Cap and Trade

Today it is time to talk about cap and trade. I am sure now that it is going to be imposed as a priority program in the USA and very likely in both India and China. It can become the first international revenue/expenditure model in place that will help create common cause on a global scale.

It took the fear of global warming (wrong reason) to make this program possible. By monetizing the disposal of CO2, it becomes profitable to solve the problem. This means that it creates demand for solutions that is driven by something other than altruism. I have thought for years that any and all waste disposal problems were best monetized just like this so that the invisible hand of the market can do its magic. Otherwise that invisible hand is quite happy to send it downstream unto its neigbours.

We have reached an historical pass in which even the statist gimme crowd supports such an idea, although they would never admit that they are calling on Adam Smith. It is actually the right thing to do and it needs to be fully internationalized, while grandfathering and scheduling out the advantage players, including India and China.

I find it offensive that we have torn down obsolete super polluters and shipped them off to China. These are now twenty years older and long paid for and surely ready for disposal. Much better technologies are now available and need to be encouraged by fast write offs and loan support.

A really good start in the USA since the cash value of a ton of carbon may be about $40.00 would be to convert all agricultural subsidies into carbon credits upon the farm sequestering the appropriate ton of carbon in the farm’s soils. If Europe did the same, we will have killed two birds with one stone. The farmers will actually earn their subsidies. The subsidies will no longer be paid by the tax payer but by the carbon polluters. With any luck that will jump start the terra preta soil revolution in the USA.

It will also establish a new global agricultural regime that will be more easily directed into extending these same systems everywhere else. I would love to subsidize new terra preta soils in the Phillipines at the rate of $40 per acre per year per ton of carbon while converting tropical soils into lush croplands forever. That would swiftly put millions to work establishing family farms like the family farms that existed in the Amazon for thousands of years. And modern mechanization allows these operations to be economically sized and operated.

This will also swiftly end slash and burn agriculture.

I know that this can be done right. My misgivings come from the unlimited capacity of the stupid and ignorant to divert programs like this into their own dreams of self aggrandizement, making it all messy for everyone else.

We only need to look at the ease which the mortgage industry bought off Congress to prolong their death spiral to know how possible this is. Can we keep them honest or do we have to walk through a history of swindles before it is done right? I am not too trusting these days.

Roosevelt and his brain trust did get a lot of things right back in the thirties. That is why I was so disturbed when Congress merrily took of the governors as a late action of the Clinton administration. To be followed by a smuck whose grasp of economic history was modest and clearly prone to been hoodwinked by folks he thought were on his side.

Obama and his brain trust have an opportunity to get this right, principally because the folks in office on both sides of the house have a lot to account for. But he better be prepared for an arm wrestle. Clinton ran into an unchastened house that was unprepared to give up anything and this immediately emasculated him for the entirety of his mandate.

So far Obama’s cabinet choices are fairly conservative and certainly careful. And he already knows what is top of the agenda as the auto industry has been given a stay of execution for three months to sort things out.

By the way, a subsistence farmer can be expected, using terra preta, to sequester one ton per year of carbon while upgrading one acre of soil per year. Therefore, removing 100,000,000 tons of carbon per year requires 100,000,000 families to be paid $40 for a total of $4 billion dollars. Maybe we can get Mohammed Younis to administer the program rather than the UN.


Connecting the Carbon Dots

By Nick Hodge Friday, December 19th, 2008
Pee-Wee Herman used to sing, "Connect the dots... laa la laa la laa," as he leapt into the magic screen.

No, I haven't been hanging out with Pee-Wee in movie theaters. But his advice on connecting the dots is applicable in the context of financial and political realms... and the trends and investment ideas that emerge.

Since the election in November, a series of dots have been emerging that indicate it's time to take a serious look at recently-established carbon ETFs and ETNs.

Connecting the Carbon Dots

In naming his climate change and energy team last week, Mr. Obama nominated Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

In her previous position, Jackson led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, where she is credited with helping put New Jersey in a leadership role on the issue of climate change and with encouraging the state to adopt a moratorium on building new coal plants.

She also championed the reduction of emissions. And, in 2007, New Jersey became the third state, behind California and Hawaii, to pass a law that mandates steep emissions cuts over the next four decades.

New Jersey, under Jackson's direction, also helped establish the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first mandatory, market-based CO2 emissions reduction program in the United States.

A "market-based" program means it is possible to profit from reducing emissions.

And I suspect, under her leadership, the EPA will push through a similar measure that covers the entire country. You may know it as a cap-and-trade system.

Her new boss is certainly on board. The 'agenda' section of his website has the following three things to say about changing our carbon habits:

· Reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions 80 Percent by 2050

· Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050

· Make the U.S. a Leader on Climate Change.

Obama has already said he'll consider asking the EPA to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act, which is something they should've been doing already, but Bush declined to do so after saying that such a plan would turn the EPA into the "de facto regulator of the economy."

In response, Jackson sent a forceful letter to the EPA saying that "the past eight years have demonstrated a shocking, yet consistent, irresponsibility on the part of the federal government to engage in any meaningful way... in implementing sustainable solutions to reduce emissions."

I think the policies she intends to carry out in her new position are clear.

Here we have an attack rant against cap and trade. He is right of course, if no carbon ever gets sequestered, and he is not about to investigate the possibilities. The object is to monetize the carbon waste stream. My object is to use that to monetize the two billion or so subsistence farmers so that their enterprise is recognized as capital.



The Cap And Trade Fraud - Global Warming Scams

by Jack Ward

The big buzz in the political world is 'cap and trade'. What is cap and trade and where did this idea come from?

The cap and trade concept came from the UN's Kyoto Protocols. Cap and trade is based on the flawed premise that anthropogenic activities (humans) are causing global warming by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The American Physical Society (APS), which represents nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its previous position on climate change. APS editor, Jeffrey Marque said, "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the ICCP (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution." The UN IPCC computer modeling contains numerous exaggerations and extensive errors which led to the global warming hoax.

Virtually all human activities (work and play) results in the release of CO2. A cap and trade scheme would limit the release of CO2 that countries, corporations, and individuals could emit. Those that exceed this arbitrary carbon cap would be required to buy or trade a carbon credit from a country, corporation or individual that did not exceed the arbitrary cap. A carbon credit is a permit that allows a country, corporation, or an individual to emit a specified amount of carbon dioxide. These credits are bought and sold on carbon trading markets just like stocks. Contrary to stocks that have an actual value, the value of carbon credits is artificially created by governments for the sole purpose of generation income from a commodity that has no actual value. In a free market economy no one in their right mind would pay good money for a commodity that has no value without government coercion.

The buying, selling, and trading carbon credits will not remove one molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere. But, the purpose is not to eliminate CO2, it is to generate income for the government, redistribute wealth, and control the people. Yet Obama said, "Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

According to the Congressional Budget Office this new energy tax will cost businesses and individuals trillions of dollars. In addition, legislative analysts have predicted that millions of jobs will be lost if legislation implementing the cap and trade proposal is passed. Once these schemes are allowed, the government will be able to regulate and control all carbon emissions. This will give the government complete control over travel, lifestyle and what ever businesses and citizens consume and produce. This is the change Obama desires.

Cap and trade advocates chose the Hegelian Dialectic to sell this draconian plan. Georg Hegel's theory of the dialectic was used by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to sell their economic theory of Communism. The Hegelian Dialectic is used to guide thoughts and actions that lead to a predetermined solution. Here is how it's done:

* First, create a problem of monumental proportions.

* Second, stir up hysteria by every means possible.

* Third, when people hysterically demand a solution to the contrived problem, offer predetermined solutions that will take away rights, cost considerable money, and put more power in the hands of the power-grabbing bureaucrats.

