Archive for the 'Environment' Category

“It is so cold in here,” said Gretchen. “The fire is almost out.”

“I will go to our woodpile and bring more wood,” said Hans.

“There is none left, Hans,” replied Gretchen sadly. “We have used all our wood that we saved for the winter.”

“I will go into the great forest,” responded Hans, “and bring more.”

“Hans!” said Gretchen with alarm. “The forest wardens will take you! I have heard that there are more of them, and they are fiercer than ever toward wood thieves!”

“Nonetheless, I must try, dear Gretchen,” replied Hans firmly, “for you and for the little ones.” He put on his thin overcoat, opened the door, and stepped outside into the icy, howling blast.

A folk tale from the Middle Ages?

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A government-funded videogame featuring a black alien female superhero delivered to Earth to fight global warming is about to be released. The game was inspired by the artist’s “sense what we do on Earth impacts the universe − not just pollution destroying the ozone layer, for example, but our thoughts and how we organize gender roles and social systems also have impact.”

In the US we hear frequently about the environment and how we are doing so much damage to our environment. It would be good for people to visit India to see actual pollution in action on a large scale.

As we drove around Delhi, the smog was amazing, even with all the vehicles that converted to CNG from diesel (in this picture you can see a tuk tuk in “CNG” yellow and green colors). In this photo there are a couple of huge office buildings right off the road but you can’t even make them out in the smog. We asked our guide if the CNG over diesel made any difference and he said that in the days before the conversion “if you wore a white shirt outside it would be colored grey from all the soot in one day”.

This photo shows a jet flying over a famous minaret in Delhi. You can see the smog there, too.

I felt like one of those cartoon characters where when you cough “dust” flies out of your mouth. One of my close travel mates blew her nose and it just came out black. And we were in a tour bus much of the time that was just from being outside seeing the monuments (and then getting herded back in the bus).

With the CNG and investments in public transport it seems that India is trying but the current state seems unimaginable to a Westerner. I really don’t think that I’d be able to survive in Delhi for an extended period of time since I have allergies unless I never left the house.

Cross posted at LITGM

There is still considerable talk about global warming, or as it is now termed, “climate change.” California is about to destroy a large part of what is left of its economy by initiating a new “Cap and Trade” program that will spike energy costs and drive more employers from the state. New reports are casting more doubt on the reality of “climate change” and now there is more information that warming ended in 1997. The past two years have shown a definite cooling trend.

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

There is even new debate among climate scientists.

Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.

Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.

California, of course, is not going to wait to see if the trend continues with cooling.

Oct 2 (Reuters Point Carbon) – California Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills related to the use of revenue raised through the sale of carbon allowances, although details of how the money will be spent won’t be determined until next year.

That plan, expected to be released in the spring of 2013, will be submitted for approval to the legislature as part of the governor’s budget and will be reviewed and updated on an annual basis.

It doesn’t matter that the state is going broke. Left wing pieties still rule California.

Around a decade or so ago a lot of things began to change in the world of residential HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning). What I am going to discuss here is HVAC centric, but can apply across any industry where the government can (and does) make rules that on the surface mean “well” but in reality, just end up costing the consumer bucks$$$.

About five years or so, the manufacture of central air conditioners was mandated to be no less than thirteen SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Rating). The previous minimum was ten SEER.

On the surface, this doesn’t appear to cause too many problems, besides cost the consumers more money on their initial installation, since the 13 SEER product cost more money (more raw materials to get that energy savings). Sadly, the engineering and physics (which can’t be mandated) told us different.

From an article by Michael Prokup (sorry can’t find the link):

Older evaporator coils operate at lower temperatures and pressures than modern evaporator coils.

Without getting into too heavy of an engineering discussion, this means that basically, the new 13 SEER units won’t work well with the old evaporator coils that sit on top of the furnace. The air conditioning cycle uses condensation and evaporation of a chemical (at this time, it was R-22) to move the heat from inside the house to the outside. Moving from 10 SEER to 13 SEER changed the whole game. No longer could a contractor come to your house and simply replace the outside condensing unit – now the evaporator had to be replaced, adding a lot of cost to the job – especially if the inside unit was sheetrocked into a closet, or was in some other type of area that was difficult to access. Apartment building owners were also affected by this.
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Borlaug saves, Greenpeace kills.

