Personal Energy Sufficiency in Kenya

I dragged this item out of the Oil Drum and it is well worth sharing. We are sold on excessive consumption for the sake of consumption. And we get almost nothing back for it that at the end of the year but the demand to work harder.

There are certain truths that need to be listed.

1 It is possible to design and build a living space that is approaching energy neutral with the environment. I did not say it was easy, but passive design and excellent insulation catches most of it in bitter cold country and dose the same in arid hot country. Linked to a geothermal system and you are home free.

2 It is possible to properly link urban style and quality housing with modern agriculture to establish a fully symbiotic community environment that can become self sustaining. Yes we will have to modify a number of things, but the likely social reward is huge and reinforces the social contract imposed by a larger polity.


3 It is easy to dream that larger social structures are unnecessary, but that is simply not true. It takes a national polity to demand universal education and social discipline. That has to be supported and protected by the beneficiaries, who are granted freedom from personal exploitation by armed strangers. And no one in Africa should have any such illusions. The problem is more that we are still a long way from getting it right.

4 Our own society is struggling with the need to lower inherent costs of our own society. Very cheap energy has allowed wasteful methods to proliferate simply because they were convenient. It was convenient to buy cheap oil to operate tractors to produce corn by the ton. Now we need to convert corn stover into cellulose ethanol on the farm to fuel those same tractors in order to achieve the same productivity.


5 The best signal for all this is price, but price has been distorted in many places and his has retarded the transition to a broad cheap energy base. A energy floor of say $60.00 per barrel for oil equivalent and a rationing of imported energy would supercharge the North American energy conversion. Ending farm subsidies would translate some of that energy offshore to maximum effect. Anyway, I have said all this before.

This is a welcome reminder that it is in our power to live on this earth with a very modest footprint. The drive is on to do so and we are behooved to support it.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5282
I want to share an e-mail I received from a reader I know as Derek. His Oil Drum name is "Ndege" (Kiswahili for... Bird, Airplane, Helicopter, Airport, Butterfly, flying--one word covers quite a lot of related concepts). We had been corresponding about another matter, and I had sent him a link to this presentation I have given several times recently.

Gail,

Based on some experience, I have a 'feeling' that the doom we see coming will actually not result in real doom on the ground – after a period of severe adjusting, that is. At least, it mustn't really 'feel' like doom. Things could go 'bad' - and we still (many, many, many of us) could have not such a bad life after-all - including an economy with things (some) and food (less exotic).

There is this thought/observation/concept (of mine), and it might interest you. That's why I feel it's okay to take some of your time.

When I read the scenarios on The Oil Drum, I believe them. They make sense. Yet I feel there is something missing. Or, rather, some factor factoring in too much: the way we measure events and changes that we see coming, and how we consider them to be 'bad' or 'good'.

We merely measure them (as one always does, I guess) against the known constants of our own lives, our own known parameters for survival and happiness. But I have a feeling that by generalizing this, yes, by assuming that this is a necessary standard in the first place, we might be wrong. And, therefore, many (not all) of our fears may actually be much less justified. Not because that sort of envisioned change isn't coming - but because the change really won't 'feel' as bad as we now believe that it must.

I may have that feeling, because I also know a different set-up, one where, for a very large part, the standard of what to expect is not based on an oil-fueled society with all its trimmings.

You see, during the past 28 years, I have spent a lot of time in Kenya, where our family has a home.

What I experience there is a society that does pretty well with VERY little energy, all things considering. Mind you, not 'pretty well' by any standard of the Western world. But survival - and happiness! - are pretty much possible. Oddly, a first-time visitor would think, but, yes, even (I would say, especially) the Masai, who really live lives quite, well, horrible (in the eyes of Westerners) are very happy people (and wouldn't want to change a thing, basically. A solar cell to get some TV and the mobile charger, that's all).
It's the mindset that makes most Kenyans experience a happiness most Westerners would never consider to be possible given realities - as they see and experience them.

In Kenya, we do use electricity (hydro / diesel), if we can. We have constant power cuts. But that's not the only limit. In fact, the vast majority of us, even the so-called middle-class, build our lives around limits. Limits are the basis for every decision we make, business or otherwise. It is, you could say, a way of life that is happy when it is not done in - not unhappy if things go wrong (I am not sure that this makes sense).

People there - including me - celebrate every day that was a good day. And a good day is one where we got by. I would say, for 95% of Kenyans, life there is very much focused on the hour - and hardly ever on the future.

We are used to being very mindful of how to not waste water. Or anything, really! Things get mended and re-used and re-used. Still, even our - middle class - standard of living FEELS like it is much higher than even here in cozy Europe, where I spend about two-thirds of the year.

We - and our guests - do really feel much better 'down there' - despite lacking certain consumer- and other creature comfort. When we get a nice block of (imported) chocolate, it is something special (as, I guess, it should be). It tastes great. It's fun to share something like this with guests (and, please, we have a big house - 500 sq. meters - so we are not 'poor' nor are our guests. We just don't define happiness by the amount of shopping for consumer goods - and use of energy. There is a big limit of both: things to buy (shops are far away, Western-lifestyle-items are very expensive); and energy.

When you go to the towns and villages, except for the ever-present mobile phones, everything else is pretty much powered by people doing their work by hand (one way or another). The approach employs a great number of people (although, mainly 'outside the legal employment system'). Everyone I know (or see) is constantly busy doing something. Not very efficient by 'our' standards, everything takes a long time to get accomplished, but, well, people do stuff, which creates opportunities to survive.

The outcome is different in the respect that little energy is put into things that may be fun, but are not important in the end. We go for income that generates food. Not tons of toys or consumer-stuff. Buildings are build by hand - even our house was. Not with machines. I guess there was only a special saw used once when certain stones had to be cut perfectly (but we would have well survived without them stones cut like we wanted them to be cut). Everything else was done by hand, using ZERO energy.

Our house was built according to local tradition (for such Mzungu - white - houses). We don't need AC. Not even with 32 Celsius.

Credit is not really something that propels that part of the Kenyan economy that the vast majority depends on for its survival. It is people, social structures, give and take, barter on a certain level (I assist you with providing you with a certain contact/job; you return the favor - or else...). And it is - mostly - cash... wads of cash. All the time. It is a society that is extremely people-orientated, extremely network-reliant. And, when it comes to financial transactions, they are cash-based, even for big projects. Builders for the houses are paid in cash in most cases. When people buy cars, they pay in cash, mainly. And cars are expensive - they cost at least US$ 20.000 - even for a Toyota Corolla (that's why I don't have one; I use a taxi or public transport if I have to get someplace - as do most Kenyans).

I am not saying there aren't any problems there. In fact, there are many and they are huge. But they are related to a very basic human - and modern - (mis-)behavior. One: political leadership squandering resources, getting into debt for silly things (things 99% of Kenyans have no use for), constant in-fighting to sit at the source of power. The other: people making too many babies, which is a tradition, because there is not much else to do in the villages (I am serious) and because, up until recently, many of them died within the first year or so. (Some Kenyan cultures don't give names to their babies within the first year still to this day.) Except, since the onset of modernity (farming/medicine) many of these babies do make it, which, please don't get me wrong, is fine with me - I love children, but which puts obvious strains on resources. But, on the other hand, I have also been witness to a great many situations where people lost their children, cried for a week, and moved on, had new babies, weren't depressed - nor impressed (strangely; I am still not getting over this - but that's the way it is; again: different view on things in Kenya).

It is safe to say that Kenyans would use even less energy and yield much higher economic results where it matters for most of them if there were NO politicians, no political structures, at all (and no credit facilities). Most Kenyans get along not because of modern financial and social structures, but despite them. In Kenya, most of what we assume to be a modern society actually is a hindrance (because it is so corrupt and because it doesn't fuse well the traditional culture, which is group- and NOT AT ALL individual based). I am pretty sure you won't find a Kenyan believing otherwise.

I am writing this because I believe (well, know, actually) that what we consider to be a 'flourishing' economy mustn't be the standard to go by when judging whether we, as people, can live without fear of constant social meltdown - and without perceiving our lives to be happy ones.

I think the coming changes will hit different societies differently. Maybe European and American people will have to let go of much more (stuff) than we in Kenya. We really have very little to lose as it is. There is very little credit - internally - to unwind, and people aren't too attached to it in the first place, knowing how difficult it is to hold on to stuff - or people, really.

I wouldn't be surprised if what you called the 'bad option' for the future (new currency etc.) may actually, after only a surprising limited amount of time of re-adjusting, be the better option. Because, it seems to me, things have to shrink a LOT. And they will.

