these programs as labor intensive job creation WITH the added benefit of economic payoffs could be a more profitable path.

But Enron's, zombie, cap-and-trade program isn't going to die if you say the right words. You don't have the silver to kill it. Find another path.

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Enron's legacy

Cap and Trade was meant to be a regulatory game that Enron could manipulate to create a closed energy market. There was never any intention to actually regulate emissions but rather to exploit Global Warming concerns in order to create new profit centers. Industry insiders prefer this program because it offers the highest profit margins and the lowest chance of a radical change in utility structure.

There is no cap and trade scheme that is going to win retail level political support where a 100% rebate carbon tax is stated as an alternative option. Cap and trade raises retail energy bills and returns nothing vs. the tax-and-rebate system.

Obama, rather than committing to a specific carbon cap or tax scheme appears to be promoting retail level energy generation and conservation as a means of mooting this debate. Given the choice of a carbon trading scheme or jobs and monies for energy savings investments at retail levels I'm not sure why we still discuss cap-and-trade. Where's the support for it in the streets?

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Briar Patch Economics

"I guess I'm going to be barbecue this day." Brer Rabbit sighed. "But getting barbecued is a whole lot better than getting thrown in the briar patch." He sighed again. "No doubt about it. Getting barbecued is almost a blessing compared to being thrown in that briar patch on the other side of the road. If you got to go, go in a barbecue sauce. That's what I always say. How much lemon juice and brown sugar you put in yours?"-mythfolklore .net

Yeah, those poor conservative shills or the Coal'N'Oil industries suddenly want anything but "Cap'N'Trade...."

On Noes!! B'rer Obama! You gots us now and we know we have to change our coal burning ways. We'll do whatever you like just don make us deal with a "Cap'N'Trade"system; oh my, think of the paper work."

Now B'rer Obama he knows how tricksy Coal'N'Oil can get and he surely is tired of getting kicked by them so he thinks he just might toss 'em in a sack of Carbon Tacks where the more they kick the more they get poked. Yep, it's a little bit of the hike over the hill to the shed where he can get a good strong sack and them Carbon Tacks but to be rid of Coal'N'Oil he jus might do it'. Yer gone git the Carbon Tacks in a nice tight sack he tells Coal'N'Oil.

Coal'N'Oil he surely don't want no Carbon Tacks in a nice tight sack so he thinks quick looks around and sees the crazy Sierra Club bird hanging out on a nearby tree limb. Throwin his voice he sings out like it's the Sierra Club bird... "Give 'em to the Carbon Off-sets" he sings, "they'll tear him to pieces and starve him to death those Carbon Off-sets will."

"Well those Carbon Off-sets will fill my mouth with fur, bite me like a thousand house-flies and tear out my nails" sez Coal'N'Oil,  "but surely that will be better than throwing me to the Cap'N'Trade system. Whatever you all do jus don' throw me there."

Now, anybody who knows their folklore knows that this scene is supposed to play out with Coal'N'Oil good as scott-free in the Cap'N'Trade patch while B'rer Obama ends up looking like a fool. We know that Ol'Coal loves a maze of regulations much better than a nice fat sack, er, tax that they can be tied up in/on and we all can watch.

The fools in Washington know that as long as Coal runs free they get a cut on the takings. Bread today being better than a field of grain tomorrow. Especially since it's not their field.

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Solar solves the Social Security issue

Right now the social security trust fund is invested in treasury bills. In order to pay the trust fund back the loans the current operation budget is making from the trust fund taxes will have to go up at some point.

As we have just discovered, finding corporate investments that remain stable over 30 years and produce income that pays back initial investments with any interest is rather difficult. The former blue chips of past years GM and PG&E have both faced massive devaluation.

Investment in solar panels OTOH produces net power above the energy cost of production and installation. A lifetime return of 10 to one is reasonable to assume if you accept an average panel life of 30 years. The return is greater if the high-purity silicon is recycled into new panels.

Concentrated solar thermal (CSP) plants will have much higher returns and longer lives since modular construction allows replacement of only failed components. It's pretty reasonable that a tracking mount will outlast a VW bug of which many are still driving fourty years after production. They are way less complicated than a VW's engine.

Putting a percentage of Social Security trust fund monies directly into PV and CSP plants to be paid back with income from power sales at peak rates should produce a solid, inflation-proof investment. The nation gets power, an investment that will be repaid and relief from future tax and pension burdens without diminishing support for the elderly.

If somebody else can find me another investment that sits in the sun and produces income with little maintenance speak right up. I think that there are a lack of good dam site left though.

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Hey Craig C. Clarke,

A reminder to the Randian eco-burners and other anti-science whackos.

Burning your house down is flaunting your consumption too. Why don't you give that a try? It has the same effect on you as your espoused policies do on thousands of people in the Pacific Northwest that will lose their houses to fires forced by Global Warming.

Drink down a nice tall glass of H2SO4 while you're at it. It's just a common chemical present in lakes and rivers all over the Northeast thanks to coal burning. You don't seem to think it hurts the fish. A carbonic acid chaser would do you good as well since the CO2 in the oceans is acidifying the water. Science says these substances might be harmful to you but you don't buy that namby-pamby science stuff do you?

What you object? Could it be that you aren't actually ignorant but paid shills for polluters? Surely that is the more likely case.

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The Die-off

It works just fine and conveys all the information needed to understand the scale of the problem. It doesn't matter if the arctic melts or the ocean conveyor stops our crops won't come in either way and the human race gets to play lifeboat.

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Environmentalists?

Aren't those the people that fly thousands of miles to attend "sustainability" conferences?

At this point reality has very little trade value in our political discourse. We're freeing ourselves from dependence on Mideast oil by building 450 hp. SUV's. We're ripping "clean coal" from the ground with mountain top removal mining and massive drag-line pits. We're "improving health care" by blowing a third of our spending on insurance company scams. Our farm policy demands the use of synthetic nitrates and oil-based pesticides that pollute our rivers and streams.

Backcut, the forests that were here when Europeans showed up where subject to regular fires lit by natives to produce forage for game. The snag thickets you complain about are the products of loggers and fire crews. You're not a great advocate of the cool-season burns that would preserve your timber for harvest.

Reality doesn't get majority poll on sites like Gristmill and the rest of the world is a lost cause. Why shouldn't major environmental groups cash out by parrotting the "clean coal" fiction? Who's going to call them on it?

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Failure is still the default

It's what we're doing now and what every proposal on the floor of Congress amounts to. The "no money" objection is totally bogus since the US government merrily goes on it's way producing tanks, fighters, submarines and aircraft carriers that will never once return a kilowatt-hour to the grid or put so much as a single potato on a dinner plate.

We "print money" every day to produce total waste in the form of war machinery. The energy return on all of this is zero or negative since any real calculation of the energy costs of middle east oil would have to include the GHG impact of burning it. The entire world is behaving like a farmer spending his seed money on booze and cheap floozies. Fine until the harvest fails and the mortgage comes due.

Forget money. It's a bogus concept in this context.

Windmills produce more power for general use than they require to build. Concentrating solar thermal plants produce more power than they require to build. Many, many times more power.  Societies that learn this lesson will prosper and those that ignore it will fail. The funny paper that we manage that power exchange with is less important than the energy slope equations.

What happened to the $350 billions given to the banks? Nobody knows and you can't find out. What happened to the trillions waste in Iraq? It produced nothing of productive value. Huge amounts of men, materials and equipment were destroyed to no account. The educations of millions of people devalued to zero.

Yet we can't find funds for solar panels that will produce power for 30+ years. Come again?

As long as we are committed to thinking in terms of money and we can't see the energy returns of our behavior we will continue to fail. Failure is the status quo; the default.

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Hey Randy,

Go down to your local big box supercenter. The place where the WalMart and the building materials supply place snug right up next to one another. Then count the number of SUV's and large pickups driving in with one or two people in them. Compare that to the number of small cars. The people who can finance new vehicles have gone back to purchasing SUV's totally ignoring the lessons of last summer.

Those people had all the time to reflect on the volatile nature of oil prices that I did. Me, I'm a high school drop-out. I'm as common as you get with the exception being that I read. I work and live with "the masses" and they pretty much don't care. Actually most college graduates couldn't give you a reasonable synopsis of how to deal with climate change more detailed than the words "solar" and "wind."

The masses need options presented to them where their own personal power bill goes down, the car they buy is automatically a fuel saving version and that's built into the price, and the business they go to work at has better insulation and solar panels on the roof because every business pays that as a gate fee. The masses don't have to worry about whether the milk is sterilized or if the bridges are safe; the government takes care of that. They need conservation and alternative power to be just that seamless.

Now we can wait for them to get a clue prodded by resource shortages but then the best options to minimize the damage have already passed by. Or, we can roll out what solutions we have now in force and avoid most of their pain.

I'll take the snotty liberal elite title if it gets the job done; call me whatever you like.

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The Alternative?

The majority of Americans now live in communities too diffuse to make conversion to light rail a viable option. There is currently a single operating personal rapid transit (PRT) system operational in the U.S. in Morgantown West Virginia.

Without functional roads people, food, clothing, medicines and building materials do not get to their destinations efficiently or sometimes at all. The alternative personal transit and freight packet switching and distribution system (a physical internet) simply does not exist outside of engineers drawings.

All the parts exist. Amusement parks have perfected small rails and pods (cars) run by electricity and computers. Automakers use automated pallet and freight delivery systems to get parts to factory floors with close timing, good safety and physical accuracy. As of today nobody has a functional system that can replicate what interurban light rail did in 1910 in getting freight and passengers from rural areas to cities and back again.

For the time being we are stuck with cars, trucks, bikes, busses and roads. Work for improvement but don't burn the bridge you're standing on.

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Beat the reality drum then!!

Don't let up. Don't stray from known science and proven engineering. Never let them turn around without having the truth bite them on the ankle even if the bite is as tiny as the smallest ant.

If anyone here needs to take a break and wander off to the lotus fields for a while I can't blame them but if you were so inclined you wouldn't be here in the first place. There are plenty of distractions on the internet. Infinite porn for starters.

Beat the reality drum. Change the beat, change the rythm, change the place, timing, color whatever it takes to make sure that the reality of the situation is thrust in the faces of Congress wherever they turn

The world has built it's collective economies around hopeful fantasy for far too long and the piper has come for his fee. We can pay up or lose our children's future.

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Splitting the baby

To get a "political solution" just gets you a dead baby. Or in this case several billion dead babies because climate change threatens to gut our ability to produce food crops.

I think we have established here on Gristmill and other websites that there is absolutely no need for new coal plants and several ways of shutting old coal plants down through combined programs of conservation, wind and solar power. This doesn't even touch dry rock geothermal power.

So any talk of "new coal plants" is simply turning our back on off-the-shelf solutions in favor of the coal industry's fairy tale. When a major industry starts telling political stories that don't jibe with physical reality watch out. California played that game with Enron and lost. The whole country played that game with the automobile industry and lax CAFE standards and lost. Now the coal industry wants to play "let's write our own laws" with the help of some pet greenwash organizations.

This isn't simply ignorance but flat denial of reality. Technologies exist that can eliminate coal use. George Bush has one of these technologies installed in his Crawford Texas home so they aren't exactly bleeding edge. There are no  methods of sequestering CO2 from a coal plant and still producing net power as cheap as conservation, wind, concentrating solar power or enhanced geothermal. There is no way that continued burning of coal doesn't accelerate climate changes already in progress as the mining and shipping processes alone involve increased emissions of GHG's.

Continued use of coal is the same as accepting failure on climate change.

This is coal industry money telling us what to think; period.

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Pheonix, Vegas, Reno, Houston, Dallas

These will be places that will baffle people in a millenia as they try to figure out what all of the people there did to survive in such resource poor environments.

The aquifers and energy-surplus economies that allowed people to sprawl over hundreds of square miles of asphalt and desert are going away and not coming back. Without good water, good cropland and good ports these place just don't make any sense.

Our ancestors will herd goats under the concrete columns of the overpass and wonder just what the hell we were thinking sticking columns of rock up in the blasted wilderness that will remain.

Our own collections of Easter Islands.

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Eat weird food

One way to help in diversifying the monocrop nature of our agriculture/food systems is to promote the eating of weird food. That is, foodstuffs that are readily produced but you aren't familiar with.

I regularly send my kids to school with what they report to me is "weird food;" things like fuyu persimmons and dried mango slices, dried figs, sandwiches with identifiable meat in them. It helps me realize that for many, many people normal foods consist of a very short list of products.

Here's what I'm suggesting. Every time you make a major grocery run at the supermarket or farmers market buy one item, a fruit, vegetable or grain that you normally don't eat. Research it, look it up, find out what normal preparations are and try it out. If you don't like it right away, no biggie, you just might find yourself buying it again later and liking it as you brain gets used to the idea.

Now all you foodies; getting something truly new might mean a detour to the local ethnic market. Just speak right up and ask and people are usually glad to explain what's what to somebody truly interested in their food culture.

Weird food; live a little.

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The money problem again

I feel that much of what gets messed up in economics is that money has a variable value while a kw/h or Btu is rather more definable. I keep seeing these arguments about "the cost" of one energy generation or savings path over another in dollars when I feel that we should rather be looking at the costs in terms of energy balances.

By all accounting practices I've heard about wind power produces far more energy than it requires to build and install modern turbines. Why is there even any consideration of doing something else until wind is built out? Once it reaches break even the economy that owns those turbines is in gravy whether we count that in guilder, yen or sheckels.  The same energy cost vs income is true for concentrated solar power and to a lesser extent for photovoltaics. Energy exports will exceed inputs and nicely enough can be separated from the inputs by simply moving the panels.

The money issue is rather moot at that point. If the money flows contradict energy flows all the owners of the wind turbines and solar power stations have to do is flick the off switch until that gets sorted out. The Gazprom solution to energy finance issues.

