Everyone is my friend until they prove otherwise.
Whether you are an alarmist, a denier, or in the luke warmist camp like I am, you have to understand the contribution of coal and the challenge we face with China and other developing nations. Here’s a good lecture from a Sino expert that you should watch.
That’s how it started off, a plan like the Europeans… but since then it’s turned into a patronage scam of perks and pork as Rep. Henry Waxman trades credits to states whose votes he needs to pass the bill. It’s a monstrosity that we don’t need while the economy is recovering.
Nancy Pelosi was expecting a quiet soiree of Democrat fat-cat insiders as she attends a private fundraiser for the Democrat Congressional Committee and Congressman Bruce Braley. Braley was out speaking last night trying to tamp down the upset over her lies about the CIA, but they just won’t go away.
Meanwhile the NRCC robo-called across the district to let voters know about the National energy tax that’s the likely outcome of the Democrat Cap and Trade scheme.
At inception it was a plan like those imposed upon Europeans the past few years, plans which have totally failed to reach goals and that increased use of fossil fuels in Europe while strangling those economies. Some of the economic malaise we are in can be tracked back to Euro cap and tax schemes.
That’s how it started off, a plan like the Europeans… but since then it’s turned into a patronage scam of perks and pork as Rep. Henry Waxman trades credits to states whose votes he needs to pass the bill. It’s a monstrosity that we don’t need while the economy is recovering.
Here’s the audio from one of the robo-calls:
I’ve been a big fan of Click and Clack for years, in this full edition of NOVA they examine the cars of the future. They look at the horsepower phenomenon, and how SUV’s are the new station wagons to start with and then travel to Iceland to look at Hydrogen cars.
I’ve been a big fan of Click and Clack for years, in this full edition of NOVA they examine the cars of the future. They look at the horsepower phenomenon, and how SUV’s are the new station wagons to start with and then travel to Iceland to look at Hydrogen cars.
Also I”m not too happy with Amory Lovins, anti-nuclear kook in this, but what he has to say about car weight vs strength is true.
Following up on an earlier post on Lord Monckton’s anti-AGW campaign it turns out that he’s playing fast and loose with data, and apparently making things up. The sordid details can be found at RealClimate. What’s his defense going to be? That he was only trying to make the chart look good?
I’ve seen this cycle in the past – new breakthroughs ballyhooed, lots of articles, and then… nothing. It always occurs when it looks likely that someone actually might start building a new nuclear fission energy plant
Glen Reynolds has covered a couple of new fusion developments at Instapundit, and they are definitely interesting, but those hoping for fusion sometime soon might be disillusioned.
I’ve seen this cycle in the past – new breakthroughs ballyhooed, lots of articles, and then… nothing. It always occurs when it looks likely that someone actually might start building a new nuclear fission energy plant, and several of these are on the skids for consideration now. So while I’m hoping for a game changing breakthrough, I’m not counting on one.
Rod Adams, who like I has a bias for off-the-shelf Fission, covers this from a different angle.
If you are hoping for fusion sometime this decade or next, you shouldn’t start holding your breath yet. We do need to keep researching Fusion for energy needs of the latter half of this century, we need to up our Kardashev rating quickly to cope with the coming 9 billion human souls and their needs.
This is the worst possible time to be pushing cap and trade – increased prices for energy are not the answer for our economic woes, and a low energy future is not the way to combat pollution. If we want to tackle the problem we should be building clean energy, not penalizing all sources we don’t agree with because bankrupting power companies and decreasing energy supply has dire consequences for the world. Make no mistake about this: it’s the middle class tax hike Obama didn’t tell you about in the election, and it could easily be argued that sustained high energy prices for several years led directly to the mortage debacle which pushed us over the hill into recession.
The environmental movement of the sixties has spawned a lot of bad craziness in it’s day, but none so bad as cap and trade. Cap and trade is a desperation measure which as unintended consequence will keep the most abundant but also the dirtiest, power sources in production. It’s a shell game, and just like that carny scam game you never seem to pick the right option.
The biggest proponent of Cap and Trade is Al Gore and he comes from a coal state. While professing to want to shut down coal plants, everything he has done has led to greater use of it as covered here in previous articles. Al Gore also stands to profit greatly from cap and trade, so rather than an environmental messiah you should see him for what he is: a carny huckster after some cash. Now ask yourself who has the cash?