Because, at the end of the day, it is our lifestyle that is doing us in. Our desires, not our needs. Nor the amount of oil available or not (which was just a propellant that was used to build a certain kind of society, which is by no means the only kind possible).

Maybe, one day, someone will come up with something that is available indefinitely to provide an indefinite lifestyle for an indefinite number of people (I doubt it). But as long as that is not the case (or as soon as oil gets uneconomical), I guess different ways to survive and to make a living are going to take place - and are, as such - not at all bad, once we arrive at that point.

To go from here to there, the way it will happen, and the decrease in population so far sustained by a lot of cheap energy, that will be horrible. The loss of lives, that is the price that will have to be paid. Credit? Consumer goods? Nice to have, perhaps. But not that important, really, to have a nice day.

I am pretty sure that this unwinding of the market - and of populations - will take place rather quickly. And afterwards, maybe not on a personal level, but for societies, life can and will continue. And it won't necessarily be a bad life. It may be one that feels, at first, like waking up from a dream, where everyone went shopping for tons and tons of things with a credit card - and finding one-self in a reality where there is less stuff, less choice in supermarkets, less of everything, but where one still does all kinds of things (including surviving), also 'modern' things, using a lot less resources - and still having a laugh, friends, fun, joy.

I guess what I am trying to say is this: even if all you wrote comes true (and, I am damn sure it will; option 'B' that is), life mustn't necessarily be bad for those who can survive - which, I guess, will be all those countries with a food-surplus, or, roughly, enough food to hang on. Kenya can be one of those places (after a decrease of population, which, knowing Africa, would take place rather quickly). Especially since we produce food with a lot less oil-input than the so-called First World.

In other words... what we assume to be so bad (change of economy and lifestyle) will most likely prove to be quite okay once we get there - and live it.

Forgive my ramblings. Thought I should share. And thank you, thank you, thank you... for all the mind-expanding input you and your fellow contibutors made available to me on The Oil Drum!

Cheers,

Derek

Portugal's Successful Decriminalization

This program in Portugal is as close to a rational drug management program as I have yet seen. You start by transitioning the criminal addict to the health care system as a patient. And you do this for all forms of addictive drugs.

The one extra step that could be added is to permit prescription controlled access to the drugs in question in order to remove the third party supplier from the equation. The difficulty is that all medical practitioners have sworn oaths to do no harm and authorizing access to an addict is pretty hard to swallow however rational the reasons.

The immediate benefit is to eliminate the economic incentive to produce new addicts. Actual drug costs are so low now that most addicts have options.

In the first five years of the program Portugal has experienced a marked improvement that fully supports the arguments in favor of this approach.

I personally loathe chemical abuse in any form. I have a drink once a month to prove I am not a teetotaler. I respect mind and body way too much to play games with it.

That does not change the fact that drug addiction is a crippling difficult to treat disease normally induced by merchants to the gullible. The tobacco industry is the classic business model. Portugal is quite correct to continue to criminalize free lance pr0oduct marketing.

A thought: Smokers die ten years early thereby eliminating ten years of prime tax production. How does the tax loss through early death compare to the tax revenue through tobacco sales? This should be easy to calculate.

April 7, 2009

5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Street drug–related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes
By Brian Vastag

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization&sc=DD_20090408

DRUG PLAN: Portugal decriminalized the use and possession of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other illicit street drugs in an attempt to cut down on related deaths and infections

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs.

The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination." Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working."

He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it.

In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.

Agricultural Dawn in Upper Mississippi Valley

This item establishes the antiquity of agriculture in the Upper Mississippi Valley and it is noteworthy that corn is not on that list yet. Small barley and chenopods are seed sources whose productivity is surely hard won compared to most grains. Rather interesting however is that they exploited marsh elder which is a highly productive very sweet fruit that would lend itself well to drying. The berries are small and thus quick to dry out. They would be ideal for the production of pemmican.

Apparently wild ragweed was also exploited for seed. The domesticated form is known as amaranth. As an aside freshly sprouted ragweed four inches long and not yet producing a mature leaf provides the best spring greens for steaming. They should be produced commercially just like alfalfa sprouts. It is traditionally called lamb’s quarters.

We have forgotten how to use bottle gourds and the like in our cuisine but I recently got a good indication. The flesh is air dried and then smoke preserved. This can be then added to soups and stews as a flavoring agent as well as a food source. This also can be developed into a modern industry.

This describes a robust agriculture in the upper Mississippi valley beginning in the middle of the European Bronze Age and contemporaneous with the advent of copper mining just north around Lake Superior.

All this is early days in understanding the archeology of the Upper Mississippi Valley. A few sites are located and many have been ignored due to intellectual prejudice. It is reasonable to assume a high level of contact and inspiration between sites, and also reasonable to anticipate European contact influencing the rise of these site. Proving it is quite another matter.

Agricultural Clues of Early North American Civilization

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/complexagro.html

By Brandon Keim April 06, 2009 5:44:42 PMCategories: Agriculture, Archaeology

http://blog.wired.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2009/04/06/chenopods.jpg




North America's cradle of civilization can be traced 3,800 years back to the lower Illinois River valley.
It's there that archaeologists have found evidence of the continent's first so-called agricultural complex — a set of different crops, rather than a single domesticated plant species.

A rough biological analogue of an agricultural complex is a multicellular animal: It represents a higher level of both complexity and possibility, in which the ability to process more types of energy and better adapt to shifting environmental conditions.

As described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, molecular-scale imaging of botanical remains from the Riverton, Illinois archaeological site shows that at least five crops were harvested 3,800 years ago: bottle gourds, sunflowers, marsh elders and two varieties of chenopods (for seeds)(pictured at right).

http://www.cas.sc.edu/ANTH/gardening/ancientgardening.html#TheThreeSisters

for a better description of pre contact gardening.

Two other plants, the Cucurbita pepo squash and little barley, appear to have been consumed, though evidence of their domestication is not as clear.

Turn back the clock another 200 years, and no such complex is apparent.

The findings provide an early window into the dietary habits of the region, and could ultimately help anthropological sleuths trace a narrative of cultural evolution from hunter-gatherer to complex society.
In the meantime, they suggest the makings of a retro-historical Thanksgiving feast.

Citation: "Initial formation of an indigenous crop complex in eastern North America at 3800 B.P." By Bruce D. Smith and Richard A. Yarnell. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 14, April 6, 2009.

Image: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Greg Walden on Forest Practice

This letter helps elucidate the current interplay of stakeholders over forest practice and really shows us the workings of a headless committee with entrenched positions and no guidance as to best practice. Very much an interest argues his interest and extracts concessions from elected representatives who are rarely able to see other than short term financial interests.

That is exactly how we destroyed so much of our ecological heritage.

At the same time activists with their own agendas attempt to merely interfere with any economic process.

There is a crushing need to create a system of representation that is bound to the land itself and can speak to the interests of the land, one river valley at a time. A river valley needs it rivers to be protected and spared excessive damage. It needs to have its forests periodically burned over to maximize diversity and to allow maturation of high quality timber. Its agriculture needs to also be optimized. These are simple things if you are speaking for the valley, but complex if you are shaping a corn field or building a subdivision.

March 30, 2009
The President
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President,

While the entire country is reeling from the drastic downturn in the economy, few communities have been as hard hit as those in rural Oregon. As an example, in Oregon’s Crook, Grant and Harney counties, unemployment rates stand at 20.7 percent (the highest in the state), 18.0 percent and 20.5 percent (the second highest in the state), respectively. These communities are surrounded by vast federal timber lands, where little work is allowed in the forests.

The Oregon Employment Department conducted a study in 2007 following several mill closures in eastern Oregon and found that 200 jobs lost in eastern Oregon would have the same economic impact as 26,400 jobs lost in the Portland, Oregon area. When you lose your job in a rural, forested eastern Oregon community like Burns, Oregon, the next closest city is 130 miles away. That’s the same distance as between Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. There is no place to go. We need to put Oregonians back to work on the vast tracts of federal lands they neighbor.

While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided needed funding for forest thinning work, know that in one forest alone, the Malheur National Forest, at the current rate of treatment it will take about 25 years to deal with today’s excess biomass build up. As a result, we can expect more summers with catastrophic and costly fires. Enclosed please find a copy of a letter from Harney County Judge Steve Grasty to me and my colleagues that details that county’s plight and his call for specific help.