So if Appalachia wants long-term sources of incomes they would be well served to site wind turbines on those hilltops in preference to removing the hills. The flat spots left by the coal industry could be used for concentrated solar power fields and the earth moving expertise used to create pumped storage reservoirs. One way or the other the coal industry is leaving town.

One thing we are sure of is that waving dollar bills at an oil well or a natural gas well-head will not produce more energy when the well is tapped out. The money itself has no value without an energy source to feed the monetary system. So if all these economists could please throw out their calculations as to how many dollars something will cost and look at the EROI equations we could get on with the real work of making the transition.

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Who knew?

Oh yeah, we did.

I like the line about how being denied the right to pollute the air is theft though. If you're going to tell a lie why not make it a whopper.

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A bone to builders of mansions

If it's an income tax credit they are considering this will benefit no-one but the builders of custom homes for the wealthy. Since the poor and working poor don't build custom homes, or pay much in income taxes this will benefit them not at all.

In short, this is a way to boost the bottom lines of AEI's traditional constituency; wealthy people. They would get a break on the mansions they were building anyway in exchange for design changes that will cost less than the marble for the entry. Heck, call that marble "thermal mass" and allow them to write it off entirely.

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The faster solution

An example:

Given $100K to spend on greenhouse gas reductions we could invest in geo-exchange retrofits now or nuclear plants now.  If I cluster installation of my geo-exchange systems (4 homes) I can realize significant savings in the greatest cost of the system, the drilling for the ground loop. If I bundle systems into neighborhood or block thermal-service units unit costs go down again.

In any case average extra cost of geo-exchange heat pump system is usually recovered by the building occupant in 5 to 10 years. At the ten year point where the geo-exchange system has repaid it's investment and has been reducing fossil fuel use for 9 years the nuclear plant has yet to produce a single net watt.

If these same buildings add solar thermal and solar pv systems to their roofs at year five when geo-exchange payback periods start to kick in they could be at zero net power use by year ten. Due the the reduced load from the geo-exchange system the solar pv system can be sized smaller than on a similar house with standard air conditioning. Due to the ability of the geo-exchange system to use the ground as a heat sink the solar thermal panels need not be high-temperature metal tubing but could be HDPE plastics. Rather than being demand-sized the entire system can be reserve-sized by taking advantage of the thermal battery the ground offers.

So in ten years a cluster of four homes might convert that $100K into a net-zero grid demand with some residual debt on systems. That reduction in demand lowers the cost of building the proposed supergrid. It reduces current carbon output of these building to near zero and has a residual life of 20 to 40 years.

The nuclear option has still produced no power at all in that time with standard building schedules. The nuclear option will require acceptance of many multiples of the current nuclear power plants be sited, financed and approved by the public. Then it will require grid upgrades down the line to convert homes using natural gas and oil for heating to heat pumps or resistance heating. Probably using geo-exchange heat pumps. That's a lot of steel, pipe, wire and concrete to expend for a ten year delay in greenhouse gas reduction.

In comparison nuclear power is simply a waste of money. It will not and cannot produce "unlimited power" because we still live on a limited planet. It simply removes the power limit early allowing other resource limits to check the growth of the human race. It can't even produce the desired services of comfortable homes and buildings with anything like the speed of conservation conversions. The persistent myth of nuclear power as a preferable option is simply delusional; it has no basis in fact.

Conservation, solar, wind, and geothermal resources are the faster solution.

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Dr. X

The cool thing about traction kites is that all you need to function is a kite in each of two streams of air moving at different directions or speeds to achieve controlled flight. Supposing you have a lighter-than-air airship able to inject a kite into the jet stream the drag of the airship at lower altitude would allow controlled flight.

It is even hypothetically possible to tack UP a jet stream provided materials of sufficient strength were available.

We don't need no stinking biofuels.

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Faulty details break our trust

The bolded heading...

3. Urgent R&D on fourth generation nuclear power with international cooperation.

Energy efficiency, renewable energies, and a "smart grid" deserve first priority in our effort to reduce carbon emissions. With a rising carbon price, renewable energy can perhaps handle all of our needs. However, most experts believe that making such presumption probably would leave us in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide. Such a result would be disastrous for the planet, humanity, and nature.

The rest, the majority, is about nukes and coal.

There follows no mention of specific energy efficiencies or off-the-shelf technologies that destroy "clean coal" and nuclear power in speed of implementation and cost-effectiveness. Ground-coupled thermal systems installed in all possible buildings would close coal plants down permanently. This isn't rocket science but pumps, piping and wells no more complicated than in many rural houses; why ignore this tool?

Dry rock geothermal, concentrated solar power and wind turbines together could provide several multiples of US power consumption, each alone, if fully built out. In combination a versatile, stable and affordable source of grid power is available without new research.

I can't find the words solar, wind, or geothermal anywhere in this letter despite the fact that they can be installed far faster than we can build clean coal plants or nukes. In the last five years  I've seen solar panels installed over carports, houses, parking lots, gas stations, brewery's and bus stops. No coal needed, no nukes required and none built in California during the recent building boom.

In promoting the twin follies of "clean coal" and "advanced nuclear power" James Hansen drains the strength of his earlier work. Any place in the world can harness the wind, the sun and the heat of the planet right now. Most buildings in the world could be served more efficiently converting to renewables than continuing the use of coal, fossil methane or biofuels. These benefits are available faster, cleaner and cheaper than waiting for new coal or nuclear plants to be built from non-existent models.  

I thought this was an emergency? Why promote fantasies while neglecting solutions we can install today or tomorrow? Solid solutions exist; let's use them first.  

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Confusing cost with currency.

If the price for not having your building weather stripped is that you pay some fine or incremental fee that is lower in any given year than cost of remediation a large percentage of people will opt to defray the capital costs.

Even if the remediation is free but the building owner or resident has to pay some other cost such as supervisory time for off-site workers or lost billable hours remediation will be deferred. If the benefit falls to the tenant and the expense to the landlord remediation will be deferred. I have seen free utility energy upgrades deferred for all of these reasons.

What if the cost isn't directly fiscal? Water companies routinely demand certification of anti-siphon valves or the service is shut off. Rendering building uninhabitable and rents or billable hours moot. Water valve certifications are rarely deferred.

There we have a different kind of cost. The entire value of your building is lost until the required standard is met. These types of controls are standard for fire, structural and biological hazards and there is no reason that energy standards shouldn't be included in that group considering the massive threat climate change poses.

Fix your building (we'll help mind) or lose it's value is a cost owners deal with every day. It also doesn't fit neatly into cap-and-trade arguments designed to create rents for trading exchanges.
 

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Combustion's staying

The vast majority of the world's farmers can't afford closed loop pyrolisis chambers. They can make rocket stoves and charcoal kilns out of clays that will greatly improve the efficiency of their cooking and heating fires. That's just knowledge added to resources thay already have.

With a little help they could also convert agricultural waste and dry biomass into biochar in steel drums that could be used to improve their topsoils. The long term improvement in topsoils of biochar will more than offset the temporary shift from bacterial consumption of wastes to combustion. Combustion in kilns could even decrease the amount of ag waste that converts to methane and particulate matter in normal burning and mulching operations. What isn't an option is to have soil carbon increase while maintaining the status quo.

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Dysfunctionomics

Right now the working poor have few good options other than driving whatever vehicle they can afford that meets their needs. That means used vehicles. They have car loans they will have to pay for gas guzzlers whether there is gas to put in them or not. Bus systems, for the most part, will not get them to work and essential services; possibly either/or, rarely both. They cannot stop driving short of losing their jobs. Taxing them just destroys the rest of the economy.

On the top end of the auto market new vehicle buyers are continuing to purchase size, speed and style and largely ignoring the undersubscribed, over-hyped hybrid offerings. (Prius excluded) If you have the income and credit to buy a new car or truck $4 gas isn't quite the hit that it is for the used car buyer. Chances are you are able to afford horsepower over hybrid.

The solution is to add a whopping surcharge to all new vehicles without a 20 mile, low speed electric range. Bump that up by ten miles every five years until it gets to 50 miles or so. Then add that surcharge directly back as a credit to buyers of said hybrids. This will stabilize gas prices for the poor by reducing demand while slowly turning over the vehicle fleet. The people who will pay this surcharge will also benefit from lowered fuel prices; win-win. The auto industry can just eat it as it's on the dole anyway; make the changes or die.

Public transit expansion will have to be entirely separate as much of the money is spent before anybody benefits and the majority of the benefit of rail lags installation by several years as development and commerce adjust to service the rail line's population flows. Trying to tie this all into one package and please everybody isn't going to work. Somebody is going to lose if we do something or nothing. We might as well do something right.

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Ask your alderman....

... how all the road patching is progressing with the losses county budgets have taken in sales and property tax revenues. Fading asphalt is a hazard in my town and a disaster on county roads. I live in one of the wealthier rural counties of Northern California. It doesn't even freeze here.

The trick isn't just that oil prices swing up and down. Every time we go through one of these swings enterprises that took decades to build vanish when expenses exceed the ability of the company to manage debts. Those contractors can't just go and buy back equipment when the swing looks to be heading back up because the banks have blacklisted them.

The nasty bit about Peak Oil is that human capital, training and assembled, functional, working teams, is destroyed every time the whip cracks. So that when the town suddenly has funds to pave the engineers and foreman are stocking shelves at Winco and fishing at the reservoir. The teams which got things done are gone and have to be assembled from scratch.

This is where Kunstler is right even though it doesn't come through in what I've read. Peak Oil's high price swings destroy things that can't be reassembled on the bottoms. Each cycle destroys some link in the economic chain which then requires extra energy to replace. The whip cracks; parts fall off. The whip keeps moving.

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Trees don't buy Ad space.

Fish don't buy ad space. Soil doesn't buy ad space. Marmots, whales and orngutan don't buy ad space. Archer Daniels Midland, General Motors and the coal corporations buy lots of ad space.

That's all you need to know about major media science reporting. It will deny, delay and confuse the reality about global warming up till the very day that Manhattan island is flooded by a storm surge. That's what they are getting paid to do.

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Sell 'em solar panels

Unlike just about anything else you can purchase nowadays solar panels have a unique property; expose them to sunlight and you have a salable commodity. You can put them on a roof and use them for the next thirty years or take them down and stack them in a shed for a few years with little decrease in their ability to produce power.  Pull them out, point them at the sun and you are back to producing money, er, power.

Another property of solar panels is that if the average chinese worker is counting on getting some portion of his/her income from solar panels then they have an incentive to agitate for a reduction in particulate emissions. That would include hassling coworkers, local businesses and neighbors who light smokey fires or otherwise ignore pollution control measures.

Finally, in the event a solar panel quits producing power entirely it's still a lump of high-grade silicon with significant residual value. A lump of gold is just a lump of gold in thirty years. A savings bond depends upon the issuer to honor it and the currency to not inflate beyond use. A stock depends upon the CEO to not loot the company. But a solar panel will produce an income as long as the sun is shining on it. That income will decline over the years but the panel will pay for itself several times before it ever reaches zero.

Of course all of this depends upon the relative cost of electricity in China adjusting to account for the effects of coal pollution but that has to happen anyway. Any significant fraction of a billion people with lung disease gets too expensive to support very quickly. If we could sell solar panels as a hedge against retirement people would buy them.

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Ah, the "red thread"

The nasty thing about all of those 'needs' that we sublimate with our entertainments and toys is that many of them are all too corporal. It is far easier to organize factories and workplaces with thousands of people in them if they get their meatier itches scratched after work via a screen or a purchase of distracting toys.

What our tribal ancestors did to entertain themselves on dark nights is left to speculation but it certainly didn't involve 52 inch plasma screens.
Avoiding that reality is going to be harder if we shut down the distraction machine.

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I beg to disagree.

Out here in California the endless forests of redwood and doug fir turned out to have ends after all. All the old growth is long gone. The tiny remnants that get logged are shipped to Japan for prices higher than locals can pay. The good second growth is gone too. Right now you are lucky to find a few straight clear boards in a lift and most have knots or bits of bark on a corner.

Start burning that wood instead of coal and the Northeast will revert to the rock pastures that covered it one-hundred years ago. The heat you want is under your feet or hidden in a stack of straw bales. Insulation, thermal mass and ground-loop heat pumps are far better options than windfalls and thinnings.

You're going to burn them anyway but hopefully in a retort so the majority of carbon is retained as biochar to feed the soil. Feed them to a coal furnace and you'll live in a desert.

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Electric Volkswagon bug wanted

Serve it up all you aspiring automakers. Give us an electric Volkswagen bug. All electric drive with a 30 mile range. Rooftop solar panels to deal with the "I forgot to charge the car" weekend. Optional 20 horsepower, air-cooled motor generator to extend range.

If you were really smart it would be a toaster box like the original Scion B with hard points for roof racks for ladders and other tradesman's gear. In wheel motors for a low deck and electric braking to preserve brake life.

Give it hand cranked windows, a heat-pump stolen from a fridge, LED headlights and an aluminum body filled with foam for crash safety and two doors;  driver and passenger compartment. Make the drive motor oversized to allow kids to add supercaps so they could hot-rod it.

It would knock the socks off Detroit and Japan. I saw a design like this on the net for a taxi but can't find the link. Why not? Look at what the original Honda cars were like.

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Free isn't really free.

The problems with "free" energy conservation improvements is that rental property owners don't want to spend the money to organize tenants and supervise installation of improvements. They don't want any disruptions to their cash flow first and foremost and tenant benefit improvements come later, if ever.

I experienced this first hand in California when, working for a property management company, I found I was forced to turn down free improvements to the lighting on several of my properties because I couldn't fund the staff time to do supervise installations. Also tenants weren't willing to stay home from work and lose income while we worked on the lights. I won't even discuss the hassles of working with business clients.

I hate to say it but to really get the efficiency improvements we need a bit of arm twisting may be required.

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That will be hard to pass

Think of the wailing from congressional republicans. It would be like you were asking them to personally pass the legislation in bound paper form.

