The Energy Thread

Wow, weird, virtually zero mention in the press about how NASA's data shows that this is by far the hottest spring on record, man, so surprising, jeez

fukkin scientists

Obama's Climate Complacency: Blame Rahm?

Great article (actually an excerpt from Eric Pooley's new book, which I plan on reading soon) with lots of insidery details about ignored memos, and it sounds like Axelrod has had a large (non)role too.

When corporate and environmental leaders from the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) went to the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing for a late spring 2009 meeting with Emanuel, they could see that he didn't much care about climate change. What he cared about was winning—acquiring and maintaining presidential power over an eight-year arc. Climate and energy were agenda items to him, pieces on a legislative chessboard; he was only willing to play them in ways that enhanced Obama's larger objectives. He saw no point in squandering capital on a lost cause. The White House could claim victory if Congress passed a beefy energy bill without a cap—never mind that doing so could torpedo Copenhagen and delay serious green house gas reductions, perhaps for many years. At the USCAP meeting, Emanuel made his views clear: "We want to do this climate bill, but success breeds success," he said. "We need to put points on the board. We only want to do things that are going to be successful. If the climate bill bogs down, we move on. We've got health care"

Ezra Klein OTM in his criticism of Obama's speech:

To expand a bit on a point I made on Rachel Maddow’s show, I’m just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can’t really say the words “climate change.”...

...Rachel said that no one wants to hear about climate change. The operative emotion here has to be inspiration, not fear. And she’s right about that. The polling certainly backs her up. But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don’t believe you could’ve passed health care if you couldn’t have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don’t think stimulus would’ve worked without the spur of the unemployed. It’s not that people wanted to hear about either subject all day, but they got both problems on a visceral enough level that the action being taken at least made a sort of sense.

Whale poo helps offset carbon footprint

Each whale releases about 50 tonnes of iron a year, their natural fertilization stimulating the process of photosynthesis.

was a little o_O, but then read that an average sperm whale weighs 62 tons

Judging by some things swirling around work, electric utilities are starting to get that they can make lots of money by changing the grid in ways that don't impact the consumer but do have a big impact on the Carbon intensity of the power coming out of the socket. I'm pretty bullish that even with no, or weak sauce climate legislation some pretty big actors have sat up and seen dollar signs. I can see crappy legislation benefitting the first movers as well because supply of the sorts of technologies required to do this is going to be tight for at least the next 5 years.

If only Tesla's free wireless power plant technology had come to pass...

The claim that there's "no consensus" on climate change has always been ridiculous, but tough to debunk in a soundbyte (which, unfortunately, is the modus operandi for most skeptics). A new study from the National Academy of Sciences, the first of its kind, offers a fantastic, concise conclusion:

Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

MIT's just released report on natural gas:

http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/naturalgas.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 25, 2010 -- Natural gas will play a leading role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over the next several decades, largely by replacing older, inefficient coal plants with highly efficient combined-cycle gas generation. That’s the conclusion reached by a comprehensive study of the future of natural gas conducted by an MIT study group comprised of 30 MIT faculty members, researchers, and graduate students. The findings, summarized in an 83-page report, were presented to lawmakers and senior administration officials this week in Washington.

electric utilities are starting to get that they can make lots of money by changing the grid in ways that don't impact the consumer but do have a big impact on the Carbon intensity of the power coming out of the socket

David Roberts from Grist says Senate Dems may actually grow a pair and do something! God, I haven't had any hope on this for a long time, I hope this is even a tiny bit accurate:

On Thursday, the Senate Democratic caucus held a meeting and everyone emerged giddy as schoolchildren. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) called it "one of the most motivating, energized, and even inspirational caucuses that I've been a part of." Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called it "absolutely thrilling." Said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), "It was really very, very powerful. It was inspirational, quite frankly."

This is, to say the very (very) least, uncharacteristic. Are these Senate Democrats we're talking about? What happened at this meeting?...

...the climate bill has been proceeding along the same well-worn rut, with Kerry and Lieberman ladling on offshore drilling, natural gas, nuclear, and coal subsidies to lure corporate and, it was hoped, Republican support. Yet the only Republican support that ever materialized, Lindsey Graham (S.C.), flaked out at the first sign of danger. Now even the few remaining "moderates" on the Republican side are digging in their heels, right on cue.