Today, 47 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget is spent fighting fire. Wildfires in the United States release an average of 290 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, which is equivalent to four to six percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Last week, the House approved the FLAME Act, which sets up a separate account within the Forest Service to pay for the cost of fighting larger fires. This week, the House Appropriations Committee will consider funding for the Forest Service. It is my hope that your administration will support separate funding for the FLAME Act, or grant emergency spending status to catastrophic fire fighting costs so that the Forest Service does not have to rob from its other accounts to pay for fire fighting.

I would also call on your administration to make full use of the expedited treatment authority within the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) as another way to both promptly reduce the threat of wildfire in our forests and put our people back to work. Please encourage the Forest Service to take full advantage whenever feasible of the HFRA authority.

Within the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act is legislation (the Forest Landscape Restoration Act) that grants the Forest Service the authority to identify landscape size treatment projects up to 50,000 acres. Given the vast federal forest lands in Oregon, I would encourage your administration to identify two such areas within my state. Our forests are in desperate need of attention, and this legislation is a good starting point.

Mr. President, right now the United States is the largest per-capita consumer of wood in the world, importing nearly 40 percent of our wood products from other countries that don’t care one bit about NEPA and other environmental reviews. In a April 1, 2007 story titled, “Corruption stains timber trade,” the Washington Post reported that, "at the current pace of cutting, natural forests in Indonesia and Burma —which send more than half their exported logs to China—will be exhausted within a decade…" China's manufacturers then process this wood, using coal-fired power plants that have no emissions controls. Afterwards, the manufactured wood products are shipped to the United States on diesel-powered ships.

Why does American policy encourage this when we could sustainably manage and utilize our forest resources under the protections of our environmental laws to ensure the survivability of our rural communities and lessen the outsourced wood trade’s impact on the atmosphere? American federal forest policy is not working for the ultimate benefit of forest health, the environment, or our rural communities.

I would encourage your administration to strengthen the green andsalvage sale programs so that our mills and the people who work forthem can count on a sustainable supply of logs in the Northwest.

I commend you for the statements you've made about the needs in our forests and rural communities and I urge you to utilize all the power of your office to get the appropriate agencies to rapidly supply timber for our remaining wood products mills and provide an abundance of forest biomass for renewable energy production. Time is of the essence as wildfire season is just around the corner. It's a very sad commentary that many communities consider the influx of firefighters during the summer months as the only economic stimulus they can rely on.

I look forward to working with you and your team to bring long-term economic stability to America’s forested communities.

Best regards,

Greg Walden

Member of Congress

Representative Greg Walden represents the Oregon’s Second Congressional District, which is composed of 20 counties in eastern, southern, and central Oregon. He is a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

Housing Market Floor

Again no one really gets it. Prices cannot be lowered to move inventory without the banks hugely expanding their losses. Right now they are working off what inventory the banks can finance and sell. They cannot lower prices anymore simply because it actually worsens their highly leveraged balanced sheet. Besides, they are unable to go back to the defaulting customers to make up those losses.

What is worse, if they decide to sell a few homes at a price ten percent below current appraisal to realize the cash recovery, the remaining 20,000 homes in this case are marked to market and the banks take a massive hit on their capital in addition to what has already been written down.

Right now the banks will be picking up problem sales to prevent any price lowering. This is what it really means to be a zombie bank.

They can only hope that a recovering economy will eventually burn off this entire inventory and that they can keep the price structure intact while this occurs.

In the meantime, fear mongers are pointing out that an even greater pool of foreclosures will be joining this pool and that it will take another two years to get the complete picture.

And once again there is a solution by using an equity take out to refinance a portion of the property through altering the foreclosure laws. But who is listening? The hard way is surely much more fun.

Banks aren't reselling many foreclosed homes

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

A vast "shadow inventory" of foreclosed homes that banks are holding off the market could wreak havoc with the already battered real estate sector, industry observers say.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2009/04/08/MNL516UG90.DTL&o=0


Lenders nationwide are sitting on hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes that they have not resold or listed for sale, according to numerous data sources. And foreclosures, which banks unload at fire-sale prices, are a major factor driving home values down.

"We believe there are in the neighborhood of 600,000 properties nationwide that banks have repossessed but not put on the market," said Rick Sharga, vice president of RealtyTrac, which compiles nationwide statistics on foreclosures. "California probably represents 80,000 of those homes. It could be disastrous if the banks suddenly flooded the market with those distressed properties. You'd have further depreciation and carnage."

In a recent study, RealtyTrac compared its database of bank-repossessed homes to MLS listings of for-sale homes in four states, including California. It found a significant disparity - only 30 percent of the foreclosures were listed for sale in the Multiple Listing Service. The remainder is known in the industry as "shadow inventory."

"There is a real danger that there is much more (foreclosure) inventory than we are measuring," said Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Moody's Economy.com in Pennsylvania. "Eventually those homes will have to be dealt with. If they're all put on the market, that will add more inventory to an already bloated market and drive down home prices even more."

More than one-third locally

In the Bay Area, a Chronicle analysis of data from San Diego's MDA DataQuick shows that more than one-third of foreclosures are in shadow territory - that is, they are not registering in county records as having been resold.

For the 26 months from January 2007 through February 2009, banks repossessed 51,602 homes and condos in the nine-county Bay Area, according to DataQuick. Yet in the same period, only 30,823 foreclosures were resold, leaving about 20,000 bank repos unaccounted for.

Turnaround usually quick

Realtors say foreclosures generally go on the market a month or two after the bank takes title and then sell fairly quickly, often getting an accepted offer within a week or two of being listed and then closing escrow within 30 days. That means that foreclosures should register as being resold within three months.

But taking the foreclosures in any given month or selection of months and looking at what happened three months later also reveals a big gap between what banks took back and what they resold.

Tom Kelly, a spokesman for banking giant Chase in Chicago, said the bank sells foreclosed homes in a timely fashion.

"We try not to be in the business of owning homes," he said. "Our goal is to get them back on the market as quickly as possible. We want to maximize what we sell them for and yet do it quickly."

Kelly was at a loss to explain the shadow inventory phenomenon other than the quantities involved.

"The inventory might be growing because there is just a lot of volume coming in. That would not surprise me," he said.

Locally, the monthly number of foreclosures has decreased since peaking at 4,321 in August 2007. That has allowed foreclosure resales to start closing the gap.

Most observers say the recent fall-off in foreclosures came because California and many banks implemented foreclosure moratoriums in the fall, not because the problem has diminished.

Only 65.5 percent resold

A second DataQuick study of all Bay Area homes repossessed by banks in the 18 months ending January 2009 tracked how many of those homes had resold by mid-March. It found that 65.5 percent had resold. Discovery Bay's ForeclosureRadar.com compared its database of Bay Area foreclosures to MLS listings for the past 120 days and found that fewer than one-fifth of the foreclosures showed up as for-sale listings.

"Foreclosure numbers are artificially depressed," said CEO Sean O'Toole. He puts California's shadow inventory at about 100,000 homes.

So why aren't banks selling off their foreclosures?

Observers say several factors are at work.

-- The "pig in the python": Digesting all those foreclosures takes awhile. It's time-consuming to get a home vacant, clean and ready for sale. "The system is overwhelmed by the volume," Sharga said. "In a normal market, there are 160,000 (foreclosures for sale nationwide) over the course of a year. Right now, there are about 80,000 every month."

-- Accounting sleight-of-hand: Lenders could be deferring sales to put off having to acknowledge the actual extent of their loss. "With banks in the stress they're in, I don't think they're anxious to show losses in assets on their balance sheets," O'Toole said.

-- Slowing the free-fall: Banks might be strategically holding back some foreclosures so prices don't fall as fast. "They want to be careful about not releasing them too quickly so they don't drive prices down and hurt the values," O'Toole said.

Besides the shadow foreclosures, yet another wave of distressed properties is in the pipeline. These are homes with delinquent payments for which the banks appear to be prolonging the foreclosure process.

Some of that could be because they're negotiating with homeowners about loan modifications or other ways to keep them in the home. But banks also could be deliberately foot-dragging for the same three reasons listed above.

"The problem is that no one knows how extensive (the shadow inventory) is," said Patrick Newport, U.S. economist with the Massachusetts research firm Global Insight. "It's a wild card. If it's a really big number, you'll see prices drop a lot more and deeper problems for the financial system."

Missing foreclosures

Only 65.5 percent of all Bay Area homes repossessed by banks in the 18 months ended January 2009 had been resold by mid-March. This study looked at the same homes over time, not an aggregate of all foreclosures.