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No hydrogen needed.

I'll just pop on down to the hydrogen station then for a little fill-er-up.

Too freaking bad for me the nearest hydrogen station is 80+ miles away at Arnie's house and I couldn't buy the tanks or the fuel cell for a HEV for the cost of my current used car.

I could however trade in my Matrix for a Prius for about $6K more; that has batteries. Or buy a GEM neighborhood electric vehicle for the same price.

If I'm really smart I'll sell the car I have. Hire a cab for rainy days and spend $2K for an electric assisted cargo bike. That way I ditch the monthly insurance bill, gas, repairs and I don't have the temptation of taking the car on tough days. Plus I'll save that $2k in the first year easy.

Of course, I've already got the cargo bike but I'm still lusting over an electric wheel. Maybe Santa can help out.

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That's just cruel

There isn't even any decent barbecue in my town and there you go posting about burgers to die for. Man, I hope it rains a LOT up there so that you get a chance to work off some of that weight. Maybe borrow BD's superbike and ride around some.

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All the roofers are men too.

That doesn't mean that women don't like a sound roof over their head. It's just that they have mysterious ways of avoiding the hot, dirty and dangerous job of roofing not available to men.

The fact that great portions of people manage to avoid the dangerous work involved in procuring food & shelter on the physical level doesn't mean that we can ignore it.

Any women willing to join the boys on roofing crews, insulation crews, window installers and sheet metal workers are welcome to sign up. Hot, dirty and dangerous; what's not to like? All the equality you want with none of the benefits of lawyering.

If the green jobs go to men I'm sure that women will somehow benefit due to the "invisible hand of the free market." Or possibly due to the not-so-invisible hand of their wives on the checkbook. The work still has to get done.

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Cell phone controllers

The easiest way to do this is to install simplified cell phones in appliances and give them unique address numbers. The link and the utility would swap data encoded in standard text-messaging packets.

You bring the appliance home, plug it in and it looks for mama and sends a ping to whatever local network it finds. This has huge advantages with sprinkler timers as they could talk to the weather station about how much water to put out.

This works for power generation also. I know a guy who's working on solar panels that call the shop when they get dirty or a section is getting too much shade.

Of course vastly larger amounts of energy can be saved by tyeing building thermal systems to ground loops. Swapping out to the most efficient lighting and replacing dated and faulty refrigerators and water heaters. This stuff sounds cool but it's the parsley on the pigs ear at a luau. Not the meat of the issue.

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The bicycle path

That's where I see the local college kids expressing energy on climate change. I don't see the suit wearing hordes of resume polishers have had any effect at all so far.

Until the hall-hiking crowds at climate conferences start talking to people who build and farm on a retail level this trains going nowhere. People need to know that there will be a place for them in the new economy. A place maybe different, but as good as what they can get now.

They rest of us surely aren't going to get jobs as Senate staffers and corporate climate change consultants. How about helping us out?

Quit with the conferences already. It's the same group of insiders playing echo chamber in new places. Build some demo projects in whatever home town you came from and haul the public through them.

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Bob

If you are accusing me of accepting a pig in a poke based upon internet posts you would be wrong. I've done my own pot tests. I've had a discussion with a research Ph.D in geology about the persistence of charcoal in soils that confirmed the claims of the Cornell team. You can confirm for yourself that soils are generally understood to have a "carbon equilibrium" by researching that phrase on Google:scholar.

A quick scan of that research will show you that warmer soils generally have lower carbon contents due to the rapid utilization of biomass by micro-flora and microfauna. That's why my local soils are relatively light colored even under a 200 year old Valley Oak. Despite the fact that the tree has been dropping leaves twigs and acorns and gophers have been mixing plant material into the deep soil virtually all of the carbon has converted to atmospheric gasses. It's too warm.

Biochar is showing in repeated research that it increases crop yields and total biomass. That would necessarily include root biomass (soil carbon) as well. Resulting in quotes like this from research papers:

from:  Enhancing the Productivity of Crops and Grasses while Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Bio-Char Amendments to Unfertile Tropical Soils.
Results: Additions of even low doses of charcoal (Biochar) to soils results in a net cumulative increase in total biomass of maize, improved pasture and native savanna vegetation. Yields of maize were similar in all treatments during the first year but significantly increased by biochar in the two subsequent years. In the third year, yields increased from 5.7 ton/ha (control) to 6.6 and 7.3 ton/ha for the low and high dose of biochar. Forage production from B. dictyoneura increased by 26% and 55% in the second year relative to the control in the low and high biochar plots respectively. Total biomass production on the native vegetation trials was slightly increased from 5.78 ton/ha (control) to 6.14 ton/ha in the high biochar dose, but was similar to the control at the low biochar dose.

I don't know about where you live but the farmers in my area would be giddy with that kind of long term improvement in production. That's science there talking. Not some handyman in N. Cal. and it looks dang near like a miracle. What would be your problem with that?

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Thanks for the detailed post.

If these figures on crop improvement...

"Plant height Increase 141 % versus control
Picking yield Increase 630 % versus control
Picking fruit Increase 650 % versus control
Total yield Increase 202 % versus control
Total piece of fruit Increase 171 % versus control
Fruit weight Increase 118 % versus control"

Don't convince a gardener to till in some biochar then all my noise about improved tilth, water percolation, weed removal and plant health aren't going to help.

That's for a one time application.

Also, considering the labor involved in turning 500 lbs of leaves into 150 lbs of compost a more rapid incorporation of biomass into soils is welcome. Since most undisturbed soils are already at carbon equilibrium this will only change the equation by a few months in tropical and subtropical climates and a few years in temperate climates.

If I'm correct then the increase in soil carbon from charcoal amended soils is greater than the mass of the charcoal added. Additional root and fungal mass counts as increased carbon sequestered also.

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Storage is needed onsite.

Nasty as it is grid reliability is dropping all over the US. Last winter several hundred thousand people in California had no power for at least a week due to a storm. Last summers wildfires had dispersed power outages as transmission lines were shut off as fires threatened them.

Solar power and even a small battery supply can make the difference between a bit of power and no power at all. No power at all gets expensive fast.

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Ouch.

Vaikibs- Radiation in groundwater kills people all the time. We call it radon contamination and it happens in water wells in certain kinds of rock and some basements. Where uranium oxides are present in large enough quantities to mine people don't live just like the areas around quicksilver mines. I've actually seen a dinner plate with a uranium oxide glaze made in the 30's in New Mexico. While it won't kill you right away it's not something you want in your pantry either.

If you know enough to promote Gen IV reactors you know that it isn't the fuel but the actinides, plutonium and intermediate products that are really toxic. Gamma sources in the ground water are too much of a threat for anyone to bury a reactor anywhere there is any groundwater at all.

As to the solar/geothermal hybrid. The Feds. sponsored a brief study in the 70's that concluded it could be feasible provided cheaper solar sources or more expensive power prices were available. Dang if I can find it again though. Credit where due.

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Try it yourself.

I would encourage people to try a single 5 pound bag of hardwood charcoal. Use the lump kind, not mesquite, not briquets. Soak the charcoal overnight in some water. Dig a small depression in the area you intend to use it. Using the hole as a mortar pound, grind, smash or chop the charcoal until you are dirty and tired of the exercise or it's the consistency of rough sand. Add some kind of nitrogen rich mulch, horse manure, alfalfa pellets or whatever you have handy. Spread over a 4 square foot plot (2'x2') and dig in a few inches. Set aside an adjoining plot to use as a control remembering to use equal amounts of the same mulch.  

After a single season notice how the plants grow and how easy or hard it is to pull weeds in each plot. Remember your soil modification to this plot is pretty much permanent. You have just sequestered carbon but more importantly the whole dang dandelion root will come when you pull. Or even the whole oak sprout if you can believe it. Water goes into the soil instead of puddling on top and stuff grows like mad. A friend with an accidental biochar plot has crazy tomatoes.

Any gardener who does this once I'm convinced will be addicted. I'm convinced. The Amazonian natives who converted huge tracts of land this had to have believe it. It simply works wonders.

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Reality...

Not a big priority for these people. Why they think the creator of several thousand varieties of beetles (in a single day no less) would be interested in continued car production is beyond me.

It seems to me that creator might get a bit miffed at the extinction of several varieties of marine mammals and some of his best work in birds.

Watch for stray lightning bolts and burning bushes. That goes double in the West.

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Mold caution

As a rental maintenance manager in Northern California I ran across a repeated problem. People who had turned their heat down or off to save money were getting mold blooms in various places around the house. This was a particular problem on exterior walls behind furniture or drapes and in bathrooms.

After a while I figured out that these were all residences where the occupants weren't heating very much but were still taking showers and cooking. The water vapor, having nowhere else to go, was condensing on cold surfaces. Where this combines with poor air circulation mold thrives.

If you aren't heating a modern building you have to open windows, drapes and blinds daily if you are going to occupy it. Simply breathing in an enclosed space puts water vapor in the air and showers will add vaporize several gallons of water. The poor air circulation in these buildings will provide dead air spaces for mold to thrive.

Bottom line; heat the house or open the windows. On Umbra on turning down the heat posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 21 Responses

Quorn's not good enough?

If you simply want a source of chewey protein that is vegetarian there are plenty of options out there. A black bean taco with some avacado has all the protein and essential fatty acids you could hope for.

You're still going to drool when the guy next door slaps a leg of lamb on the barbecue. PETA's attempt to separate the muscle part of the animal from the mobile, self-replicating, doe-eyed bioreactor part if foolish and short sighted. The biological system has had billions of years to evolve and we're not replacing it with our glow-in-the-dark-bunny tech.

It would be far better for all concerned if we focused on improving the habitat and diet of meat animals rather than replacing them.

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Tell it to the Ice Caps will you?

Because last time I checked both the northern and southern polar ice caps were losing mass. Still, it's nice to see that you have to put "anthropogenic" in that sentence now. After twenty years of denying global warming you are now forced to merely deny that it had anything to do with you.

At this point it's insulting to Flat Earthers to compare climate change deniers with them. At least they have they wit and grace to deny ALL of the evidence against them rather than picking and choosing.

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He skipped tribalism

I'm denying the mammoth behind us because Thog deny mammoth. If Thog walk slowly I walk slowly. Thog know when to run like hell.....

Pretending that humans aren't pack hunters who were required to do individually stupid things to increase the packs survival is silly. People DO jump off the bridge because the popular kids did it first.

If denying climate change becomes a symbol of tribal cohesion then people are going to go with it until it changes from an abstract threat to a concrete and immediate one in their perception.

We're allowed to run when the tusks get close but not until we can tap them with the spear. The tricky thing is running away from the tribe when the perception of threat isn't shared.

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Wait for the phase shift.

We're at the point that everyone who is literate enough to believe that maps and medical journals represent some portion of "reality" should get it. But what are you going to do if you have to get to work? People don't feel they have options.

At some point it will become clear to people that climate change will come hunting for them personally; like it did in California. Then all the ballast is going to shift from one side of the argument to the other at once.

Kind of like Rush Limbaugh trying to figure out how a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama got elected president. There are going to be a few gasping fish left on the dry side of the tank but the shift WILL happen. We just don't know when.

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What? She can't Google?

Right up there at the top of she use's phrases like "global cooling theory" and "global cooling science" that have about as much validity as the abiotic oil whackos. There are a number of "global cooling" hypothesis but there is no "theory" in the scientific sense.

This article should have been properly labeled an advertisement and it's sponsors published. There was no reporting there.

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Bad Idea Contest?

Can anyone play or is it restricted to non-plumbers? Actually I did general building maintenance but that almost qualifies me.

Please note that I am absolutely all for saving the massive chunks of energy that heat hot water but I have dealt with the realities of changing a water heater in a second floor apartment hallway. Space can be extremely limited and plumbing runs designed by complete morons (architects). Venting is frequently hit and miss. So other than site specific, space, power, venting, drainage and plumbing issues these look good.

Residential heat exchangers: Gas to liquid systems are good ideas where applicable. That means access to a drain line for condensate is a must. (evaporation pans=bugs) Waste-water heat scavengers in residential buildings are idiocy. Slowing down and cooling the shower gels and bath salts coming from a low-flow showerhead will be punished. I shudder to think what happens when laundry drain lines clog. Just don't go there.

Complicating home refrigerators: insane. I wake up at night with nightmares about ice-maker supply lines leaking. A water drip behind a fridge is cockroach heaven. Unless you're building new with a unified utility core leave well enough alone.

Venting behind refrigerators: bug heaven. Mouse heaven too if you don't get this perfect. Just put the unit in an unheated mudroom or make your own cabinet and use a commercial, split, compressor/condenser system.

Energy savings are a good idea but changes to building systems have to be done with a deep and respectful paranoia fueled by nightmare repairs on hack construction. If you find yourself talking to an optimistic contractor; RUN. Murphy rules the job site.

b.t.w.- A buddy of mine just installed one of the heat-pump water heaters. He likes it so far.  

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Just wondering....

If the fertilizer prices shoot up just before planting and the commodity prices dive at harvest what happens to the farmers?

The dependence upon off-site inputs to get a crop in seems to be quite a risk factor affecting farm security. To encourage African farmers without protection from governments to gamble this way is morally dubious.

There are a wide variety of ways to secure nitrogen through interplanting, green manures, composts and crop rotations that might be a better option for small farmers.

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Crocodile tears at GM

Electric motors, load controllers, charging systems and batteries are all off the shelf parts. GM already has the blueprints to the Geo Metro's 1-liter engine. Those are all the parts you need to make a plug-in hybrid.

All the wailing and whining at GM about "can't make economical vehicles" are pure sheep dip. They could roll off the same bodies they have now and install power systems later.

Freed from the constraint of dead-weight executive offices I'm sure the workers at GM could come up with production prototypes in months, not years while they continue to produce bodies.

