In a sane world . . .

. . . upon hearing about this, every political leader in the freakin’ world would should be shouting ‘tell me more!”

Good Riddance to Daylight Savings Time

Have I mentioned lately that I hate/resent/dread Daylight Savings Time? Always have. Always will. And here in The Sunshine State it’s an especial torture when,  every summer, we take an hour away from the coolest part of the day and tack it on to the hottest part of the day.

So thank you National Geographic for putting it out there.  First, the premise put forward in 1917 that DST would energy has little relevance 100 years later.

In their 2008 National Bureau of Economic Research study, the team found that lighting demand dropped, but the warmer hour of extra daylight tacked onto each evening led to more air-conditioning use, which canceled out the gains from reduced lighting and then some: Hoosiers paid higher electric bills than before DST, the study showed . . . During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, parts of Australia extended daylight saving time while others did not . . . the practice did indeed drop lighting and electricity use in the evenings—but that higher energy demands during darker mornings completely canceled out the evening gains. . .

“Everywhere there is air conditioning, our evidence suggests that daylight saving is a loser,” Wolff said.

And, oh yeah, gas.

“When you give Americans more light at the end of the day, they really do want to get out of the house. And they go to ballparks, or to the mall and other places, but they don’t walk there. Daylight saving reliably increases the amount of driving that Americans do, and gasoline consumption tracks up with daylight saving.”

Conventional wisdom is that DST was begun to help farmers. Not so. Farmers found it disruptive to livestock and crops.  Who else doesn’t like it?

• Orthodox religions with traditional prayer schedules have long fought against DST
• The TV industry hates it and fights it, and
• Arizona thinks it’s stupid and does not participate.

 

Frackin’ good! (and better than fracking)

When I see this, I hear a page turning:

Walmart has been adding solar to scores of stores across the country . . . as it plans to become 100 percent renewably powered. . .  The company has aggressively been building out solar on its stores and other buildings.  It’s also been boosting its purchase of renewable energy both directly and indirectly. And it is doing so across the world.

“Walmart has 280 renewable energy projects in operation or under development, and continues to test solar, fuel cells, microwind, offsite wind projects, green power purchases and more,” the company said.

Yeah, but who has the Congress critters firmly in their deep, deep pockets?

Wouldn’t It Be Nice (splendid early Beach Boys)

Gas explosions for profit or bombs for ideology. One good. One very very bad. People still dead. Threat still there. How to choose, how to choose . . . XL baby, XL!

Today, Upworthy brings us a video by activists opposed to the construction of a fracked gas pipeline under the West Side of Manhattan. It includes footage from a PG&E gasline explosion at a similar installation in San Bruno CA. In 2010. Eight dead. 38 Homes leveled. It happened two miles west of San Francisco International Airport. And I never hard of it before. Did you? From Wikipedia:

In January 2011, federal investigators reported that they found numerous defective welds in the pipeline.  . .  . On January 13, 2012, an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses.

It’s an all too familiar story.

This graphic shows the blast zone that would be created if an explosion similar to the one that occurred in San Bruno, CA, last year were to happen in Manhattan at the location of the natural gas pipeline proposed for the city by Spectra Energy.

But back to New York, the city that never sleeps . . . the pipeline, already under construction, is the project of Spectra Energy. Were their project to suffer an explosion like San Bruno, or like the dozens of others that have happened around the world, it could kill tens of thousands, maybe maim hundreds of thousands, and might even take down the economy of NYC.  The Federal government is spending hundreds of billions, perhaps a trillion or more, to keep us ‘safe’ from terrorists. But developing alternate energy sources is too expensive.Here’s that video from Upworthy:

Portugal is not us, but damn we could learn a few things . . ..

Sure, circumstances are different – maybe a lot different – here than there. But the single most important thing they did was decide to do something. And they went from there.

 Portugal’s electricity network operator announced that renewable energy supplied 70 percent of total consumption in the first quarter of this year. This increase was largely due to favorable weather conditions resulting in increased wind and water flow, as well as lower demand. Portuguese citizens are using less energy and using sources that never run out for the vast majority of what they do use.

. . . Portugal’s investment in modernizing its electricity grid in 2000 has come in handy. Like in many countries, power companies owned their own transmission lines. What the government did in 2000 was to buy all the lines, creating a publicly owned and traded company to operate them. This was used to create a smart grid that renewable energy producers could connect to (encouraged by government-organized auctions to build new wind and hydro plants).

And then there’s this – surprising, and very hopeful:

Other countries have been making steps of their own on renewable power production. The U.S. had a record-breaking year for wind energy in 2012, growing by 28 percent. Sweden is looking to have no dependence on oil by 2020. Australia could be looking at 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. Global solar power world will soon be a net-positive energy source.