Partial sanity about the environment.

The included video interview with the journalist Emma Marris is interesting. She makes the reasonable points that 1) the environment is always changing, so determining a baseline for “pristine” is impossible, 2) humans are part of the environment and 3) many natural environments that we take for granted, such as Hawaiian forests, are populated heavily by “non-native” species that were introduced so long ago that no one now thinks to object to them. This is the environmentalist version of Saint-Exupéry’s observation that people who object to technology are typically objecting only to new technology.

Why is this mere partial sanity? Marris points out that the pythons are here to stay but doesn’t seem to consider whether allowing people to hunt them might be a good way to control the snake population. But perhaps I am being too critical.

(An earlier post on this topic is here.)

The fact that some environmental groups want to destroy existing dams, in the name of returning rivers to their natural states, is of course old news. Now, though, they have moved beyond the tearing down of dams and want to destroy bridges as well.

And, in the case of the historic Stoneman Bridge in Yosemite National Park, it appears that they may well get their way.

Environmentalists claim to have great respect for the works of nature. (Though–given the number of cars I see with environmentalist bumper stickers and the windows rolled up tight on beautiful days–it seems that quite a few of them want to minimize their actual contact with the natural environment.) But, all too often, they seems to have no respect at all for the work of human minds and hands.

Related: Frankly, my dear, I do need a dam

George Will writes about the the attack that Obama’s EPA is conducting against the Navajo Generating Station, which together with the coal mine that feeds it represents an important factor in Arizona’s economy and an important source of employment for members of the Navajo tribe.

Will notes that the NGS provides 95 percent of the power for the pumps of the Central Arizona Project, which routes water from the Colorado River and which made Phoenix and most of modern Arizona possible. A study sponsored by the Interior Department estimates that the EPA’s mandate might increase the cost of water by as much as 32 percent, hitting agriculture users especially hard.

Read the whole thing.

…and of the entire era of reliable and affordable electricity?

Is it hot where you are? Have you been enjoying your air conditioning? Appreciate it a little more after the power has come back on after an extended outage?

The American economy has made air conditioning broadly affordable, even by those whose incomes are fairly low. But how many people are going to be able to afford their A/C if electricity prices rise to the $.70 or $.80/kwh range?

Remember, Barack Obama said (in 2008) that under his plan, electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket.” The only things that have prevented such skyrocketing from happening so far are (a) the unwillingness of Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, and (b) the vast expansion in supplies of natural gas–a key fuel for electricity generation–driven by advanced fracking technologies. In a second Obama term, neither of these factors would likely be operative. A court decision has now given the EPA the ability to do pretty much what it wants to do regarding regulation of CO2, and in an Obama administration, what it wants to do is to shut down America’s coal-based electricity generation. Also, the scale of the success of oil/gas fracking clearly took the Obama administration by surprise, and in a second Obama term there would be far more regulatory effort to tie the hands of this industry and limit the development of America’s natural gas resources.

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This is the second of a series of posts on recent events in the world electricity & energy market. Here is Spain.

Britain’s Energy Policy

Britain has a mostly de-regulated electricity market for generation. One item that must be considered with electricity is plain old geography; Britain is an island and must generate all their electricity locally. Thus they can have costs either significantly higher or lower than those found on mainland Europe, because it is difficult to use arbitrage (in the form of transmission) to resolve price imbalances. Correction – Britain imports 5% of her electricity from France in a cross-channel cable. Thanks to commenter Jim Miller for pointing this out.

Like most of Europe, Britain is in the thrall of the greens, and their favorite tool is to mandate a certain percentage of energy to come from “renewables” (wind and solar, for semi-practical purposes), while hounding coal on environmental grounds and nuclear on whatever grounds they tend to come up with at the time. Natural gas represents almost 50% of current energy today. This article from the Economist provides a good summary of the British market.