Global warming zealots are using the Hegelian Dialectic to push their environmental agenda to the detriment of the American people. People are being brainwashed into believing the planet is being threatened by global warming. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, even claims that she was elected to 'save the planet'. Al Gore, the self appointed high priest of global warming, lectures everyone to reduce their energy consumption. But don't be fooled. Neither Peolsi nor Gore walks the walk. Both are multi-millionaires that live in energy gobbling mansions.

These elitist Liberals want to re-create a serf / royalty society, with them representing the royalty class. You will know when this global warming hype is for real when Gore, Pelosi, and their ilk give up the amenities of the 'rich and famous' and live in 1600 sq. ft. houses, fly coach, and use mass transit. Until then, their hot air is the cause of global warming. Every aspect of your life will be adversely affected if our politicians are allowed to implement any of these fraudulent cap and trade schemes.

Jack Ward is an independent columnist

Post 1492 Reforestration

Without a doubt, an explanation for the Little Ice Age is a priority item on my personal to do list. Here we are introduced to a factor that I certainly have overlooked and may turn out to be valid. We do not know the real extend of pre Columbian agriculture except to recently recognize that slash and burn was not part of the program.
The early explorers in North America found woodlands and small tracts but that was a century after Columbus and several centuries after a previous economic high. A die off could have progressed generation by generation penalizing organized high density populations whose remnants merged with less organized groups.

The few reports we have out of the Amazon is saying the same thing. The real question is what size of population was necessary to create the warmer original regime as per this theory. Viewed in reverse, it quickly becomes much less convincing and sounds more like an argument in favor of today’s global warming theory.

In the event, strong reforestation was taking place, as is happening today in the East.

I am inclined to think that expanding forests will absorb more of the incoming solar energy and thereby add to the Earth’s total heat.

In any case, this is a factor that is quite real whose effect may be measurable and needs to be accounted for. The problem is that we have a very poor understanding of the impact.

We know that the Bronze Age saw the stripping of the Sahara coinciding with the end of the two millennia climate optimum that was warmer than the present. This is explained easily by understanding that the Earth lost the ability of the Sahara to absorb and hold heat. Since then we have had a well frozen Arctic and a cooler regime in Europe with some warm pauses.

That is why I am a little hesitant to assign an extended little ice age to this cause, but the carbon ratios and the decline in atmospheric CO2 certainly points at a contemporaneous shift in biomass size independent of the weather.

New World Post-pandemic Reforestation Helped Start Little Ice Age, Say Scientists

ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2008) — The power of viruses is well documented in human history. Swarms of little viral Davids have repeatedly laid low the great Goliaths of human civilization, most famously in the devastating pandemics that swept the New World during European conquest and settlement.

In recent years, there has been growing evidence for the hypothesis that the effect of the pandemics in the Americas wasn't confined to killing indigenous peoples. Global climate appears to have been altered as well.

Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands—abandoned as the population collapsed—pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, known as the Little Ice Age.

"We estimate that the amount of carbon sequestered in the growing forests was about 10 to 50 percent of the total carbon that would have needed to come out of the atmosphere and oceans at that time to account for the observed changes in carbon dioxide concentrations," said Richard Nevle, visiting scholar in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford. Nevle and Dennis Bird, professor in geological and environmental sciences, presented their study at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Dec. 17, 2008.

Nevle and Bird synthesized published data from charcoal records from 15 sediment cores extracted from lakes, soil samples from 17 population centers and 18 sites from the surrounding areas in Central and South America. They examined samples dating back 5,000 years.

What they found was a record of slowly increasing charcoal deposits, indicating increasing burning of forestland to convert it to cropland, as agricultural practices spread among the human population—until around 500 years ago: At that point, there was a precipitous drop in the amount of charcoal in the samples, coinciding with the precipitous drop in the human population in the Americas.

To verify their results, they checked their fire histories based on the charcoal data against records of carbon dioxide concentrations and carbon isotope ratios that were available.

"We looked at ice cores and tropical sponge records, which give us reliable proxies for the carbon isotope composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide. And it jumped out at us right away," Nevle said. "We saw a conspicuous increase in the isotope ratio of heavy carbon to light carbon. That gave us a sense that maybe we were looking at the right thing, because that is exactly what you would expect from reforestation."

During photosynthesis, plants prefer carbon dioxide containing the lighter isotope of carbon. Thus a massive reforestation event would not only decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but would also leave carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was enriched in the heavy carbon isotope.

Other theories have been proposed to account for the cooling at the time of the Little Ice Age, as well as the anomalies in the concentration and carbon isotope ratios of atmospheric carbon dioxide associated with that period.

Variations in the amount of sunlight striking the Earth, caused by a drop in sunspot activity, could also be a factor in cooling down the globe, as could a flurry of volcanic activity in the late 16th century.

But the timing of these events doesn't fit with the observed onset of the carbon dioxide drop. These events don't begin until at least a century after carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to decline and the ratio of heavy to light carbon isotopes in atmospheric carbon dioxide begins to increase.

Nevle and Bird don't attribute all of the cooling during the Little Ice Age to reforestation in the Americas.
"There are other causes at play," Nevle said. "But reforestation is certainly a first-order contributor."

Enhancing Evaporation

Every idea needs a champion and Ron Ace is cheer leading the idea of blasting sea water into the atmosphere beside deserts and the West African coast in particular. The idea is not wrong per se but the methods described scream excessive energy and other issues.

I posted over a year ago on work been done beside the desert coast in which water was lifted and then dripped through an exchange mat in conjunction with a greenhouse operation. It was essentially doing the same thing a lot more efficiently and pragmatically.

We already know that humid air can be exploited with the Eden Machine to grow trees that respirate the same water for a downstream repetition ad infinitum. The weakness occurs in those places were the onshore winds are dry. There is no humidity to start with.

It is thus possible that a coastal structure can be designed to produce humid air. The problem is to produce a lot of humid air. A six foot layer hardly cuts it. It is just that I am not so sure even a two hundred foot lave would be enough either.

The greenhouse system would work but only to produce a thin layer of very humid air. A more practical idea may be to integrate it with our windmills. Jetting sea water out of the trailing edge of the air foils can be tuned so that it all evaporates and little energy expended. Staggering the mills in echelon inland should allow a maximum amount of air to be moistened in this manner. Perhaps this can be combined with the greenhouse idea.

This is certainly mega engineering on a grand scale, but again can be built out in economic bite sized pieces over longer time scales allowing the advancing woodlands and populations to keep pace,


Inventor: Evaporation units could cool Earth

Some scientists find idea intriguing, others scoff at plan

By GREG GORDON

Mcclatchy-tribune
Dec. 20, 2008, 5:43PM

Ron Ace has studied the Earth's climate cycles for three years and has filed for a patent on a way to prevent global warming that his computer models show is effective, but others question his work.

WASHINGTON — Ron Ace says that his breakthrough moments have come at unexpected times — while he lay in bed, eased his aging Cadillac across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge or steered a tractor around his rustic, five-acre property.

In the seclusion of his Maryland home, Ace has spent three years glued to the Internet, studying the Earth's climate cycles and careening from one epiphany to another — a 69-year-old loner with the moxie to try to solve one of the greatest threats to mankind.

Now, backed by a computer model, the little-known inventor is making public a U.S. patent petition for what he calls the most "practical, nontoxic, affordable, rapidly achievable" and beneficial way to curb global warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise.

Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, he says.

The evaporating water, Ace said, would cool the Earth in multiple ways: First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation.

McClatchy Newspapers has followed Ace's work for three years and obtained a copy of his 2007 patent petition for what he calls "a colossal refrigeration system with a 100,000-fold performance multiplier."

"The Earth has a giant air-conditioning problem," he said. "I'm proposing to put a thermostat on the planet."

Although it might sound preposterous, a computer model run by an internationally known global warming scientist suggests that Ace's giant humidifier might just work.

Effects would be immediate

Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, roughly simulated Ace's idea in recent months on a model that's used extensively by top scientists to study global warming.