There are no more compromises to make and no one left to compromise with. The traditional approach can only lead to failure now.

The other approach is what pushed financial reform over the top: Take a strong bill to the floor without 60 votes, beat the sh*t out of Republicans for obstructionism, use public opinion in your favor, compromise where you're forced, and pry off enough votes to get it done. It's the go-big-or-go-home strategy. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) argued, and it looks like the caucus generally agreed, it's time to go that route on climate.

And from ClimateWire (via NYT):

According to a staff-written summary of yesterday's closed-door caucus meeting obtained by E&E, senators discussed a legislative strategy "more akin to the financial regulatory legislation than of health care, with Democrats bringing to the floor an impenetrable package that Republicans could not roadblock."

Democratic senators declined to discuss the exact details of their strategy after emerging from the hourlong talks. But its basic thrust appears to be a plan to anchor the climate and energy effort to widely popular legislation that would overhaul offshore drilling regulations in the wake of the Gulf spill, and then dare Republicans to vote against it.

LONDON — Alcohol-induced behavior has produced many unintended consequences, but pushing up the global price of oil and losing $10 million must rank among the most novel.

Britain’s financial regulator disclosed on Tuesday that Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil futures broker, single-handedly engineered a jump in the price of oil a year ago and cost his firm millions of dollars with a string of unauthorized trades after a weekend of heavy drinking.

Mr. Perkins had just returned from a liquor-soaked golf weekend with colleagues in June of last year when he sat down in front of his laptop at his home east of London and started to place bets on Brent crude futures, according to a report by the Financial Services Authority. He continued to drink and place bets through the night, and by the morning of June 30, Mr. Perkins had placed more than $520 million worth of trades, at one point pushing the price of oil to $73.05, an eight-month high. The trades by Mr. Perkins were the main reason the price gained about $1.65 a barrel in just over two hours in the middle of the night, according to the report.

“Mr. Perkins’s explanation for his trading on 29 and 30 June is that he was drunk,” the F.S.A. said. “He claims to have limited recollection of events on Monday and claims to have been in an alcohol-induced blackout at the time he traded.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html

thorium: energy pros, tell me about it

bump

if.....he might

I know a little from investigating investment opportunities.

Thorium is used primarily in ceramics, if you have a kerosene lantern the mantle is thorium cloth. The common isotope Th232 is way more abundant than U235 (of which there may be only about 70 years supply from known deposits. India, a country that possesses practically no uranium, has extensive beaches of somewhat radioactive monazite black sand - the nation could fuel itself for a century by refining thorium out of bulldozer loads.

http://www.hindu.com/seta/2009/01/01/images/2009010150131601.jpg

Its no surprise that India is leading the push for thorium reactors. Western nuclear engineers have avoided using nearly pure thorium reactors for a few reasons, the most important being that spent fuel includes U233 which is super convenient for building bombs with, and Th238 which is difficult to work with (compared to say U235 and Pu239, blocks of which can be handled with thin gloves). India is going ahead with some Pu-Th fast breeders that look a lot like conventional breeders (pressurized reactor core with fuel rods, lots of piping to fuel exchangers etc).

I came across thorium while reading the active lobby for thorium molten salt reactors (an intrinsically meltdown proof design that performs in which the reaction occurs in a closed loop of moving liquid)to be considered among GenIV or V reactor designs. I don't think liquid sodium has many US fans since the fire at the Japanese fast breeder.

Thorium could also be used in the traveling wave breeder reactor design Bill Gates is funding, but presently those will be using depleted uranium accumulated (in huge quantities) from conventional U fuel reprocessing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRYtiSbbVg

Pardon the numerous grammatical errors.

the giant problem that no one likes to talk about:

http://i54.tinypic.com/29bymnm.jpg

graph should probably be labeled better, e.g., "Declining Oil Discoveries vs. Increasing Oil Consumption"

I read the entire contents of dieoff.org ten years ago (it hasn't been updated), and many/most of JH's sources. Financially I'm 10x better off as a result. Emotionally, well I can sleep after a bottle.

ha! yeah, I sympathize with your last point. it's difficult to come to grips with it. But at least in much of the rest of the world, peak oil studies get a least a little bit of publicity. Der Spiegel highlighted the German military study and the Guardian has been consistently pretty good,relatively speaking.