County % foreclosures resold % foreclosures unsold
Alameda 58.6% 41.4%
Contra Costa 69.8% 30.2%
Marin 66.9% 33.1%
Napa 66.0% 34.0%
San Francisco 49.8% 50.2%
San Mateo 61.5% 38.5%
Santa Clara 62.0% 38.0%
Solano 67.5% 32.5%
Sonoma 75.3% 24.7%
Bay Area 65.5% 34.5%

Source: MDA DataQuick

Morano Opens ClimateDepot.com

Marc Morano is moving his efforts to propagate reports and news that challenges the global warming lobby to a private website titled ClimateDepot.com. He has been a thorn in the side of the GW lobby while operating out of Senator’s Inhofe’s office and promises to continue the assault.

The GW lobby has been very good a suppressing dissention to their theory and has certainly dissuaded many scientists from entering the fray while promoting ample budget support from those prepared to publish the party line. Good science becomes very difficult in the face of a powerful lobby. Remember the tobacco industry?

Morano has made their game difficult to sustain, particularly as good science is emerging that totally challenges the lobby. Time is vindicating him.

Time may have proved him wrong, but he still helped create an environment in which proper science could be conducted. Imagine a world in which the only reports on tobacco had to be vetted by the tobacco industry.

That is why I am offended when efforts are made by proponents to suppress the opposition. Every good theory needs in its early days a vigorous opposition to encourage real work to prove the opposition’s case.
A good example of this is my conjecture on crustal shift recently reposted upon. I have argued the resolution of the principle objections to the conjecture and am satisfied that I am on the right track. That does not mean that I have covered every possible issue. That is impossible. But right now, the conjecture is best advanced by an open debate in which objectors try to flaw the arguments. If this leads to a full debate by all likely participants, we are likely to arrive at a new consensus or a previously unidentified objection that needs to be resolved. This is great science in the making.

None of this is possible without a heated debate that draws everyone to the flame of truth.

This article appeared in print on April 10, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/us/politics/10morano.html?_r=1&ref=us

April 10, 2009

Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
WASHINGTON — Marc Morano does not think global warming is anything to worry about, and he brags about his confrontations with those who do.

For example, Mr. Morano said he once spotted former Vice President Al Gore on an airplane returning from a climate conference in Bali. Mr. Gore was posing for photos with well-wishers, and Mr. Morano said he had asked if he, too, could have his picture taken with Mr. Gore.

He refused, Mr. Morano said.

“You attack me all the time,” Mr. Gore said, according to Mr. Morano.

“Yes, we do,” Mr. Morano said he had replied.

Mr. Gore’s office said Mr. Gore had no memory of the encounter. Mr. Morano does not care. He tells the story anyway.

As a spokesman for Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Morano was for years a ceaseless purveyor of the dissenting view on climate change, sending out a blizzard of e-mail to journalists covering the issue. Now, with Congress debating legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions, Mr. Morano is hoping to have an even greater impact. He has left his job with Mr. Inhofe to start his own Web site, ClimateDepot.com.

The site, scheduled to debut this week, will be a “one-stop shop” for anyone following climate change, Mr. Morano says. He will post research he thinks the public should see, as well as reported video segments and ratings of environmental journalists.

Supporters see Mr. Morano as a crucial organizing force who has taken diffuse pieces of scientific research and fused them into a political battering ram.

“Before Marc, efforts to debunk global warming were scattered and disorganized,” said John Coleman, a weather broadcaster who helped found the Weather Channel and who has called global warming “a scam.”

And environmentalists and mainstream climate scientists, however much they disagree with Mr. Morano’s views, still pay attention to what he does.
Kert Davies, the research director of Greenpeace, said he would like to dismiss Mr. Morano as irrelevant, but could not.

“He is relentless pushing out misinformation,” Mr. Davies said. “In denying the urgency of the problem, he definitely slows things down on the regulatory front. Eventually, he will be held accountable, but it may be too late.”

In his work with Mr. Inhofe, Mr. Morano, whose thick build fills out his suit like a bulldog in a restraining jacket, did not hesitate to go after journalists he saw as biased. He promoted any study or statement that could be construed as cutting against the prevailing view that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide contribute to global warming. Peter Dykstra, a former executive producer for CNN’s science, environment and technology unit, recently called him the “drum major of the denial parade.”

Mr. Morano may be best known for compiling a report listing hundreds of scientists whose work he says undermines the consensus on global warming.

But environmental advocates and bloggers say that many of those listed as scientists have no scientific credentials and that their work persuaded no one not already ideologically committed.

Mr. Morano’s new Web site is being financed by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues.

Craig Rucker, a co-founder of the organization, said the committee got about a third of its money from other foundations. But Mr. Rucker would not identify them or say how much his foundation would pay Mr. Morano. (Mr. Morano says it will be more than the $134,000 he earned annually in the Senate.)

Public tax filings for 2003-7 — the last five years for which documents are available — show that the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the ExxonMobil Foundation and from foundations associated with the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime financer of conservative causes best known for its efforts to have President Bill Clinton impeached. Mr. Rucker said Exxon had not contributed anything last year.
Mr. Morano grew up in a conservative household in Northern Virginia with an affinity for nature and animals — his basement was home to a menagerie of reptiles, including a boa constrictor.
“I used to tell people I was Republican except on the environment,” he said.
After college, Mr. Morano worked as a reporter for Rush Limbaugh, where he said he had learned the satisfactions of poking at the “liberal establishment.” He made a documentary on the Amazon rain forest, he said, because it annoyed him that celebrities like Sting could dictate what people think about the issue. They vastly exaggerated the problem of deforestation, he concluded.
He then jumped to Cyber News Service, where he was the first to publish accusations from Vietnam Swift-boat veterans that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, then the Democratic presidential nominee, had glorified his war record. Many of the accusations later proved unfounded.
Mr. Morano is proud of his work, which he says is not advocacy but truth seeking.
“Even in the Senate, I’d put up any of the stories we did against any pablum Time or Newsweek has put out on global warming,” he said. “We’d link to the other side; we’d present their arguments. They do one-sided screeds.”
In 2007, he points out, the Republican Web site of Mr. Inhofe’s committee won an award from the independent Congressional Management Foundation.
But some scientists and environmental advocates who have made it their business to monitor Mr. Morano see his reports — the most recent was titled “More than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims” — as far from balanced.
Kevin Grandia, who manages Desmogblog.com, which describes itself as dedicated to combating misinformation on climate change, says the report is filled with so-called experts who are really weather broadcasters and others without advanced degrees.
Chris Allen, for example, the weather director for WBKO-TV in Kentucky, is listed as a meteorologist on the report, even though he has no degree in meteorology. On his Web site, Mr. Allen has written that his major objection to the idea of human-influenced climate change is that “it completely takes God out of the picture.” Mr. Allen did not respond to phone calls.
Mr. Grandia also said Mr. Morano’s report misrepresented the work of legitimate scientists. Mr. Grandia pointed to Steve Rayner, a professor at Oxford, who was mentioned for articles criticizing the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on curbing carbon dioxide emissions.
Dr. Rayner, however, in no way disputes the existence of global warming or that human activity contributes to it, as the report implies. In e-mail messages, he said that he had asked to be removed from the Morano report and that a staff member in Mr. Inhofe’s office had promised that he would be. He called his inclusion on the list “quite outrageous.”
Asked about Dr. Rayner, Mr. Morano was unmoved. He said that he had no record of Dr. Rayner’s asking to be removed from the list and that the doctor must be “not to be remembering this clearly.”
Many scientists, Mr. Morano said, are afraid that appearing on the list will have political fallout.
And political fallout, for him, is the point.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 10, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.

Lagrange Point Look See

In a way I am surprised that this particular mission was not undertaken decades ago. It is the one place near Earth that might hold material that has been captured for millions of years and held in one locale.

In time the better L4 and L5 spots will be those associated with Jupiter. these are less likely to have been disturbed.

Of course that likilhood of disturbance would have made me skeptical of success and that surely explains the tardiness getting there.

Anyway, the look see is now underway and material ibeen detected, but insufficient to act as an attractor. This suggests the the region is likely to be 'dirty'. I suppose we should anticipaqte low velocity hits during this passage. Of course the solar wind may be ample to cleanse the system.

anyway we can look forward to a detailed report.

STEREO Hunts for Remains of an Ancient Planet near Earth

04.09.2009
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/09apr_theia.htm?list1109684

April 9, 2009: NASA's twin STEREO probes are entering a mysterious region of space to look for remains of an ancient planet which once orbited the Sun not far from Earth. If they find anything, it could solve a major puzzle--the origin of the Moon.