How 'bout giving the workers at GM six months to fight for their working lives? Give us plug-in's in six months or hit the bread lines.

I think they could do it.

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Greenhouse still a minority concern

Admitted that minority includes many of the people who make all the decisions but they still have to deal with the masses.

That said I still believe that replacing the heating oil market with ground-loop heat pumps is the fastest route to demand destruction in the US.

In the rest of the world the Chinese-manufactured electric scooter is going to dominate city traffic. Nothing more easy and convenient has ever been built. I saw a white-haired old lady of the first order on one last Saturday and she was thrilled. If she can ride one anyone can.

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And I feel fine... Not.

People can acknowledge it or not but part of the stress they feel can probably transfer back to the loss of ecological services. If there are no spaces to retreat to where do people get their heads together?

Where would a Buddha find a fig tree that he could sit under in the US? He'd be arrested long before the 40 days came around.On Oceans acidifying much faster than thought, study says posted 1 year ago 2 Responses

It's a bogus criticism.

Smokey, your criticism of the OP is that it doesn't cite data when in fact it cites numerous sources that summarize and collate legitimate scientific findings and only legitimate scientific findings.

Given that the review paper citing abstracts of a series of reports and summarizing findings into a concise whole is a well known and practiced scientific technique I don't see the validity of your criticism.

A valid criticism is that the so-called "journalist" in the politico piece is in no way qualified to judge the difference between legitimate scientific findings and political blather by whack jobs with science degrees. Not that I have a science degree but I can recognize there is a difference between peer reviewed works and Anthony Watts blog.

Politico's acceptance and promotion of such low-standard work should taint the rest of site. It screams "we'll accept any old trash as content" reducing it from journalism to something akin to  Twitter.  

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Um, Chevron's a Corporation

If we haven't learned in the last year that corporations are almost incapable of acting in the common good we never will. Chevron's Richmond CA refinery used to be known for dumping so much toxic crap in the air on foggy nights that it would peel the paint off cars.

That's one monster thats going to have to be chased into the corner and impaled in a wooden stake. We might also consider the evils of allowing fictional entities freedom to lie in the public domain.

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Do we really think.....

coal burning is going to stop in the next twenty years? I can't see that happening.

If we aren't going to quit sending carbon into the atmosphere we better work on ways of pulling it back down. Increasing soil carbon is one possibility but given that the majority of the planet is covered by water we might want to revisit ocean nutrient fertilization. Isn't that how the oil deposits got laid down?

Somethings gotta give and I don't like the frog-in-the saucepot option.

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Overshoot much?

JMG- You're absolutely right. We've already grossly overshot the tipping point where all the easy global warming remedies were going to work. Siberian permafrost methane is melting and that's the fat lady of climate change.

Short of a dictatorship we have to deal with mitigations that can pass congress. That's why I like tax and rebate; it's a free-money gimmick with benefits where we want them.

Without putting the carbon in the atmosphere back into mineral form the human race is FUBAR'd. Simply stopping emissions isn't going to cut it anymore.

Gotta try anyway.

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A solid month of fires

Is what we had in California this last summer. Much of that was due to the refusal to either hand cut excess fuels growth or implement controlled burns. Both cost money that can be put off of budgets so they are.

The forests evolved with fire and without mankind. Fire suppression and lumbering has got us where we are today. What some people call "forest management." It hasn't worked.

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Economic contraction is death....

to capitalism. Capitalism relies on the concept that somebody in the future is going to hand over more resources (money) then in exchange for a smaller resource investment now. This is very difficult in a steady state economy and almost impossible in a contracting economy.

Wall Street hates retail efficiency measures because they make it hard to calculate a return on energy production investment. Of course the risk-free investment market really isn't capitalism then but simply socialism for the rich.On Big drop in U.S. electricity consumption confounds utilities posted 1 year ago 14 Responses

I have vauge memories....

Of a very satisfactory tryst overlooking the the ocean just off Highway 1. The sunset was the same color as the first generation Honda Civic we had pulled into the driveway of a cattle chute.

That little orange Honda all the space required. It was smaller than a current Mini-Cooper. All the bigger vehicles I've had since then haven't served as well. I guess size really doesn't matter. On From Backseat to Front Seat posted 1 year ago 2 Responses

Low hanging fruit.....

There's massive amounts of power savings available that will be slowly worked into the system. Our buildings are full of old, inefficient, refrigerators, air conditioners, lights, ducts, motors, water heaters and heat pumps. As older equipment dies the availability of efficient replacements on store shelves makes upgrades almost automatic. There are 30-year-old AC units out there clanking away on half their rated load of refrigerant just waiting for somebody to strongarm the property owner into replacing them.

A vigorous inspection and replacement program that allowed billing of replacement lighting, refrigerators and AC units through utility bills could free far more grid capacity than plug-in hybrids could possibly require in the short term. In particular retail and commercial buildings use far more power than strictly required due to the problem of leased buildings maintained on least-cost budgets.

It's past time to pick the low-hanging fruit. On Big drop in U.S. electricity consumption confounds utilities posted 1 year ago 14 Responses

Head banging idiocy

Didn't wild bluefin evolve over millions of years the ability to migrate to where the little fish are, eat them, and then become big fish. All without an ounce of human assistance.

Now, due to the age of cheap fuel, tuna stocks are declining. With the cheap fuel age over we are using fuel to go catch food for the tuna, freeze it, then transport it to captive fish. This is supposed to be preferable to simply setting fishing quotas that will allow stocks to grow and enforcing them.

What part of "sustainable" includes the massive burning of fossil fuels to farm fish? That can't be sustainable for long.

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Still posting a "buy" on Exxon shares?

The New York Times credibility starts and stops with Krugman. Other than that you can write off any opinion posted there on economics. These are the idiots that spent the last year telling us what a good buying opportunity the stock market is.

What more can you say? Sure, some stocks will go up; but which stock? They've got a buy on all of them. Just as surely we will be using some fossil fuels but how much is anybody's guess. I'm guessing the supply isn't going to go up.  

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Chop Tyson up...

into pieces small enough to fail.  If we haven't learned the lesson of monopoly economics this year we are never going to learn it. Putting that much of the US food supply in the hands of one corporation is idiocy.

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And then a miracle occurs.....

The nasty part about bailing out Detroit is that Toyota, Honda and Nissan are also suffering from sales drops despite the fact that their vehicle fleets get significantly better mileage. Even with these improved mileage vehicles Toyota has suffered a drop in sales volume that would cripple any US automaker. For any domestic vehicle a more efficient import can be found already in production and they can't sell all of those cars.

Where are these improved mileage vehicles supposed to come from?  They aren't on the drawing boards of engineers and there certainly aren't any in pre-production testing. They don't exist. We could try slapping electric motors, batteries and motor-generators into existing vehicle lines but their isn't enough motor or battery production in the world to supply them.

The US auto industry as a free-market entity is dead. The only way to save it is to idle assembly lines while they retool to produce non-existent, plug-in hybrid vehicle designs all the while paying workers to do nothing. Then it has to be re-started and car buyers will need guarantees of vehicle performance that bankrupt companies cannot honestly provide. All of this to sell to consumers who cannot afford to purchase cars due to the overall economic failure.

Can we stop digging this giant hole into which we are throwing resources? Couldn't we build something that create resources instead with that money and manpower? Only a miracle will get us out of this mess.

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Electrify and standardize.

Give them 18 months to make every vehicle electric drive. Power can come from a Allison diesel but the drive has to be electric so that it can be converted.

Then make them standardize electric motor mounts, motor-generator mounts, control units and battery packs. So that you could pull a type three electric drive motor from a GM vehicle and insert it into a Chrysler vehicle. Pull a battery from a Ford and drop it into a Chevy.

It's time to stop throwing cars away because the parts are hard to replace. Electric drives would make American made cars the most reliable in the world and major component compatibility make them good investments. They could be converted to new batteries or motors without tossing the entire car.

It's not rocket science. Electric drive vehicles have been running for over 100 years.

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I can't see it from my house; or yours.

While Al Gore's plan might do something about climate change it ignores the sentiment of the populace. People want to be able to see changes that they are paying for with their tax moneys.

A climate plan that included a larger portion of rooftop solar and local conservation methods would cost slightly more for each ton of carbon saved but would gather more political support. If the local HVAC company is hiring to install geothermal heating units and the local solar installer is hiring to install rooftop units people in Peoria are going to notice as well as the people in Newark.

Rooftop solar will cost more but that cost converts directly to wages and the benefit applies directly to home and business owners who get some measure of control over their power costs. Centralized solar power, while cheaper, retains the negative of utility control over power costs while adding the negative of conversion costs to utility bills. Who wants that?

Bring the green wave home Al.

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More rural slavery in Brazil?

You can count on the conditions surrounding Tyson meat packing plants to reproduce the debt-slavery that is associated with Brazil's sugar industry.

The nasty part about "free trade" is that the conditions don't look all that free when you look at the lives of the people working the jobs involved.

I have a strange idea. Lets raise meat on small farms where the animal numbers don't exceed the ability of the land to absorb their waste as fertilizer. Then we can process said meat at small local markets.

We could save huge amounts of fuel that is now used to ship chickens, feed and fertilizer around the world. Sure, Mr. Tyson would no longer get his nickel for every chicken eaten but screw him anyway. His vision sucks.

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Access to land.

At my local farmers market I don't see many young people in their 20's working on diversified agriculture. Fertile land close to cities is held in suburban ranchettes that split that land into 5 acre plots that grow grass or, at most, a few bored riding horses.

The prices of truck garden land is completely beyond the expected income earning ability of a small farmer. Exactly how a person starts farming without inheriting land is a mystery to me. It could be a mystery to everybody else also.

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Just try and milk an american bison

After she's given you a good goring and trampled you to death you're not going to have very much in the bucket left to make cheese out of.

Sorry Wolverine but even the local natives only eat acorn meal a few times a year and the immigrants never do. As long as we're eating animal protein keeping the 1200 lb. bio-reactor alive and harvesting 13 times their weight in milk they yield  per calf is a better deal.

It's a nice fantasy but the return of the buffalo commons is a long way off. On USDA aims to tighten grazing standards for organic cows posted 1 year ago 6 Responses

Costs left out.....

of the KFC meal include the gym membership that you will pay for in hopes of removing the spare tire that such a diet will give you. Loss of time going to and from the gym and time in the gym. The cost of the vitamins and laxatives that such a diet will require you to purchase to deal with the resulting bad health.

Also include hypertension medicine, statins, blood test strips and meter to deal with the type II diabetes that are promoted by high-fat, high-salt diets.

The red beans and rice listed above and a light slaw will same you reams of time in comparison. We won't even discuss how fast three-can chili and frozen string beans can be. On How I beat KFC's 'family meal' challenge posted 1 year ago 46 Responses

Unfortunately regressive.

For the very large percentage of residents of Berkeley that rent there is exactly zero direct benefit. I don't see why their landlords would take on higher tax bills in order to benefit tenants.

If the Green transition is going to be anything other than another brand like a Volvo in the driveway it needs to benefit the whole spectrum of the population.

Municipal financed solar power for the wealthy isn't exactly very green. Rework it and include some means of converting rental properties to solar power and it won't end up being another "socialism for the wealthy" issue.

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Dead truck bounce

This is like a mushroom hunter rising from his deathbed, suddenly recovered, only to wander into the kitchen and finish the toxin laden omelet that almost killed him three days ago.

If this isn't an indictment of capitalism nothing is. There is no way that the executives of Ford are benefiting their shareholders with this action.

You can hardly give away a full sized pickup truck these days much less sell one. On Ford rehires truck manufacturers posted 1 year ago 3 Responses

Maintenance issues

A home refrigerator with two hydraulic pistons will have two grime collectors. As is, many perfectly functional refrigerators get tossed because people won't wipe off the magnetic seals when soda gets spilled on them. It's difficult to replace the seals correctly and frequently cheaper to buy a new unit.

If you want your fridge door to close more easily simply slap a level on the top and adjust the feet so that the level reads half a bubble towards the hinge side with over-under fridges. For side-by-side units you want the unit level left-right but tilted half a bubble towards the front.

Most refrigerators are not properly leveled when installed and work just fine. Just a bitty off level so that gravity gives the door a boost is ok.

Oh, toss any fridge over ten years old and clean the coils on newer models. Except for a few models newer units are always more efficient.

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Labor, Bilhook, labor

The only way one can get a forester to leave a warm house on a wet morning with nothing for company but a billhook and a mule to tend trees is to let him own it. "Ownership" doesn't even have the right context; the man has to know that his son's right to the profits of the log he shapes today is beyond question.

The forests of Europe have had centuries of shaping or they simply would not exist. The kind of mad, anything grows anywhere, groves I can find a short bike ride from here in California aren't likely in England or France.

Try to explain to a people focused on quarterly profits a business where one tries to limit net harvests to soil incomes; I wouldn't know how to do it. Explain to Wall Street that the berries bring birds and the birds bring soil. Good luck.

In the US labor doesn't have the rights and the land is clearcut.

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Lack of access to land kills this

Currently the local farm country consists of vast farms owned and operated by big-machine, big-ag farmers, genteel urban refugees using their 5-10 acre plots to keep very bored horses and llamas and tiny, rented, plots in odd corners used for vegetable farming.

The only way for a person in their twenties to start farming is to inherit land anymore. Since commodity and produce prices have been relatively low most farms cannot support the two generations needed to hand off land and skills to younger farmers.

In twenty years there is going to be a major problem finding people willing to start farming after living urban lifestyles. Where are we going to find these people?  

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The New York Times fails

Anybody who has read the New York Times over the last several years has read consistent reports that NOW is a good time to buy stocks. When the stocks were up they've insisted there was more up to go and every day of the slide some Times columnist has insisted that there were bargains galore on the stock market.

Never mind that if you purchased last week or last month on their advice you just got hammered. All you need to know about the New York Times can be found by reading the financial pages for any date in 2007. There would have been nothing there to prepare you for 2008 where Sharon's advice has been good all along.

