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7582. jexster - 7/17/2008 5:11:22 PM Gore sets energy goal for next president to heed
Gore wants US to produce all power through Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years
7583. jexster - 7/18/2008 3:53:49 PM California First State with Green Building Standards 7584. jexster - 7/18/2008 9:01:28 PM The Greening of America
T. Boone Heads to Capitol Hill to Meet with Democrats 7585. robertjayb - 7/19/2008 2:56:22 AM Yeah! Judge stays wolf slaughter...
BILLINGS, Mont. — A federal judge has restored endangered species protections for gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, derailing plans by three states to hold public wolf hunts this fall.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy granted a preliminary injunction late Friday restoring the protections for the wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. Molloy will eventually decide whether the injunction should be permanent.
The region has an estimated 2,000 gray wolves. They were removed from the endangered species list in March, following a decade-long restoration effort.
Environmentalists sued to overturn the decision, arguing wolf numbers would plummet if hunting were allowed. They sought the injunction in the hopes of stopping the hunts and allowing the wolf population to continue expanding.
There were fall hunts scheduled that would call for perhaps as many as 500 wolves to be killed.
7586. wonkers2 - 7/19/2008 2:42:55 PM Joe Nocera "Costly Toys or New Era for Drivers?" The latest on vehicle fuel efficiency technology. 7587. jexster - 7/22/2008 4:11:49 PM I never knew this though it isn't surprising. If Calfornia were a country it would be the world's second largest consumer of gasoline.
Guess that says it all about why the State's decided to lead the Greening of America 7588. jexster - 7/22/2008 8:32:39 PM Peak Oil - LAT
Why the Oil Crunch May Grow Worse
Bush shoulda listened to T. Boone 7589. thoughtful - 7/22/2008 10:05:26 PM complete article
When it comes to global warming, extreme scare stories abound. Al Gore, for example, famously claimed that a whopping six meters (20 feet) of sea-level rise would flood major cities around the world.
Gore’s scientific advisor, Jim Hansen from NASA, has even topped his protégé. Hansen suggests that there will eventually be sea-level rises of 24 meters (80 feet), with a six-meter rise happening just this century. Little wonder that fellow environmentalist Bill McKibben states that “we are engaging in a reckless drive-by drowning of much of the rest of the planet and much of the rest of creation.”
Given all the warnings, here is a slightly inconvenient truth: over the past two years, the global sea level hasn’t increased. It has slightly decreased . Since 1992, satellites orbiting the planet have measured the global sea level every 10 days with an amazing degree of accuracy – 3-4 millimeters (0.2 inches). For two years, sea levels have declined. (All of the data are available at sealevel.colorado.edu.)...
Consider one of the most significant steps taken to respond to climate change. Adopted because of the climate panic, bio-fuels were supposed to reduce CO2 emissions. Hansen described them as part of a “brighter future for the planet.” But using bio-fuels to combat climate change must rate as one of the poorest global “solutions” to any great challenge in recent times.
Bio-fuels essentially take food from mouths and puts it into cars. The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year’s corn production in the United States will be burned up on America’s highways. This has been possible only through subsidies that globally will total $15 billion this year alone.
Because increased demand for bio-fuels leads to cutting down carbon-rich forests, a 2008 Science study showed that the net effect of using them is not to cut CO2 emissions, but to double them. The rush towards bio-fuels has also strongly contributed to rising food prices, which have tipped another roughly 30 million people into starvation.
Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked an unmitigated disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation. 7590. alistairconnor - 7/23/2008 12:57:37 PM More spin and half-lies from Lomborg.
Biofuels (in Europe and the USA) are an unmitigated disaster. It's only in recent months that this has become obvious to nearly everyone. Hansen has been in favour of biofuels in the past? Not surprising (it would be surprising if he is now!) but anyway it's not his subject : his ideas on biofuels are about as interesting and credible as ... let's see ... Lomborg's on climate science.
In any case, the idea that the fad for biofuels is aimed at fighting climate change is pretty silly. It's driven by the price of oil. 7591. iiibbb - 7/23/2008 6:57:02 PM Any earth-friendly energy must first and foremost compete economically with oil.
The problem with biofuels right now is that the technology is still developing, and the infrastructure to support it is not in place. Certain biofuels (i.e. the ones that rely on food crops) are obviously flawed. Other biofuels (i.e. cellulosic ethanol) still may work out, but the technology isn't mature.
There's still a chance for fusion via polywells... but that is a fledgling technology. Robert Bussard claims that all of the fundamental physics issues were solved and that only engineering hurdles remain... but he says there is strong political forces preventing it's adoption. I am of the belief that if the solution is really that close, then someone would take it on because there's simply too much money to be made sitting on that kind of breakthrough. I don't care who you are... that aspect of the free-market does work. 7592. arkymalarky - 7/23/2008 8:03:18 PM What are the pro and con issues with hydrogen? I keep seeing Honda's hydrogen car commercial, and I know there are a few on the road.
I thought about buying a hybrid when I bought my car, but mine gets almost 40mpg and it was several thousand dollars cheaper. I couldn't see the advantage. But I'm figuring by the time I get around to buying another one there's no telling what non-gas options there'll be.
Our house would be a great place for solar energy and for a geothermal system, but the front-end costs are beyond our means. I keep thinking one of these days they will get within our reach, and if they do we'll hardly use any electricity at all. We're hoping to change out our CH/A systems to geothermal when we pay the house off in another seven or eight years. 7593. thoughtful - 7/23/2008 8:29:39 PM Hydrogen is largely derived from petroleum products.