While Britain traditionally has gotten much of its natural gas from local drilling, LNG imports from overseas provide a higher percentage today. According to this article, LNG imports represent 25% of British usage, while locally drilled gas has fallen by 10% from the prior year. Britain traditionally has relied on the North Sea for its natural gas and oil production, but these fields are in long term decline.

In 2011, the UK initiated a surprise tax increase on North Sea oil and gas producers. The percentage of tax on profits increased from 68% to 80%, an increase of 12%, per this article. This sharp rise in taxation was a surprise under the supposedly Tory administration, because it is typical of more of a labor “carve up the pie” view of the world than one I would typically expect under the Tories that “incentives drive behavior”.

This article discusses the impact of ever changing tax policies in the UK on investment in oil and gas rigs.

The hike prompted furious reaction from the industry. Mark Hanafin, director of Centrica Energy, told the Telegraph: “the North Sea is the second-largest oil-producing region in the world after Saudi Arabia. It’s a national treasure for the UK. The government is utterly destroying that. I wish people would step up and say you just can’t do this. Capital is leaving the country and going elsewhere”.

Who could have predicted what would happen next? Oil and gas produced since the tax hike has dropped by the most since records have been kept, per this article:

UK natural gas production in the third quarter of 2011 slumped to the lowest level since records began in 1996, at 103TWh (terawatt hours), Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) data show. This also represented the largest year-on-year quarterly decrease ever seen, down 29.4pc on the same period last year.

Now that the British government has dis-incented investment and damaged their oil and gas industry through erratic and socialistic behavior, what’s next? A central-planning, top down new “plan” for the electricity sector, of course.

As summarized in the Economist article (which failed to mention the negative impact of tax incentives on natural gas’ decline, a serious oversight):

Renewable technologies account for a mere 7% of current supplies… government pledges to cut planet-heating (ed – their words) emissions and get 15% of energy from renewable sources by 2020… the industry regulator reckons that around $315 billion USD needs to be spent by 2020. Investment currently amounts to $6-9B USD / year. But the move to greener power in Britain must be achieved without infuriating voters already upset at high bills.

The government expects the private sector to finance the renewables (wind, solar and new nuclear) that they plan to have in place to meet the 15% target, while shutting down older nuclear plants and coal plants, as well. It is very difficult to entice the private sector to make these sorts of investments, however, unless they know in advance that they can recover the high and otherwise un-economical costs for these renewable power through the life of the facility (30 years or more). These costs, obviously, must in the end be borne by either residents or corporations (the business sector).

I would love to be a “fly on the wall” if you tried to convince any rational financial institution to invest in these sorts of projects, knowing that Spain just abandoned all their subsidies midway through (decimating their industry) and that the UK has a history of changing tax regimes with gas and oil extraction (see above).

Even the economist, which unfortunately is a cheerleader in this sort of central planning, sums it up dimly:

It is doubtful that the draft bill has enough detail to break the current hiatus in energy investments. It is still unclear how prices will be determined, how often they will be reviewed, and how contracts will be implemented. Uncertainty about the form of the contracts compounds existing investor fears about the durability of government price guarantees on energy.

While these government fantasies about supposedly rational private sector investors ploughing funds into un-economical renewables continues, a backup plan of sorts is occurring because they are extending the life of existing, older nuclear plants that they were planning to close. Keeping these plants alive defers the enormous (and likely significantly under-estimated) costs of building new nuclear plants, which are summarized here at wikipedia. From my perspective I would be willing to bet that none or perhaps 1-2 at best nuclear plants would ever be built going forward in the UK post the disaster in Japan; the greens are too strong and they will protest and drag the process out for an eternity. Other than one plant that came on line in the mid 1990′s, all the plants are from the 1980′s and 1970′s and dreams of a nuclear renaissance in the UK ring just as hollow as they do in the US. Here is an article about re-licensing British reactors. Britain’s ageing nuclear reactors, which were due to close in the next decade, are set to be kept open under a plan approved by the industry’s regulator.