The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said.

"In the computer simulation, evaporating water was almost as effective as directly transferring ... energy to space, which was surprising to me," he said.

Ace said that the cooling effect would be several times greater if the model were refined to spray the same amount of seawater at strategic locations.

He proposes to install 1,000 or more devices that spray water 20 to 200 feet into the air from barren stretches of the West African coast, bluffs on deserted Atlantic Ocean isles, deserts adjoining the African, South American and Mediterranean coasts and other arid or windy sites.

To maximize cloud formation, he'd avoid the already humid tropics, where most water vapor quickly turns to rain.

"It does seem like evaporating water outside the tropics would be more effective," Caldeira said.

Buying time for research

Several scientists who reviewed Ace's patent petition for McClatchy reacted with caution to outright derision over its possibilities, but some softened their views upon learning of the computer model.

It would be relatively easy to design spraying equipment to carry out his plan to fill that water vapor deficit, but it would take a major international effort to install 1,000 large spraying devices, or thousands of smaller ones.

If fully deployed, the 15,800 cubic meters of sprayed water per second would be equivalent to the flow at the mouth of the Mississippi River and would require enough energy to power a medium-sized city.

However, spraying only a portion of that amount for a decade would be enough to cool the equivalent of current man-made global warming, estimated to range up to 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit, Ace said.

Such cooling, he said, could buy mankind decades of time for more research and precision.

Ace has his doubters, partly because he took the patent route rather than submitting his idea for scientific peer review. A patent certifies that an invention is unique, not that it would work.

David Travis, a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor who's studied clouds extensively, praised Ace's innovation, but said he's "generally opposed to geo-engineering" solutions and can't imagine evaporating water on a large enough scale to have a near-term effect.

Caldeira, who plans to submit his computer findings for peer-reviewed publication, is among scientists so concerned about sluggish progress in curbing greenhouse gases that they met last year to consider geo-engineering options.

One thing is certain: Ace is dead serious. He's tenaciously compiled more than a thousand pages of research, sometimes during all-night binges despite a fight with cancer. He said he's invested large sums in patenting his global-warming inventions.

EEStor Patent Released

Here is the link to the EEStor patent released December 16th or two days ago. It clarifies a great deal and demonstrates a developing practice that fits the powdered and coated barium titanite protocol. The descriptions are also detailed enough to give one confidence in the numbers they are reporting.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/patents/pat7466536.pdf

It appears that they have actually made this device and it is working at the levels advertised. They may even have the manufacturing process settled down enough to make a bunch and to expect some reliability. It appears robust enough to handle vibration easily.

Folks have been responding to the claim that there are over 30,000 parts, but this sounds more like 30,000 micron sized barium titanite particles. Silk screening layers of such, multiple times, is hardly onerous.

This clearly describes what one would expect as the manufacturing system. It all depends totally on the capacity of each particle to absorb and to also discharge energy. Everyone wants to see that demonstration. It the protocol works, this patent convinces me that they can deliver sooner or later. After this we will see incremental improvements that moderately improve the system over the years likely by decreasing the size of the particle and sharply increasing the particle density. Yes, it can get better.

Take your time to read the patent and I don’t mean just the abstract. There is a lot of useful detail laid out in the description of the manufacturing process. I scanned the initial summary on the history of battery development but you may find it useful.

The energy separation caused by the use of coated particles makes this device safe so long as discharge is as easily controlled. One would hate to find a molten electric wheel in your parked car.

If this technology comes through, and from reading the patent and simply accepting the work clearly indicated, it has come through, then we have a real practical and compact energy storage device to work with from now on that clearly facilitates the electric car.

Breaking up Financial Behemoths

I am seeing a rising future consensus opinion on the need to force an end to gigantism in the corporate world. It is stated very simply. If it is too big to fail, then it is too big and must enter upon a planned dismemberment. There needs to be legislation and a court ordered process. Trust busting legislation shows the way quite well and we have had the recent example of AT&T to inspect.

GM is the obvious current example that certainly calls for this type of treatment, and while we are at it, it needs to be applied to a couple of the other global manufacturing behemoths.

More importantly the financial behemoths that are all been bailed out need the same treatment. Does anyone think that AIG and Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac and their ilk actually successfully managed their capital exposure? The truth is that they all jumped onto a race to the bottom that was incentivized with bonuses and they could not get off or correct it and maintain their illusionary profit performance. There was obviously no way to correct it without getting fired.

They have all been smashed and it is now an excellent time to spin out the successful sub units that can still stand alone. And perhaps we can return to the good old days in which cross investment was banned. It never made sense ever to have brokers be in the same office as a lender. The conflict is always fatal and the incentive to grab is overpowering.

There is also always a lawyer to package any scheme.

Who will not borrow money in the hopes that sometime later he can liquidate it all and walk away rich. A banker has to know better than that.

Today our primary source of available leverage, the housing market, is completely under water. It is a good bet that no one who acquired real estate in the past ten years is able to liquidate and is trapped with paying off the property in the hopes of seeing daylight.

I think that one of the best stimulus methods that could be applied to the US economy and the global economy is to order a breakup of all the obvious behemoths, as soon as possible. A ten fold increase in banking competition will revitalize the lending market for the newly emergent independent manufacturers.

The so called efficiencies of management redundancies have turned into a mirage. The errors incurred have destroyed the entire capital base of the financial industry and many others besides. GMAC has great business if it can get money to lend on good terms. A little more difficult when the several biggest lenders have shrunk hugely. A little easier if supported by an army of small lenders and operated as several smaller GMACs.

One way to promote corporate breakup is to create a credit formula that actually penalizes dangerous sizing. That would remove the strongest incentive pushing corporate gigantism. The events of the past quarter would actually support such a formula by the credit rating agencies. I am stilled startled to wake up and realize that triple A firms abruptly failed. It should never happen.

Handy Post on GW

I share this post from another blogger as it has a really nice to read list prepared by one of his correspondents.

The illustration is also cute.

The items in the list are surprisingly complete in spelling out the various arguments.

This is a handy tool when reading another propaganda piece that is playing fast and loose with the evidence.

A Reader Shares His Doubts About Global Warming

Written by Timothy B. Hurst

Published on December 15th, 2008

Posted in Climate Change, Conservative, Leader

http://redgreenandblue.org/files/2008/12/global_warming_evidence.jpg


Last week, I received an email from a reader in Estonia (I was just as surprised we were big in the Baltics as you) who indicated that he used to be a believer in the global warming phenomenon until he “read some quite believable articles suggesting that man made Global Warming is a hoax.” Two of the pieces the reader pointed me to were authored by Robert Brisnmead, who, evidently, is a devoted climate change denier. The third was a longer, more detailed piece.

The reader also passed along a summary of the take-home arguments he gleaned in his newfound readings that I thought I would share with you. I’m only passing these along because the reader seemed like a friendly chap, not because I buy it. Do with it as you please.

1. The “Greenhouse Effect” is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.

2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.

3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.

4. Man’s contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn’t cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.

5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems.

6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population.

7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past.

8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future.

9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the “reporting process” so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid’s lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit “opinion” on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models.

10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat… particularly the North Slope oil fields.

11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science.

12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures.

13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently “melting” sections of Greenland.

14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula.

15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax.

16. Scientists who “deny” the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs.

17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling.

18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production consume more energy than the fuels produce.

19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder.

20. In short, there is no “climate crisis” of any kind at work on our planet.

Image: re-ality via flickr under a Creative Commons License

Tags: climate change, climate science, global warming, global warming is a hoax

Seth Borensen attracts Derision

This is only one of several articles pounding Seth Borenstein on his recent article drumming global warming. He obviously had not noticed that the winds are now blowing the other way, nor sensed that a number of science writers were obviously looking for an excuse to unload.

As far as new information is concerned, there is nothing here that has not been well covered before on this blog, if not over covered.