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We need modular production.

Standardize the solar panel size so that any panel will fit on any rack produced.

Create a hybrid battery pack standard so that packs are swappable from a Prius to a Ford Escort hybrid with sizes up to dump truck. Likewise create a series of genset standards the will power anything from a Geo Metro to a cement truck. Make them all fit the same motor mount and have some kind of common output.

Ground-loop or community-thermal loop heat pumps should be sized in standard sizes and connections just like regular AC units are.

With modular units smaller companies can enter the game producing a better version of module-X with full knowledge that customers can put their product to work. This did wonders for bringing down computer prices.

As long as many of these projects require an engineers review we will always play catch-up. Industry standards boards are precisely where government does it's job best. Tell them to agree upon a standard or the gov't will do it for them and the process will fly.

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Nice idea.

Dr. X are you suggesting that we finance the coming wind industry boom with hedge-fund type financial instruments and then burn the intermediaries allowing the US to collect power from all our new infrastructure while paying the remains of the bill with devalued fiat currency?

Why, that is as evil as invading other countries to control the worlds remaining oil reserves. The only thing more evil would be to publish the plan in a book and call it something like "Project for a New American Century." Perhaps "Building the Green Millenium" would do as a title. Once you publish an insane plan like that only a conspiracy theorist would be willing to believe that the events in front of them corresponded to the plan in the book.

I say we do it.

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Drill close to home, REAL close.

Like in your backyard, alley or driveway and install a ground loop geothermal system that reduces the amount of energy needed to heat or cool buildings significantly and displaces natural gas and oil used for residential water heating. Applied wherever applicable it's pretty clear that there is enough energy under the houses of the US to displace far more than those 45 nuclear power plants.

Most importantly geothermal heat used in the Northeast and rural areas where oil heat is the norm will save significant carbon emissions as much of the load could be carried by rooftop solar panels or small wind turbines.

Politically it's a no-brainer as it would be very hard for the Republicans to refuse to fund an energy saving system that's been installed on George Bush's Crawford Texas house. Since these systems have a payoff time under ten years all that is needed is a financial vehicle that funnels the payments and the financing through the buildings utility bills allowing the system to be paid off by whomever occupies that building.

The only nasty part is that we would have to fight fossil fuel industries that would watch their profits disappear into a hole in the ground with each installation.

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Light rail is an oxymoron

At $35 million dollars per mile people won't see the benefit in your average suburb. People just can't do the math to figure out if it's a reasonable solution for their community or not.

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Oak, walnut, apple, persimmon....

plums, chestnut, mulberry and hickory might do it. Here in California a heavy acorn crop can drop nuts that drift several inches deep.

Of course the real trick anywhere is finding ways of preserving enough feed so that the livestock that can thrive on summers windfalls can make it through the winter.

The deer and wild boar around here do it but I don't know how.

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The trolling has to stop.

This was a site where honest discussions of problems and solution options were discussed. The participants range from the noted PhD's to my overeducated handyman self.

Now the spamming and off topic posts make everything in the response threads all but unreadable. The sooner that upgrade shows up the better.

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The bamboo brush is key.

The secret to maintaining cast iron cookware is to obtain a bamboo cleaning brush at an asian supermarket. Once you are done cooking an item a splash of water and immediate application of the bamboo brush will take off almost anything you've managed to char to the pan.

Follow with a quick rinse of hot water, return briefly to the flame and let cool and it's done. I'm 43 and I've been using the same cast iron pans that my mother raised me with. The 40 year-old pans are better than the new pans as the years of patina are incomparable as a cooking surface.

btw- For those disasters where roomates or well meaning guests use detergent on your pans a visit to the interior of the wood stove for a HOT fire will return your pan's virginity. The bottom of a bonfire works well in a pinch also.On Umbra on green cookware posted 1 year, 1 month ago 12 Responses

Some industries require fossil fuels.

I'm willing to believe that there is a list of industrial processes that I want done that require fossil fuels. No other way to do them. In those cases it makes absolute sense to get every scrap of work done out of those fuels that we can.

Somewhere else on the planet carbon will have to return to the earth as a mineral or it will end up in the oceans as an acid.

I can't help feeling that there will be an ongoing need to be overly fussy when looking at these projects. Not to stop them but to measure them against a zero-net carbon goal.

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Split the difference already

Drive up to any existing coal plant, clear a nice swath 1 mile radius from the existing smokestack and plant a field of solar mirrors. Put a collector near the existing boiler and you have solar-boosted coal plants with staggering fuel savings.

Commit all farmland within a five mile radius to biomass production and you have a coal plant that can be fed by pyrolized biomass. Run the smokestack waste through the Eprida process, bury the biochar as fertilizer and you have a carbon-negative, base-load power plant that you can still burn coal in.

Innovation needed zero. Installable, modular, job-creating, carbon-negative energy.

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More on wood....

I found an interesting article titled Planting the Next Generation of Waterproof Lumber. That's worth reading.

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Try buying a cargo bike.

You take a number and you sit on the list. Or you pay through the nose for a European import that costs you more than your first car.

As to the deck thing black locust, honey locust and catalpa are reputed to be rot resistant woods and they grow relatively quickly. Second growth redwood or cedar has poor rot resistance and should be painted or treated regularly; never use it for ground contact.

To understand what we lost when we clear cut the redwood forests of California for quick profits you would have to work with the wood. I once saw a house in Petaluma CA. that had a foundation of four squared redwood logs laid directly in the soil. That foundation lasted a hundred years. It's a tragedy that we destroyed this resource for decks and shingles.

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Well of course....

Our local trolls have been wailing all summer about how there really isn't global warming and the planet is actually in a cooling phase.

Planet cools down means it makes less ice right? I thought I learned that fundamentalist physics class.

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The Saluki troll is racist as well?

Who could have guessed. This nasty little passage it (Saluki) left here:

Is was Jimmy Carter that started the ball rolling on loans for people that couldn't afford them. Is Klanspeak for: "Jimmy Carter forced the banks to stop redlining, selling discriminatory loans to blacks, asians and hispanics or refusing them loans entirely."  

Well digging around for more information I came up with a perfect rejoinder which, alas, I did not write. I quote from the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen:

September 22, 2008

THE NEW TALKING POINTS.... For about a week now, Republicans have been looking for a way to blame the crisis on Wall Street on Democrats. The search hasn't gone well -- at one point, John McCain said Barack Obama was partially responsible, because he'd been "gaming the system." The comment didn't make a lick of sense, no one bought it, and McCain hasn't repeated it since.

But conservatives kept on trying. In fact, the right seems to have finally come up with a new line: Democrats forced banks to give mortgages to low-income minorities, those low-income minorities couldn't keep up with their mortgage payments, and the banks struggled as a result. Voila! Blame the Dems!

Fox News' Neil Cavuto helped get the ball rolling. Media Matters reported that Cavuto conflated giving home mortgages to minorities with risky lending practices, suggesting that there should have been "a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.' "

The National Review is on board with a similar line of thinking, blaming the Community Reinvestment Act for much of the crisis: "The CRA empowers the FDIC and other banking regulators to punish those banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama's fellow community organizers would like. Among other things, mergers and acquisitions can be blocked if CRA inquisitors are not satisfied that their demands -- which are political demands -- have been met. There is a name for loans made to people who do not have the credit, assets, income, or down payment to qualify for a normal mortgage: subprime."

All of this seems rather silly on its face, but thankfully, Matt Yglesias went to the trouble of setting the record straight.

    For one thing, the timeline is ludicrous. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977. Are we supposed to believe that CRA was working smoothly throughout the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years and then only under Bush II did overzealous anti-"redlining" enforcement come into play, perhaps a result of Dubya's legendarily close relationship with ACORN? Or maybe overzealous enforcement back in the late 1970s is somehow responsible for a real estate blowout that only materialized 30 years later? It doesn't even come close to making sense.

    Beyond that, the mere existence of "subprime" loans -- i.e., mortgages given to less-creditworthy individuals at higher interest rates -- isn't the problem here. The problems have to do with what was done with the loans after they were packaged, sold and used to make leveraged plays.

Sorry, conservatives, you'll have to keep looking for a way to blame Democrats for this mess. Good luck with that.

Never mind that each of these transactions were supervised by real estate agents who are supposed to earn their pay making sure that deals are legit on all sides and that their clients are represented. Never mind that mortgage brokers, appraisers and banks are all under investigation by the FBI for writing bad loans on bogus appraisals. Never mind that the banks then sold the loans as 'tranches' which violated the Glass-Steagall act until it was repealed thanks to Republican, Phil Grahm.

It was the coloreds that caused this you say?

Isn't there a hole you can crawl into somewhere? Preferably in Idaho where your own kind congregate.

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Javelins?

Maybe if bikes carried the equivalent of a lance or javelin they could get some respect. Perhaps a length of bamboo with a pennant and a steel fleur-de-lis on the end. More functional would be a ditchbank but riding along with a foot of sharp, double-edged steel might be problematic.On From Goldilocks to the Three Bears posted 1 year, 1 month ago 3 Responses

No new jobs drilling.

There are a limited number of drilling rigs out there. Each has a limited crew and that crew recruits from their home community. Despite the run-up in fuel prices there hasn't been a sudden increase in orders for rigs.

Solar power and wind power on the other hand can provide hundreds of thousands of jobs with training periods of several weeks to several months. Add geothermal/geoexchange installation and we're talking millions of jobs.

Faced with an economy about to go into depression the coming president will have very few levers with which to return people to work. Even if solar/wind/geothermal power provided only a flat economic return over 20 years that would be cheaper than unemployment, law enforcement and prisons.

All indications are that a green jobs program would be wildly profitable to the economy as a whole. Compared to a bailout of crooked bankers it should be a shoe-in.

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Palin is the avatar......

of the B.S. and hype gods. A meatpuppet representing for a total lack of knowledge in exchange for short-term gain.

It would be nice if Canis. could chime in and tell us which misbegotten shard of mythology she represents but I can't recall.

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Futile cycling again

For a human system to continue it must be sustainable in both the local ecology and the overall ecology. A system that pulls 300 times the product off the land also pulls 300 times the minerals and organic matter off. Simply in terms of lost mineral ash this is a dead end road.

Once you add to this the energy cost of building, fueling and maintaining the combines and other farm machinery as well as tractors, plows, drills, harrows, sprayers and pumps and the system is dead.

Like a guy who's had a dose of polonium stirred into his tea with his sugar is dead. The corpse may walk around for a while but it must fall.

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Nobody has to believe in climate change

The citizens of Galveston didn't have to believe in an oncoming hurricane. After all the news was coming from a computerized satellite image. The residents of Greenburg Kansas didn't have to believe in the tornado warning. That came from doppler radar.

The idea that all of us are going to move to a proverbial trailer park in tornado country because some of us can't be bothered to believe inconvenient truths is going to get shifted.

I think the proponents of profitable scepticism are losing credibility at an exponential rate. At some point deniers will be mocked like flat earthers and UFO abducteees.

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Weird weekend/late night trolls

I'm not sure what can be done about the trolls that post links on weekends and late at night in hopes of generating internet traffic but could more of whatever be done please?

By Sunday evening it can get almost impossible to follow legitimate threads due to this mess.

Otherwise, thank you for all your efforts.

PS- I LIKE disemvoweling. Not quite dungeoning which is my favorite troll-beater but more fun.

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So "advanced reactors" are vaporware

The Wiki article listed above didn't make it clear that there were any significant advances in so-called "3rd generation" reactors.

The advances people are looking for are:

1)Inherent safety. Walk away and the plant powers down safely.

2) Nuclear waste consumption and reduction. The plant should produce the absolute minimum amount of waste ideally consuming all plutonium produced on site. In addition secondary wastes such as radioactive polluted iron from fuel rods should be minimized. Post use reprocessing of fuel rods and wastes should be minimal or unnecessary.

3)Fuel efficiency- Limiting the fuel that has to be mined and purified in the first place should be a priority as uranium mine tailings are rather toxic. .

Despite all the bragging about the wonders of nuclear power I'm not aware of a single reactor that manages these three goals.

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I'm thinking McCain was loaded.

Excuse my analogy but McCain looked like he'd been given beta blockers and a stimulant at the same time. Wired, with a low heart rate.

When Obama was speaking it was all he could do not to climb the podium and ook. Considering how haggard McCain has looked this last week this is reasonable. Seventy-three-year old men are not endurance athletes by nature.

At the same time Obama had to cool it so that he didn't look like a black guy slamming on the helpless white guy. He had to play rope-a-dope and feed McCain rope gently and hope for a hanging. He also had to carefully avoid using those two-dollar words that educated people use in their daily life.

McCain held on but only just barely. Obama got a draw which is a win this week.

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Rock Candy Mountain strikes again.

The idea that we can somehow produce a balanced budget with either presidential candidates economic plan is laughable.

The meme "Continue a war but cut spending at home" in order to balance budgets is nuts. A quick glance at your federal budget cut into pie slices will tell you that there isn't enough in the domestic budget after Medicare and Social Security to cut. Throwing more people in the street will only increase the medical load on society because rich people seem to be able to catch diseases from poor people.

We have to invest in areas where efficiencies are real and returns are real and declare more of the world "somebody else's problem."

If you're losing blood maybe it's time to get our um, carrot out of the juicer. Close overseas bases, bring the troops home. Declare victory and bug out.

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I keep looking on Google Earth....

but I can't figure out where in Alaska she thinks her house is. Does anybody else have a problem with this?

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Sez you it's not a class war.

From here it looks like a class war just fine. No money to optimize education, health care, housing or job training. The schools hold bake sales and car washes to fund anything they can. Homeless people wandering the streets of every US city without access to the most minimal housing or regular medical care. No money for that.

But when the wealthy piss away trillions of dollars on usurus loans and get caught out its 'stop the presses!!' We've got to bail George Bush's drinking buddies out or the economy will crash.