In a move that could have far-reaching implications for the government’s energy policy, the Office for Nuclear Regulation has told the Guardian it is working with the country’s dominant nuclear operator, the French-owned company EDF, to extend the life of its eight nuclear power stations in the UK, and that it is “content for the plants to continue to operate”, as long as they pass regular safety tests.

Well there you go. Before the ink on the plans are dry, they’ve already backed down on one of the key tenets of their mad plan. I guess that is progress. But there is no way that their math can work as far as bringing new investment into the system since utilities and power generators won’t ‘add’ to their investment in this climate at the level needed to mothball such critical elements of their power generating infrastructure.

It is quite sad to see that the UK, which had once been a leader in electricity de-regulation, with lower prices to show for it than most of their European counterparts, to propose to effectively nationalize or central plan out an entire industry. All this under a Tory government, too. It seems that cooler heads have prevailed by keeping the nuclear stations open longer, and the collapse of the renewables market in Europe will likewise be a precedent that the UK will not want to follow.

Cross posted at LITGM

In 2005, Mike and Chantell Sackett purchased a small lot in Iowa (.63 acres) for $23,000. When they began to lay gravel on the land, which is located in a residential neighborhood, they were hit by an EPA compliance order informing them that the property had been designated a wetland under the Clean Water Act. They were ordered to stop grading their property and were told that they would face fines of up to $75,000 per day if they did not return the parcel to its original state. When the Sacketts attempted to contest the order, the agency denied their request for a hearing.

The case went to the Supreme Court, and in March, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, said that the Sacketts are entitled to appeal the EPA order, rejecting the agency’s claims to the contrary. “The [law’s] presumption of judicial review is a repudiation of the principle that efficiency of regulation conquers all,” Scalia said in the decision. “And there is no reason to think that the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties into ‘voluntary compliance’ without the opportunity for judicial review — even judicial review of the question whether the regulated party is within the EPA’s jurisdiction.”

Scalia also noted that the Sacketts’ property bore little resemblance to any popular conception of a wetland, protected or not.

“The EPA used bullying and threats of terrifying fines, and has made our life hell for the past five years,” said Mr. Sackett. “As this nightmare went on, we rubbed our eyes and started to wonder if we were living in some totalitarian country. Now the Supreme Court has come to our rescue and reminded the EPA — and everyone – that this is still America.”

Read this post…the personal cost of big-government thuggery…for more on the Sacketts’ ordeal.

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The hot energy story of the last few years has been the vast expansion in the available supplies of natural gas, and the very significant economic implications thereof. I though it might be interesting to take a look at the past, present, and future of this commodity.
The first known use of natural gas was by the Chinese, circa 500 BC…they captured gas from places where it was seeping to the surface, transported it in bamboo pipelines, and burned it for a heat source to distill seawater and capture the resulting salt and fresh water. The modern gas era began circa 1800 with the use of gas for lighting–initially of streets and later of homes and other buildings. Since there was no network of gas wells and long-distance pipelines, the gas used for these applications was usually not true natural gas, but rather “town gas,” made by heating coal. (Gas stoves seem to have become popular circa 1880, and apparently had quite an impact….I’ve read that the term “gas-stove wife” was enviously applied to women who were so fortunate as to have one of these appliances and were thereby spared the labor of tending a wood or coal stove, and hence had some leisure time available.)


The transition from coal gas to true natural gas had to wait on the build-out of a long-haul pipeline network, which took place mainly from 1920 to 1960. Although electricity became the glamor “fuel” and displaced gas in many cases for cooking and heating, the generation of electricity itself has in recent years become a major source of gas demand. Natural gas is also important as a feedstock for the production of fertilizer and of various plastics. By the early 2000s, there were serious concerns that the US was running out of natural gas–see for example this 2003 TIME Magazine story. The article cites Alan Greenspan’s concerns that high nat gas prices would make us uncompetitive in many industries, as well as citing direct economic pain inflicted on consumers. The only solution seemed to be large-scale imports of natural gas via LNG (liquified natural gas) ships. (Gas is far more difficult to transport than oil, because it needs to be liquified in order to make the volumes manageable, which in turn requires refrigerating it to very low temperatures.) In late 2005, US natural gas prices hit an inflation-adjusted level of almost $16 per million BTUs.