"The name of the planet is Theia," says Mike Kaiser, STEREO project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "It's a hypothetical world. We've never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago—and that it collided with Earth to form the Moon."

Right: An artist's concept of one of the STEREO spacecraft

The "Theia hypothesis" is a brainchild of Princeton theorists Edward Belbruno and Richard Gott. It starts with the popular Great Impact theory of the Moon's origin. Many astronomers hold that in the formative years of the solar system, a Mars-sized protoplanet crashed into Earth. Debris from the collision, a mixture of material from both bodies, spun out into Earth orbit and coalesced into the Moon. This scenario explains many aspects of lunar geology including the size of the Moon's core and the density and isotopic composition of moon rocks.

It's a good theory, but it leaves one awkward question unanswered: Where did the enormous protoplanet come from?

Belbruno and Gott believe it came from a Sun-Earth Lagrange point.

Sun-Earth Lagrange points are regions of space where the pull of the Sun and Earth combine to form a "gravitational well." The flotsam of space tends to gather there much as water gathers at the bottom of a well on Earth. 18th-century mathematician Josef Lagrange proved that there are five such wells in the Sun-Earth system: L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5 located as shown in the diagram below.

When the solar system was young, Lagrange points were populated mainly by planetesimals, the asteroid-sized building blocks of planets.

Belbruno and Gott suggest that in one of the Lagrange points, L4 or L5, the planetesimals assembled themselves into Theia, nicknamed after the mythological Greek Titan who gave birth to the Moon goddess Selene.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/theia/lagrangepoints_strip.jpg


Above: Sun-Earth Lagrange points. The STEREO probes are about to pass through L4 and L5. Solar observatories often park themselves at L1 while deep space observatories prefer L2. [more]

"Their computer models show that Theia could have grown large enough to produce the Moon if it formed in the L4 or L5 regions, where the balance of forces allowed enough material to accumulate," says Kaiser. "Later, Theia would have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth."

If this idea is correct, Theia itself is long gone, but some of the ancient planetesimals that failed to join Theia may still be lingering at L4 or L5.
"The STEREO probes are entering these regions of space now," says Kaiser. "This puts us in a good position to search for Theia's asteroid-sized leftovers."

Just call them "Theiasteroids."

Astronomers have looked for Theiasteroids before using telescopes on Earth, and found nothing, but their results only rule out kilometer-sized objects. By actually entering L4 and L5, STEREO will be able to hunt for much smaller bodies at relatively close range.

Right: This dynamical simulation shows how asteroids linger in the gravitational well of a Lagrange point of the Sun-Jupiter system. The principle of Sun-Earth Lagrange points is the same. Credit: Prof. Aldo Vitagliano/SOLEX.

"The search actually began last month when both spacecraft rolled 180 degrees so that they could take a series of 2-hour exposures of the general L4/L5 areas. In the first sets of images, amateur astronomers found some known asteroids and new comet Itagaki was imaged just a couple of days after the announcement of its discovery. No Theiasteroids however."

Hunting for Theiasteroids is not STEREO's primary mission, he points out. "STEREO is a solar observatory. The two probes are flanking the sun on opposite sides to gain a 3D view of solar activity. We just happen to be passing through the L4 and L5 Lagrange points en route. This is purely bonus science."

"We might not see anything," he continues, "but if we discover lots of asteroids around L4 or L5, it could lead to a mission to analyze the composition of these asteroids in detail. If that mission discovers the asteroids have the same composition as the Earth and Moon, it will support Belbruno and Gott's version of the giant impact theory."

The search will continue for many months to come. Lagrange points are not infinitesimal points in space; they are broad regions 50 million kilometers wide. The STEREO probes are only in the outskirts now. Closest approach to the bottoms of the gravitational wells comes in Sept-Oct. 2009. "We have a lot of observing ahead of us," notes Kaiser.

Readers, you may be able to help. The STEREO team is inviting the public to participate in the search by scrutinizing photos as they come in from the spacecraft. If you see a dot of light moving with respect to the stars, you may have found a Theiasteroid. Links to the data and further instructions may be found at sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil.

Let the hunt begin!

Mokele Mbembe Sauropod of the Congo

A few weeks ago I was surprised to come across reports on the Burrunjor in Australia, an apparent member of the theropod family which is the same as Tyrannosaurus Rex. This opened my eyes to the prospective ecological niche. It is a swamp based carnivore that dines on crocodiles primarily.

This begged the question regarding the thousands of reports of the existence of members of the plesiosaur and sauropod families. This article describes our knowledge of the members of the family who apparently live still in the Congo.

I first heard of the Makele – Mbembe forty years ago and it was based on a couple of reports at best. Since then the number of reports have filled out and became much more convincing.

What I find most convincing is that all such dawn creatures observed so far are associated with much the same biological niche. This is primarily swamp lands that are also homes to that other survivor, the crocodile. It seems that if the croc could survive the great extinctions, then its cohabiters also had a chance.

The theropods clearly shared the same environment and are thus not such a surprise when observed in Australia. The plesiosaur like creature or its swamp cousin the sauropod is also a natural survivor. The sauropod is a plant eater and surely consumes the like of the water hyacinth which is ample for such a plant eater. The plants would also provide ample cover.

I also return to another issue. All these animals are nocturnal although the sauropod is observed feeding in the late afternoon while active at night. That is one reason that they are so rarely observed. And no I do not plan to spend nights in the middle of a mosquito and snake infested swamp sitting in a flimsy blind hoping to get lucky.

Most important in terms of normal observation is the fact that these creatures operate in swamps and rivers with dense vegetation. This is where humanity is least likely to be operating and certainly that is true in modern times.

Reading between the lines, I would suggest that these creatures are soon emerging into the media spotlight. Neither the Australian theropod nor the Congo sauropod represents a difficult capture scenario or photograph scenario. They are not cunning and wary like the more famous Bigfoot or Sasquatch which is surely as smart as any human hunter gatherer and has been clearly shy of allowing itself to linger in contact.

Rather it behaves just like us upon meeting a grizzly bear.

These lizards do not show such behavior but hang around in contact. I believe that either capturing or photographing the theropod is feasible using obvious strategies and that this attached article unless fabricated, practically gives us the street address of the sauropods.


The pleisosaur has been observed in the ocean but the question of their ecological niche is conjectural. We assume fish eating. We also do not understand how they breathe, or at least I do not. If they behaved as whales, they would have been available for inspection every day. That is not the case. Gills may be possible and they seem to be deep ocean swimmers perhaps working bottom fish. Otherwise, we know nothing.

Mokele-mbembe: a dinosaur of Africa?

by Phillip O'Donnell


http://www.livingdinos.com/mokele_mbembe.html

It was 1986, Rory Nugent and his expedition party were out in the world's largest unexplored swamp on earth, the Likouala Swamp of Africa. While near Lake Tele he saw a long, thin neck come up out of the water, like that of a dinosaur. Rory imediately took two photographs and quickly got in his canoe, but his native guides stopped him at gunpoint and siad," He (the creature) would have killed us all..."



Over the last 100 years, evidence has accumulated that sauropod dinosaurs may still be roaming the vast, unexplored regions of the African swamp and jungle. Places like Nigeria, Congo, Angola, Gabon, and Cameroon have similar reports of huge, long-necked monsters, some with a length of 75 feet! Native sightings have been confirmed by reports from missionaries, explorers, and even army personnel. The natives in the Congo region call this creature “Mokele-mbembe” (the one who stops the flow of rivers). This creature is said to possess a long neck and tail, small head, large body, and four legs. They say the animal is very aggressive when disturbed and will bite and lash its tail at you when it is tipping over canoes, killing elephants or hippos. It is herbivorous (plant-eater) and enjoys eating very large amounts of the Malombo fruit that grows on vines at the edge of the rivers. Tracks from this creature range from 1 to 3 feet wide and are spaced 7 to 8 feet apart. It has no hair and it’s skin is very smooth. Dr. Bill Gibbons and Dr. Roy Mackal have done much research on Mokele-mbembe and without their work, little would be known about it.



At Lake Tele in 1983, Marcellin Agnaga was on an expedition when he said he saw Mokele-mbembe swimming in the lake. The creature was half-way out of the water and he could see it’s head, neck, and part of its body. His sketch resembles a sauropod dinosaur. He got his camera and began filming, but left the lens cap on and lost all proof of his encounter.