Well, my personal economy already crashed and nobody gives a rat's hiney; time for Wall Street to feel what personal responsibility feels like.

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California Conservation Corps

The CCCs got revived from the dead in California and given new life. My sister and brother-in-law both boss crews now after having started as urban kids without a direction. She's a field biologist and he supervises trail crews.

In California this summer we had over 1000 lightning strike fires and without the CCCs some of those would still be burning.

What we need is a combination of Green Jobs and Conservation Corps ethics to put millions of people  unemployed by the housing implosion back to work. The unemployment numbers are totally bogus and millions of people need an employer of last resort option.

Real work, real wages, full time, medical and dental. It would force americas crappy employers to get real about paying their workers also.

Capitalism is a failure. Next idea please.

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GM lies.

GM had a prototype for a working series hybrid running in 1969 with the Stirlec (google it) stirling-electric hybrid. Anytime since a hybrid could have been produced using advanced lead-acid batteries and a small, air-cooled engine.

The thing is that the modularity of a series hybrid would allow shade-tree mechanics to keep them running forever. It would have shot their model swapping ways in the foot.

The real secret to big vehicles is the big repair bills that push people to purchase new vehicles. If F=MV^2 then the only to increase vehicle mortality if you cant' increase speed is to increase mass.

So what the little people die.

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Who says they're separate? Not me.

Not Jim Kunstler or Matt Savinar or the crowed over at The Oil Drum. Ok so that's doomer broadway, first avenue and main street but just a wee bit ago they were mocking them for being doomers at all.

The funds extracted from regular commerce by high energy prices and insurance payouts for hurricane damage slash deeply into our ability to mobilize against climate change.

The bailout isn't going to be made with oil, coal or natural gas but with digital dollars that exist only in the virtual world. The only true source of exchange is energy, resources and knowledge.

When the people who collect this 700 billion demand energy, resources and knowledge from the US it could be that we will be occupied elsewhere. Like cleaning up after a hurricane for example.

Then our plastic widgit suppliers get annoyed and the whole commerce system grinds to a halt. Which is what the doomers think is happening anyway.

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Public employees work HARD

They do it year in and year out and they do it for a fraction of what the scam artists in the private sector charge.

In California this summer thousands of public employees worked day after day in choking smoke to put out wildfires. Some days with no visible hope of making headway without a stroke of luck.

All any of those people has to do was fake a coughing fit and they could go home with pay. Not just the fire crews but state, county and city employees worked round the clock without Wall Street luxuries.

Sorry Sean but the facts are that there are several fields where public sector simply does a better job. Health care is one; utilities are another. SMUD does a better job than PG&E for less cost to consumers.

Maybe banking is another.

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Shale isn't oil, tar sands aren't oil either.

Neither are going to replace light sweet crude which we need to phase out anyway due to global warming.

Calling that stuff oil is a flat lie.  

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Hummer with a solar panel.

I was one of five kids and the biggest house we ever had was 2100 sq ft. It was plenty big enough. Massive walls of glass are as useless in Seattle as they are in the redwoods of Northern California.

Straw bale walls, PV panels, a small geothermal hot water system and a wood stove to boost should be more than ample. Real ascetics could use the stove to heat a sauna placed centrally instead of heating all that air. The 2800 sq. foot figure makes the geothermal cost complaint a joke.

If it's cloudy and wet there is plenty of wood and straw bale's thermal mass minimizes stove feeding. Where the sun shines there is more than enough power from that alone. Since the majority of Seattle's power comes from hydropower using some power from the grid tie isn't exactly a disgrace.

750 Kw/hrs of electricity a month is just excessive unless you have eight people living there. I max at 150 Kw/hrs in July when I air-condition every day to keep the house below 85º.

You can build it; but why brag about it? It's not even pretend sustainable.

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Rigs as Caltrops?

Could we just cut old rigs into triangular sections and leave them as a self-regulating fish sanctuary. Pull a trawl in the sanctuary and lose your gear. The fish get a breeding ground and there is no need to moniter for illegal fishing.

Sanctuary zones are proven to improve fish catches when the zone is honored. Nobody is going to drop a net or a trap into a mess of old rig sections. It must be too easy to work.

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The environment is the economy

All the monopoly money in the world doesn't make wheat grow. Good soil, rain and sunlight all in appropriate amounts, times and places does.

Ask the people of Houston how their economy is doing without the environment's cooperation. Or better, Galveston.

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Why they don't teach statistics in high school

instead of pre-calculus or calculus is quite obvious. It keeps a greater number of people from understanding the world and allows a greater number of people to feel resentful about the educated.

Functional Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry should be taught in about two semesters with two semester of Statistics following then a year of Accounting. That's what allows you to know if the doctor is repeating blather the pharmacy rep. whispered in his ear while she distracted him 'Sara Palin' style. Of if the climate change deniers are still completely off the reality bus.

Instead my kid is trying to memorize the definition of 'commutative property' rather than learning how to use it. I don't need to define the terms for the parts of a screwdriver to push the pointy end and turn.

The whole point of this rant is that a glance at the graph tell me that the point is below the trend line. If the 2008 point is below the trend line that indicates a continued worsening of the problem rather than an improvement. To show an improvement a running average using a sample of more than two points would need to show an upward curve. This doesn't qualify.

Even having to run this thread at all shows we are dealing with serious reality denial.

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Hazards to navigation

Every oil rig is effectively a reef that must be avoided by shipping. When the floating ones break loose in hurricanes they become big steel versions of icebergs until they are collected.

We will have to learn to do without oil sooner or later. Drilling doesn't put the later date off by much at all. The huge oil fields have all been found and are largely depleted. New production won't fill the gap left by the loss of Cantarell or the North Sea oil fields.

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Metaphor fails again...

The drought came to California this year and I choked through a month of smoke. Many houses burned and we almost lost a town uphill and upstream from me; twice, saved only by luck changes of wind.

My point is that the pain comes if you ignore the problem or try to fix it. Organic farming, permaculture, biochar agriculture all get more calories and higher quality food off farmland for a given caloric input than mechanized ag. This debate has raged all over the net for years but fuel prices will put off-site amendments beyond the reach of most farmers anyway.

The human population will be checked by voluntary action, governments, disease, war or starvation. The four horsemen still ride wherever diligent people fail to act ahead of need. The Torah was clear on this 2,500 years ago. Prepare for the harsh times in the good. Or else.

The Green movement, rather than ignoring this, has been screaming their heads off for almost forty years on population and fuel issues. I learned about this stuff in the 70's reading Stewart Brand's magazines before he sold out.

If you want to see what deep greens are thinking go to CultureChange.com where things are a little grimmer than they are here on Grist. Grist, tries to keep a positive focus and rightly so; for Grist. It's not the whole spectrum.

Prepare for climate change; or else. We can estimate accurately what the preparation might cost us. "Or else" charges that plus interest and penalties.

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Whoops. Too late. Too last week.....

The new trend in water fashion is to carry around a $30 dollar stainless steel water bottle preferably in a customized sling. Filled from the water filter at home or the filtered-cooled tap at the gym.

All, and I do mean all, the hot and trendy ladies at the pricier gyms carry them as well as a growing number of road-racing cyclists. Whatever the hot yoga mamas and tour-de-france wannabees in California do the rest or the nation is soon to follow.

We got the rest of you wearing crocs for dogs sake.

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Oh No you didn't......

The article mentioned by the above poster doesn't refer to Sara Palin as a porn star. The quote is "Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look...." Which is actually one of the milder comments in there but you really should read for yourself to make sure. (HINT) It's freaking hilarious.

Here it is: "A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention." Normally this isn't Grist material but since the loyal opposition brought it up I thought you deserved to get the full story. As a reward.

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Arrogance? Condescension?

That would be inappropriate in the context of a scientific debate. Too bad there really isn't any valid scientific debate happening that refutes AGW.

Global Warming in the last century is a FACT. Multiple sources of data and analysis from ice cores to tree rings to migration patterns have established this beyond doubt.

AGW has been established to the level of scientific certainty that allows us to put people on jumbo jets and wave happily as they fly away. Sure sometimes all the parts don't quite fit but for the vast majority of uses the theory flies.

The people who deny AGW can safely be classified along with the flat earthers, chemtrail nuts and those who believe the planet is only 6,000 years old and built by a sky fairy who likes to do rock sculptures in the shape of sharks teeth.

So quote Anthony Watts and don't be surprised when people rank you with the people who knock on doors Saturday mornings and hand out religious material. My bad for taking advantage.  

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An English Major? Do we have one?

Thank god she was a journalism major instead of an english major because everybody knows that journalists write at an eighth grade level. If she was an English major they'd have to close the school she graduated from.

Of course it will take a PhD in English to parse that statement and tell us what the heck it actually means.

Can anybody round one up for us?

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She's an idiot

Her most basic claim is that being governor of Alaska makes her competent on energy issues is refuted by her own words within minutes.

She claims that Alaska supplies the US with 20% of it's energy when it only supplies 4.5% of the oil it uses. Of course those supplie don't go to the US but to oil refineries that export more petroleum product than that out of the country.

The US could shut down Alaskan oil operations entirely by switching the Northeast from oil heat to geothermal heat pumps and lowering the speed limit to 60 mph.

Of course we'd still need to import oil but until we quit using it to push SUV's and jet airliners we will be importing oil.

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Bonus!!

Say you're Dr. Tummytuck and you've just taken a 20K hit on your portfolio and you've pulled another 150k out and it's now sitting around in untrustworthy banks earning 4%. What to do with the money? Just today your $2.5K heating oil bill hit your desk for the winter.

Converting a good chunk of that money to a geothermal heat pump for the mcmansion along with some solar panels is a quick way to get it earning gold-plated returns as wells as being tax free. The government can't tax you on money you don't spend but the effect on the bottom line is the same as earnings.

It's also a hedge against inflation since fuel and electricity prices tend to go up regardless of the state of the economy while the government is likely to increase the money supply to pay it's bills. Dr. Tummytuck even gets a tax credit if he lives in the right state. A solar panel, once installed, is fixed cost electricity for twenty years which PG&E isn't about to give you.

The next good storm when the power is out and your neighbors run out of gas for the generator Dr. Tummytuck gets to brag that the solar panels kept his house warm and beer cold while everybody else fed generators at $4/gallon. If they could get the gas. Independent power supply is starting to become a neccesity if you live out of town even a few miles.

Multiply this event by several hundred thousand in various combinations and you've got a new industry that will look for new customers further down the economic ladder. A little help from the government on building codes and financial vehicles that allow people to pay for new installations as part of their utility bills and we're talking real money.

Wall Street is a disaster. Real estate is a disaster. Commodities is just gambling. Where else are the petit-bourgeoisie going to hide their money?

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No worries

Like all other forms of mystical alchemy oil shale isn't a threat because anybody who tries it works themselves into exhaustion while yielding little or nothing. Only in childrens stories does straw spin into gold.

Short of pure investment guarantees by the government oil shale will never get funding. It simply cannot make good on it's promies.

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Nuclear Power?

New nuclear power hasn't contributed nearly as much energy to the mix as solar power, wind, geothermal and conservation have. I can't find a single new nuclear power plant in California but I can find several megawatts of solar power within five miles. I live in a poor wind area but there is quite a bit of wind power being installed south of me. All with very little controversy or opposition.

Conservation efforts within that five mile radius have probably returned more capacity to the grid than those solar panels by several fold. If conservation was done in earnest with mass conversion of building heating and cooling loads to geoexchange rather than the common gas heat and electric air conditioning that is common locally much more capacity would be made available without building a single new power source.

It's simply easier to conserve, convert to geothermal, or produce power with wind and solar than it is to build a nuclear power plant and you can do it faster and cheaper.

The idiots at the WSJ are still pushing hydrogen cars and clean coal; you'd think that they never got on the internet. On the ground the alternatives are bicycles, public transit and solar panels. It's no wonder Wall Street is taking a dive; they've quit reading anything but their own PR. On WSJ special package runs the energy gamut posted 1 year, 2 months ago 4 Responses

Reality is a political loser

Right now the american people are simply not going to accept a reality based politics. The very pretense that John McCain and Sara Palin represent anything other than continued failure is laughable. Yet they appear to have the support of about half the electorate.

Ralph Nader has the unfortunate tendancy to be right which annoys the stupid. This Washington Post article explains how stupid people actually get stupider when confronted with the truth which contradicts their previously established world view.

If Nader was serious about the environment he would be promising that solar power was going to provide free power for giant cars. It doesn't matter that it's a lie. The people you have to convince prefer lies.

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When we run out of mountains....

with coal under them.

Then it would only make sense to stop the mountaintop removal mining.

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Why not lie?

The televised media won't correct these lies while the lies will be supported by advertising from industry. When the bulk of your populace doesn't bother to read any kind of text-based news there isn't any requirement to tell the truth.

The US populace thinks that it's acceptable to be stupid. What they don't get is that reality is always going to find the weakness of an inattentive system and consume it.

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Saluki still trolling?

It has been well established that battery's charged off the grid are the most efficient means we have available of running an independent motor vehicle short of slot cars. Much greater efficiencies have been proven with personal rapid transit demonstration projects on very light rail but as it's a proven reality with hard numbers it's beyond you.

They can't lay a pipe on mud and the existing trans-alaska pipeline is having to retrofit to deal with melting permafrost. Look at the results in Google. Laying a new pipeline on shifting permafrost and melt is an impossible task.

The Daily Kos article that you scoff at is filled with links to primary sources as vs. the nutcase web pages you link to.

The $500 million Sara Palin committed Alaska to won't lay a single mile of pipe; not one. Like that bridge to nowhere the planned pipleline route doesn't link up with existing pipelines; it goes to the Alberta oil sands. If there's a plan to get that gas to the lower 48 it's not in any contract anywhere.  

Prove me wrong.