What is interesting is the newly found courage of the scientific community to yell rubbish when it has been so consistently dished out by the pro warming crowd.

It is now a full year since Mother Nature ended the very warm 2007 summer with a very cold winter in a complete reversal of the preceding pattern. That led me to immediately reevaluate assumptions and to focus on the movement of heat which presaged the sudden cooling.

It is very much as if the heat buildup caused by a decade of solar stimulation was simply discharged into the Arctic sending us right back to where we started. This winter is confirming this new trend and may see a further drop in global temperatures before solar stimulation begins again.

Because the northern ice age will never appear again, the climate is operating in the Holocene with a temperature variation spread of perhaps two degrees. Right now we are back to the middle of this range.

The question is what it takes to drop that extra degree. It may in fact be a protracted solar minimum as happened during the little ice age.

A major volcanic event can also do it for a year or so unless it is a very big event in the right position like Hekla in 1159 BCE.

Right now folks, the proponents of solar variation are winning the argument hands down, while the proponents of CO2 as a causative agent are looking foolish. You can be quite sure that during the time in which global temperatures stayed flat and then tumbled, that the human CO2 contribution to the atmosphere likely doubled (or so close that it does not matter). The fact is that Kyoto accomplished very little except to expose the honest guys to ridicule.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/12/15/scientists-denounce-ap-hysterical-global-warming-article

Scientists Denounce AP For Hysterical Global Warming Article

By Noel Sheppard

December 15, 2008 - 10:50 ET

Scientists from around the world are denouncing an Associated Press article hysterically claiming that global warming is "a ticking time bomb" about to explode, and that we're "running out of time" to do anything about it.

As reported by NewsBusters, Seth Borenstein, the AP's "national science writer," published a piece Sunday entitled "Obama Left With Little Time to Curb Global Warming."

Scientists from all over the world have responded to share their view of this alarmist propaganda:

How can this guy call himself a "science reporter?"

He is perhaps the worst propagandist in all the media, and that's stating something.

In his latest screed, he screams: "global warming is accelerating"

How then does he explain the fact that the mean global temperature (as measured by satellite) is the same as it was in 1980?

How can global warming be "accelerating" when the last two years have seen dramatic cooling? Is this guy totally removed from all reality?????

He completely ignores any evidence contrary to his personal beliefs, and twists everything to meet his preconceived notions.

How can anyone so ignorant be a reporter for AP? Seriously? -- David Deming, University of Oklahoma

“Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating.”

Rubbish! Global warming is not “accelerating”: global warming has stopped. There has been no statistically significant rise in (mean global temperature: MGT) since 1995 and MGT has fallen since 1998.

The Earth has been warming from the Little Ice Age (LIA) for 300 years so, of course, the warmest years happened recently. But that warming from the LIA peaked in the El Nino year of 1998. MGT has been near but below that peak for the last 10 years.

Arctic ice advances and recedes over decades. 2007 saw a minimum in Arctic ice cover in the short period that it has been monitored using satellites. But 2008 saw the most rapid growth in Arctic ice cover in that same period and Arctic ice cover is now back to the average it has had in the period. Also, 95% of polar ice is in the Antarctic and Antarctic ice is increasing.

Nobody can know if the recent halt to global warming is temporary, permanent or the start of a new warming or cooling phase. But it is certain that anybody who proclaims that “Global warming is accelerating” is a liar, a fool, or both. -- Richard S. Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant.

The Great Global Warming Hoax appears to be a collaborative effort between the world’s [sic] incompetent scientists and the worlds [sic] scientifically illiterate journalists. Science Illiterates like Borenstein are the Chicken Littles of the 21st Century, spreading climate change poppycock like bread crumbs in the forest. The crumbs, hopefully, will lead them to a paycheck at the end of the week from their similarly science-illiterate employers. Well, the lower-I.Q. portion of the population has to eat, too....<> -- James A. Peden, atmospheric physicist formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

Borenstein, time is definitely running out – for you to save any possible credibility unless you find a new drama to act out on the public because your current one is going down the drain faster than a so-so sitcom in September.

The world hasn’t “warmed” in a dozen years and over the past year not even Jim Hansen and His Magic Bag of Tricks can make it appear we’re all getting “warmer”.

Once the Public gets wind of the true data that shows their intuition has been right all along – not even the tabloids will pick you up for an occasional column to entertain them. -- Chemical Scientist Dr. Brian G. Valentine of the U.S. Department of Energy and Professor at University of Maryland, has studied computational fluid dynamics and modeling of complex systems

"Hottest on record" means little for a 5 billion yr old planet, when the 'record" is only 100 years or less. Please avoid parsing the data, to support you [sic] indefensible conclusions and to ignored [sic] the data which don't support your conclusions. Selecting data for a desired outcome is as old as drying labbing [sic] chemistry labs. This seems to be SOP for today as environmental journalists and just as silly (and detectable---you are outta my chem. class). Your hypothesis is easily falsified, and has been falsified.

Lots of Temp stations show cooling for decades while CO2 rises, ergo falsified. Ergo there are more powerful unspecified climate forces involved. CO2 is likely uninvolved or if so a minor player. Next problem please. -- Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a retired nuclear scientist and university chemistry professor.

He is the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com

One of the biggest problems in all this is that the major media are so busy bashing President Bush for any and every thing that they have lost sight of what he realized 5+ years ago: none of the CO2-related strategies will work unless China and India join the community. Bush's initiative to form an "Asia-Pacific" consortium of nations was the very first realistic step in the direction of a coherent approach to climate-change mitigation.

What is going on currently is that A) India has dismissed the whole thing, saying "we will never be higher in "per capita" energy use than the western countries; B) the Europeans have figured out that it will cost them big bucks and are fleeing from their Kyoto promises; C) the bandwagon in the USA is still going forward in high gear, and in about a year they'll realize they're way out in front with no followers. -- Dr. Thomas P. Sheahen, an MIT educated physicist, author of the book "An Introduction to High-Temperature Superconductivity," and writer of the popular newspaper column "Ask the Everyday Scientist"

One further critical aspect of global warming alarmists that is so fiercely debated by all is the "climate forcing" property of carbon dioxide. Allow me to state categorically that, despite any and all arguments to the contrary, including the most elaborately well-balanced mathematical formulae by the best mathematicians in the world, the climate forcing ability of carbon dioxide equals exactly zero. Not 4 degrees C, not 1 degree C, not even 0.0001 degree C. Just plain zero. Even the much heralded graphic indicating that the first 20ppmv of carbon dioxide makes a difference to the air temperature that is much greater than any subsequent increase in concentration is a useless bit of info based on laboratory tests that have absolutely no relation to the open atmosphere. There exists not one single laboratory test on climate that can be extrapolated to mimic the open atmosphere and that includes the most advanced computers that in any case treat the earth as a flat disc with a 24 hour haze of solar radiation - about as far removed from reality as is possible. -- Hans Schreuder, Ph.D. Mathematical Statistician, Rocky Mountain Research Station

In responce to what is happening to global temperatures. The key is using the right statistical technique to plot the "average" temperature. I do not have the qualifications to establish what the correct technique is. I just understand such things as non-linear least square regression analysis. There are five organizations which report global temperature anomalies on a monthly basis. If you use simple non-linear analysis, and include 2008 data, then all five data sets show that world temperatures seem to have passed through a shallow maximum. My guess is that when we can look back with 20/20 hindsight, we will be able to see that this maximum occurred around 2005. So it is understandable that recent years are amongst the warmest on record. This fact is no argument that temperatures are still rising. What counts is the slope of the average temperature/time graph at the present time. For a couple of years, this slope has been negative; global temperatures have been falling. We do not know, of course, if this will continue. But so far as I can see, none of the IPCC and other pro-AGW organizations predicted falling temperatures. However, before you attempt to use an argument like this, you need someone who really knows statistical analysis techniques. -- Physicist F. James Cripwell, a former scientist with UK’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge who worked under the leading expert in infra red spectroscopy -- Sir Gordon Sutherland – and worked with the Operations Research for the Canadian Defense Research Board

What does it take to ignore 10 years of global cooling, sharply declining temperatures the last couple of years, record setting lack of sun spots, flipping of the PDO into its cool mode, failure of computer models to predict real climate, predictable warming and cooling climates for the past 500 years, and ................
The answer is really quite simple--just follow the money! -- Don J. Easterbrook, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Geology, Western Washington University, U.S.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.