In a nearby part of Africa called Cameroon, there is another creature called Le’Kela-mbembe. It is said to grow around 70 feet in length and will eat the leaves from the Esem Tree. Dr. Bill Gibbons has done over twenty years of research on Mokele-mbembes and has discovered that Le’Kela-mbembes are actually mature Mokele-mbembes that migrate into Cameroon to mate (in September) and later return to the Congo to give birth to live young. Bill Gibbons discovered also that it will dig tunnels or caves on the shores of rivers. It mostly eats between 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. and is active at night. An expedition in 2003, confirmed that the Le’Kela-mbembe has a height of up to 18 feet by finding trees with all their branches eaten off up to a height of 18 feet. They also found tracks and a cave that had been sealed partly from the inside with mud. One biologist named Peter Beach could hear scratching sounds inside the cave. As the noises became louder it was evident that what ever was inside the cave was digging it’s way out towards them. One member of the expedition named Pierre feared for their lives and they quickly left, since an adult Mokele-mbembe can be very dangerous if disturbed at close range.


S. Arrey was housing some British soldiers in 1948 near Lake Barombi in Northern Cameroon. While he and some others were swimming in the lake, something broke through the surface of the water. In a very short time everyone was out of the water. They observed two giant reptiles coming out of the water. The larger one had a longer neck (about 15 feet long) and a spike or horn on it’s head that the smaller one did not have. Their skin was not smooth, but rather scaly.


Please note that the natives who see these creatures are not afraid to tell others what they have seen because they haven’t been taught about evolution, and do not know that dinosaurs were suppose to have been extinct millions of years ago. I feel the theory of evolution actually hinders the discovery of animals thought to be extinct. When the school text-books teach about the history of dinosaurs, why don’t they mention there is a strong possibility they might still be living? Because of this unproven theory, people are hesitant to tell anyone when they see dinosaurs like the Loch Ness Monster or Mokele-mbembe for fear of what people might think.



Here is some recently contributed information by David Woetzel (who has done expeditions in search of Mokele-mbembe):



1.) The older 20-45 ft long creatures live and mate in the Dja and maybe the Sangha rivers. These mature MM's (Mokele-mbembe) have very tough scales, like the back of a crocodile. Also like a croc, their underbelly is much softer. Their coloration is a dulled brownish gray.


2.) The younger creatures live in the Likouala swamp region. Their scales are softer and their colors are a more vivid reddish-brown. They're probably more skittish then their older counterparts.


3.) This sharp contrast in areas by age suggests a migration that only happens once in their lives (although the mother likely goes with its offspring to take them to the swamp).
4.) Their birth instincts are peculiar and vague. The native people say the MM gives birth to live young every 20 years. This is not a trait likely in reptiles, maybe the people their have it wrong because they are not able to find a nest site (some nests have been found) for how territorial these animals are they likely guard their nests very aggressively. They would likely kill anyone that gets close enough to see the eggs.


5.) No matter what, the mother's birth migration probably happens 1 of 2 ways. They either migrate to the swamp and lay eggs (or give birth) there, or they lay their eggs along the river and the mother and offspring go to the swamp together. I'm in favor of that idea because the nests are found along the rivers and the only time more than one MM is seen is when it is with its mother (according to the natives).


6.) The mother remains with her offspring for about a year (it may use this time to take the baby to the swamp and prepare it for life on its own)


7.) The adult male has a shorter neck but it also has a spiky back, and the female has a longer neck without the spikes.


8.) The young all have dermal ridges.



Someone from the internet recently told me about these sightings from people in Africa:

Witness: Doreen
Date: unknown
Place: Congo
Observed: A creature like a giant elephant, with a long tail and a long, snake-like neck. It appeared to be about 30 feet long.


Witness: Ama
Date: October, 2003
Place: Congo
Observed: A snake-like creature that had an elephant-like body. It’s neck was around ten feet long and had a tail about fifteen to twenty feet long. It appeared to be around forty feet in length.

Power Grid Backbone

I have been alluding to this issue for a long time and here we have a survey article about the need for an extensive national and continental grid. The customers are always somewhere else than were the power is best produced.
Not only does the grid need to be fully built out but it needs to be robustly built out so that there are multiple routes available to move power around. Everyone sees value in moving power from the Dakotas to Chicago, but it also needs to be linked to Alberta and Denver.

At the same time preparation should also be make for industrial scaled energy storage, since the emergence of viable protocols are eminent.

A combination of storage and low loss transmission will make the system very efficient.

This may be just in time to support the massive increase in demand driven by the replacement of gasoline with electricity in the personal transportation business.

Giving the Power Grid Some Backbone

The U.S. needs a high-voltage transmission system to deliver plentiful energy from wind and sunshine to power-hungry cities. At least one plan has emerged

By Matthew L. Wald
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=giving-the-power-grid-some-backbone&sc=DD_20090407

A stiff wind blows year-round in North Dakota. In Arizona the sun beats down virtually every day. The U.S. has vast quantities of renewable electricity sources waiting to be tapped in these regions, but what it does not have there are power lines—big power lines that can carry the bountiful energy to distant cities and industries where it is needed.

The same is true beyond the windswept high plains and the sun-baked Mojave Desert: renewable supply and electricity demand are seldom in the same place, and too often the transmission lines needed to connect them are missing. The disparity exists even in New England, where hundreds of miles of high-tension wires supported by thousands of steel towers run neatly through dense areas of settlement. When Gordon Van Wiele, chief executive of ISO New England—in charge of transmission in the six-state region—unfurls a map of the land there, large ovals show the location of the best wind sites: Vermont near the Quebec border and eastern Maine spilling over into New Brunswick. But sure enough, no transmission lines tran­sect them.

The U.S. has the natural resources, the technology and the capital to make a massive shift to renewable energy, a step that would lower emissions of greenhouse gases and smog-forming pollutants from coal-fired power plants while also freeing up natural gas for better uses. Missing is a high-voltage transmission backbone to make that future a reality. In some places, wind power, still in its infancy, is already running up against the grid’s limits. “Most of the potential for renewable resources tends to be in places where we don’t have robust existing transmission infrastructure,” Van Wiele says. Instead, for decades electric companies have built coal, nuclear, natural gas and oil-fired generators close to customers.

That strategy worked reasonably well until recently, when 28 state governments set “renewable portfolio standards” requiring their utilities to supply a certain portion of their electricity using renewables, such as 20 percent by 2020 or even sooner. But as Kurt E. Yeager, former president of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., points out, such standards “aren’t worth the paper they’re written on until we have a power system, a grid, that is capable of assimilating that intermittent energy without having to build large quantities of backup power, fossil-fueled, to enable it.”

In Colorado the utility that serves most of the state, Xcel Energy, is now building a megawatt of natural gas capacity for every megawatt of wind so that it is ready to come online quickly to provide power when the wind tails off. That plan is a carbon improvement but not really a carbon solution. The U.S. needs a new transmission backbone that crisscrosses the country, knitting together many large wind farms, solar-energy fields, geothermal pools, hydroelectric generators and other alternative sources.

One utility company has already unveiled a grand plan for the U.S., and other experts are charting their own backbone schemes. But whichever one might prevail will require a lot of money and a lot of coordination across what are now independent areas of technological and political control.

Bottlenecks Would Benefit, Too

Even before the emphasis on climate change, reasons were mounting to remake the grid. Chief among them are bottlenecks that stifle the flow of power.

North America is actually covered by four regional grids (three of which serve the U.S.). The largest is the Eastern Interconnection, an extensive complex of transmission lines that stretches from Halifax to New Orleans, with substations that step down the high-voltage electricity to lower levels so that it can be distributed locally along smaller wires. West of the Rockies is the Western Interconnection, from British Columbia to San Diego and a small slice of Mexico. Texas, in an echo of its history as an independent republic, comprises its own grid, now called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. And Quebec, with its separatist undercurrent, also has its own grid. The high-voltage transmission systems in the four regions comprise about 200,000 miles of power lines, divided among a staggering 500 owners, that carry current from more than 10,000 power plants run by about 6,000 investor-owned utilities, public power systems and co-ops.

The four interconnections are linked by short, high-voltage lines, but they do not provide nearly enough capacity to move sufficient power back and forth, much less to handle the additional burden of thousands of renewable sources with output that is intermittent and sometimes hard to predict. Transmission lines within the interconnections are similarly inadequate, strained by the ever increasing demand for electricity. As a result, the entire grid is more prone to blackouts.

“The transmission system is being used closer to its limits more of the time than at any time in the past,” says Rick Sergel, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets operating standards for the system in the U.S. and parts of Canada. Restructuring of the electric industry has also created many more dispersed buyers and sellers, but the conduit to connect them has barely changed.

