The environment thread

[southsider2k5]

Not sure I'd go that far. Its succeeding now more in spite of it, than because of it. And what incentives have been out there to date were enacted by Congress over the years, as part of larger legislation - and only a few have been at the behest of Dubya. Bush was all about Ethanol, which using corn, is not very helpful.

 

BTW, not saying that any other President has been notably better. They've all been pretty useless. Its a tallest midget contest.

 

I'm not talking about his legislation. I'm talking about the high energy prices that everyone blames on him. That has been the single biggest factor BY FAR to push people towards making smarter energy choices. That is when this whole snowball got really rolling. The vast majority of the country really didn't care before, because it didn't affect them. Once it did, they changed their tunes.

[NorthSideSox72]

I'm not talking about his legislation. I'm talking about the high energy prices that everyone blames on him. That has been the single biggest factor BY FAR to push people towards making smarter energy choices. That is when this whole snowball got really rolling. The vast majority of the country really didn't care before, because it didn't affect them. Once it did, they changed their tunes.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, true.

 

[BigSqwert]

MEAT IS NOT CHEAP.

 

I already posted on the general outlines of Michael Pollan's food policy proposal, but he makes a couple points on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations -- the massive feedlots that provide most of our meat -- that deserve their own post. I've argued repeatedly on this blog that we don't pay the true cost of meat. But Pollan makes that argument with customary grace and clarity:

In fact there i

s

nothing inherently efficient or economical about rai

s

ing va

s

t citie

s

of animal

s

in confinement. Three

s

trut

s

, each put into place by federal policy,

s

upport the modern CAFO, and the mo

s

t important of the

s

e

—

the ability to buy grain for le

s

s

than it co

s

t

s

to grow it

—

ha

s

ju

s

t been

k

ic

k

ed away. The

s

econd

s

trut i

s

F.D.A. approval for the routine u

s

e of antibiotic

s

in feed, without which the animal

s

in the

s

e place

s

could not

s

urvive their crowded, filthy and mi

s

erable exi

s

tence. And the third i

s

that the government doe

s

not require CAFO

s

to treat their wa

s

te

s

a

s

it would require human citie

s

of comparable

s

ize to do. The F.D.A.

s

hould ban the routine u

s

e of antibiotic

s

in live

s

toc

k

feed on public-health ground

s

, now that we have evidence that the practice i

s

leading to the evolution of drug-re

s

i

s

tant bacterial di

s

ea

s

e

s

and to outbrea

k

s

of E. coli and

s

almonella poi

s

oning. CAFO

s

s

hould al

s

o be regulated li

k

e the factorie

s

they are, required to clean up their wa

s

te li

k

e any other indu

s

try or municipality.

 

It will be argued that moving animal

s

off feedlot

s

and bac

k

onto farm

s

will rai

s

e the price of meat. It probably will

—

a

s

it

s

hould. You will need to ma

k

e the ca

s

e that paying the real co

s

t of meat, and therefore eating le

s

s

of it, i

s

a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling re

s

erve

s

of fre

s

h water and for the welfare of the animal

s

. Meat and mil

k

production repre

s

ent the food indu

s

try

’

s

greate

s

t burden on the environment;

a recent U.N.

s

tudy e

s

timated that the world

’

s

live

s

toc

k

alone account for 18 percent of all greenhou

s

e ga

s

e

s

, more than all form

s

of tran

s

portation combined. (According to one

s

tudy,

a pound of feedlot beef al

s

o ta

k

e

s

5,000 gallon

s

of water to produce

.) And while animal

s

living on farm

s

will

s

till emit their

s

hare of greenhou

s

e ga

s

e

s

, grazing them on gra

s

s

and returning their wa

s

te to the

s

oil will

s

ub

s

tantially off

s

et their carbon hoof print

s

, a

s

will getting ruminant animal

s

off grain. A bu

s

hel of grain ta

k

e

s

approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; gra

s

s

can be grown with little more than

s

un

s

hine.

