Month: August 2011

Now Michelle Bachmann has made light bulb lunacy an issue in the presidential campaign.

Mother Jones:

Few issues get Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) going quite like lightbulbs. At campaign stops across the country, she has repeatedly denounced a 2007 law that required manufacturers to develop energy-efficient lightbulb varieties. Bachmann sees the law as an affront to American values. “I think Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the lightbulb,” she told a New Hampshire audience in March. “And I think darn well, you New Hampshirites, if you want to buy Thomas Edison’s wonderful invention, you should be able to!”

In reality, no one’s stopping New Hampshirites (or anyone else, for that matter) from buying any kind of lightbulb they please—even the incandescent variety that Bachmann warns will be outlawed unless we pass the Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB) Act that she supported. (BULB would repeal the energy-efficiency rules.) But Bachmann’s crusade is about much more than energy-conserving bulbs: The Minnesota congresswoman is part of a movement that considers “sustainability” an existential threat to the United States, one with far-reaching consequences for education, transportation, and family values. If Bachmann is right, lightbulbs will soon be the least of our worries.

Bachmann’s concerns may have been best articulated in an interview she gave to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow in 2008. As Republicans in Washington revolted over the rising costs of gas, the then-freshman congresswoman outlined the stakes:
“This is their agenda—I know it’s hard to believe, it’s hard to fathom, but this is ‘Mission Accomplished’ for them,” she said of congressional Democrats. “They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America.”

As we move into the renewable and efficiency revolution, yet another illustration of how listening to climate denialist light bulb loons will lead us back to the dark ages.

NewScientist (sub required)

Visible light communication (VLC) uses rapid pulses of light to transmit information wirelessly. Now it may be ready to compete with conventional Wi-Fi.

“At the heart of this technology is a new generation of high-brightness light-emitting diodes,” says Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, UK. “Very simply, if the LED is on, you transmit a digital 1, if it’s off you transmit a 0,” Haas says. “They can be switched on and off very quickly, which gives nice opportunities for transmitting data.”

It is possible to encode data in the light by varying the rate at which the LEDs flicker on and off to give different strings of 1s and 0s. The LED intensity is modulated so rapidly that human eyes cannot notice, so the output appears constant.

More sophisticated techniques could dramatically increase VLC data rates. Teams at the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh are focusing on parallel data transmission using arrays of LEDs, where each LED transmits a different data stream. Other groups are using mixtures of red, green and blue LEDs to alter the light’s frequency, with each frequency encoding a different data channel.

Li-Fi, as it has been dubbed, has already achieved blisteringly high speeds in the lab. Researchers at the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, Germany, have reached data rates of over 500 megabytes per second using a standard white-light LED. Haas has set up a spin-off firm to sell a consumer VLC transmitter that is due for launch next year. It is capable of transmitting data at 100 MB/s – faster than most UK broadband connections.

The recent posts by D.R. Tucker, here and here,  a conservative soul search on issues of climate, have been popular.

Now we have this discussion between Chris Mooney, and two more well connected observers with ties to the American right, David Frum and Kenneth Silber.  I’ve
excerpted a few minutes of this discussion, which it seems to me is an essential one that must take place for us to move out of the current dark place. The whole half hour is here.

Worth a listen, if you are interested in hearing the tectonic plates grind in the Conscience of American Conservatives.

When it comes to the U.S. political right, it often appears that the opposition to science-and reason in general-is everywhere. From climate change denial to anti-evolutionism; from debt ceiling denial to, that’s right, incandescent light bulb availability denial; conservatives today have plenty to answer for.

Fortunately, some conservatives know it. And given how much he has blasted the “Republican War on Science” in the past, on this show Chris Mooney wanted to hear their take.

So he invited on David Frum. Frum is the editor of the group blog Frum Forum, a former speechwriter for the George W. Bush White House, and a widely published author, most recently of Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again. In recent years, Frum has become a leading critic of today’s GOP and its allegiance with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

Joining Frum is Kenneth Silber, a frequent contributor to Frum Forum. Silber is a science writer based in New Jersey who contributes to Research Magazine, Scientific American, and other outlets. He calls himself a “center-right dissenter, a deviationist apostle of the Frumian Heresy” and these days, a RINO (Republican in Name Only).