1kg CIGS = 5kg Uranium

Martin Roscheisen made this very telling comparison on his blog recently. Without question, the one side effect of nano techniques is the dearth of raw materials actually required. This something not fully appreciated by those in the materials side of things.

Of course, that one kilo has to be spread on many square miles of substrate to generate the actual energy.

Regardless this technology is going to change all aspects of the energy business and the sheer capacity to have one tool produce the energy equivalent of one nuclear plant each and every year has not sunk in yet. That is going to need a year, by which time I hope to have an early version of the Eden machine operating.

Before we are all finished, every square mile of usable land on Earth will have a large surplus of power to dispose of in the daily course of business, either at the farm gate or internally. It is just that simple.

It will still take decades to perfect efficient networks and adapt our civilization to this new bounty of energy. But make no mistake, it is a bounty. The average household will be primary producer of power at a nominal cost. There will be no distribution system to pay for.

This power source has a starting selling price of $1.00 per watt which competes now with every other option. A couple years out, the selling price can be much lower and capacity can be at four nuclear power plants and doubling every year therafter until the Earth is saturated.

1kg CIGS = 5kg Uranium

December 16, 2008

By Martin Roscheisen, CEO - Nanosolar

The notion of a kilogram of enriched Uranium conjures up an image of a powerful amount of energy.

Enough to power an entire city for years when used in a nuclear power plant, or enough to flatten an entire county when used in a bomb — that’s presumably what many people would say if one asked them about their thoughts.

In our new solar cell technology, we use an active material called CIGS, a Copper based semiconductor. How does this stack up against enriched Uranium?

Here’s a noteworthy fact, pointed out to me by one of our engineers: It turns out that 1kg of CIGS, embedded in a solar cell, produces 5 times as much electricity as 1kg of enriched Uranium, embedded in a nuclear power plant.

Or said differently, 1kg of CIGS is equivalent to 5kg of enriched Uranium in terms of the energy the materials deliver in solar and nuclear respectively.

The Uranium is burned and then stored in a nuclear waste facility; the CIGS material produces power for at least the warranty period of the solar cell product after which it can then be recycled and reused an indefinite number of times.

Cattail Culture by Daniel Little

Good item on the use of cattails. My thoughts on harvesting, is that it will need to be mechanized. That is the very good reason it was not a primary food crop of our ancestors. Something like a potato lifter should do it with a pressure line to wash out the mud perhaps.

With the right machinery it will be easy to harvest and ultimately macerate the rhizomes.

The cattail paddy would be harvested in late October after it has been drained and allowed to firm up. And after the stalks and leaves have also been harvested and processed. This harvesting cycle will also allow possible separation of the cattail seed head fiber and the ripe seeds themselves all having recognized value.

This also happens after the mosquitoes are suppressed in northern locales.

I wonder how this plant behaves in the saline waters of the tarsand tailings pond. It would be nice if they could extract the various salts. I doubt if it does much good, but its propensity to work well in sewage ponds is a positive indication.

These folks are wrestling with the economics of operating a coop that could be self sufficient and the prospect of efficiently producing one’s own fuel is critical. They appear to have made real progress.

It is obvious that a starch rich crop easily harvested in the off season like cattails and not competing for food is a valuable addition to the community business plan.

http://changingsociety.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/sustainability-and-biofuel-farming

Sustainability and biofuel farming

James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability , and it’s an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that sustainability will require a truly profound transformation of how we think about a “good life,” and a rethinking of the kinds of material circumstances we might aspire to in order to create a world system that is genuinely sustainable.

One way we might try to pursue this line of thought is to consider whether gardens and local biofuel production might provide a basis for more sustainable human activity. Could we use more of our own time and labor to create some of the material necessities of our lives, and do so in a way that imposes a smaller footprint on the world’s energy and resource system?

David Blume was a guest on NPR’s Science Friday on August 15. Blume is the author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. Blume is an advocate for the idea that alcohol can be a large and ecologically positive component of our modern energy economy (website). And he believes that it is possible to imagine a more decentralized energy economy for the United States in which local producers and distillers satisfy a large percentage of the energy needs of a region.

Blume made an observation that I found intriguing: that the common wetland plant, the cattail, can be a fuel source for producing ethanol. (Here’s a news story on Blume’s comments about cattails on an earlier occasion.) Corn produces about 250-300 gallons of ethanol per acre, and it is estimated that cattails would produce something less than this. (Blume himself estimates that the yield of cattail ethanol production would be “many, many times” that of corn, and says that 7,000 gallons per acre is feasible. This seems unsupportable, given the potential yield of other biofuel crops.) But cattails also have ecological advantages: they soak up excess nutrients (e.g. agricultural fertilizer runoff or sewage waste plant effluent), and they require little cultivation. Here are a few news stories (story, story) with some interesting background.

So here’s the question: what would be involved in creating a community that is energy self-sufficient based on ethanol production? Could households grow their own fuels? What would the economics of a cooperative community-based distillery look like? How much land, labor, and money would be required for the household?

It should be noted that there is serious disagreement about the most basic features of the commercial ethanol economy: does ethanol production lead to a net gain in energy, or do the inputs into the cultivation and distilling processes exceed the energy content of the resulting volume of alcohol? Here’s a discussion at FuturePundit and a summary of the findings of a national expert, David Pimental from Cornell University. Here are the central conclusions of a recent study by Pimentel and Tad Patzek at UC-Berkeley:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
(Other studies reach a very different conclusion. See a summary of studies on the energy balance of current ethanol production on this Oregon website.)

But still, let’s think it through a bit. The scenario I’m imagining is labor-intensive and local, so the costs of energy associated with mechanization and transportation are reduced or eliminated. Could we imagine a local energy economy based on crops and distillation that could be fitted into an otherwise acceptable lifestyle? (The analysis will begin to sound like Piero Sraffa’s exercise, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory .)

A family’s energy budget might look something like this, estimated in gallons of ethanol:

transportation 800 gallons (10,000 miles)
cooking 300 gallons (365 days)
heating 1000 gallons (180 heating days)
illumination 100 gallons (365 days)
refrigeration 200 gallons

This adds up to 2,400 gallons of ethanol required for a year’s energy use. But we aren’t finished yet, because cultivation and distillation also have an energy cost, and this cost is a function of the volume of alcohol required. Let’s take a more optimistic estimate than that provided by Pimental above, and assume that the energy cost of distillation is 30%. (We’re working with a coop, after all!) To produce a gallon of ethanol we have to expend .3 gallons in the distillation process. And let’s assume that cultivation is done by hand without mechanization, but that the crop needs to be transported to the distillation facility at a 10% cost. (That is, I assume that the net transportation cost of transporting the thousands of pounds of feed crop to the processor is 10% of the net alcohol product of the crop.) These estimates imply that the household requires 4,000 gallons of alcohol.

Now assume that the alcohol yield of an acre of cattails is 250 gallons; this implies a fuel farm size of 16 acres. (It would be nice to extend the exercise to include a food garden as well; this is left for the reader! Here’s an interesting United Nations article from the 1980s on the economics of family gardening that can help get the analysis started.)