The price is now about $2.50 per million BTUs. What happened?

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In Britain, an 83-year-old woman has been told that she must find a new medical practice, because travel to the one she has been attending for the last 30 years involves an unacceptable carbon footprint.

One of the best things about buying a house and retiring from the military was being able to feel free to actually get serious about a garden. I went through a phase of planting roses – many of which have thrived and survived – and a long project to rip out the existing lawn, back and front, and put in xerioscape plants. The back yard was the place that I put the most into, though. Because of the layout of the rooms and the windows in them, the back was the part I looked at the most. And because of the peculiar soil composition – a foot or so of heavy, dense clay laid down over an impermeable layer of caliche which apparently goes all the way to the core of the earth – getting certain things to thrive and grow in it has been a challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

A just-released study suggests that Burmese Pythons have devastated Florida Everglades animal populations (e.g., raccoon and opossum sightings are down by 99%).

The pythons were originally released in the Everglades by people who had kept them as pets and their population has grown rapidly. It’s possible that much of the snake population was killed off by last year’s cold snap. However, as with cancer cells, a fast-growing population regenerates quickly unless almost all of its members are exterminated.

The cited article points out that it’s not certain the snakes are responsible for radical declines in small-animal populations but that no one has a better explanation.

The article mentions the possibility of preventing the snakes from expanding their territory but doesn’t discuss how close the snake population is to equilibrium in its current habitat. (Since a large number of prey animals needs to be around to support each predator, and Everglades prey populations appear to have been radically reduced, how close is the snake population to equilibrium?) Also, I wonder if the snakes will kill off the panther population by depleting its food supply.

Naturally, the federal govt has responded to the snake problem by banning importation and interstate trade of several kinds of snakes. This will have no effect. The snake is out of the barn, so to speak.

“Pythons are wreaking havoc on one of America’s most beautiful, treasured and naturally bountiful ecosystems,” said Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, whose scientists contributed to the study. “Right now, the only hope to halt further python invasion into new areas is swift, decisive and deliberate human action.”

I wonder if it’s possible to constrain the snakes to their current habitat. From the tone of the article, and frequent media stories about giant snakes captured in the wild, it looks like the Park Service is slowly trying to figure out what to do. Maybe they should try to eradicate the snakes altogether. OTOH, I wonder how much farther North the snakes can migrate before they get killed off by winter freezes.

I don’t know if there’s a moral or political point to be made here. It’s a difficult problem.

…out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen’s attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.

There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)—another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama’s suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more.”

Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?

There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America’s energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America’s energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky’s bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.

Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various “alternative energy” options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature’s cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.

The US could be almost self-sufficent for energy by 2030, while the EU will be the most vulnerable region for energy security, BP said on Wednesday.
 
Growth in shale oil and gas production would mean the US needed few imports, while North America as a whole could be self-sufficient, BP forecast at its Global Energy Outlook 2030.
 
BP forecast that Eurasia could also become self-sufficient, based on the prediction that Europe would being a net importer of energy, and the former Soviet Union countries net exporters by a similar amount.
 
In practice, this would leave the EU the most vulnerable region for energy security.

– The Telegraph

Friends, I have no particular knowledge of this subject. If you have anything to add in comments, I’d love to hear it.

Ah, age. One of the most daring aspects of this novel is that Lively is concerned with the hearts and problems of older characters. Her major players are well past their youth, and a boyish up-and-coming historian (the snake in Lord Henry’s mansion) doesn’t become important until much of the novel has passed. “How much remains when youth is gone?” Lively seems to be asking. And the answer is, “An abundance.” Here middle and old age are times of blossoming identity and possibility, miraculous bursts of sunshine.

– The New York Times on Penelope Lively’s “How it All Began.”

Even as a twenty-something, I was fascinated with literary representations of middle age. An odd one, that’s me.