Overconsumption of meat imposes huge costs on both the environment and on public health. And that's to say nothing of the indefensible cruelty that characterizes CAFO operations. Yet we spend billions to subsidize ever cheaper meat. And billions more to treat the ill health that results from our meat-heavy diets. And we will pay billions, even trillions, more, to handle the environmental damage that eventually results from these policies. It's an incredibly odd state of affairs, like paying someone to touch up your house with lead paint. But we continue doing it because people like meat and because the various industries arrayed around meat -- from actual producers of livestock to the pharmaceutical companies that create the antibiotics to the corn industry which supplies the grain -- wield enormous political power.

 

LINK

[EvilMonkey]

If anyone is interested, a quick rundown of how the battery system will work on the Chevy Volt.

http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008-10...y-volts-battery

[EvilMonkey]

A small, nuke plant that can be online in 12 months? That could speed things up a bit.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/10/power-to-...-aspect-of.html

[NorthSideSox72]

BMW will do a small scale test release of an all-electric Mini Cooper, in LA and NY. Only 500 will be leased out, and at a high cost. This is apparently sort of a combination concept and test car.

 

it will be able to go 150 miles on a charge. No gas engine backup on this one though.

 

[BigSqwert]

Now all they need to do is make a version that doesn't look so ridiculous.

 

LINK

 

There is nothing worse than running out of juice on your cellphone or iPod when you are out walking the streets. NTT appears to have solved this problem; water-filled soles are attached to a small turbine. With every squishy step you take, the water is pumped through the turbine which runs the generator which generates 1.2 watts of electricity, "“a level sufficient to run an iPod mobile music player forever, as long as the wearer keeps walking,” said spokesman Hideomi Tenma.

 

 

[NorthSideSox72]

Like the idea of solar panels for your home, but can't stomach the upfront cost?

 

Just lease them, for $75 a month. That's significantly less than the typcial electric bill, and the leasing company guarantees a base amount of power to cover your home's needs. Net basis, customers typically save 10 to 15%, right away.

 

Also, a side note in the article that is of interest - one of the bank bailout bills included a removal of the $2000 cap on the 30% solar panel tax credit. So now, the 30% has no cap, if you do indeed want to buy your own panels.

 

Solar is coming, folks.

 

[NorthSideSox72]

Not sure if this is the ideal place for this, but...

 

Passenger Rail in the US continues to gain traction. Congress authorized $13B for Amtrak and other competitive city-to-city rails, to put in new routes and make more corridors capable of high speed trains. Also, money set aside for the faster trains themselves. Chicago seen as a major hub for such a network. Amtrak set a record for passengers in the past year, and increased ridership buy 11% YOY.

 

Obama is a major supporter of increased rail service. McCain voted against the rail money in this case. Bush, who had been a big critic of Amtrak (and with some good reasons), actually signed this bill.

 

Article in Crains.

 

[Rex Kickass]

Not sure if this is the ideal place for this, but...

 

Passenger Rail in the US continues to gain traction. Congress authorized $13B for Amtrak and other competitive city-to-city rails, to put in new routes and make more corridors capable of high speed trains. Also, money set aside for the faster trains themselves. Chicago seen as a major hub for such a network. Amtrak set a record for passengers in the past year, and increased ridership buy 11% YOY.

 

Obama is a major supporter of increased rail service. McCain voted against the rail money in this case. Bush, who had been a big critic of Amtrak (and with some good reasons), actually signed this bill.

 

Article in Crains.

 

With any luck, that means we'll start seeing more train service that makes sense in the US. Like a Three C corridor line in Ohio. This can be done with no additional track building as there are plenty of lines connecting Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

[EvilMonkey]

More improvement in solar collectors.

http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey...tappvar=page(1)

 

An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective, this unharvested light is wasted potential and a major barrier hampering the proliferation and widespread adoption of solar power.

 

After a silicon surface was treated with Lin’s new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability.

More at the link, but that is the meat of the story.