Now how many hours of labor time need to be devoted to cultivating and harvesting this crop? Evidently cattails don’t require much by way of fertilizers, irrigation, and pest control. But I’m sure there is some level of maintenance needed, and 16 acres is a large area. In fact, it represents a rectangular plot that is 200 feet by 3,500 feet — more than half a mile long. So let’s assume that basic maintenance of the cattail crop requires 2 hours a day of adult labor. The large investment of labor, however, occurs at the harvest. About 14,000 pounds of cattails will be harvested per acre, or 224,000 pounds for the farm over the course of the harvest. If we assume that an adult can harvest 200 pounds per hour, this represents 1,120 hours of harvest work. Let’s assume that harvesting can be spread out over a couple of four-week periods or 56 days; this implies 20 hours of adult labor per day during the harvest season. So it would take 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the eight weeks of harvest season for two adults to harvest this volume of cattails. Two months of very hard work devoted to harvesting will eventually produce enough ethanol to support the household’s chief energy needs.

Now what about the economics of the cooperative’s distillery? If we assume a cooperative involving 100 households of the scale just discussed, the distillery needs to process 22,400,000 pounds of material in order to produce 400,000 gallons of ethanol. The households will be farming an area of 1,600 acres of cattails — about three square miles. And the system will be supporting the energy needs of about 500 people. If we keep our assumption of a 30% ratio of input-to-output, this process will consume 120,000 gallons of ethanol. The coop members will need to fund the purchase and maintenance of the still and the labor costs associated with operation of the still. Perhaps it’s a labor coop too? In this case, each household will need to devote several hours a week to work in the distillery. And we might imagine that the coop would require a “tax” of some small percentage of the alcohol produced to cover maintenance and operating expenses. Here’s a research article from AGRIS that examines the costs of a small distillery of roughly this size. The conclusion is somewhat discouraging: “The analysis indicates that the distillery would not be profitable at current prices for corn and ethanol.” In other words, the cost of inputs and operation of the distillery exceed the value of the alcohol produced, according to this analysis. But this conclusion isn’t quite relevant to our scenario, because the raw materials are not purchased through the market and the product is not sold on the market. Nonetheless, the finding implies that there’s a shortfall somewhere; and it may well be that it is the unpaid labor of the fuel farmers that is where the shortfall occurs.

So here’s the upshot of this back-of-the-envelope calculation: it would be a major commitment of land and labor for a household or a village community to achieve energy self-sufficiency through cooperative-based ethanol distillation. And I’ve made an assumption I can’t justify: that the energy input to the distillation process is 30% of the energy content of the resulting quantity of ethanol. If that ratio is 60% instead of 30%, then the land and labor requirements for each household are greatly increased; and if the ratio approaches or exceeds 100%, then the whole idea falls apart. But even on these assumptions, the life style associated with this model sounds a lot closer to that of a peasant village in medieval France or traditional China than to that of a modern US citizen. It involves hard physical labor during several months of the year and a moderate level of labor effort during the remainder of the year. And if we imagine that the scenario is extended by incorporating a substantial amount of food gardening for family consumption, then the balance of necessary labor to free labor tips even further in the direction of the peasant economy.

Benny Peiser on Poznan

To say that the players at Poznan are having sober second thoughts is an understatement. The science was supposed to be settled, yet now it is not. In the meantime CO2 has risen sharply while global temperatures flat lined and then recently dropped. I am still waiting for someone to come out with an explanation. We obviously will have to wait a while longer while a few more scientists can distance themselves from previous positions.

This article by Benny Peiser summarizes the reasons for the developing political collapse. The costs are been felt at the same time that the causation is evaporating. The true believers are still walking the walk to their shame as scientists. Eventually even the politicians will start jumping ship unless next spring delivers a convincing warm spell in the Arctic and global warming resumes. I look forward to been surprised.

Right now we are catching a very convincing cold winter with no surplus heat to spare anywhere. I would actually go so far as to predict that the global temperature drop of 0.7 degrees experienced last year will be added to this year by around 0.3 degrees. By the end of next year solar cycle 24 should be back in play and the temperature will then stabilize thereafter. Perhaps it will even get warm again.

None of this is good news for the believers who will need to keep up morale for at least another year. We are also not that far from catching weather like the late fifties when you could count on been hammered every winter just like now. In the meantime I will have to put on the winter boots tomorrow in Vancouver and expect repeats this year. Usually it is once slightly if at all.

DECEMBER 15, 2008, 4:57 P.M. ET

Cooling on Global Warming

Germany and the rest of Europe are getting more rational on climate change.

By BENNY PEISER From today's Wall Street Journal Europe

Participants at last week's United Nations climate conference in Poznan, Poland, were taken aback by a world seemingly turned upside-down. The traditional villains and heroes of the international climate narrative, the wicked U.S. and the noble European Union, had unexpectedly swapped roles. For once, it was the EU that was criticized for backpedalling on its CO2 targets while Europe's climate nemesis, the U.S., found itself commended for electing an environmental champion as president.

The wrangle over the EU's controversial climate package at a separate summit in Brussels wrong-footed the world's green bureaucracy. The EU climate deal was diluted beyond recognition. Instead of standing by plans to cut CO2 emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, the actual reductions might be as trivial as 4% if all exemptions are factored in.

The Brussels summit symbolizes a turning point. The watered-down climate deal epitomizes the onset of a cooling period in Europe's hitherto overheated climate debate. It may lead eventually to the complete abandonment of the unilateral climate agenda that has shaped Europe's green philosophy for nearly 20 years.

The reasons for the changing political atmosphere in Europe are manifold. First, the global economic crisis has demoted green policies nearer to the bottom of the political agenda. Saving the economy and creating jobs take priority now.

Second, disillusionment with the failed Kyoto Protocol has turned utopian thinking into sobriety. After all, most of the Kyoto signatories failed to reduce their CO2 emissions during the last 10 years. There are also growing doubts about the long-term viability of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme. The price of carbon credits has collapsed as a result of the financial crisis. The drop in demand and the recession are likely to depress carbon prices for years to come. As a result, the effectiveness of the extremely volatile scheme is increasingly questioned.

Third, a number of countries have experienced a political backlash over their renewable energy schemes. Tens of billions of euros of taxpayers' money have been pumped into projects that depend on endless government handouts. Each of the 35,000 solar jobs in Germany, for instance, is subsidized to the tune of €130,000. According to estimates by the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research, green subsidies will cost German electricity consumers nearly €27 billion in the next two years.

Perhaps even more important is the growing realization that the warming trend of the late 20th century has, for the last 10 years or so, essentially come to a temporary halt. The data collected by international meteorological offices confirm this. This most peculiar fact is rarely mentioned in policy debates, but it certainly provides decision makers with a vital respite to reconsider their climate policy options.

Above all, Europe's politicians have recognized that green taxes have turned into liabilities that may undermine economic stability and their chances of re-election. As German radio Deutsche Welle put it last week: "With the recession tightening its grip on the German economy, [Chancellor Angela] Merkel is betting that job reassurance is more important to the average worker than being a pioneer in tackling climate change."

Nowhere has the fundamental change of the political landscape been more pronounced and less expected than in Germany. For more than 20 years, Europe's economic powerhouse has been the major bastion of green politics.

In the 1990s, Angela Merkel steered and implemented Europe's Kyoto policy as Germany's first environment minister. Now serving as chancellor, she was hailed as Europe's climate savior after playing host to last year's G-8 summit in Heiligendamm. Only 18 months later, however, she no longer wears a halo. As a result of a concerted campaign by Germany's heavy industry, as well as growing opposition from within her Christian Democratic party, Mrs. Merkel has been forced to abandon her green principles and image.

The deepening economic crisis seems to transform the mood of the German public. Next year's general election looms large, and voters right now are worried about the economy and jobs, and not green issues.

In early December, more than 10,000 angry metal workers and trade unionists -- most of them from Germany -- protested outside the European Parliament in Brussels against the EU's climate policy, which they fear will increase unemployment.

