Ontario’s ambitious renewable power plan will make the province a world leader and the cost to the average Ontario household will be the equivalent of less than 1% of their electricity bills each year – less than the cost of one Tim Horton’s donut per month.
The Cost of Ontario's new energy program to ratepayers - one doughnut per month, eh?
Ontario’s ambitious renewable power plan will make the province a world leader and the cost to the average Ontario household will be the equivalent of less than 1% of their electricity bills each year – less than the cost of one Tim Horton’s donut per month. That’s the message in a new report released by Clear Sky Advisors, as reported by Renewables Guru, Paul Gipe.
World wide, critics of feed-in tariff programs like Ontario’s have complained about the cost to ratepayers, and taxpayers, of new energy. According to Gipe, the Clear Sky conclusion is that the “Cost of electricity in the province will increase slightly to a maximum of about 1% of a typical household’s bill, then decline steadily as the initial contracts work their way through the system.” Continue reading “A Tim Horton Doughnut”
I took the bizarre predictions of arctic ice recovery from the “Watts Up With That” blog as a topic for this week’s video. One reason was because, after prominently featuring unhinged forecasts of ice extent recovery,
“Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya. Even if all the ice less than 2.5 metres thick melted this summer, we would still see a record high minimum in the DMI charts.”
the Watts blog had been strangely silent on the matter, as ice in the real world continued the ongoing death spiral.(see Joe Romm’s illuminating take here)
Sherwood Boehlert (a republican who represented New York’s 24th District in Congress from 1983 to 2007) wrote a piece in today’s Washington Post asking, “Can the Party of Reagan Accept the Science of Climate Change?”.
Of course, this is no longer the party of Reagan, who would be seen as a flaming, florid, flamboyant socialist by the current crop of Beck-ites and Palin-oids.
Excerpt:
“I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.
In a trio of reports released in May, the prestigious and nonpartisan National Academy concluded that “a strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.” Our nation’s most authoritative and respected scientific body couldn’t make it any clearer or more conclusive.
What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn’t deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them.”
..including, I might add, cap and trade, which was developed in the Reagan White House.
Republican Rep Bob Inglis spoke from the heart, and the brain, at this week’s House Science and Technology Subcommittee Hearing on Climate Change. Defenders of reason and fact have fallen into disfavor in Republican politics.
If you believe that the earth is more than 5000 years old, if you believe the scientists about climate change, if you believe there is something to be learned from scientific research, if you think education and technology have value – you are suspect in tea party gatherings that now set the Republican agenda.
Rep. Inglis is a lame duck, having been defeated by a more conservative member of his own party last June. Here is part of his statement:
INGLIS: I’m very excited to be here Mr. Chairman, because this is on the record. And it’s a wonderful thing about Congressional hearings — they’re on the record. Kim Beasley (SP?) who’s Australia’s ambassador to the United States tells me that when he runs into a climate skeptic, he says to them, “Make sure to say that very publicly, because I want our grandchildren to read what you said and what I said. And so, we’re on the record, and our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, are going to read. And so some are here suggesting to those children that here’s a deal: Your child is sick — this is what Tom Friedman gave me this great analogy yesterday — Your child is sick. 98 doctors say treat him this way. Two say no, this other way is the way to go. I’ll go with the two. You’re taking a big risk with those kids. Because 98 of the doctors say, “Do this thing,” two say, “Do the other.” So, it’s on the record.
And we’re here with important decision to be made. And I would also suggest to my Free Enterprise colleagues — especially conservatives here — whether you think it’s all a bunch of hooey, what we’ve talked about in this committee, the Chinese don’t. And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century. They plan on innovating around these problems, and selling to us, and the rest of the world, the technology that’ll lead the 21st century. So we may just press the pause button here for several years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button. And as a result, if we wake up in several years and we say, “geez, this didn’t work very well for us. The two doctors didn’t turn out to be so right. 98 might have been the ones to listen to.” Then what we’ll find is we’re way behind those Chinese folks. ‘Cuz you know, if you got a certain number of geniuses in the population — if you’re one in a million in China, there’s 1300 of you. And you know what?
They plan on leading the future.
So whether you — if you’re a free enterprise conservative here — just think: it’s a bunch of hooey, this science is a bunch of hooey. But if you miss the commercial opportunity, you’ve really missed something. And so, I think it’s great to be here on the record. I think it’s great to see the opportunity we’ve got ahead of us. And, I also — since this is sort of a swan song for me and Mr. Barrett I’d encourage scientists who are listening out there to get ready for the hearings that are coming up in the next Congress. Those will be difficult hearings for climate scientists. But, I would encourage you to welcome those as fabulous opportunities to teach.
“.. More certain is the conclusion that the hack of the server was a sophisticated attack. Although the police and the university say only that the investigation is continuing, Nature understands that evidence has emerged effectively ruling out a leak from inside the CRU, as some have claimed. And other climate-research organizations are believed to have told police that their systems survived hack attempts at the same time.”
One of the least commented-on mysteries of this affair, is why so little attention has been paid to who the hackers were, and what were their motives. The right wing noise machine has successfully propagated the “gate” suffix in the referencing the event, but in the original “gate” event, Watergate, the investigation focused on the burglars, not the victims. It’s a testimony to what’s happened to our media that the idea of crime and punishment have been turned on their head, and truth tellers become targets of journalists, instead of the criminal perpetrators.
My son was fortunate enough to intern at Growing Power in Milwaukee this past summer, and I had the opportunity to tour the facility. It’s not perfect, it’s a work in progress, kind of coming together all at once, and you can definitely see lots of opportunities to improve on the basic model. In fact, the idea is being exported to cities throughout the rust belt and beyond – food for people, grown in their communities, solving problems of nutrition, global climate, urban blight, and self determination.
In the heart of North America is the world’s largest concentration of fresh water, the Great Lakes system. The system has been resilient to a myriad of human insults over the last 2 centuries, primarily because of the remote and relatively untouched nature of Lake Superior, the largest of the lakes, and the source of most of the Great Lakes water.
In recent years, the impact of climate change has been more and more evident for those of us who spend time on Lake Superior and love the lake. If climate change unfolds the way most experts believe it will, the abundant water supply available to the American midwest will become an all the more critical resource in coming decades. Understanding how the system works, and moving to reduce impacts where we can will be a critical priority.
Time-lapse sequence of satellite images of Lake Superior taken between March 2009 and May 2010. The images were posted daily on NOAA’s Coast Watch page (http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/modis/modis.cgi/modis?region=s&page=1). Notice how the lake has ice cover in the early part of the video (winter of 2008-09) but has no ice cover during the winter of 2009-10. That’s a big part of the reason why this summer Lake Superior’s surface reached the highest temperature ever recorded.
As climate change accelerates, the biggest impacts will be felt first among the world’s poorest people.
The following, though made before last year’s Copenhagen conference, remains relevant. For most of the world’s poor, the debate about whether climate change is happening is long over, and the race to mitigate effects is underway.
Large scale thermal solar systems are being built today around the world, more and more with thermal storage based on phase change of molten salts. That means, they will be able to continue making power on cloudy days or when the sun goes down. MIT has announced a breakthrough in what may be the next generation of energy storage.
I promise I’ll be getting back to climate solutions videos, soon. I had been hoping the barrage of climate denial that started a year ago would abate, but since that doesn’t look likely, I’ll just have to redouble my efforts, find the time, and get em done.
I’m using Final Cut software now, in the hope that will speed up my production process. I’ll let you know how that works out.