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. (click photo to enlarge) Left: September 22, 2003. Right: September 25, 2010. Mountain Pine Beetles killed about 60 percent of the medium-to-large lodgepole pines on the western slopes of the park between the years depicted here. In the 2003 image, dense vegetation (dark green) is seen near the center. In the 2010 image, the dark green has been replaced by shades of brown over large areas, indicating tree loss. Warmer winters are allowing more pine beetles to survive. (NASA)

In “Confessions of a Climate Change Convert”, D. R. Tucker explained the change in consciousness that came to a conservative writer after seriously looking at the evidence for  anthropogenic climate change.  That post was a popular one, and I asked D.R. to let me know if he had any other insights into the conservative rejection of science and reason – and how we might turn it around.

Fear of State
by D.R. Tucker

The year’s most provocative political book is not Ann Coulter’s Demonic or David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge. Ironically, Michael Stafford’s An Upward Calling: Politics for the Common Good is provocative precisely because it is non-confrontational. If you’ve read years of aggressive agitprop from the likes of Mark Levin and Michelle Malkin, you’ll be shocked by how calm Stafford’s book is.

Stafford, a former Delaware Republican Party official, calls on the GOP to reconsider its ideologically blinkered stance on a number of issues, including illegal immigration, capital punishment and tax reform. However, his call for the GOP to move away from its obsession with denying the reality of climate change is most striking: Stafford urges the party to issue a declaration of independence from ignorance.

“Today,” Stafford writes, “the GOP’s legacy of leadership on environmental issues is often forgotten. Instead, we have become the party opposed to the anthropogenic global warming ‘hoax.’ Environmentalism has become, for some conservatives, a dirty word, tinged with the negative connotations of a statist, anti-growth (or even anti-human), radical agenda…[However], there is no debate in the scientific community about whether the Earth is warming – it is. There is also a nearly unanimous consensus that human activity is responsible for this warming…[that] it will probably have a significant negative impact on human civilization and the natural world, and that there are practical steps that could be taken now to avoid this fate. Given the potential implications for humanity, it is reckless to ignore the broad scientific consensus on AGW. Doing so in the face of this evidence is tantamount to an abdication of both our duty to future generations and our duty to care for the natural world.”

The Republican Party has no rational basis for opposing climate science. Much of the opposition—the opposition that isn’t influenced by campaign donations from oil and gas interests, of course!—is based on two ideas: strongly held libertarian views and an unyielding contempt for Al Gore. Those who come to climate denial because they’re repelled by regulation and still see Gore as the “Vice Perpetrator” (to use Rush Limbaugh’s infamous quote) should ask themselves the following question:

What if Al Gore had never been born, and President Reagan, in the years between his departure from the Oval Office and his announcement that he was battling Alzheimer’s disease, had urged conservatives to take the fight against climate change seriously?

Continue reading “D. R. Tucker: Can the GOP Face Climate Reality? (or any reality?)”

Responding to a recent brain-dead column in the Boston Globe spewing right wing talking points about incandescent bulbs, Zia Eftekhar, CEO of Phillips Lighting North America, a member of the Lighting Hall of Fame (who knew?) – set the record straight, once again: 

JEFF JACOBY’S assertion in his July 17 op-ed, “How many lawmakers does it take to..,’’ implies that the 2007 federal energy efficiency law will ban incandescent light bulbs. This is actually not the case, and is a common misunderstanding of the legislation. With this law consumers now have more choice than ever before, including new energy-efficient incandescent light bulbs that meet the new requirements.

Already on retail shelves and selling for as little as $1.49, energy-efficient incandescents look and feel the same as the light bulbs consumers have been using for more than 100 years, but they use almost 30 percent less energy. They are no more fragile than their traditional incandescent sibling, and some can last as much as 3,000 hours, or three times longer than Edison’s bulb.

Even compact fluorescent bulbs have been greatly improved over the years in both performance and light quality, including new silicone-covered versions that are shatter resistant and self-contained should the bulb break.

Our company’s innovation in energy-efficient bulbs is in direct response to consumer demand for longer-lasting, more energy-efficient products. We consistently work to improve their development and help lower their cost, while trying to be mindful of how their operation and recycling will impact the environment.

The savings from these new choices are a direct result of government, business, and industry working together to drive innovation and improve energy efficiency. At a time when families are struggling with high energy costs, these new minimum efficiency levels will lower our nation’s electricity bills by over $12 billion per year. That’s about $100 per year for every American family.

Cleantechnica explains below:

Continue reading “Bonehead Barton Bulb Bill Bulletin: Lighting Leader Lauds ‘Lectric Luminary Law”

Bill Nye, you’re back at our time of greatest need.

Fox News hack tries to spin new evidence of ancient volcanic activity on the moon to somehow apply to the radiative properties of greenhouse gases.  Ignorance so breathtaking, you can see Nye just catch himself  in a WTF moment.