Of course Al is not going to see himself that way, and the rationalizations on the left for supporting the cockamie scheme range from the “Small is Beautiful” mentality from E.F. Schumacher’s book to the left’s love of redistributive schemes that require coercive government force.
Rearranging the chairs on the Titanic through cap and trade doesn’t change the picture however, and it doesn’t add to our overall energy supply. By 2050 the world population will be over 9 billion, and estimates of world power needs run from 50 to 70 petawatt hours per year.
Many people will argue with that estimate, but they don’t account for the unbuilt sewage treatment plants we will need, they don’t account for billions of wood cookfires all across the globe daily, they don’t account for untreated water in most of the world, they don’t account for electric needs for hydrogen, fuel cell, or direct electric vehicles in their estimates. During the 20th century power use accelerated by 20 fold, and if you aren’t expecting that pace to grow by nearly a hundred fold this century, then you really have your head in the sand. Energy in all forms is the blue sky industry of this century.
Solar power and wind power are problematic in that they require other power sources for their downtime. On a cold winter night when there’s a big demand for heating, what good are solar arrays? On hot windless days what good are windmills for cooling? Each requires supplemental power, which is why T. Boone is hedging bets with natural gas.
With wind and solar you end up building infrastructure for two power sources, not one. It’s a hard fact that proponents of these power sources need to accept and work with rather than live in the cloud cuckoo land of undercutting other energy sources for the big fail at the end. Where wind has been implemented in Europe it has had the unfortunate effect of increasing coal and oil usage, the outcome speaks for itself.
Solar and wind do have their place in the energy mix, and I am a proponent for them, but I also like being honest – we must recognize that they are not the full answer to the future need of somewhere between 50 to 70 petwatt hours of electric world wide by 2050.
If the left and the right want to overcome the retrograde brakes to our energy future they have to toss the underlying notion that energy use in and of itself is bad. Energy use is good; it’s demonstrably good in a thousand different ways and modern civilization cannot survive without high energy use. You certainly should conserve where it makes sense, but most of our problems with environment require energy abundance, not conservation.
Recycling, sewage treatment, replacement of fossil fuels, modern medicine, scientific research, education, and information technology all require a high energy, not a low energy future. If Western nations hope to help advance freedom and modernity in second and third tier income nations then they must make energy more abundant. On top of that, high energy even in its dirty forms like coal still does more good for the environment than harm.
If Germany were put in a position by Russia where they had to load shed daily during winter as Pakistan does, how many winters would the Black Forest last? In the Hindu Kush there are whole mountains where you cannot see where the tree line starts or stops because all the foliage has been stripped for burning. If you think forest is valuable then high energy, not low energy, is needed to save it.
To sum up in one sentence: in places where people burn biomass to cook and heat even dirty coal power makes better sense.
A marvelous presentation by Hans Rosling, please ignore the Obamanistic term a moment – Hans tells you what I’ve thought all along. Energy is key, what good is advantage if you are living on an island of wealth and the rest of the world is shipwrecked on the reefs of third world despair?
Do poor neighbors make good neighbors, or would you prefer your neighbors to have the energy wealth that you do? Are high infant mortality, poor education, and poverty things which any country can really overcome? Yes, they can.
Please take a moment to think of the difference between “yes we can,” and “yes, they can.” We can’t do this for them, we must however convince them to do it for themselves. Environmental Imperialism won’t get us there.
Yes they can! from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.
This is where we’ve lost our moral footing. Charity as it is today is mostly maintenance and displacement activity to help the wealthy nations feel better about themselves. Our support for advancing third world countries is best when we are demonstrating why liberty works to strengthen a nation, why education works to strengthen a nation, and most of all why abundant clean energy is the bedrock that future civilization will stand or fall upon.
Ayn Rand once wrote an essay that compared the crowd and the aftermath of the Apollo 11 Launch in 1969 to that of Woodstock. It was both acerbic and insightful, contrasting how the 1 million souls interested in science and the future at Cape Kennedy left the scene of the historic launch to how the 300,000 music and drug enthusiasts left Woodstock. I will leave it to you to determine what this post-innaugural video of the National Mall is more reminiscent of.
It makes you wonder how these people enthused by Green solutions will perform over the next few years.
Frankly, this bias is disturbing…
Frankly, this bias is disturbing…
Weather Channel Accused of Pro-Weather Bias