The Montreal Protocol is a document signed by many nations that gives us in the HVAC industry (and other industries as well) the road map as to how certain chemicals will be phased out over time, due to their ODP (Ozone Depletion Potential). Whether this is scientific or not is a discussion for another day. The fact is that the nations that signed on are obliged to follow the phase out.

Of particular interest to my industry over the last couple of weeks has been what is going to happen to R-22. Any of you reading this in your homes or office buildings that have air conditioning probably have a machine that uses R-22 within rock throwing distance. With the quicker phaseout of refrigerants R-12 and R-502, many commercial refrigeration applications moved to R-22 as well.

In addition to this, I have one more sidetrack to make before I get to the main point of this post. A few years ago there were to be no more new units made that used R-22 refrigerant. The Chinese exploited a loophole in the poorly written law and kept making units that used R-22, but shipped them “dry” – in other words, the technician in the field would put the refrigerant in the unit upon installation.

The OEM’s in the US put up a huge stink and demanded the EPA either close the loophole, or let everyone do it. They let everyone do it. These units were enormously popular last summer. In a central air conditioner for home use, contractors were once again able to “cut ‘em out, cut ‘em in” like they used to do. Before the availability of the dry R-22 units, contractors were forced to swap out the evaporator coils on the inside of the house since the new condensers, charged with the new refrigerant R-410a, are not compatible with old R-22 evaporators. To be honest, the new dry R-22 condensers aren’t either, but that is a different post for a different day. They worked, for now, and everybody was happy.

This brings us to January 2012. The previous rule for R-22 phase-out written by the EPA allocated 100 million pounds for 2011 and 90 million pounds for 2012. The EPA decided to accelerate this and was proposing anywhere from 55 to 80 million pounds for 2012. But the EPA sat on its hands and didn’t issue a ruling at all! Worst case scenario. This from one of the manufacturers of R-22 on January 5:

As of today, no producer or importer has the legal right to manufacture or import R-22 for refrigeration or air conditioning use. Under such circumstances the EPA is expected to issue ‘non enforcement’ letters to allow business continuity.

Consequently, given the current absence of non-enforcement letters and the possibility of significantly higher than previously expected reductions in allocation rights, (company x) must now evaluate the impact such a reduction may have on our ability to meet customer demands.

Meanwhile, since then, the EPA has proposed cutting the R-22 allocations by FORTY FIVE percent. This does not help business continuity, to say the least! In addition, no final ruling has been made, and we still don’t know the true allocations.

So what are the results to the market?

It is destroyed. Manufacturers are not accepting orders for any price right now. Consequently, guys like me (distributors) are halting all large quantity sales until we can figure out what is going on. Oh, the price? Since the first of the year, it has tripled to the street.

The market for R-22 is completely locked down and in a total state of chaos. Rumors are flying, and contractors don’t know who to believe or what to do.

In addition, it is time for us to begin ordering our air conditioning equipment to sell this summer. Nobody has any idea at all what to do about the dry R22 units. Will they be allowed to be sold? Will the cost be prohibitive with the new allocations/pricing on R22?

All this and more, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Administration.

So if your air conditioner conks out this summer in your house or business, or if you own a convenience store and a refrigeration unit goes down, or if you work in a restaurant and a walk in cooler goes down, expect that bill to be WAY higher than you thought it would be.

Not judging, just sayin’.

I know that in Louisiana, they are trying to create a culinary demand for nutria, since the wretched beasts have outworn their welcome in the wetlands there. They were once imported from South America for their fur – but I have no idea why American grey squirrels were inflicted upon Great Britain. You’d think they had enough problems of their own without adding imported, fluffy-tailed tree rats to them … maybe it was payback for that fool who wished America to have every critter mentioned in Shakespeare.
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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled against the Bonneville Power Administration, which is itself a creature of the Federal Government. The case provides an interesting microcosm of the difficulties encountered in doing any kind of large-scale productive work in the increasingly rule-driven environment of contemporary America.