 

[Balta1701]

A couple authors wrote a paper for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society taking a look at the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s' all the scientists thought that the earth was cooling and an ice age was coming. They did so the right way, looking at the numbers of peer reviewed papers published making those sorts of predictive claims and the impact of those papers based on number of citations. Turns out, there was some cooling literature, but even then, it was being swamped by people who were starting to understand the CO2 forcing. (Link to the paper, not sure if everyone can download it or only me because I'm @ a school)

 

The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations. Graphical representations of this survey are shown in Fig. 1 for the number of articles and Fig. 2 for the number of citations. Interestingly, only two of the articles would, according to the current state of climate science, be considered “wrong” in the sense of getting the wrong sign of the response to the forcing they considered—one cooling (Bryson and Dittberner 1976) and one warming (Idso and Brazel 1977) paper— and both were immediately challenged (Woronko 1977; Herman et al. 1978). As climate science and the models progressed over time, the findings of the rest of the articles were refined and improved, sometimes significantly, but they were not reversed.

 

Given that even a cursory examination of Fig. 1 reveals that global cooling was never more than a minor aspect of the scientific climate change literature of the era, let alone the scientific consensus, it is worth examining the ways in which the global cooling myth persists. One involves the simple misquoting of the literature. In a 2003 Washington Post op-ed piece, former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger quoted a 1972 National Science Board report as saying, “Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end . . . leading into the next glacial age” (Schlesinger, 2003). The quote repeatedly appeared other places in the political debate over climate change, including the floor of the U.S. Senate where Inhofe (2003) followed up that quote by stating, “That was the same timeframe that the global-warming alarmists are concerned about global warming.” The actual report, however, shows that the original context, rather than supporting the global cooling myth, discusses the full state of the science at the time, as described earlier. The words not extracted by Schlesinger and Inhofe are highlighted with italics:

 

Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading to the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now. However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path.

And their money figure:

[Balta1701]

Brita will finally start recycling their water filters starting in January, supposedly. Thus making them that much greener than bottled water.

[YASNY]

Brita will finally start recycling their water filters starting in January, supposedly. Thus making them that much greener than bottled water.

 

Bottled water is not very green. What do you think happens to all those plastic bottles and caps?

[Balta1701]

Bottled water is not very green. What do you think happens to all those plastic bottles and caps?

Well, from my end, they get recycled if I ever use the stuff.

 

But you'll note, I was pointing at Brita's continuing greening, rather than saying anything positive about bottled water.

[YASNY]

Well, from my end, they get recycled if I ever use the stuff.

 

But you'll note, I was pointing at Brita's continuing greening, rather than saying anything positive about bottled water.

 

I can respect that, but still all those plastic bottles that end up in the landfills are petroleum based products in themselves.

[Balta1701]

I can respect that, but still all those plastic bottles that end up in the landfills are petroleum based products in themselves.

Which is why I'd recommend a Brita water filter with now recyclable filters! Yay!

[StrangeSox]

FPL breaks ground on Florida solar-thermal plant.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews...225320320081202

 

NEW YORK, Dec 2 (Reuters) - FPL Group Inc's Florida Power & Light Co broke ground on the 75-megawatt Martin solar-thermal power station in Florida, the company said in a release Tuesday.

 

The facility, which is expected to enter service in 2010, will combine solar-thermal with a combined-cycle natural gas-fired power plant to use less fossil fuel when heat from the sun is available to produce steam needed to generate electricity.

 

It will consist of about 180,000 mirrors over roughly 500 acres at FPL's existing 3,657 MW Martin natural gas/oil-fired power station in Martin County. Martin County is about 100 miles north of Miami.

 

FPL said the solar-thermal station should provide enough power to serve about 11,000 homes, while preventing the emissions of more than 2.75 million tons of greenhouse gases, which is the equivalent of removing more than 18,700 cars from the road every year for the life of the project, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

 

The Martin solar-thermal facility is the largest of three solar projects FPL is building in Florida for a combined total of 110 MW. The other two projects are at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and in Desoto County.

 

FPL already operates the 310 MW Solar Electric Generating System in California's Mojave Desert, which is the largest solar-thermal plant in the world.

 

FPL, of Juno Beach, Florida, owns and operates about 38,000 MW of generating capacity across the United States, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes electricity to more than 4.5 million customers in Florida. (Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Christian Wiessner)

[StrangeSox]

I know Balta had originally mentioned this in another thread, but it looks like the Bureau of Land Management is backing off the sale of a lot of that land around the national parks.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-...0,2563954.story

 

 

Agency backs off from land auctions

Bureau of Land Management will defer oil and gas exploration leases for some sites close to national parks. Environmentalists had accused Bush administration of giving energy industry a 'parting gift.