Transmission is not faring well even within the footprint of a single large utility. Take American Electric Power (AEP), which serves a broad swath of the nation’s midsection. Throughout the 1980s a key high-voltage link near the center of its system operated like an occluded artery. The bottleneck ran between two places most electricity users have never heard of: Kanawha, Va., and Matt Funk, W.Va. At times the line hobbled the entire system, limiting transfer of abundant, cheap electricity from dozens of coal plants in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio to the hungry markets of the East Coast, which had to rely instead on local generators fueled by more expensive natural gas or oil.

The line was rated as high as the industry goes—a 765-kilovolt leviathan with towers 13 stories high, straddling a right-of-way 200 feet wide. But it was usually limited to carrying less than half of its capacity because of the grid’s design. The electric system always has to be operated so that no single line failure will start a cascade of failures that would lead to a blackout. If the Kanawha–Matt Funk line tripped out of service at full load, it could send a wave of power flowing to a parallel but smaller line rated at only 345 kilovolts. That line would be knocked out, and a cascade might follow.

The occlusion started in the 1980s, when for a few hours every year limits on the line prevented interregional transfers of power that would have saved consumers money. Instead new power plants had to be built or existing plants that were expensive to run were kept on when, economically speaking, they should have been shut. By 1990 the hours ran into the hundreds, and AEP reached for the obvious cure: it decided to erect a parallel line, also rated at 765 kilovolts.

On paper the project was straightforward. The company already had decades of experience operating about 2,000 miles of such lines. And construction took a modest 30 months. The new line, which cost $306 million, finally entered service in June 2006. But that came after 14 years of work to get the permits from all kinds of jurisdictions that ruled part of the route, including two states and the U.S. Forest Service.

It is even more numbing to consider that in this case the entity that wanted to build the line was the same one that wanted to send power across it. Now consider the more typical situation—in which a power producer is trying to persuade another company to build transmission—and the prospect becomes even more complicated. During the past two decades very little transmission capacity has been built. Seventy percent of the existing high-­voltage system is consequently 25 years old or more, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A Grand Plan
The electric system undergirds nearly every aspect of modern life, from water supplies and steel mills to traffic lights and the Internet. Although we think of it as a national institution, it is virtually a feudal system among those 500 owners. Control of the power flow is also balkanized among dozens of jurisdictions, an artifact of the grid’s history; it grew together from many small systems and local regulators that to this day are not melded

Frustrated by internal complications such as the Kanawha–Matt Funk line, AEP last year teamed up with the DOE to rethink the grid for the whole country. The result—part of the DOE’s exploration of how to get 20 percent of U.S. electricity from wind by 2030—was a plan for a national, high-voltage transmission backbone. The 22,000-mile system would be to electricity what the interstate highway system is to transportation, enabling a different kind of energy economy suited for a carbon-conscious era.

The plan would not extend today’s transmission system, which often operates at no higher than 345 kilovolts. Rather it would be superimposed over it, with various on- and off-ramps. The backbone would move power across the continent at the extreme high-voltage rating: 765 kilovolts, which would reduce typical system losses of 3 to 8 percent to around 1 percent. The higher voltage would also require fewer lines than any lower-voltage option, meaning less real estate for rights-of-way.

To further decrease losses, some long stretches would use direct current, instead of the usual alternating current that most of the system—and virtually all households and businesses—run on. Although direct-current lines are highly efficient, the equipment that converts alternating current into direct current and back again is not, so the advantage accrues on long spans—such as those from the windy high plains and the sunny Southwest. Those spans only make sense if they traverse sparsely populated areas, however. If the line was going from Wyoming to Chicago, notes Michael Heyeck, senior vice president of transmission at AEP, “I’m sure Iowa or other states would want to tap into it.” Otherwise the line becomes like an interstate without an interchange, hardly welcome anyplace.

High-voltage lines of both varieties have long proved reliable. And there is now reason to believe that a national backbone could be effectively controlled. AEP recently opened a state-of-the-art transmission control center in New Albany, Ohio, near Columbus, that could serve as a model for nationwide operation. The center sits far back from a local highway, surrounded by a moat, with an unmarked gatehouse in front. Inside, giant floor-to-ceiling computer-driven displays show all the power lines and electricity flows across AEP’s entire system. The displays can show details down to the level of transformers at individual substations and circuit breakers across thousands of square miles. The wall-size monitors also generate foglike clouds over large parts of the maps of entire states to indicate general voltage trends: white is good, orange is not, and red is worse.
AEP’s primary motivation for the center, through better real-time monitoring of every line, better organization of all the data and better presentation of diagnostics to the operators, is to prevent another great blackout such as the one of August 2003. Back then, a neighboring utility, First Energy, lost track of what was running and what wasn’t, which allowed a cascade to begin. In a few seconds the blackout raced across Ohio, propagated to Detroit, up through Ontario and back down into New York. But beyond preventing such blackouts, the level of sophisticated control the center provides would also make operating a national backbone possible.
Political Muscle Needed
The concept of a national energy grid is not far-fetched. Indeed, the U.S. already has one that is highly successful in moving resources vast distances, notably from the Gulf of Mexico to New York and New England. But it is for natural gas, not electricity. And it exists because in the 1940s Congress created a system of national regulation for natural gas. Electricity was left to be regulated state by state and sometimes town by town.

As a result, says Andrew Karsner, a former assistant secretary of energy for renewables and efficiency, the country has “Btu liquidity” but not “electron liquidity.” Scrapping feudal transmission regulations for similar national rules would require forceful leadership from Washington. The first step, Karsner notes, is making transmission reform a priority. “Stop the blah-blah” dithering among elected officials, he says.

A regulatory lever might already exist. The 2005 Energy Act gave the DOE “backup authority” to approve new power lines over state objections, by designating “national interest electric transmission corridors.” But some utility executives think the department has been too hesitant to use the authority. Bureaucrats at the DOE are moving carefully, because in the two locations they have tried, one in the Northeast and one in the Southwest, they have provoked fierce reaction. In the Northeast case, for example, Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr., a Democrat from Pennsylvania, quickly rounded up 13 other senators to ask for hearings about how the authority was being used. He said the exercise of such power showed “a level of arrogance on the part of the federal government that undermines confidence in government.” Translation: even where the legal authority may exist to erect transmission lines, the political consensus may not.

Another issue, of course, is cost. The DOE’s wind report put the price tag for a national backbone at $60 billion—a staggering sum, at least until various federal bailouts started to come along last autumn after the stock market plummeted. Whether a better grid would be considered an infrastructure investment worthy of stimulus spending by the Obama administration is not clear; the work would not produce legions of jobs and would create economic benefits only slowly.

But even very large investments can be modest compared with the cost of having to use expensive local generation rather than cheaper renewables from remote locations. In Connecticut, for example, Northeast Utilities recently completed a 20-mile line from Bethel to Norwalk that cost $336 million but in its first year saved nearly $150 million. The line will operate for decades. According to the DOE, the national electric bill is about $247 billion a year, meaning that a small percentage drop in costs could finance tens of billions of dollars in investments.

Implementing such broader thinking would require a true national energy strategy, not a state-by-state energy strategy. A similar problem is repeated to varying extents across the globe. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, says the world must replace the 40 percent of its electricity that comes from coal with a like amount from wind, with 1.5 million wind turbines rated at two megawatts each. But transmission, he acknowledges, is a “gnarled-up situation.”

Clearly, a construction of a national transmission system is within America’s capabilities. “The interstate highway system was not designed by individual states and glued together,” Brown points out. “One way or another, if it became important enough, we would do it.”

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Giving the Grid Some Backbone".

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Matthew L. Wald is a reporter at the New York Times. He wrote about a possible renaissance for nuclear power in the previous issue of Scientifc American Earth 3.0

Eastern Forest Recovery

It never occurred to me that anyone ever thought that the carbon retention ability of eastern north America was even close to been satisfied. But I guess that some did. The rebound has been natural and pretty inefficient. I have championed the need for a restoration of close forest management similar to that of the original managers who created an open forest of mature trees supporting a maximum of biodiversity.

That is what needs to happen and it has to be accomplished in partnership with local government acting as a stakeholder in the timber itself, since the life cycle is way beyond that of an individual operator. Good forest management will provide a stream of forest products including charcoal. Open woodlots also will provide areas for cattle and buffalo and deer husbandry.

The partial forest recovery is actually successful but rather dominated by weed trees. This needs to be changed.

