The Energy Thread

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

I think the fact that telling a lie can be done briefly while proving something is a lie takes much longer pretty much explains everything that is terrible in the world

The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.

Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs.

hmm...well yea, it is a tough political situation, so I guess that-

On Tuesday, EPA asked for a one-year delay on its new rules for soot and toxics pollution from industrial boilers and solid-waste incinerators. On Wednesday, it announced that it would be delaying its new smog rules (for the third time) until July, despite a court order to produce them by Dec. 31.

This is mystifying. By any rational cost-benefit analysis, these rules would be some of the most cost-effective in federal government history. Brad Plumer has an excellent state-of-play piece. As he notes, "EPA experts found that cutting toxic pollution could prevent 5,000 deaths and 36,000 asthma attacks each year. All told...the rule would have cost an estimated $2.9 billion each year while delivering between $17 billion and $41 billion in annual health benefits—not a bad deal.

Sorry to be the stereotypical leftleaning envirofascist here, but we're delaying a rulemaking on something that could save FIVE THOUSAND lives a year, because of political pressure. FUCK THAT. I'm so sick of this shit.

sorry, second quote is from David Roberts, here

Sorry to be the stereotypical leftleaning envirofascist here, but we're delaying a rulemaking on something that could save FIVE THOUSAND lives a year, because of political pressure. FUCK THAT. I'm so sick of this shit.

ive been doing a fair bit of background reading on pollution levels & various environmental changes over the past half century and the galling selfishness and sheer bad faith of the opposition here is just... honestly it just depresses and enrages me to where i cant do much with it.

Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the "veracity of climate change data" and ordering the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

The directive, sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, was issued less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was "on track to be the warmest (decade) on record."

From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 036 -FOX.WHU; 054 -FNSunday; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers; 069 -Politics; 005 -Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data...

...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

sigh

Joe Romm OTM, I guess: "Well, okay, this would be a bombshell email coming from any other news organization in the world. So maybe the only bombshell is that Sammon was foolish enough to put this egregious Fox News policy into an email."

Out of the many depressing things in the world, one of the worst is that Fox News has been debunked/called out/embarrassed so so so so so many times, and yet so many people still watch and believe everything it spews out. I mean, I'm glad Media Matters is there documenting all of this and trying to correct things, but it just doesn't work. Yes, only several million people watch Fox, a small proportion of the United States population, but surely most of that relatively small audience of Fox True Believers goes forth into the world to spread the nonsense to people who don't follow the news at all and take them at their word. Straight from Industry/Frank Luntz to Fox/GOP to TOTAL FUCKING MORONS to people who don't follow the news. I love the idea of democracy but any hopes of an enlightened populace within the next 100 years is being torn to shreds

it'll happen. whether it will take utter cataclysm is another issue. thinking of irreversible global warming is a great way to terrify myself, but that's not the problem yet - the problem is a question of basic universal human empathy and the fact that tropical, undeveloped countries are getting this in the neck far worse than temperate, developed ones

I also strongly believe that in a few years' time, humanity will have the opportunity to choose the way of greed or the way of universality, and the fate of the planet rests on that decision - not just in a climatic sense but in a holistic sense

some pretty millennial thinking there bro

there's a revolution on and you're invited

revolution + on + on

hope that's true over there. In the U.S. the revolution generally looks a lot like this:

http://i56.tinypic.com/ng8pp5.jpg

http://i53.tinypic.com/viej9k.jpg

"The Facebook group 'STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW' has over 150,000 likes? Great Scott. I need a minute to think. THINK. Let's see. OK. Cancel my 2:00, get me Wen Jiabao on the phone ASAP - TODAY WE STOP GLOBAL WARMING"

http://i53.tinypic.com/viej9k.jpg

"listen to me god DAMMIT! to HELL with industry! this facebook group has over 150,000 goddamn LIKES. That is a MANDATE."

sorry, i'm just joshing around. I like the idea of the president barking orders like Patton.

lol :-/

^

kinda lol, mostly despair

^my epitaph^

Anyway, my main (sorta) point is that it's going to take people on the streets to do anything, imo. There was a decent Harper's essay a few weeks ago that argued that as lol rong as the tea party was/is about everything, they're out there on the streets, making themselves known, creating a persistent presence, so props to them for that. There was no comparable presence on the left, not with that persistence.