But the WashPo and the NYT? I can't tell if it's an editorial decision to not mention peak oil if they're really that clueless. Either way, the resulting ignorance is catastrophic.

BTW, if you like to keep up to date daily on resource depletion issues, oildrum.com is the best moderated non-investment oriented forum.

Just for you, Z S, www.peakoilblues.com. I could real off another several dozen sites of interest. Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation has at least been well written for the better part of the past decade.

appreciate it, but I've already got them all bookmarked (except for peakoilblues, which I'll check out now!). Energybulletin.net is my first stop, though.

(granted, since they publish just about anything that is even tangentially related to the issues of resource constraints, there's a lot of bad stuff on there, but plenty of good as well)

And for the grand picture (including discussions of the incompatibility of credit-based money with finite natural resources) I'd recommend everyone set down (with their favorite drink) to Chris Martenson's Crash Course. Nothing this decade has come as a suprise to a dieoff.org reader, it's just been a matter of timing and leverage.

I've only seen Ch. 18, which was excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfAQktktGgQ

And of course, all of this was anticipated in 1972 by the Club of Rome. Avert your eyes.

http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ODcomments/LTGScenario1.jpg

Sanpaku that can't be right because all models have been discredited because weatherman sometimes get the weekend forecast all wrong. Also, token comment about Malthus and how he was completely wrong (even though it appears that he's still on track to be correct).

typos galore but I'm hitting the bottle so I can sleep tbh

interesting paper comparing projections of Limits to Growth to what actually happened, 1970-2000:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century. The data does not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies.

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/solyndra-spells-disaster-for-doe-loan-guarantee-program/

Not good news at all, I had high hopes for Solyndra, I hope this isn't going to sour the climate for Loan Guarantees.

Z S or Ed do you guys have any recommendations for books on the early years of climate change science/research? ive been reading a little bit abt arctic & near arctic ecology & it touches on climate change obvs & was wondering if ppl doing field research in the far north were among the 1st to really visibly notice these things.

also Z S if youre still w/ the EPA much love hope it doesnt get to hard out there

a nice free resource is The Discovery of Global Warming

and within that, a nice summary is here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm

thnx!

also have u read elizabeth kolbert's climate change book? 'field notes from a catastrophe'?

I have! it's excellent, and a quick read, too.

it's not all bad news in the CA solar industry

not really "energy" related, but i just reread neal stephenson's "zodiac" and it makes me want to ~take direct action~

also apparently we don't have a generic "environmentalism" thread, but i guess it'd just be a pretty miserable and bitter place

http://i51.tinypic.com/2q0kcgh.gif

this single image should be enough to prove to all future generations that Joe Bastardi, Accuweather’s chief long-range forecaster, is the dumbest man in North America. What kind of fool looks at that data and concludes that sea ice is on a rebound? What kind of fool puts him on television?

(btw, looking at sea ice trends by volume, a more useful metric, is incredibly depressing)

haha oh wow

wait, hold the phone, i just saw ANOTHER trend in that graph, hold on just a sec while I get my monitor writing pen thingy...

http://i51.tinypic.com/2mxh9wj.jpg

ladies and gentlemen...SCIENCE

not really "energy" related, but i just reread neal stephenson's "zodiac" and it makes me want to ~take direct action~

haven't read it, but I'm gonna throw it on my xmas wishlist

wait a second...look at that revised screencapture...a HOCKEY STICK shape for sea ice?

TAKE THAT GLOBAL WARMISTS

(sorry i'm depressed, politically alienated and drinking)

Don't worry, we're just at the indicated stage:

http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/2519/mcdiagram.gif

zodiac is a great book, but it kinda put me off lobsters for life, I can never make myself to eat tomalley ever again

On one hand, awesome. Benjamin Santer WAILS on Patrick Michaels here.

On the other, I'm almost certain that when Patrick Michaels gets on a roll at a cocktail party and spews off a bunch of his bullshit, almost everyone believes him, forgets all the misleading details he may bother to include, and only remembers "climate change...uncertainty...needs more research..." So mission accomplished for him, pretty much, regardless of how embarrassingly he gets humiliated in this clip, because the only people who will watch that clip are people that don't need to be convinced.

sigh

oops, forgot to include "the clip" (testimony starts about a minute in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a4R1bKGsN8