BPA’s mission is to provide electrical generation and transmission services in the Pacific Northwest. In May-July of this year, the agency suffered from an embarrassment of riches: owing to weather conditions, vast amounts of both water power and wind power were available. Storing large amounts of electricity, though, is not a very practical proposition: in most cases, supply and demand needs to be balanced on an instant-by-instant basis. Hence BPA needed to cut either its hydroelectric generation or its wind generation, the latter of which comes in substantial part from independent businesses which sell their output to the BPA. The only alternative was to engage in “negative pricing”–ie, paying various entities–either customers or other power providers–to take its excess electricity.

The agency did not believe it could legally cut the hydropower generation below a certain level: routing excess water over spillways causes it to pick up nitrogen, which is believed to be harmful to salmon, and hence in BPA’s interpretation would be in violation of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. What BPA did instead was to tell the the wind operators that during this time period it didn’t need or want all of their output–100,000 megawatt-hours of potential generation was turned away. The wind operators, unsurprisingly, filed a complaint, and FERC sided with the operators. So next time there is an oversupply situation in the Pacific Northwest, BPA will be paying to give its power away–ultimately resulting, of course, in higher electricity bills for its customers.

Various technical fixes for problems of this kind are being discussed, such as the remote control of water-heater thermostats in homes and businesses (which would allow excess electricity to be stored in the form of heat) and the interconnection of power grids across wider geographies. But basically, operating a power grid reliably and economically is already a difficult problem. Adding substantial amounts of relatively-unpredictable capacity such as wind makes it harder still, and each additional regulatory constraint makes it even more so.

The continuing proliferation of rules, many of them adopted without any deep consideration of their implications, makes increasingly difficult the running of productive activities of any kind.

Related: Frankly, my dear, I do need a dam

Aptera, the 120-300mpg car design, has shuttered it doors for good as I predicted it would three years ago.

The failure of Aptera and similar designs reveals the real-world functional differences between stated preferences i.e. what people tell themselves and others they want, and revealed preferences i.e. the things people actually end up choosing. People tell car designers and manufactures they want and will buy an inexpensive, efficient, two-seater commuter car but when it comes to putting money down for one they don’t follow through.

The conflict between stated and revealed preferences has significant political ramifications.

Looking back over my previous post on Aptera and the subsequent comments, it’s clear that Aptera specifically failed for three major reason:

1. It was uni-dimensional design that sacrificed every other functionality for fuel efficiency.
2. Cars are general tools. Every if  people spend 80% of their milage commenting, they still have other task the car needs to perform to some degree. A car that cannot fulfill these secondary task necessitates that the car owner spend time and money finding other solutions. That additional expense usually destroys any economic advantage the unidimensional design purports to offers.
3. The Aptera specifically represented nothing knew. Everything in the design had been repeatedly tried before and always failed. Specifically, highly efficient, two-seater commuter cars using a wide array of  technologies have been repeatedly offered since at least the 1920s in all parts of the world. They all failed to catch on.

The last reason brings me to the “Smart” car. Marketed as “unboring”, “uncluttered” and the “uncar”, they should have added “unusable” and “unsellable”.  The Smart car is another in a long, long, long list of attempts at a highly efficient, two seater, urban car. Arguably, it could be the best attempt ever made. It’s failure should, but won’t, drive a stake into the two-seater commuter car concept.

The Smart car’s design and technology are impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

During all the argument about global warming that has gone on over the past decade, warming activists have questioned the motives of defenders of traditional energy sources, implying they are all funded by fossil fuel companies. The motives of those warning of the risks of global warming have rarely been questioned, implying they are only worried about the planet and nothing so crass as accepting money for their efforts.

Now, it seems, they had normal acquisitive instincts, as well. And some of them have done quite well, I might add.

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Oh, Oh. Normal instincts after all. This will set the sainthood movement back a few years. We already know about Al Gore, of course.

Nephila clavipes (I think) from the Everglades.

Beautiful, cuddly, they make great pets. And unlike the Burmese python they rarely grow big enough to consume your cat, much less a deer.

(A larger version of this photo is cross posted at Jonathan’s Photoblog.)

UPDATE: An earlier spider photo here.

… and not too bad a picture for being taken with a cell-phone, either. We have these little critters all over the garden. My daughter surprised this one as she was hanging out the Halloween adornments.