And (this would be more debatable obviously, but imo) that necessity to have a physical presence on the streets runs counter to the digitilization of "today's youth" (god i'm starting to feel like an oldtimer). There are examples of social networking/etc being used to successfully advance political protest, but I don't see it happening in the United States (please prove me wrong someone?). In the last year of lol grad school I helped a professor work on a book that was focused on taking advantage of the social networking, and particularly the ease with which young people utilize it, for progressive issues. And the more I researched the issue, the more my gut was telling me NO NO NO NO NO. it's not going to work. not in time.

Anyway, I want to be wrong on all of this more than anything else in the world.

no i think you're right

sorry

no, you're right. enormous fucking truth bomb. at least europe is learning how to get out there, every week. soon it'll be every day. americans need to mobilise too, or else I fear for you (and by extension everyone else)

have this image of an obese, bespectacled old man sitting on the world until it chokes. what needs to happen is that everyone decides not to work for that man

a real american does not wear spectacles

that 'suck it up' dude is who I was thinking of when I imagined it

http://www.charlesmunger.com/images/pic.jpg

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7465

uhh guys

Yep. No one ever could have known - except matt Simmons + others, several years ago, who tried to warn everyone...

Will the NYT even mention it, except maybe in an awful bloggins by andy revkin, or a story focused on recent oil prices that mentions the leak as something doomsayers are worried about? Probably not!

reading that news made me have my first cold sweat over peak oil. like before it was like you said, yeah, doomsday speculation. but to see uh, people close with the issue at hand claim this - pretty chilling.

I guess it's compounded by the fact that I have to fly back to the US this summer, and tickets are roughly 50-80% more expensive than the same time last year, no doubt due to the rising cost of jet fuel... and you think of how dependent our society is on fuel, and you just wonder for how much longer can we keep this up.

I'm on a train typing with my clumsy fingers so I'll make this short, but I think there is a strong likelihood that when the global economy "recovers", oil prices will once again shoot through the roof (they're already way above what was thought of as a crisis level by GWBush after Katrina, which prompted him to release much of the US strategic reserve in order to stabilize prices - at the time I think they were in the $70s range, now they're in the $90s).

The only reason they dropped from the levels they were at in 2007-2008 (100-140s) is the Great Recession. Supply didn't increase, demand dropped. As demand starts to increase, we're quickly running against hat supply limit again, driving up oil prices and food prices synonymously, since US presidential hopefuls and the corn industry thought it was a great idea to tie the food and oil markets together through corn ethanol. Whoops!

The bleak (but not bleakest) scenario is a series of price spikes coming in tandem with new recessions, each time the new spike oil price and demand getting a little lower, each recession cutting even deeper.

:/

heh, I have a friend of a friend who allegedly is a doomsday nutjob now after watching a documentary on peak oil while high. I feel like if I had that news while high today it would have sent me over the edge.

that bleak scenario doesn't seem that bad - the US dies a slow death. my mind fast forwarded to the mad max + clockwork orange scenario where droogs be in my house, raping my dog.

I dunno it's pretty easy to see that if uh people can't afford food anymore in the states + easy access to guns = some heavy shit

regarding the wikileak about saudi production,this article rightfully points out that it wasn't news to the peak oil crowd,who have been trying to get anyone to pay attention to the issue for years now.

here's the important part:

Were the Wikileaks revelations a game changer in the world of oil? Hardly. All the basic, but horribly muddled, information in the cables was already public. And, the flat trend of oil production for the last several years has been plain for all to see. Still, governments and societies largely prattle on as if nothing is wrong. Well, perhaps one thing did change. U.S. government officials are now known to have spoken the words "peak oil," albeit in secret cables. At last the feckless corporate media has reason to ask them why. But will they?

it's amazing that we still live in a world where the statement 'there is a finite supply of certain natural resources' is treated like a politicized argument instead of, ya know, an incredibly basic fact

Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking

we are fucking ourselves