By Nicholas Riccardi

November 26, 2008

Reporting from Denver -- The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday backed off from plans to auction more than a dozen leases to explore for oil and gas on the doorstep of several national parks, deflecting accusations by environmental groups that it was handing a "parting gift" to the energy industry before the Obama administration takes over.

 

The agency still will proceed with more than 100 lease sales at a Dec. 19 auction. BLM officials did not return calls for comment Tuesday night, but they released a statement with the National Park Service after a Monday meeting, saying the two agencies had come to an agreement on protecting the environment.

 

"This constructive dialogue between our agencies has resulted in a positive outcome," Selma Sierra, the BLM director in Utah, said in the statement. "This is important for two sister agencies with environmental stewardship missions."

 

It was unclear Tuesday night precisely how many sales were being deferred -- environmentalists counted 34, and the BLM's statement identified at least 18. But environmental groups said that was not enough. They noted that the Park Service had identified 93 of the leases as problematic.

 

"Putting oil and gas exploration and industrial zones in the Southwest causes irreparable damage," said David Nimkin of the National Park Conservation Assn. "It's like burning Rembrandts to heat the castle. I'm not sure we're that desperate."

 

About 360,000 acres of available lease sales in Utah were quietly announced on election day, including leases near Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Dinosaur National Monument. The BLM bypassed the National Park Service, which normally is allowed to weigh in on leases near parks.

 

The disclosure of the auction several days later sparked complaints that the Bush administration was trying to rush the leases before leaving office. The co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, John Podesta, said the new administration may try to reverse the sales.

 

Mary Wilson, a BLM spokeswoman, said early Tuesday that the agency had erred by initially leaving the Park Service out of the loop. But she defended the process, noting that the agency conducts auctions every four months and has sought to auction some of the parcels for as long as five years.

 

"We're doing what we're mandated to do," she said.

 

The BLM said it waited to offer the leases until it finalized new management plans for more than 11 million acres of land in Utah last month. Wilson said the new plan has environmental protections in it, but critics of the BLM said it opens pristine land to exploration and is the legacy of an administration obsessed with drilling.

 

"This is the cementing of the Bush administration legacy in Utah," said Stephen Bloch, an attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

 

He noted that leases will still be sold in "wilderness-quality" areas such as Nine Mile Canyon, an area with many Native American artifacts. "That's their parting gift to the industry and the American public to conduct this at the last minute."

 

Riccardi is a Times staff writer.

 

[email protected]

[NorthSideSox72]

I know Balta had originally mentioned this in another thread, but it looks like the Bureau of Land Management is backing off the sale of a lot of that land around the national parks.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-...0,2563954.story

Sounds like they backed off on a few, but will continue on others.

 

[EvilMonkey]

More solar news!

Summary: Sun + Water = Fuel. With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy, with a cheap reliable way to store the energy created by solar power for use at any time.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

[StrangeSox]

More solar news!

Summary: Sun + Water = Fuel. With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy, with a cheap reliable way to store the energy created by solar power for use at any time.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

 

Tree hugger!

 

That's interesting news, though.

[NorthSideSox72]

More solar news!

Summary: Sun + Water = Fuel. With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy, with a cheap reliable way to store the energy created by solar power for use at any time.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

Great stuff. Could be used to store energy for even-flow solar electricity, or to generate hydrogen compressed energy for, say, cars.

 

[Disco72]

Hawaii trying to wean itself off oil with a combination of electric cars, wind farms, etc. It clearly makes sense from a transportation perspective and could be an interesting case study to follow.

[Balta1701]

Great stuff. Could be used to store energy for even-flow solar electricity, or to generate hydrogen compressed energy for, say, cars.

Here's the sarcastic/angry counterpoint to that work from a few months ago when it was originally announced. The simple reality is that compared to every other energy collection and storage system, hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism is still vastly more expensive than the other options currently available and there's little reason to expect those costs to decrease as rapidly in the near future as other methods.