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On second thought

Say a large source of new capital feeding cash into the economy, like a giant bank that purchased mortgages, went belly up. Wouldn't that slow down the diffusion of US dollars into world economies as american consumers cut down on spending for the new houses they are no longer buying?

Say at the same time a large number of dollar denominated assets became worthless negating the ability of overseas investers to purchase commodities with dollars. Could that reduce the number of dollars therefore making the dollars available for oil purchase worth more?

The nasty thing about wheels within wheels complexities is that it makes too much of the world a crap shoot to those outside the engine room.

Back to praying to FSM for winning lotto ticket.

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Google then type

The existing Alaskan oil pipeline is threatened by melting permafrost. That warming that the trolls say isn't happening is melting permafrost and threatening the foundations of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

Since the sea ice that's melting faster than expected will affect the permafrost melting in a negative fashion (is melt-more negative of positive?) then there is the nasty problem of how one lays pipe on mud.

Of course there is also the other nasty problem of how a country that has proven that it can't handle it's money (that's the US of A for the news blind) is going to borrow the money to build a pipeline from declining oil fields across mud to the nearest terminal head in Canada.

So yeah, other than laying a pipeline on mud for a gas field that doesn't exist with money we don't have the project is booming.

The Daily Kos also points out that the whole thing was set up by now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff's corrupt lobbying firm. Which could indicate that Sara Palin is the special interest puppet she appears to be.

You keep washing your hands in mud like that you'll never come clean Saluki.

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We're Bankrupt

Which is a condition that shouldn't happen to a nation of christians because the Bible makes very clear God's official opinion on debt financing. Don't.

We've literally shattered our forests, poisoned our wells and salted the fields. We've blanketed our children in corruption and at least one of the leadership factions seems to have a bit of a problem acknowledging reality.

So other than declining, oil, gas, coal, water, grain and metals resources we're stupid to boot. If we weren't Sara Palin wouldn't even be on the radar as a possible US president. She's a dummy which means that we, collectively, are just about as stupid.

I keep pushing for solutions in the hope that somebody with some actual cash or power will pay attention. It's a thin thread.

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What sacrifice?

Have you ever walked into a straw bale house on a cold day or a really hot day? The palpable feeling of comfort goes way beyond anything achievable with central heating and air.

Neighborhood stores and neighborhood cafes are FUN as well as reducing trip miles by shoppers. That's why rich people drive or fly across the country to walkable shopping areas with good scenery and art. Our weekly farmers market is at least as much a baby brag, social network and promenade as food vending. Try chatting with the people at Winco and they glare.

Nobody takes a vacation so they can tour the strip malls of the midwest but the villages of France are all the rage.

Trolley rides as a group are part of the fun of a night out where the drive in the car would be a worrisome hassle about parking places and designated drivers. Take the trolly and if you can walk straight you're good.

Which sacrifice are people talking about?

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But cars pay for themselves

Or at least that's what we get told when we ask for money for public transit projects. You would swear from the screams that every inch of asphalt laid down came from gas tax monies.  

Now the DOT says that ain't so. Who you gonna trust anymore.

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Volume of work? Try volume of typing

If anybody takes a close look at the volume of typing just on this one thread one thing becomes certainly clear. Somebody's treating AGW denial as a full time job.

If Saluki was a novelist it'd be producing a book a month.

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Re: Explainable

In addition to the brain damage caused by particulates there is the nasty problem of essential-fatty-acid (EFAs) depletion in the US diet. This is what your brain is made of and you won't get it in a diet of corn syrup, corn starch, white flour corn oil and corn fed meat and corn fed milk.

Either you have to eat lots of greens nuts and seeds or you have to eat other critters that did. No exceptions.

Look in the shopping carts of Bush-McCain voters and better than half the calories in that cart are corn or sugar. They literally eat themselves stupid and get grumpy with complicated thinking because it hurts. No fuel left for higher functions.

Look up the link between Omega-3 fatty acids and depression and it all becomes clear. They're Republicans because of their pasty white diet not due to being pasty white people.

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Flat earthers

People who deny science then use their GPS device to get them to the airport. To call them luddites would be to insult people who had legitimate complaints about losing access to resources.

As far as they're concered it's all magic .

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Right wing stupidity

All in all these are the usual idiotic arguments that you expect from the left.
First of all, at their closest points, Alaska and Russia are 2.8 miles apart.  Now, while such a fact may not bestow any automatic information on one, it could certainly be a reason for Palin to have a strong interest in Russia and their policies.

Exactly how many people are on that island three miles from Alaska? Just because our rock in the Aleutian islands is close to their rock in the Aleutian islands doesn't make that a foriegn policy concern. Aside from a rare grumble about somebody dropping their crab pots on the wrong side of the line nobody cares.

The nearest Russian Consulate is even in Seattle. Alaska, with it's tiny population of Russian orthodox christians, doesn't rank one.

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Permafrost feedback causes phase changes.

Warming heats permafrost above equilibrium. Methane and CO2 are released causing localized increases atmospheric methane and CO2 causing further local warming that melts arctic ice.

While the atmospheric temperature and even the surface temperature can stay the same during all this melting phase changes in ice and permafrost will release gasses the contribute to overall warming.

A stable temperature does not equate to overall stability of energy flows within the system. That's high-school physics.

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Asphalt again?

Thanks David for the reminder that car and bus transportation have to include the cost of the roads to be truly accounted for properly.

Likewise my bicycle likes nice smooth asphalt much better than gravel or clay roads. I also like a good cement or granite sidewalk when available for walking around downtown. Barefoot down a forest path doesn't seem to be an option for most of us.

Everything has a cost.

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Learning IS experience

Experiencing the challenges of working with local resources only will teach the students far more about environmental limitations than ordering drip irrigation equipment off the internet and hooking it to the tap from the Colorado.

Patching $15K worth of fancy plumbing on a black-roofed ranch house is all well and good but building with straw bales in the first place and whitewashing is more generally applicable. If it takes a shipping container full of gadgetry to make a 2.5 person household "sustainable" then we should all just quit now and seek our preferred neurotoxin to wallow in.

Teach them what balancing energy imports and exports would mean, right there, where they are. Maybe one of them will "get it."

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People KNOW!!

According to my local bike shop bicycles are flying out the door and good luck getting a cargo bike. All sorts of scooters are being offered for sale and used car lots are closing.

Big SUV's and trucks sell for silly low prices and I even saw a 'for-sale' sign on a shiny black hummer.

The political hacks and car makers are way behind.

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What the heck?

So they want to freeze a huge chunk of ground so they can superheat another huge chunk of ground and crack out hydrocarbons in situ. Somewhere in the process there's sure to be steam injection which means a water cut and brine ponds to nasty up the local watershed and kill wildlife.

All of this would require a huge source of electrical power that doesn't exist right now meaning a massive coal-burning plant. With no water source in Western Colorado for any of this that isn't spoken for already. You could do that somewhere it rains.  

The weird thing is if you inject steam into any carbon source you get syngas which you can reformulate into the liquid fuel of your choice, ethanol, DME or butanol if you want. That has to be easier in low grade coal seams than this hokey idea.

Yep. Googel reveals several patents for in-situ coal bed gasification and what looks like some pilot projects.

So this whole "we have lots of oil-shale" business is simply a means of telling people they have oil reserves when they don't really. Propaganda.

We could have ham and eggs if we had any ham. Or eggs.

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I can see it now....

The ancient and wise residents of Pheonix popping from their holes at first light to pound the yucca fiber and weave the shade nets while their neigbors check the wind-catchers harvest of the nights dew.

Yesterday's production of the glazed plant wells that keep moisture from straying from the root mass comes out of the solar furnace and today's firing loaded in to be ready when the sun hits the mirrors.

The gardens are groomed carefully, each plant, shrub and tree carefully sited in it's collection basin, shade wall and moisture conserving well as the days quota of prickly pear and napolitas are gathered for the morning meal to be eaten when full heat comes and drives everyone indoors till half-shade allows them out again.

The city transformed from suburban sprawl of tar roofed ranch houses to a whitewashed clusters of walls, domes and ventilation towers. Surrounding each cluster the palms and gardens marking the intervals where excess streets and houses used to be.

Everywhere the blue-black of the panels and shine of the mirrored dishes making the view from a rise a pointilists dream of white, green, blue, black and wicked glare from poorly tuned mirrors.

To be sustainable Pheonix would have to change into some bizzarre, appropriate-tech, arab architectured city with big chunks of Arcosanti thrown in for good measure. The transition would have to be slow enough so as not to beggar the residents before dividends were felt. Not going to happen.

Nice science ficiton though.

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Help me here.

More people in agriculture, say as part-time market gardeners, should have the time and freedom of scheduling to grow a diversity of crops to prevent losses due to temporary labor shortages. They can also do things like build their own houses, manage their own woodlots and raise their own meat animals with a surplus to sell to neighbors. Each of these activities decreases freight shipment miles as the food, fuel and building materials could be produced and consumed on-site or locally.

Fewer people in agriculture would require that migrant workers travel to crops in surges. This requires excess housing be built and maintained by specialist builders that travel to job sites. The food and housing is purchased by some other kind of specialist in retail or the mysterious "services" that has to drive around to meet needs that could be met on a 1/3 acre plot. All of this driving requires more roads, and more traffic management specialists.

So rather than have having a person working 600 hours away from the home and otherwise supporting themselves we would have people work 2000 hours outside the home and require the support of a few hundred specialists all driving independently to their 2000 hour jobs.

How is the second scenario less energy intensive again?

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Now you're just typing.

Whose idea was it to pay trolls by the word instead of google ranking or reply count?  Cut it out.

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Show me first.

Then I'll believe it. Both times I've been in Pheonix I was mostly impressed with the massive sprawl and the total vulnerability to loss of the one water source.

Sure we bicycle here in California at 105º F but I think 120º is a no-go for all but the absolutely insane. Short of a massive conversion to electric cars or a personal rapid transit system and water management that would put Dune to shame Pheonix is a ghost town waiting to happen.

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Somebody's mama drank the brown acid

Oil shale is profitable but they can't produce it because of enviros. Like we do such a great job stopping coal production. Maybe the oil companies lack cash and the government should give them low-interest loans.

Alaska caribou can't survive the wolves without human assistance. How the caribou survived the 40,000 years with unchecked wolf predation and first peoples hunting is a mystery.

Drilling in alaska doesn't harm the environment. Those are natural pads, roads and pipelines?

Polar bears aren't endangered. A)No climate change. B) Some sort of we-said-so that's why excuse. (never mind missing ice pack)

The future high-technology society (Blade Runner fantasies?) will be worth the mass extinction of species now. Because we're not understanding what biodiversity means.

I think we have a professional troll. We must be doing something right.

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There is no "shale oil"

There is shale, a mineral, which contains a certain amount of hydrocarbons but to call it "oil" is a flat lie.

'Shale oil' is a lie that even beggars 'clean coal.'

To mine, crack, crush and steam that mineral to extract the hydrocarbons costs more energy than it yields. That's just physics.

Saluki, you're a troll, and you rely on lies. There really isn't any truth in anything you or your ilk say. You are destroyers, reavers and the enemies of life wherever you are found.  

Crawl back into the darkness will you?

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Oil Shale?

That got a laugh. There is more energy in a potato or your average landfill, pound for pound, than there is in oil shale. More solar energy hits the surface of any place on the planet that the oil shale underneath will yield on a net basis. See this Grist thread.

Shale oil operations are farming the govenment with some trucks driving around to look busy.

Oil Shale makes for good roofing in northern climes but is otherwise a waste. You might as well claim the petroleum fairy is going to fill your hummer at night if you leave a bottle of Jack Daniels on the dash.

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Just the facts ma'am please.

John McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his naval academy class. As he was the son of an admiral and the grandson of an admiral his ability to dress himself and not drool between mealtimes ensured his graduation. Then he crashed five aircraft and was possibly involved in starting the disastrous fire on the USS Forrestal. He currently collects a full disability pension from the US Navy.

How a middie graduating that low was ever allowed to pilot an aircraft is beyond me. After crashing the second plane he should have been cashiered.

Sara Palin attended six colleges in six years to get a B.A. in journalism. It is noted that she doesn't seem to have published a single article in her school paper. We're not talking a shining light here but some seriously low wattage.

Given that Ronald Reagan had alzhiemers disease during his last term in office and the disaster that George W. Bush has been it might have been prudent for the GOP to nominate some of their brighter lights.

When pigs fly that will happen.

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And yet the ice is still melting

The glaciers that I hiked on in the Sierras and Alaska in my teens and twenties are gone or retreated miles up into the hills. The polar ice cap has had three of it's lowest coverage and volume records in the last seven years.

How do you deny the ice is melting?

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That's just spam JB

Your last post doesn't even have the slightest connection to the carbon-capture coal plant referred to in the OP. Hydrogen is still a dead horse as a transport fuel. On Germany opens world's first carbon-capturing 'clean coal' demo plant posted 1 year, 2 months ago 8 Responses

Electric bicycles

Here in the flatlands of California there has been a massive boom in cycling. At some events this summer it can actually get to be a hassle to find something to lock your bicycle to.

A local little old lady uses a tricycle with an electric front wheel to get around. I haven't caught her riding but I see the bike all over town.

Re: Trolls- Debating trolls is like using a map on a merry-go-round. You can refer to the map and pull the reins when the horse is headed in the right direction but the only way to make progress is to get off the ride and walk. Anyone who stays on those horses goes nowhere.

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The media on whose side?

There's a Jon Stewart clip on YouTube that shows quite clearly that the media is tying themselves in knots to sugar coat Sara Palin. The woman is an idiot when it comes to energy policy, raising children of political ethics. I guess she's great at getting other talking heads on her side but that doesn't heat the house in the winter does it?

All the oil and gas in Alaska will not make us energy independent. Actually if the Earth were a thin crust of iron floating on a ball of petroleum burning oil wouldn't be sustainable. The only thing that changes is the date that we have to stop.