You know what’s not HUGE? Donald Trump. You know what is HUGE? This.

This is not a suggestion. This will happen. Full story here.

The Obama administration announced strict new fuel-efficiency vehicle standards Tuesday, requiring the U.S. auto fleet to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, an uncontroversial move that, unlike other administration energy policies, was endorsed by industry and environmentalists alike.

[will] expand on existing standards requiring American-made cars and light trucks to average 34.5 mpg by 2016. They will significantly cut U.S. oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by the time they are fully implemented, according to EPA.

Let the demonizing begin

A Rhode Island company plans to begin construction in 2014 on the Atlantic coast, of the US’s first offshore wind farm.

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”    Thomas Edison.

 

How the left blows the message war. Every. single. day.

Fluffy funnin' with fellow celebrity Karl

These days I mostly skip the ‘interview’ portion of the Sunday gasbaggery exhibitions. An interview with someone singing the company line is not something I’m inclined to waste time on . . . . however, while far from the remote, I caught the last moments of some White House talker-whose-turn-it-was with David Gregroy (known in many corners of the liberal blogosphere as ‘Fluffy’) . Here’s how it went:

GREGORY: Is the President responsible for high gas prices?

WHITE HOUSE TALKER: Well, first of all . . .

Wrong!!  Better answer? How about:

WHITE HOUSE TALKER: Of course not! First of all . . .

How hard is that?

You gets whay you pays for. And climate skeptics pay.

Mouthpieces are a dime a dozen. But they do get busy and quite obedient when the pay is really good. Like $8.6 million. From a single donor. Ever hear of the Heartland Institute? They are a right-wing think tank whose mission is to “cast doubt on climate science”. They’ve been around for a while, doing the dirty, making the world safe for fossil fuels, the ‘free market’ and the extraction industries. But a rash of newly leaked memos and reports – in a world of curtains to hide behind, that’s how we get our information now – gives us a glimpse of what’s behind that curtain . Who funds Heartland?

Most eyes will probably fall first on the “Anonymous Donor” who, the documents show, personally funded Heartland’s “climate change projects” to the tune of $8,602,267 between 2007 and 2011. The largest donation came in 2008 when “he” donated $3.3m – the same year that Heartland began its annual climate change conferences which have attracted just about every prominent climate sceptic since. This mystery donor has apparently pledged a further $1m for “climate change projects” during 2012.

That’s ‘personally funded’. A man. One person. Until now information about their funding had been sparse. The story in The Guardian doesn’t name anyone, but they hint rather nakedly that the wampun comes from  one of those famous American Libertarian brothers, whose ’causes’ usually align well with the growth of their personal wealth. (To be polite, Koch Industries makes some proper token public donations.

Click the chart for a clearer version.

From Greenpeace - IRS data

Of course, they get a little help from their friends.

Many of the Republican Senate candidates are signatories of the Koch Industries’ Americans For Prosperity No Climate Tax pledge and the FreedomWorks Contract From America.

Heartland is also committed to creating an alternate science curriculum in K-12 classrooms – which would be cool, eh? Combined with the ‘creationism’ curriculum, we could produce an entire generation scientifically illiterate.  (Now that’s the way for a world power to stay on top!)

So, we have an anonymous millionaire donor – whose agenda and/or vested interest we know not – funding an effort to discredit the teaching of climate science in schools? How can that ever be justified or considered democratic, let alone judged to be in the pupils’ best interests?

But the dropping of jaws doesn’t end there. Next up, we learn that Heartland paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to write a series of reports “to undermine the official United Nation’s IPCC reports”. Not critique, challenge, or analyse the IPCC’s reports, but “to undermine” them. The agenda and pre-ordained outcome is clear and there for all to see.

The leaked documents are here.

We absolutely cannot subsidize energy developement because that would be Kenyan communism – unless it’s fossil fuel or nuclear

It’s remarkable my country could afford to do this after the $500 million in loan guarantees to Solyndra, because I thought – besides being !European!Socialism! –  it busted us. FOX News told me so.

The Obama administration has offered the Vogtle project $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees as part of its pledge to expand nuclear power.

Good gobbly gobbly y’all and a neighbor’s story

I don’t host Thanksgiving but I am the traditional baker of the pies, a task I really enjoy. So the shopping is done, ingredients are at hand, the weather is lovely and the doors and windows are wide open. I’m ready!

There will be two pies baked today and the pumpkin gets done tomorrow morning. Today’s pies will not be refrigerated but wrapped in cloth and left on the lanai for the overnight. And tomorrow’s pie will come to the table still warm.

I’ll bring two to Thanksgiving dinner, but the third is for my neighbors across the street.