For many international observers, the ease with which Mrs. Merkel overturned her celebrated climate policy has come as a shock. But she was almost the last member of her Christian Democratic party willing to accept that a change in strategy was necessary given the immense costs of the EU's original climate plans. In fact, her party demanded that Mrs. Merkel veto the climate package if German industry did not receive an exemption from the Emissions Trading Scheme's auctioning of carbon credits. The exemption was duly granted.

Perhaps the most critical factor for Mrs. Merkel's almost unchallenged about-face is the vanishing strength of the Social Democratic Party, whose members were once among the most forceful climate alarmists. Mrs. Merkel's junior coalition partner has lost much of its support in recent years. And amid growing fears of a deepening recession, there are also signs of a split within the party on climate and energy issues.

At the forefront of the left-wing opposition to the EU's climate policy has been EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen. The German Social Democrat has been arguing throughout the year that the climate targets should only be accepted if "truly cost-effective solutions" could be found. Other prominent dissenters in his party include Hubertus Schmoldt, the head of the mining, chemical and energy industrial union, who has recently called for a two-year postponement of the climate package.

In part as a result of German -- as well as Italian and Polish -- objections, Europe's climate package did not survive in its original form. The inclusion of a revision clause, pushed by Italy, is particularly significant as it makes the EU's climate targets conditional on the outcome of international climate talks.

If the U.N.'s Copenhagen conference in 2009 fails to seal a post-Kyoto deal, it is as good as certain that some of the EU's targets will be further cut. By linking its decisions to those of the rest of the world, Europe has begun to act as a more rational player on the stage of international climate diplomacy.

Instead of yielding to the siren calls of climate alarmists, European governments would be well advised to focus their attention on developing pragmatic policies capable of safeguarding their industries, labor forces and environment at the same time.

Compressed Air Energy Storage

Compressed air energy storage or CAES has been around for a while and I think most of us have been dismissive of it. It made little obvious sense when most power production was fuel driven. That is now changing. What is more, most of the population is living in areas that have geological storage potential. In that case, it makes perfect sense to transfer nighttime base load into compressed air and to shove it underground.

The interesting fact that this same compressed air needs to be heated up before it enters a power turbine is very interesting and is possibly a major opportunity.

Huge amounts of fuel are ideal sources of low grade heat that is currently wasted. That may even include the spent water in a thermal plant which is still at the edge of boiling. Fuel sources such as municipal waste are normally unsuitable as useful energy sources unless augmented with a higher grade fuel.

An excellent example of this that I once appraised was the use of open hearth incinerators. The burn temperature was just too low to completely consume the contained carbon with a resultant waste removal problem. By the simple blending of a fifteen percent chopped tire component (a high grade hydrocarbon) it was possible to raise the temperature sufficiently to consume the carbon and even to oxidize the steel. This worked particularly well with wood waste.

Any such process still produces a lot of heat in the form of hot gases that if not already to temperature can be readily upgraded with a little natural gas.

The point is that with a lot of not too clever engineering, compressed air would fit very nicely into existing thermal plants, existing incineration operations and existing industrial power systems that are already using cogeneration. This is not a dumb idea.

This also suggests that reservoir storage should be part of every power plant’s design, not just windmills in the Dakotas. The creation of, and existence of such reservoirs will obviously stimulate the building of nearby windmill farms.



Air forced underground could provide energy

WHAT'S IN STORE FOR THE GRID?

It's generally accepted economical energy storage is the key that will to unlock the potential of renewable energy and help the electricity system operate more efficiently.

"Energy storage to me is the big breakthrough," says Ken Kozlik, chief operating officer of the Independent Electricity System Operator, which manages the supply and demand of power in Ontario.
Batteries have advanced significantly and show tremendous promise for smaller grid applications. Examples of such battery chemistries include lithium-ion, zinc-bromide, vanadium-flow, sodium-sulphur, sodium-nickel-chloride and even improved lead-acid. Problem is, they can only store energy for a few and are expensive when deployed on a large scale.

The same holds true for most other emerging energy-storage technologies, such as flywheels and ultracapacitors, though an unexpected breakthrough could change the game.

On the other end of the spectrum is old-fashioned pumped storage. This involves pumping water from a lower body of water up to a massive natural reservoir, then releasing the water so it can turn turbines on the way down.

Pumped storage can be economical but only at a massive scale – 1,000 megawatts or larger. Also, it's restricted by geography and geology. There are few natural reservoirs close to populated cities or transmission corridors that could accommodate such a project and creating a man-made reservoir would be prohibitively expensive and environmentally risky.

In the middle is compressed-air energy storage. It's economical when deployed on a large scale and the underground reservoirs – such as depleted gas fields or salt caverns – are widely available in southwestern Ontario, which also happens to be rich with wind resources.As energy-storage technologies such as CAES and batteries advance, more energy experts are citing the potential of an electricity system based on 100-per-cent renewable energy.

"My prediction is that renewable power plus storage will outperform any second-generation nuclear plant or coal with carbon capture and will be much easier and faster to install," says Roger Peters, a senior technical adviser at The Pembina Institute, an energy and environmental think-tank.

- Tyler Hamilton

Storing compressed air below ground could provide the grid with wind power when it's needed, not just when it blows

Dec 15, 2008 04:30 AM

Tyler Hamilton

ENERGY REPORTER

Pumping compressed air underground so it can be extracted later to generate electricity could prove one of the most effective ways in the short term for Ontario to add vast amounts of renewable energy to the power system, industry experts say.

So-called compressed-air energy storage, or CAES, has been around for more than 20 years and while only two facilities have ever been built – a 110-megawatt plant in Alabama and a 290-megawatt plant in Germany – officials from New York, California, Texas and a number of other U.S. states are beginning to seriously explore the potential. Iowa has already taken the leap.

The basic concept is that cheap, surplus electricity available overnight is used to compress air and inject it into underground reservoirs, like a salt cavern or depleted gas field. When power is needed during the day and can fetch a higher price on the market, the air is released, exposed to heat and put through an expansion turbine that generates electricity.

"It's beginning to capture people's imagination," says Mark Tinkler, an energy consultant with Emerging Energy Options and former manager of distributed energy technologies at Ontario Power Generation.
Five years ago, Tinkler did a study for OPG on the economics of using CAES and at the time he concluded it didn't make sense. Looking back, he says, enough has changed in the world to revisit the idea.

"My personal feeling is that the time is right to do another assessment."

The reason? In a word, wind.

The wind blows intermittently, so unlike a coal-fired power plant that can dispatch electricity when we need it, a wind farm often generates electricity when we don't need it (or it fails to when we do). Energy storage can level the playing field between renewables and fossil fuels, allowing us to capture wind energy whenever it blows and dispatch the power as demand dictates – much like a coal plant operates today.

It turns out the wind blows best at night, when there's little or no demand for it. Wind-farm operators will often shed the energy or sell it for practically nothing to other utilities.

"It comes down to what the value of electricity is at night," says Tinkler. "Five years ago we didn't have any wind. Now, it's a completely different equation."

Geologically, Ontario is well equipped to embrace CAES – particularly southwestern Ontario. It's often forgotten the region was once the hub of oil and gas exploration in North America and was home to the world's first commercial oil well.

More than 50,000 wells have been drilled in Ontario over the past 150 years and slightly more than 2,000 still produce today. Union Gas and Enbridge Gas Distribution already use depleted gas fields in southwestern Ontario to store natural gas for the heating season. In fact, the Sarnia-Lambton region accounts for 60 per cent of Canada's natural gas storage capacity.

Andrew Hewitt, manager of the petroleum resources centre in Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources, says the region is also rich in wind resources. He's currently studying the CAES option, having decided several months ago the opportunity was ripe for consideration, particularly as the province moves to shut down its coal plants.