Potential To Amass More Carbon In Eastern North American Forests

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Potential_To_Amass_More_Carbon_In_Eastern_North_American_Forests_999.html


http://www.terradaily.com/images/wisconson-woodland-forest-bg.jpg



The results have implications not only for Wisconsin, but also for regions across eastern North America where forests were leveled historically to make room for agriculture, and then grew up again as settlers abandoned their farms and headed west. In Wisconsin, for example, forest biomass and carbon have been steadily recovering since the peak of agricultural clearing in the 1930s, while those in the northeastern U.S. have been rebounding for about 125 years.



by Staff WritersMadison WI (SPX) Apr 08, 2009

With climate change looming, the hunt for places that can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is on.

Obvious "sinks" for the greenhouse gas include the oceans and the enormous trees of tropical rainforests. But temperate forests also play a role, and new research now suggests they can store more carbon than previously thought.

In a study that drew on both historical and present-day datasets, Jeanine Rhemtulla of McGill University and David Mladenoff and Murray Clayton of University of Wisconsin-Madison quantified and compared the above-ground carbon held in the forest trees of Wisconsin just prior to European settlement and widespread logging, and the total carbon they contain today.

Writing in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that despite decades of forest recovery, Wisconsin's woodlands still only hold about two-thirds the carbon of pre-settlement times - suggesting substantial room for them to accumulate more.

"There's probably more potential (to store carbon) than people were considering," says Mladenoff. "There's still a big difference between what was once there and what's there now."

He adds that the true storage potential is probably at least two-fold higher than what he and Rhemtulla calculated, since they factored in only the live, above-ground biomass of tree trunks and crowns, and not the carbon stored in roots and soil.

The results have implications not only for Wisconsin, but also for regions across eastern North America where forests were leveled historically to make room for agriculture, and then grew up again as settlers abandoned their farms and headed west. In Wisconsin, for example, forest biomass and carbon have been steadily recovering since the peak of agricultural clearing in the 1930s, while those in the northeastern U.S. have been rebounding for about 125 years.

Yet, it's precisely because many temperate forests have been recovering for so long that people tend to assume their potential as carbon sinks is "maxed out," says Mladenoff.

"Our results suggest we need to rethink this," he says. "Rather than there being an intrinsic limit on how much carbon a forest can store, how we use the forest - how much we log, how we manage - may be more important."

The findings come amid sweeping discussions of international carbon treaties and accounting systems that are designed to reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change. In the future, for instance, countries might earn credits for maintaining carbon-rich old-growth forests, or replanting trees on lands logged off previously for agriculture.

Areas that once supported large amounts of forest biomass might also be good sites for growing plantations of hybrid poplar and other biofuels crops, says Mladenoff. But, he cautions, any move toward planting more land in trees must be weighed against competing social and economic factors, such as the need for farmland.

"The landscape is full," says Mladenoff. "So if we're going to add something like forests, we're going to need to take something out."

That certainly seems to be true in Wisconsin. Based on historic carbon levels, the researchers' analysis found that much of the best land for growing trees is the north-central region and along northern Lake Michigan. If those lands could be reforested to pre-settlement levels, the scientists estimate they could add 150 teragrams of carbon (150 million metric tons) to the state's current total of approximately 275 teragrams.

The problem, however, is that most of those lands are still being farmed, setting up an interesting dilemma for policy makers: how to weigh the current economic benefit of agriculture against the future environmental benefit of carbon storage.

"Because we often forget the invisible services, like climate regulation, that ecosystems provide to us for free, we don't usually factor them into our decision making," says Rhemtulla. "But this will need to change if we're going to find ways to meet our immediate needs without compromising critical services over the long term."

Crustal Shift

It has been two years since I posted a copy of my chapter on the Pleistocene Conformity and my revitalization of the crustal shift conjecture previously championed by Einstein and Hapgood back in the Fifties. It is now timely to revisit the conjecture, since I am alluding to it again and again and other developments are enhancing our understanding.

I will not outline the supporting evidence which is ample and most importantly successfully eliminates contradictions and serious overreaches in our present understanding of the possibilities of the Pleistocene transition to the Holocene. It is enough to say that it works as a thirty degree pole shift to the center of present day Hudson Bay.

What I want to revisit are the two primary objections that need to be overcome if this conjecture can survive to the next level of investigation. These objections are angular momentum and crustal slipperiness. We can deal with the issue of angular momentum first.

The thirty degree shift released a balance problem created by the then present polar ice cap regime. First off, the South Pole was in the open ocean just adjacent to the West Antarctic Polar Ice cap. That placed the present day mass on one side of the pole only and with the balance of the Antarctic shifted north and carrying much less ice. The actual ice mass was somewhat less than at present but not significantly so. It is now much better balanced and is inherently more stable as the East Antarctic sheet has since grown.

The real difficulty was presented by the Northern Polar Ice Cap. Again, the bulk of the ice buildup took place on land mostly on the North American side of the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ice accumulated during the Ice Age landed again on one side of the pole. And what an accumulation! It has since added three hundred feet to the sea level and this means that this mass also altered the globe’s angular momentum on the same side of the global axis as the South Polar Ice Cap.

The key take home point is that this build up of ice changed angular momentum significantly and sufficiently to seriously load the crust should it begin to move and likely also induced a wobble. It has been conjectured by others that it had moved twice before within the past 100,000 years. I do not see that as necessary to the success or failure of the conjecture, except that recent evidence makes the deliberate nature of the last shift highly probable and such could not have taken place without clear prior histories. It is likely that the angular momentum displacement caused by the alignment of the mass of the two ice caps created a roving crust that was naturally catastrophic and naturally drove efforts to resolve it. Again, it is suggestive but unnecessary to this discussion.

The present configuration eliminated the Northern Ice Cap and has totally stabilized the crust possibly for millions of years. This ended a clear imbalance in angular momentum that had accumulated for at least a million years and likely a lot longer than that, replacing it with a well balanced Southern Cap and an unloaded Northern Cap that is a minor fraction of its peak.

Been rid of that objection we can now deal with the more serious objection. How is it possible for the crust to move at all? I also want to observe that the clear reality of plate tectonics is not an answer either. This provides completely ironclad evidence of mass transfer from one side of a continental plate to the other side. Even allowing it to be forced by heat transfer it still must overcome viscosity on an unimaginable scale. Simply put, current explanations are at best acknowledgement of the reality of the phenomenon.

Logically, plate movement and a complete movement of the crust can only occur if it is possible for a layer to exist whose viscosity approaches zero or whose contact layer exhibits friction approaching zero. That is why plate tectonics was rejected outright for seventy years until the evidence became impossible to explain away.

This deal breaker problem became resolvable when I began to take an interest in the properties of elemental carbon. Recent discoveries regarding graphene have allowed us to become even more confident.

Fundamental to this conjecture is that carbon has the highest melting point of any element and is well above the disassociation energy of any compound. That means that unmelted carbon can be dragged down to a melt layer below all the crust yet to just above the metallic core. That layer is likely at least a hundred feet thick and perhaps a lot thicker. The depth is almost one hundred mile beneath us which is really not very much.

I describe it as molten but the bulk of it is more likely in the form of graphene, now that we know that exists. This layer does have a viscosity approaching zero. We already know that from recent work on graphene, but we also know that from our understanding of diamond pipes.

A diamond pipe rockets through the crust at about seventy miles an hour, originating from this layer. They are typically eighty to a hundred feet across and yet survive the trip. This is surely possible only because they begin as pure carbon, picking up and altering material on the way to the surface. In fact, the high carbon content is necessary in order to reach the surface, but once that motion ends, the surrounding and contained rock consumes the carbon leaving a fine distribution of carbon crystals known as diamonds.

The mere existence of diamond pipes is proof of a super slippery layer between the crust and the denser metallic core, and the lack of chemical bonding at this temperature and depth assures us that that layer is actually smooth. The mere fact that a pipe loaded with liquid carbon could penetrate the crust in about sixty minutes makes the proposition of the crust shifting a few miles an hour for a few days completely feasible until it was braked by the temporary loss of the carbon layer at the equators.

Therefore, our conjecture that the moderately unbalanced crust will respond to a nudge in the right direction appears to be well founded. That it may have happened naturally a couple of times is possible but unnecessary. That human intervention triggered it appears likely but is also unnecessary. That it shifted thirty degrees is necessary to resolve a range of logical impossibilities in the geological record.

It is worth observing that the Andes and the Himalayas are on the proper axis to have absorbed the necessary braking energy while the Gulf of Mexico may have additionally subsided. Once the conjecture is accepted then a lot of interpretive evidence will spring out at us. The safest place to be during all this was the continent of Africa.