They are the future – at least I hope so! This is an interesting family who appear, on the face of it, perfectly normal. They are six, which is larger than most these days, but with school, hockey, soccer, an SUV and pickup, bikes, flower gardens, chores and electronics, they are otherwise a normal and handsome representation of a U.S. family, circa 2011.

Except for one thing . . . they are about one year away from taking their home life entirely off the grid. They’re fully integrated into the community and school activities, but at home they will be independent (Okay, they’re keeping internet and cable.)

They’ve converted the house (and pool!) to solar. Two rain barrels supply the pool and kitchen. The rest is on a well.  A big wood stove heats the house in winter. They have a kitchen garden. Actually, two – one in their backyard and a much larger garden on a bare plot of land about half a mile away. Both are fenced. Both are watered from wells, and tended by Dad and the four kids. They’ve also got chickens and guinea hens out back and share the eggs. They’ve  begun playing with grape vines, thinking of making their own wine.

Dad owns a small business and employs a few guys; as such his income is mostly secure. (If necessary they could probably get by on the earnings of son #1 who mows my lawn!) They fully own that business as well as the house and cars. There’s a fishing boat too, which goes to the Gulf regularly and comes back with lottsa fish on a good day.

I’m sharing this story so I can tell you what happened one night last week. At about 6pm, Dad showed up at my door – with a wide and proud smile – holding a full dinner plate. On the plate were a quarter guinea hen, red potatoes, broccoli, corn, string beans and onions. “Enjoy” he said. (UPDATE: When this post first went up, I’d failed to say that every single thing on that plate was from the  garden. You probably got that, but in the interest of crossing all the ‘t’s’ . . . )

Earlier they’d had guests and fed 11 people. And they did it with the grill and the solar oven. So come the revolution, our plan is to run the fence to enclose my property inside theirs, make the gardens bigger and have the kids man the turrets.

Good thing I love brocolli.

More Sunday funnies and still not funny.

Thanks Don in Mass

The Koch brothers systemic criminality

Bloomberg just published a bombshell story about the Kochs and Koch Industries and how they do business –  apparently, they do it their own way and the law be damned. It’s a lengthy story and it confirms that these enormously rich and very secretive brothers really do see themselves as sovereigns, occupying a higher plane than mere mortals. With all this criminality, I don’t know how they ever found the time to hire Dick Armey so he could create FreedomWorks, the group that stands behind the Tea Party.  (These guys work ‘freedom’ into everything. They need some new writers.)

A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism . . . [Moe asks: Remember when Halliburton did that?]

Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.

. . . . In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mis-measuring the amount of crude it was extracting. . .

Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat — using techniques they called the Koch Method.

Waste not, want not? Nah, Grandma had it wrong. Silly Grandma.

We’re a short sighted people, just asking for trouble. And it will come. Oh, it will come.

Oil companies have begun extracting oil from shale fields now. Doing it the responsible way is, however, expensive. Profit is god in our f-r-e-e-d-o-m  market, so any other considerations are for sissies. The Times reports from North Dakota:

Flames of wasted natural gas light up the prairie

. . .  the deliberate burning of natural gas by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field and take advantage of the high price of crude. The gas bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil, and with less economic incentive to capture it, the drillers treat the gas as waste and simply burn it.

Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.

And look, this is way cool: we’re like Nigeria and Iran!

All told, 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. No other major domestic oil field currently flares close to that much, though the practice is still common in countries like Russia, Nigeria and Iran.    

But take comfort, we’re “not as bad as Kazakhstan” . . .

. . . but this is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do: to flare off a perfectly good product just because it’s expensive to bring to market,” said Michael E. Webber.

Anyway, those companies can always count on us to go to war somewhere if we need more. Just not on their dime.

Atrios proves again that a few well chosen words work just as well

There’s a wee flaw in designing an economy which requires people to spend a huge amount of money to purchase and maintain a giant metal box in order to be able to drive to minimum wage jobs.

Yup.

Stop the LED; what was good enough for Thomas Edison in 1880 is good enough for me

Save the incandescent!

So sayeth Republicans in the 112th Congress.  Because there’s nothing else going on this week.

House Republicans plan to bring to the floor next week legislation that would water down a provision in a 2007 energy law that requires light bulbs to be more energy efficient . . .

Barton’s Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB) Act would repeal a provision in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that requires traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient beginning in 2012.

This Rep. Barton, ardent creationist and perennially anti-science in all its manifestations:

. . . The first question from C-SPAN’s moderator: “What causes, in your perspective, global warming?” Barton’s reply: Well, the short answer would be God.

The House Committee no doubt was forced to act upon discovering to their horror that the 2007 law was totally part of a socialist-terrorist-loving-faggot-elite plot.