If you can afford to refinance and can throw in the cost of panels or geothermal into the mortgage, the cash flow can actually be positive. By that I mean that the monthly outlay without solar on your electric bill may be greater than the additional monthly outlay on your mortgage would be with the solar added.
But all of that depends on the solar generating capacity of your location, the state subsidies, etc etc. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to ask the question. 7594. iiibbb - 7/23/2008 9:57:18 PM Hydrogen is a great energy delivery system, but you still have to generate it using electricity (where do you get the electricity), and there are obvious storage issues (which I think have been resolved to a large degree).
Basically hydrogen is something you compare to batteries in electric cars. Hydrogen has obvious benefits over batteries from a industrial waste standpoint.
The only country that's adopted hydrogen is Iceland, but they have abundant geothermal.
7595. arkymalarky - 7/23/2008 10:42:30 PM We looked into it when we built, and it was far higher than what we would have saved on our electric bill. As it is, our electric bill is about 150-200 a month. But I haven't looked into anything since then, which was about twelve years ago.
We have a 100X30' metal barn whose roof is totally exposed to sunlight. That's where we'd have panels. 7596. arkymalarky - 7/23/2008 10:44:44 PM Plus my mortgage is below 5%, and I'd like to see interest rates go back down if I refinanced the house. 7597. thoughtful - 7/24/2008 1:45:40 PM I suspect the costs of panels have dropped since then. Also, if you can find anyone issuing them you may try a heloc (home equity line of credit). We just got one to help pay for the new house and surprisingly the bank was not only willing to give it to us, but they waived the maintenance fee the first year and gave us a $100 gift certificate to the local grocery store! Who knows, next they might even give away toasters!
The other alternative you might look into is solar thermal panels to heat your hot water. It won't pay for us, but it does make sense for quite a few people. 7598. alistairconnor - 7/24/2008 2:23:02 PM iii : my opinion is that all the biofuels and similar (e.g. wood to ethanol) are, at best, barking up the wrong tree - they are about substituting petroleum to fuel internal combustion engines. ICEs were only ever a good idea because petroleum was extraordinarily cheap. Fuel cells or batteries are far, far more efficient.
In particular, cellulosic ethanol (for which, despite all sorts of claims from start-ups, there is no proven economic process) comes with the same huge handicap that all ethanol systems have : no matter how clever your enzymes or whatever, you end up with an alcohol/water solution that you need to distill. That is very energy-intensive, and basically kills the whole deal from the point of view of energy returned on energy invested. The best those people can do is to use cheap fossil energy (e.g. gas or coal) to produce transport fuel (alcohol), with little or no net energy gain.
Far better to use the feedstock (wood waste, grass, whatever) for heating : turn it into pellets, and replace your fuel oil burner (like I did). 7599. iiibbb - 7/24/2008 3:06:20 PM Energy problems will have to be solved using multi-faceted approach. Biofuels are superior environmentally to fossil fuels because at least the carbon was recently sequestered.
Until we can quit getting the majority of our energy from oxidizing carbon biofuels are worth pursuing. Not all biofuels are created equal because the energy needed for production is a consideration. Wood is better because the energy density is higher, and the energy required for production is lower, than agricultural crops. Additionally, trees can be harvested year-round as opposed to perennial crops.
Personally, I think our near-term energy needs are best answered by nuclear. However, perhaps I had misconceptions about solar. I had a friend who was an engineer in energy years ago and he was not too keen on solar. Lately I keep hearing reports that it is feasible in places. A friend of mine built a house that is off the grid and she gets most of her power from solar, but they had to build a custom house and make a lot of sacrifices to make it work for them. They certainly don't have a surplus that they could charge a car with. Incidentally they use biodiesel in their vehicles. 7600. iiibbb - 7/24/2008 3:11:00 PM The limitation for burning biofuels for energy is usually transportation distances. Biomass just isn't dense. Unless you could make pellets on-site. There are studies out there that have portable power plants... so it may work out.
Basically it's all about infrastructure. Which technology is most easily adopted or adapted. That's why I think nuclear will win for the next 50-100 years... however I only see it as something we use to transition to truly sustainable energy. 7601. thoughtful - 7/24/2008 3:42:42 PM Solar pays at this point due to the subsidies. Without it, it is still cost prohibitive. Though there are some applications that continue to make sense. A buddy at work owns lots of land in the adirondacks and is nowhere near any grid so solar w/batteries is how he powers his cabin.
Under normal circumstances, though, you shouldn't have to make a lot of sacrifices to get the benefits from solar...unless you want to go totally off grid. Our area allows net metering so when we produce more than we need, our meter will spin backward. Also, if we go to time of day metering, we should make out even better as we'll be producing power during the peak usage time when rates are higher and using power during the off peak hours when rates are lower. Not bad.
Also, our house will have no 'sacrifices'...at least not from our pov. It will be smaller than the average 5000 to 8000 sq ft mcmansions they build in our area, but we don't consider that a sacrifice at all. We want a smaller home...less to heat, less to clean, less to insure, less to tax....
The only sacrifice we are making is the home is expensive to build...geothermal, solar, icynene, low-e windows, tankless hot water heaters all cost more than standard alternatives. And we are adding a lot of custom features to the house that costs $$$. But from the look and feel of the place, other than the solar panels on the roof, the house will look and feel and operate like a normal house. Except it won't have an oil tank and it won't have outside air compressors for central air.
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