"The compressed-air component doesn't have to be in the same area as a wind farm, it just has to be hooked into the same region of the province," says Hewitt, who hopes to brief the minister on his findings once his research is complete.

"The oil and gas industry has been doing this kind of storage for years. You're using the same technology and just substituting it (natural gas) with air."

The problem is, engineers from power utilities know little about geology and underground technologies. Likewise, engineers from the oil and gas sector are not as knowledgeable about the above-ground machinery that generates electricity.

"You've got to bring teams of these people together to make compressed-air storage happen," says Robert Schainker, a senior technical executive and CAES expert at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute.

Schainker says it's worth the effort if the geological conditions are right and the goal is bulk energy storage, such as a CAES facility that can store 200 megawatts for 10 hours or more – the equivalent of powering two million 100-watt light bulbs or 400,000 dishwashers for half a day.

True, a number of advanced battery-storage technologies are becoming economical for much smaller applications – for example, one megawatt for one to three hours of storage.

These technologies include zinc-bromide, sodium-sulphur, lithium-ion and vanadium flow battery chemistries. But at much larger scales batteries are simply too expensive.

CAES, on the other hand, isn't economical on a small scale since the bulk of capital costs relates to the compressors and other turbo-machinery. The underground storage costs are the same whether you've got a small or large reservoir.

Adding an additional hour of storage to a CAES project will only cost $1 (U.S.) or $2 per kilowatt-hour, compared with $350 to $500 per kilowatt-hour of additional battery storage, says Schainker.

Still, there are a few wild cards that could influence the future cost of compressed-air storage. The current generation of CAES facilities still require fuel, typically natural gas, to heat the air before it enters the expansion turbine. Generally, a CAES plant consumes a third less natural gas for every kilowatt-hour it generates, compared with a simple-cycle natural gas or "peakier" plant.

Tinkler says when Ontario Power Generation studied the economics of CAES, the cost of natural gas was $3 per thousand cubic feet. At the time, "we were looking at a $5 break-even point," he says.

"As the price of natural gas goes up, compressed-air storage looks better and better."

Today, natural gas is above $5 per thousand cubic feet. The National Energy Board is projecting it could go as high as $9 over the winter and the U.S. Energy Information Administration is projecting it will hit $6.25 in 2009. As recently as this summer it was higher than $13.

Another factor that would make CAES even more attractive is carbon pricing. Both Canada and the United States plan to introduce a continental cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. CAES, by increasing our use of wind energy and reducing our consumption of natural gas, would become more economical over time by lowering carbon dioxide emissions in the province.

"You should redo your studies," says Schainker, referring to OPG's initial study in 2003. "CO2 costs will be a big one."

The fact that a CAES facility, like wind farms, can also be built in two or three years also makes it attractive when compared with building a nuclear facility, which, because of more rigorous regulatory requirements, can take 10 years to plan and build.

And the technology continues to mature, Schainker adds, pointing to next-generation designs that can take the waste heat that results from compressing the air and use it in place of natural gas to reheat the air during the electricity generation process. No facility has ever been built around this design, but it's only a matter of time.

"There would be no fuel used whatsoever, no CO2 emissions," he says.

"On paper, it looks very attractive. We're working on it."

Andrew Hewitt at the natural resources ministry says making it happen in Ontario would necessarily require the participation of OPG. He says wind developers in the region could get together and build a facility to share, or a single operator of a large wind farm may decide to pursue such a project alone.

"It doesn't have to be the big utilities," he says. "Commercializing it would depend simply on who wants to get into that business."

XCOR Testfires 5K18 Rocket Engine

This bit out by XCOR. Rather good news and anything else would have been viewed as a set back. They certainly have compiled an enviable track record in this sort of thing.

I have not seen much of the specs here but something is going right and obviously modern design engineering is able to do all this on the computer before anyone does something incredibly expensive.

I have felt for some time that the massive costs in this industry has preselected designs that minimized the gross weight to the detriment of good final design. The experience in the aircraft business reminds us amazingly that bigger is both better and actually easier.

I have often wondered if a large space frame could ease our road into space. Conventional jet engines could easily lift such a craft off the ground and ease it up into typical subsonic cruising altitudes. Ramjets could then lift the bird and increase the speed to optimals for high atmospheric flight, after which the herein described rocket engines could kick in and lift the craft into orbit. Three engine classes plus the kerosene demands a large craft. Yet a large craft would also have a large load capacity to work with. Obviously piggy backing on a 747 is a form of this strategy but is likely still too slow.

The key to this design strategy is to use air to approach the critical orbit injection zone where kicking in high trust engines will not tear the craft apart from buffeting. One may even be able to accept slow and high.

The point that I am making is that such a strategy can never be tackled with a small craft and too small engines. Bigger makes a lot of what I described a real possibility, but the economic demand to build small is likely keeping us on the ground.

December 17, 2008, Mojave, CA: XCOR Aerospace, Inc., announced today that it has successfully completed its first test fire of the rocket engine that will be used to power its Lynx suborbital launch vehicle to the edge of space.

The new engine, designated the 5K18, produces between 2500-2900 lbf thrust by burning a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene. The engine was fired Monday, December 15th, 2008 at XCOR’s rocket test facility located at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The first test of the engine was performed using pressure-fed propellants whereas the final version of the engine will be fed using XCOR’s proprietary cryogenic piston pump for liquid oxygen and a similar piston pump for kerosene

.“Today’s successful hot fire marks an important step forward in building the Lynx,” said XCOR CEO Jeff Greason. “The 5K18 builds on our previous experience in designing and building reliable, durable and fully reusable rocket engines from 15 lbf thrust up to 7500 lbf, that will make it possible to provide affordable access to space.”

During its nine years of existence, XCOR has conducted over 3,600 hot fires of rocket engines. During this time, XCOR has built, test-fired, and flown many different engines. The 5K18 is the eleventh engine design XCOR has built and fired. All have had perfect safety records. XCOR has not had a single lost time injury due to engine operations during its nine years of existence. It has also never seen one of its engines wear out, which is in marked contrast with the experience of most of the aerospace industry.

XCOR’s experience also includes building rocket-powered vehicles. The company has already developed and safely flown two generations of rocket-powered aircraft. Overall, the firm has flown these vehicles 66 times, and XCOR alone accounts for more than half of all manned rocket-powered flights in the 21st century. The Lynx will mark the company’s third rocket-powered vehicle, and the first designed for space access.

“Firing a new rocket engine is always an important milestone,” said COO Andrew Nelson. “It gives everyone on the team a tremendous sense of accomplishment and demonstrates to customers and investors that XCOR knows how to take new ideas and make them a reality.”

“The propulsion system is not only the hardest part of the launcher to design and build, it also determines every other aspect of the vehicle,” said XCOR CEO Jeff Greason. “The engine’s power and the amount and types of propellants it consumes determine the design and capabilities of the vehicle. There are examples in the aerospace industry where unforeseen problems forced a change of engines which then resulted in extensive redesigns of entire vehicles. By getting our rocket engines right from the beginning, XCOR reduces this type of risk.”

“XCOR’s revolutionary rocket engines are the heart of our vehicle design,” Nelson states. “They are a disruptive technology in the space launch industry because they make it possible to deliver payloads with much higher reliability, significantly shorter lead times and dramatically lower operating costs. Our safety-enhanced engines are also easier on the environment. They will make the Lynx a game-changer in the space launch industry.”

The Lynx will use four of the 5K18 engines to carry people or payloads to the edge of space. Earlier this month, XCOR announced that RocketShip Tours, of Phoenix, AZ, has begun sales of tickets for suborbital flights on the Lynx. Tickets will sell for $95,000. RocketShip Tours can be contacted via its website: www.RocketShipTours.com or phoned toll free at: 888-778-6877.

XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation located in Mojave, California. The company is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket-powered vehicles and propulsion systems that enable affordable access to space. Visit our website at http://www.xcor.com/