Incandescent light bulbs are gradually being replaced in many applications by other types of electric lights, such as fluorescent lamps, compact fluorescent lamps, cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL), high-intensity discharge lamps, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). These newer technologies improve the ratio of visible light to heat generation. Some jurisdictions, such as the European Union, are in the process of phasing out the use of incandescent light bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient lighting. In the United States, federal law has scheduled the most common incandescent light bulbs to be phased out by 2014, to be replaced with more energy-efficient light bulbs.^[3] In Brazil, they have already been phased out (by law from 2007 until 2010)^[4]. Traditional incandescent light bulbs were phased out in Australia in November 2009.^[5]

The long U.S. slide to the bottom

I see the GOP is determined to cut the budget of the F.D.A., even as Europe is caught in the grip of an E-coli scare.

I think this brief letter in today’s New York Times says it all.

A Question for the Right

To the Editor:

Re “High-Speed Rail Poised to Alter China” (Business Day, June 23):

As we persist in allowing other countries to outdo us in the development of high-speed rail, the quality of health care, the implementation of cleaner energy solutions, and the rigor of math and science programs in schools, does the “no new taxes under any circumstances or for any reason” right wing have a plan in place to bring us back up from the bottom 20 years from now?

 

But it’s hard to turn off the lights . . .

Let’s see:

• Oil subsidies
• Wars
• Foreign aid to Middle Eastern oil producing countries
• Ongoing care for casualties from the wars
• Department of Homeland Security
• pollution

Imagine the dollars and think about your taxes – all partly because we need to keep parking lots brightly lit even when no one is there. We think public transit is a joke and green technology is a joke; so we keep digging that hole –  not out of enthusiasm but because it’s easier– and because there’s money to be made.

Clusterfuck Nation*

Meet James Howard Kunstler, non-partisan, equal opportunity curmudgeon who writes and lectures on subjects I find interesting – urbanism, energy, social pathologies, economics (intelligible for the rest of us) and the general stupidness he sees around him. 

In addition,  he’s a painter, a gardener and a long distance bike rider (all the things I wish I were!). He posts every Monday at his website *Clusterfuck Nation. I love the guy.

 Here are some outtakes from recent posts (unlinked, sorry).

ON  MEDIA FAILURE:

We’ve never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. He thinks it’s just a sinister ploy to snatch the people’s “individualism.” Perhaps George hasn’t noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago

Original thinking – there is our future

We use oil. We use coal. We use gas. We use energy resources and technologies that  diminish our stores of natural resources and poison our environment. It’s really not a very smart model anymore.

We need to create a future and leave the fossil fuels in the ground – in our past. It took millions of years to create those reserves and we are on our way to using them up within two centuries while pretending they’ll be there forever.

Imagine ‘intelligent pavement’ that could generate power for use elsewhere AND power our vehicles AND pay for itself – imagine replacing asphalt roads with solar panels in glass surfaces. It’s possible.

Imagine the jobs in research, manufacturing and construction. Imagine people imagining solutions.

Friend Brian (a Canadian – quelle horror!) sent me this video.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Sheeesh, stupid windmills don’t even know when to fail

When the nuclear went down, Japan turned to its wind farms. Stupid Japanese, don’t even know that wind has no role in any serious energy policy. We know, cuz Dick Cheney told us.

Even the country’s totally badass Kamisu offshore wind farm, with its giant 2 MW turbines with blades big as the wings on a jumbo jet, and only 186 miles from the epicenter of the largest quake ever recorded in Japan, survived without a hiccup thanks to its “battle proof design.” As a result, the nation’s electric companies have asked all of its wind farms to increase power production to maximum, in order to make up for the shortfalls brought about by the failure of certain other aging, non-resilient 20th-century technologies

Random thought: the tragedy of missed opportunities

Moments when this country could have made epic and positive changes – but didn’t.

President Andrew Johnson –  He entered the White HOuse following Lincoln’s assassination. He had utter disdain for the emerging Reconstruction policy, stopped it and led with is own bigotry.  The legacy of slavery wasn’t addressed again until the mid-20th century (Truman to Johnson).

GW Bush – Following 9/11, just eight months into his presidency, George Bush had a nation that would have followed its president anywhere, risen to any challenge. He had a chance to give us a ‘go to the moon’ challenge and the US could have begun a journey to lead the world in alternative energy technology (not instead of Afghanistan; the efforts could have been side by side).

Obama – He walked into office on a day when the nation would have enthusiastically gotten behind a call for vast reform of the financial industry, the  tax codes and a stronger regulatory structure. But he didn’t. Stimulus was the right thing to do, but it stopped short. And in the financial industry at least, it reenforced the bad behaviors that led to the meltdown.