The data is quite clear that we should have stopped burning fossil fuels several years ago if we wanted to maintain the climate that feeds us now. We have no idea what the changes we are going to get will mean for feeding ourselves in the future.

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What?

You didn't expect him to tell the american people that they were going to have to slow down and drive smaller cars did you? Perhaps you were thinking that he should promote a transition from airline to rail travel?

Get real.

The Republican Party and John McCain have been making hay by dumping on Jimmy Carter's energy plan for twenty-seven years and if they adopted it now we could make them look like the fools they are.

So they have to poison the well by proposing a bunch of programs that sound like they might work but simply won't. Since the media's bias is absolutely in their favor (hello car ads) the average citizen won't hear a word of contradiction.

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Stupid has no skin color.

If she doesn't understand that global warming is a threat she's too stupid to speak in public. Of course I believe that applies to Sara Palin and George W. Bush so I'm pretty even handed on the issue.

If you don't like the climate up north move to Pheonix. It's about as artificial, engineered and life-destroying place as you can find on the planet. You'll love it there.

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Too late now.

The US auto industry will go through a few rounds of government intensive care but like Grandpa's congestive heart failure there isn't enough left to make a living.

That dog is all but dead. The near-zero value of every SUV sold or leased on the resale market will kill them and kill their customer base. On Ford won't sell 65-mpg diesel car in U.S. posted 1 year, 2 months ago 8 Responses

Ignorance bites

The first "global warming" hypothesis was made shortly after some guy noted that a CO2 rich atmosphere in a glass jar heated faster in the sun than a similar sphere filled with air. This is 19th century science.

Since then massive amounts of data from ice cores, tree rings and sea floor sediments have been recorded, analyzed and published as scientific papers. The vast majority of those papers agree with the proven theory that human action is causing global warming in excess of the normal course of events.

Your simple denial in the face of this body of work lacks credibility.  I'm going back over it because the dim view of the facts expressed here drops some denialist posters in the category of Flat Earthers and UFO abductees.

What you believe is not worthy of others attention in the abscence of evidence.

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Got a link JB?

Or are you just blowning another cloud of smoke? On Warming seas make strong storms stronger, says new study posted 1 year, 2 months ago 5 Responses

Soon to be wildfires near you!

Here in California the worst of this summers wildfires were in second growth stands of clearcut forest. The trees grow too close with brush in the abscence of shade and provide plenty of ladder fuels to bring the fire into the crowns.

After years of hemming and hawing about thinning nature took care of a bunch of it on her own. Nature bats last.

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Facts are a liberal tool

You liberals with your science and 'facts' pretend like there's some sort of reality that's independent of people and doesn't change and doesn't care if you pray or not.

You're probably foolish enough to think that cheering real hard at a hockey game doesn't help the players on your side win also. Of course it does just like praying for oil in the ground and rain in the summer fuels your car and makes your crops grow.

Building the bridge is what makes cities grow. Its' not like there was anything north of San Francisco before they built that bridge and now it's one of the richest areas in the world.

Fools.

<sarcasm off>

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Get a P.h.D and protest then

But until you get a doctorate and can pass peer review you're just another crank sawing away on the magical thinking violin. Since the great voices in global-warming denial are a religious nutcase weatherman and a fifteen year old girl vs thousands of scholars with proven credentials I think you got jack for evidence.

What's melting the ice then? Antifreeze?

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No child left behind, no adult left thinking.

The inability of the US electorate to think their way out of a wet paper sack with a sharp knife in hand is legendary worldwide. I fear that we have recreated the folly of the wealthy Spaniards after plundering Mexico's gold.

We have no idea what to do when our money won't buy what we require anymore. We wave the paper but the paper is worthless. Actual mental effort is required and those left who know how are isolated and ostracized.

All the kings horses and all the kings men won't help us unless we can see the reality of our environmental damage. Palin, and the GOP, deny that reality with their last breath.

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Fossil fueled food systems

Leave much to be desired in taste, dietary diversity, sustainability and food security. If the truck, train or ship can't get to you all the globalized Brazillion soy in the world does you no good. If the distances are long the food is stale. If fuel prices go up the farmer and the consumer suffer while the oil-man profits from peoples hunger.

Reminding the human race that water and food deserve top placement on our priority lists isn't a bad thing. I have to applaud Slow Food even if I might niggle a bit on the details.

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The slightly smaller picture...

Is that the so-called tipping point is here now. The permafrost in Canada and Siberia is melting and releasing the methane that is available in gigaton quantities. We've passed it.

The true argument is how much climete change will we have and what can we do about it. How many people will this unavoidable future kill and how many can we save by mitigation?

The human race is a blip. We weren't here before and there is no physical law that dictates our survival in the face of changing conditions.

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Disrupt the global economy....

We can plan such a disruption.

Or.

We can watch it happen as the Australians are doing now.

Choose.

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Let's just wait for reality...

to drive home the point all by itself. That's what they did in Australia and look how well that's working out. They're a coal exporting nation trying to figure out how to live without rainfall.

We need to stick to moderate qualifications that clearly state that hurricanes like Katrina and Rita will become more frequent and that we will have to mitigate and reduce atmospheric GHG's or they will get worse still.

Since it appears that humans can't understand qualified statements we might just be headed for an Olduvai hypothesis scenario.

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Mad Max with snowmobiles

It appears to be the consensus that the people of Alaska that aren't natives are more or less parasites on the rest of us. Of course my favorite little bit of Alaskan trivia is that most of the Alaskan oil goes overseas as West Coast refineries can't process it.

We don't even get the freaking oil!!

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Did you have to wash afters?

If somebody was throwing that much manure at me I'd be inclined to open a compost facility. The day the GOP does something that actually benefits the poor is the day the sun rises in the west.

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The planet is cooling see?

If you're a complete moron.

Why the climate change deniers can't manage to read a trend line is beyond me. God knows they would never be able to sail anywhere because if they were required to tack they'd completely freak out.

I suspect the studied ignorance is about as honest as a pack of little boys caught tagging the wall in the school bathroom with markers in hand.
On Arctic ice in a 'death spiral' as it hits second-lowest point ever posted 1 year, 3 months ago 16 Responses

Reality STILL has a Liberal bias

Which is about the only weapon that the Democrats get to use on a national scale. To look at the news on TV drilling in Alaska will somehow have gas down to $1.50/gal. next summer.

All next week the GOP is going to work to convince us that the son of an admiral and husband of a heiress with seven houses can somehow understand our little problems. The rest of us can look forward to a winter where some of us know we can't afford to heat the house with heating oil and don't have any viable alternatives.

Meanwhile quite a few people in the south are wondering if they'll have a roof at all come the first friday in September. It must be nice to have seven, or is it eight, houses to settle the matter.

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Pay for soil carbon.

A small farmer working organically, is likely going to increase and maintain far more soil carbon than your agro-business farm. All evidence suggests that soil carbon is also a good measure of soil fertility, methane and nitrate retention, and improved water percolation.

If we could convert the subsidy from per acre or per unit of produce to tons of carbon sequestered over baseline that could be the change needed. Of course fields would have to be sampled as a baseline and tested periodically after but a good soil database would help production also.

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Thus municipal utility districts are born.

When the people finally realize that giving guaranteed profits to fat cats at the top will always result in more profits but rarely result in better service.

Seize the utilities by eminent domain and you to can have lower power costs through programs of conservation and resource management like SMUD in Sacramento CA does.

PG&E went bankrupt when the "free market" in legislators resulted in the looting of the state of California as well as all of the people who invested in it's stock. Deregulation at it's finest.

Some things are too important to be left up to markets and capitalists.

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Nice bit of rockhopping there

While ignoring all the well known problems with hydrogen as a fuel.

Infrastructure for plug-in hybrids:one heavy duty extension cord or shared curbside charging station per vehicle.

Infrastructure for hydrogen would be some ungodly combination of new pipelines, trucking and storage facilities completely replacing our current gasoline system while leaving the gasoline network largely intact during the transition.

Currently a hydrogen fuel cell to power my Toyota Matrix (which would still require substantial advanced batteries) would exceed the new cost of the car by a factor of at least four.

Gas tank:steel. Ethanol tank:polypropylene. Electricity tank:batteries, ultracaps or flywheel. Hydrogen tank:super-high pressure carbon fiber tank or very, very heavy metal hydride tank.

I'm not even an advocate of plug-ins or BEVs; I think that the whole one car per household model has to be tossed. But I think the future of cars is electric with or without on-board generators.

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Comparitavely yes. They're saints.

At least compared to big box merchandisers, major developers and the auto industry. Small business people frequently get themselves just successful enough to make an above average middle class wage and then scale back and get a life.

Without a major corporation to ride herd on them and force them to work 50-60 hour weeks a whole lot of people work some slack into their schedule. Then they spend that time doing that civic engagement stuff that actually makes towns and cities work as places to live. They donate stuff to local charities when WalMart refuses to.

Small business people didn't have enough clout to purchase large chunks of rice land, get them zoned as suburban housing instead of wetlands like they started out and build houses in a flood zone there. It's called Natomas California and it's being foreclosed on by other big businesses called banks that wrote mortgages on land that can't get flood insurance.

While small business can pollute, log, pave and fill with the best of them the sheer lack of capital to bribe their way through opposition limits the scale of resulting disasters.

You take what you can get.

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$3 a pound tomatoes?

Come again? So a minimum wage worker picking tomatoes in Colorado, after taxes can buy a whole 2 lbs. of tomatoes for his hour's work, in mid-summer. Am I the only one who thinks the problem might be elsewhere?

It doesn't take a Yale education to figure out that when land costs, taxes, input costs and labor put into farming produce exceed the labors value in caloric or nutritional outputs there is a major problem. If you were out in the field looking at a withered tomato vine you wouldn't look in the barn for the problem but at what's limiting the vines ability to thrive. You would check the vine from leaf to root for signs of a problem.

In the case of the tomato farmer and the hired hand listed above the parasitic costs are in the same places. Energy costs and the military-industrial-banking hegemonies tax and price whallop on every working and resting hour. We tax the heck out of the working man to support overseas wars that benefit him not one farthing. Then we tax small properties and exempt large ones. Then we give the money to the already wealthy and exempt the profits they make from not working from taxes.

In a recent year the subsidy paid for my county's rice crop, excluding the cost of providing them subsidized water service and roads, exceeded the value of the crop. The rice farmer's kids roar around town in massive pick-up trucks provided free courtesy of a federal government tax credit and blow tax-free clouds of agricultural diesel smoke into the air. When they're not fishing or duck-hunting that is.

Try as you might to seperate environmental issues from labor and poverty reform you can't. It's not possible to tease out one tiny issue at a time and fix it. We waste resources on futile cycling and reward that waste greatly and consider honest labor and produciton unworthy of reward or resources.

Sounds like cancer to me. Eventually you cut it out or the host dies.

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A car on an asphalt road?

How is that new? As long as the dominant transportation model is individually owned vehicles on asphalt roads it isn't sustainable. It might be a major improvement over gasoline powered vehicles on asphalt roads but sustainable it isn't on a global scale. The only scale that matters.

Plug-in hybrids and EV's just give us more time to weasel out of really looking at sustainable environmental policy. On Electric-car visionary would overhaul the way we get around posted 1 year, 3 months ago 12 Responses

Strap him to a 2-meter kite.....

and see how manly he feels after it drags him around for a while.

Or better, find a landsailer and duct tape him in it with a stiff wind going and see if he doesn't wet himself. Crashing one of these is no joke.

There's a huge amount of power in a tiny patch of wind. Far more than is available as nuclear power if you count the whole country. That should be plenty manly enough.

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Assuming idiot voters

A fair assumption given the last eight years. The hypothesis that the United States electorate has a hint of a clue as to the nature of peak oil and the decline of their future lifestyles as a result has no foundation in data.

The Democratic Party has to behave like a bunch of slightly less clueless grinning chimps until the first wednesday in november. Nobody in the mainstream media will notice because not a one of them has ever touched a scientific calculator. Graphing exponential functions isn't even on the horizon.

The blogosphere will just have to deal.

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Hydrogen is still dead

Jabailo that link you provided had absolutely no numbers about the relative energy, materials, and manufacturing costs of the hydrogen fuel system. Which means that it's all meaningless blather.

There are better alternative energy storage systems available now from compressed air to flywheels to lithium-phosphate batteries. All of them  are in use somewhere as installed solutions at market prices.

Hydrogen just can't compete. It's propaganda used to distract from real solutions just like calls for "research" by politicians.

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Asphalt?

I see the density/efficiency vs. distribution+EVs (PHEVS, NEVs) argument going back and forth but I don't see any reference to the critical surface that makes suburbia possible: asphalt. Without asphalt driving to work at any speed above 25 mph simply isn't feasible and winter driving in the north would be touch and go.

Your local municipality, right now, is in a tizzy about the cost of asphalt. Your county is having even worse problems. It's highly likely that some of the rural roads near you are becoming a network of patches and a few will be converted back to gravel roads entirely.

Concrete is a possible replacement but requires a different subsurface infrastructure than asphalt due to the difficulty with breaking and patching it once installed. For areas outside city and town centers it will be simply too expensive.

A minimum density of houses and property values will be required to make asphalt feasible to maintain and that density is climbing every day. As that density goes up light rail or personal rapid transit schemes will become more feasible than multi-lane roadways.

Ultimately the maintenance costs of our infrastructure may dictate our means of transportation. Rails are far cheaper to maintain than roadways and overhead trams cheaper still in hilly areas. Our living and working spaces may end up being dictated by their ability to be served by transit and freight pods delivered on some sort of rail system. Spaces outside of the paved zones or distant from transit stops will be subject to decay or alternate use than our current suburban model provides for.

Suburbia started as clusters of housing surrounding light rail stops originally placed to serve farm communities. It could be that that will be it's ultimate shape.

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