Month: March 2018

So called “conservatives”  like to talk about the subsidies received by renewable energy sources like wind and solar – but don’t mention that those subsidies are on the way out.
Meanwhile, smart business people are making long-term investments in wind power, for instance, precisely because the subsidies have worked as hoped — allowing a learning curve and economies of scale to drive down prices and create a viable renewable industry.

Similar process playing out in the UK, as the video above indicates.
So who really works for, and believes in, a free market?

New York Times:

Congress does not plan on subsidizing renewable energy indefinitely. Under tax legislation passed in 2015, the credits for wind will phase out by 2020 and for solar by 2022. Both industries say that they have been preparing for this eventuality for years by cutting costs, but that changing the rules so suddenly in the current tax bill would have created major disruptions for projects that are already underway.

Popular Mechanics:

The Hywind wind farm is the world’s first floating wind farm, located about 15 miles off the coast of Scotland. Unlike other offshore wind farms, Hywind isn’t anchored to the seafloor. Instead, Hywind relies on buoys and anchors to stay afloat even in high winds or waves. This makes floating wind farms like Hywind a great choice for regions where traditional offshore wind farms aren’t viable.

“The west coast of the USA, Japan and Hawaii are all places that need a lot of energy and that are consistently windy, but where the sea is very deep,” says Hywind engineer Halvor Hoen Hersleth. “Floating wind power is ideal for these areas.”

But for floating wind farms to be successful, they have to be more than just versatile. They also have to be profitable, which means generating enough energy to justify the large construction costs. Fortunately, the Hywind farm seems to have succeeded in this area as well, reaching a 65 percent capacity factor over the past three months.

A generator’s capacity factor is the ratio between the amount of electricity it generates and the maximum amount of energy it could possibly produce. Most baseline plants, like nuclear or natural gas plants that run continuously, have around a 100 percent capacity factor. Many renewable energy facilities like wind or solar farms have a much lower capacity factor, around 30 percent or so.

Given that, a 65 percent capacity factor for the Hywind farm is pretty good. Granted, winter winds tend to blow stronger than summer ones, so we could see this number drop over the rest of the year. Still, this is much higher than typical for wind farms, which bodes well for the concept of floating wind turbines in general.

Continue reading “As Subsidies Phase Out, Wind Still Powers Ahead”

Like the Trump administration, or climate deniers, care about birds.

Axios:

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told thousands of mostly oil and natural gas executives at an energy conference here Tuesday that wind turbines kill as many as 750,000 birds a year, repeating a criticism made by other Trump administration officials.

The bottom line: Zinke is exaggerating the figure beyond virtually all published estimates. But more importantly, turbines are a drop in the bucket when it comes to the human-related causes of bird deaths, context Zinke didn’t provide.

The Week:

According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a part of the Interior Department, the “most comprehensive and statistically sound estimates” put the number of birds killed in wind turbines at 134,000 to 437,000 a year. That number will grow as wind generation expands, but for context, a 2012 Bureau of Land Management memo estimates that 500,000 to 1 million birds die each year in oilfields. “Regardless of the estimate, wind turbines rank much lower than many other human-caused threats in terms of total birds killed,” says University of Oklahoma professor Scott Loss.

Worldwatch Institute:

An anonymous tip last April alerted Canadian officials to the fact that 500 ducks had mistaken an oil sands company’s pollutant-filled reservoir in Alberta as a safe place to land. To the public’s dismay, only three birds survived.

Hundreds of decomposed ducks have since risen to the surface, leading Syncrude Canada to clarify last week that its lake-sized reservoir, known as a tailings pond, in fact killed an estimated 1,606 birds, mostly mallards. Tailings ponds hold a watery mix of clay, sand, hydrocarbons, and heavy metals that remains after the oil extraction process.

The company’s allegedly negligent environmental management has become symbolic of the problems associated withthe development of oil sands – strips of sand or clay mixed with a dense form of petroleum known as bitumen. While the true impact of the fuel’s extraction and production on wildlife and the climate is still unknown, environmentalists caution that further investments in oil sands would result in much wider damage.

To quantify the potential impact on migratory bird species, the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explored how many birds – currently alive or yet to be born – would be lost if all the oil sands projects proposed in Alberta came to pass. The report, discussed at a Washington, D.C., briefing on Friday, estimates a maximum death toll of 166 million birds over the next 50-60 years.

“The numbers are of much greater magnitude than anyone imagined because no one ever studied the whole impact of these projects,” said lead author Jeff Wells, a senior scientist at the Seattle-based Boreal Songbird Initiative.

Continue reading “Ryan Zinke Fact Checked on Wind/Birds”

Have been spending a lot of time in Michigan’s wind farms – the largest one in the state, just 20 miles from me, is one of the most successful and well received in the country.

All across the Heartland, hard hit rural communities have been boosted by clean renewable energy development in the form of wind.  Naturally the Koch brothers team is hard at work to stop America from moving into the 21st century. Their efforts will no longer go unopposed.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, overwhelming support for wind energy. Continue reading “New Video: Wind Energy Rescues Rural Economies”

Astounding and hilarious instant comedic synopsis of Sam Nunberg’s historic TV breakdown, done just hours after it happened.  Colbert’s team is obviously more than talented.

From Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I think I could turn and live with animals, 
they are so placid and self-contain’d, 
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, 
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, 
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, 
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Anthropocene:

In the early 1970s, animal-inclined philosophers coined the term “speciesism” to describe the practice of regarding different species as having unequal moral value — with humans, of course, being most valuable of all. The word caught on, at least among people inclined to care about that sort of thing. Putting animals in different, lesser categories — food, pet, wild, pest — is what people do.

