Energy Wars

"Remy Chevalier is a brilliant and eccentric eco-activist with a "bright plan": he believes a very achievable switchover to green lighting will save enough energy to shut down our aging nuclear power plants -- in particular Indian Point, one of the oldest and most controversial plants, and roughly 30 miles north of Manhattan. Seth Leitman and I found this out while working on our book about green lighting, to be published early this fall by the Green Guru Guide series. "

"Aided by federal and state tax breaks, solar energy will be cheaper than building new nuclear power plants, according to a North Carolina study released today. Dr. John Blackburn, the emeritus chair of economics and former chancellor of Duke University, said the costs of new nuclear plants continues to rise while electricity generated from solar voltaic panels is only half the cost of 12 years ago. In a study commissioned by the environmental group NC Warn, Dr. Blackburn estimates that the cost of new nuclear plants is now about 16 cents per kilowatt-hour and headed higher while solar energy can be generated with rooftop panels and solar farms in North Carolina for a comparable rate and solar costs are trending down. Solar costs are cut by about one-third because of state and federal tax credits, but Dr. Blackburn said the nuclear industry also benefits by federally backed insurance, loan guarantees and research assistance. "The message is that solar is here and now and not something exotic for the future," Dr. Blackburn said."

Some days you have to wonder if everyone who's been sounding the alarm about oil issues for years have been right all along, and the rest of the world, including the US power structure, is just now playing catch-up. At least that's the thought I had when I read BusinessWeek's U.S. Reliance on Oil an 'Urgent Threat': A group of retired senior U.S. military officers has concluded that the country's reliance on fossil fuels undermines its capacity to defend itself. Citing a "serious and urgent threat to national security," the group has urged the Pentagon to take the lead in shifting to a new age in energy.

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen "earth summit" has even been attempted before in human history. I've been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind - a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen "earth summit" has even been attempted before in human history. I've been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind - a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.

Global shipping contributes about a billion tonnes of CO2. That's more than the entire economies of Germany or the UK. Aviation lobbyists have gleefully highlighted the figures. They are a useful distraction from green assaults on the rise in aircraft emissions. But the shipping industry indignantly rejects the comparison with aviation. The International Maritime Organisation says moving goods by ship is 80-100 times more efficient than by air.

What a wonderful presentation from a company that really knows how to deliver a product!

"Obama tried cutting oil subsidies in his very first federal budget proposal, and it didn't fly. He and the Democratic members of Congress tried again earlier this year, hoping that the Tea Party's incessant yelling for spending cuts would translate into Congressional support for one of the most obvious spending cuts in the history of spending cuts. But no such luck. And get this: The true amount we pay in oil subsidies is waaaaaaaaaaaaay more than $4 billion a year. In fact, the far-right libertarian think tank the Cato Institute once calculated the true cost of subsidizing oil to be in the range of $78-150 billion -- yep, billion -- per year. A lot of these expenditures come from the massive amount of security needed to protect oil, both at its source in volatile regions and along international shipping routes 'round the world. The US gov expends much effort and capital to help safeguard the oil companies' product and operations -- it's in the national interest, after all, that everyone be able to continue purchasing Exxon gasoline. So you'd think that paring a comparatively meager $4 billio"

Last week I attended a discussion entitled After the Election: Where is Cleantech Headed Now? hosted by TiE(The Indus Entrepreneurs) at their Silicon Valley headquarters. The event was moderated by Andrew Chung ofLightspeed Venture Partners with presentations by Chris Flavin of Worldwatch Institute and Dr. Dick Swanson, founder of SunPower. Needless to say, the room was full of some very smart, visionary people with a singular focus on exploring the state of the energy sector and the potential of renewable energy to bring solutions to a beleaguered economy and stressed environment (one might say to civilization and the natural systems that support it).

The Tennessee Valley Authority wants proposals from companies to supply up to 2,000 megawatts of power from renewable and clean energy sources - almost as much as could be produced by 1½ nuclear power plants. Anyone that could provide at least one megawatt -enough to power about 350 homes - is asked to respond. Advertisement TVA, which supplies virtually all of Tennessee's electricity, gets less than 1 percent of its power from solar, wind or methane, while its hydroelectric dams are responsible for 6 percent to 10 percent, depending on rainfall.

On this basis, we estimate that the average observed decline rate worldwide is 6.7%. Were that rate applied to 2007 crude oil production the annual loss of output would be 4.7mmbpd.

Many local authorities use commingling - which sounds like more fun than it is, all it means is that co-mingled collections are the ones where previously separated waste is crushed together in the back of a dustcart. Once this happens, it's almost impossible to separate the recycled materials again, so what happens to the waste? Often it's taken to Materials Recovery Facilities where large amounts of energy are used to try and separate the waste again. Or it's shipped to India and spread out in fields where people then try to hand pick it back to the original categories. But it's also often just … dumped in landfill. Precisely what we were told recycling was going to stop in the first place.

Four years, aka one presidential term, is all the time Obama has to save the Earth according to NASA scientist James Hansen. Hansen testifed to Congress over twenty years ago alerting the world that climate change was under way. Five presidential terms later, Obama is left with a crisis of epic proportion. Hansen warns: We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.

Light pollution in the broad sense refers to any nighttime artificial light that shines where it's not needed. This nocturnal brightness can disorient humans and a host of other animals, confounding eyes and biological rhythms that evolved in a world without such light. One way stray rays pollute is sky glow, the scattering of light by clouds and atmospheric particles that makes it difficult to see stars and other features of the night sky-an increasing problem. These maps show the global extent of sky glow. More than just snapshots of the Earth at night, they account for the light-scattering effects of clouds and dust, and show how bright the sky is above a given point on the ground-revealing that most of the world's population lives under night skies fuzzy with the haze of reflected light.

Compared to, say, the pitched battles over Yucca mountain, the storage of toxic fly ash produced by coal-fired plants has gotten virtually no coverage, even though it's arguably a far, far bigger health and safety risk. So I suppose one upside-if you can even call it that-of the recent (and massive) ash-spill disasters in Tennessee and Alabama is that we're starting to see more investigations like this one, by Shaila Dewan of The New York Times: The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States-most of them unregulated and unmonitored-that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

WorldChnaging has a post on a site for managing local currencies (or locabucks, as I call them) - Create Your Own Currency. "Money," wrote Jamais Cascio, "is the tangible manifestation of an agreement between you and other people that the oddly-colored piece of paper in your hands has value." But what's truly valuable is not those units of currency, so much as the units of time they represent to those who earn and spend them. Two women from Ashland, Ore., who follow this philosophy have created a way to turn units of time into currency that can be directly traded and tracked through their online system OurNexChange. This "community currency" allows local residents to buy goods and services without exchanging any money. Sharon Miranda and Libby VanWyhe recently told the Ashland Daily Tidings about the system:

If the plans being laid for the economy and the environment work out the way President-elect Barack Obama's advisers hope they do, the future of energy can be summed up in one word: electricity. That one word covers a lot of policy twists, however: What will the economic downturn mean for initiatives to cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions? What will the recent drop in gasoline prices mean for efforts to boost alternatives to fossil fuels? Can the electrical grid handle increased demand? How do you smooth out the highs and lows of power generation? Where will all that power come from?