The question has remained, though, of whether speciesism is just a philosophical construct that describes how society works, or an actual psychological trait akin to other -isms like sexism and racism. In a world with more captive animals than people, with many wild animal populations plunging and biodiversity in crisis, it’s a question worth exploring.

“Philosophers have debated these claims, but relatively little empirical work has been conducted,” write psychologists Lucius Caviola, Jim Everett and Nadira Faber of the University of Oxford in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their findings, says Caviola, “demonstrate that speciesism exists as a psychological phenomenon and that it shows the same properties as other forms of prejudice.”

The new study comprises several separate experiments. In the first, Caviola’s team asked 1,108 Americans enlisted through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online task marketplace how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements like “humans have the right to use animals however they want to.” Based on their responses, the researchers winnowed the statements into a simple six-item test of speciesist inclinations.

Next the researchers tested whether, as would be expected of a prejudice, these inclinations remained stable over a one-month period. They did. Participants then took tests that measured biases based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. These tended to track species biases. “We found significant positive correlations of speciesism with racism, sexism, and homophobia,” wrote the researchers.

Below – New Jurassic Park trailer – “Save the Dinosaurs”. Continue reading “Speciesism: Who Cares if “inferior” beings Die out?”

 

Below, full version of NRA commercial that might be the best representation of the denial mindset ever put on film.

Continue reading “John Oliver: NRA TV”

It’s Really Easier Being Green

Washingtonian:

Most Americans think today’s strongest tensions lie between Democrats and Republicans, according to a Pew Research study. And in DC, where there’s already a lot of social sorting along party membership, the growing hyper-partisanship extends to even the most sacred of spaces: millennial dating.

Washington has the most singles actively dating and using dating apps, according to a recent Time Out ranking, so it’s not surprising that political standoffs would take place in packed bars and Bumble conversations. The League, a selective dating app, says its DC users are 15 times more likely to mention politics in their bios since the 2016 presidential election, and one-third say they wouldn’t date someone with contrasting political beliefs.

In a city as overwhelmingly Democratic as DC, the combination of lingering anger over Hillary Clinton‘s loss and President Trump‘s existence makes it tricky for conservatives to date across party lines.
——

Most of the self-identifying progressives I talked with said they could tell how far right a man or woman leaned based on their dating-app photos—”Make America Great Again” hats are an obvious tell, but some also listed photos of US flag paraphernalia, hunting gear, or fratty beach parties as turn-offs.

Conversely, a young White House staffer says she typically looks for someone from the South when swiping through profiles, as she thinks they’ll be more receptive to her support of the President. She swipes left on anyone who went to a small, liberal-arts college or has a photo “wearing one of those pink hats on their heads” at the Women’s March, she says, as she thinks they wouldn’t be compatible.

But sometimes you just can’t tell until you encounter a subject in the wild.

When she first moved to DC, a former Obama White House staffer who now works at the Aspen Institute was set up on a date with a Republican who worked on Capitol Hill. “We had a really nice time, but at the end of the date, he told me he didn’t believe in global warming,” she says. “I started laughing, because I’m from Colorado and didn’t realize people actually didn’t believe in global warming. But he was serious.”

They didn’t go out again.

Republicans say it’s liberals who are more likely to turn down someone across the aisle. “Democrats are usually more vocal” about their opposition, the Trump staffer says, and therefore quicker to demonize all conservatives.

“I feel like they look at me and are like, here’s a tall white dude with brown hair wearing loafers, and he probably has a picture of Reagan and the NRA in his bedroom or something,” says one of the reporters from the conservative media company. “I just think they have a very hyperbolic view of what a conservative is.”

 

The choice of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State,  for those paying attention, was as clear a signal as a sky-writer over Manhattan that this presidency was Putin-centric – and the incredibly bold Russian play on the election had one goal, to preserve the Oil and Gas wealth of the Putin oligarchy.

New Yorker:

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with theothers, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.

Wall Street Journal:

U.S. sanctions against Russia prevented Exxon MobilCorp.XOM +0.47% from pursuing ambitious plans to explore for oil north of Siberia. But the final blow, some experts said, may have been delivered by lower oil prices.

The Texas oil giant said in a regulatory filing late Wednesday that it would walk away from the joint venture with state-controlled PAO RosneftROSN -9.18% to seek oil in the ice-choked waters of the Kara Sea, a hard-fought deal signed in 2012 by the company’s former chief executive, Rex Tillerson, now U.S. secretary of state.

Mr. Tillerson touted the agreement as a breakthrough giving Exxon access to one of the world’s great unexplored oil-and-gas basins. The company reportedly spent about $700 million to drill the first well, likely making it the most expensive ever. It struck oil, according to Rosneft, but further exploration was halted because of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Obama administration following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2014.

Exxon unsuccessfully sought waivers that would allow it to proceed in some areas in Russia—a campaign that formally ended with President Donald Trump declining to waive sanctions for the company’s Rosneft ventures last year. The U.S. also added new sanctions on Moscow last year for its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But in the meantime, something else happened: Oil prices plunged, and the global chase for new supplies changed. The deal was struck when oil prices topped $90 a barrel and prospects for them remaining high seemed likely. Oil is now trading at just over $60 a barrel, and many companies, including Exxon, are pursuing shorter-cycle projects such as drilling in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico that can deliver returns more quickly.

Continue reading “Report: Tillerson Appointed SecState at Putin’s Request”

I worked on the street in some of the worst parts of Flint for a year as a new paramedic, before moving on to Saginaw for a while. Both hard hit towns, tough to say which place was worse.

But the people are resilient, talented, hard working, –  and slowly rising again.