Category Archives: Global Warming

Carbon Sequestration: A Surreal Carbon Solution

What was once a mountain. image courtesy of Appalachian Voices. AppVoices.org

Writing in the New York Times, here, Joe Nocera, says,

Sometime this summer, in Odessa, Tex., the Summit Power Group plans to break ground on a $2.5 billion coal gasification power plant. Summit has named this the Texas Clean Energy Project. With good reason.

The people behind this project want people to believe that the energy the plant produces is clean. Mr. Nocera continues.

Part of the promise of this power plant is its use of gasified coal; because the gasification process doesn’t burn the coal, it makes for far cleaner energy than a traditional coal-fired plant.

The plant doesn’t burn SOLID coal. It gassifies the coal, then burns the gas. It’s still burning the coal. Only this process uses energy to gassify the coal. It then uses more energy to capture and sequester 90% of the carbon. Think, Mr. Nocera, how can this make CLEANER? Answer: It Can’t and it Doesn’t. But it can – and does – make it more expensive.

And what about the Arsenic, Mercury, Uranium that are embedded in coal? And the processes that dig coal out of the ground? Refer to Appalachian Voices for more on mountaintop removal.

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Dare to Be Great, President Obama

Close to One Million people were in Washington to celebrate President Obama’s second inauguration. As Rachel Maddow commented on her show, you can catch a glimpse of the character of the man in his unscripted moments. She showed footage of Barack the man, with Michelle and their children. Maddow also showed that on the occasion of his Second Inauguration, President Obama turned, as people walked past him, to regard the crowd, estimated on The Hill, to over 1,000,000 people, and said “I’ll never see this again.”

But we can also infer the character of the man from his speeches. He said “We” 65 times. He said “I” four times, including the phrase “you and I” twice.

Obama’s greatest accomplishments for his first term, according to an NBC Poll:

Ending the War in Iraq
Killing Osama bin Laden
Raising taxes on the wealthiest while not raising taxes on everyone else.

I would add passing the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare and thwarting the Republican efforts in the House and Senate to be a One Term President.

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Global Warming, New York, The Jersey Shore, and Canada

Image 1: People enjoying the beach in Montreal, Canada, courtesy Jazz Hostels

While climate change and global warming will mean longer and hotter summers and shorter and warmer winters farther north in the northern hemisphere than previously, and even though we make like longer hotter summers and shorter, warmer winters …

Warmer and shorter winters mean thinner ice on frozen lakes – and people crashing through the thin ice and drowning in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Alaska, and Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia.

Longer hotter summers also mean warmer oceans and an atmosphere that can hold more heat.

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Hurricane Sandy, the Frankenstorm

Hurricane Sandy, NOAA handout satellite image taken on October 27, 2012. Note the size and position of the storm.

Hurricane Sandy, aka “The Frankenstorm,” a Hurricane with Snow, the 19th named storm of the 2012 season, is projected to hit Delaware, then New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Snow is expected in West Virginia. Winds and rain are expected as far west as Ohio. Additional satellite images are available at NOAA. Note that the Frankenstein monster was created by man.

While some are calling this the storm of the century, I see it, like Hurricane Irene of 2011, discussed here, and Katrina and Rita a few years ago, as a harbinger of things to come.

Several natural phenomena are combining with several man-made factors to interact in ways that will make this a very significant storm, and one that we expect to see repeated every few years. ABC News, National Hurricane Center, NOAA, other news and information media are providing up-to-date coverage. Popular Logistics provides analysis.

Natural Phenomena:

Hurricane Sandy is 900 miles wide – bigger than Irene.
It will interact with a cold front coming from Canada that will form a Nor’ Easter.
It will also interact with the Jet Stream, that will pull it northward, then refocus it back south-westerly arc toward New York City, Long Island, and New Jersey.
The full moon – which triggers higher tides – will trigger a storm surge.

Man made factors that will exacerbate the storm’s damage:

Atmospheric CO2 and water vapor – the concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapor is higher today due to burning fossil fuels. This means the atmosphere can hold more heat, and is holding more water, the oceans are warmer; thus storms will be bigger and more severe.
Coastal development – sand dunes gone from Long Island make us more vulnerable to storm surges and flooding
Crumbling infrastructure gives us a diminished ability to weather the storm.
Lack of emergency preparedness gives us a diminished ability to weather the storm.
Satellites, in need of repair, give us a diminished ability to monitor the storm.
Nuclear Power plants in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will need to be monitored. Some will be shut down, as they were last year during Hurricane Irene, leading to power outages. See “Nuclear Power, Natural Disasters, and Security.”This gives us diminished ability to weather the storm, and forces us to deploy resources to safeguard infrastructure.

In August of 2011 the Millstone 2 & 3 plants in Connecticut and the Brunswick 1 & 2 plants in North Carolina were operated at reduced capacity during and after Hurricane Irene, while the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, and the North Anna 1 & 2 plants in Virginia, were offline. The North Anna plants were shut down before the hurricane due to the earthquake. I expect Hurricane Sandy will effect most of those plants, and also the Calvert Creek plant in Maryland, Hope Creek, and Salem in Jersey, Indian Point in New York, and Vermont Yankee, in Vermont.

Solar power, wind, and wave power won’t work during a hurricane, but don’t need emergency crew on hand to make sure cooling systems are operational. And geothermal will function.

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As an analyst with Popular Logistics, I am available for research and analysis on a per project or a per diem basis. I can be reached at ‘L Furman 97” @ G Mail . com and US 732 . 580 . 0024.

What If … Gore had been President?

In the XB Cold Fingers song, “Sunbathing In Siberia,” (Listen / Try or Buy / Lyrics ) I wrote,

“If Gore had been awarded the White House
he’d chain us to Kyoto, don’t ya see.
There’d be solar panels on the rooftops,
wind power, clean power, almost free.”

While the song is a tongue-in-cheek look at energy, climate change, and the election of 2000; what if Gore had been the 43rd President?

In this series of posts, I’ll explore this scenario in terms of what it would have meant for the Supreme Court, foreign policy and defense.

Who would Gore have appointed to the Supreme Court?
How would they have decided Citizens United and Florence v Burlington?
What about September 11 – would the 19 terrorists have been able to hijack 4 planes and crash two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon?
If so, would we have gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan?
If not, would we have gone to war in Iraq anyway?
And what about Iran? Israel? The Arab Spring?
And the economy here in the United States?

This next post in the series looks at the Supreme Court. Stay tuned.

21 of 2011 – Most Significant Events of the Year

Tweet While it ain’t over till it’s over, 2011 is over. A lot that could have happened, didn’t. Obama didn’t resign, Donald Trump didn’t throw his hat into the ring or divorce his current wife and marry one or more Kardashians. Newt Gingrich threw his hat into the ring, but also didn’t divorce his current wife and marry one or more Kardashians. These are the most significant events of 2011.

Japan, March, 2011 . Nebraska, June, 2011. An earthquake triggered a tsunami which slammed Japan with a 30 foot wave, which shut down twelve nuclear reactors at three sites, triggering melt-downs in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site. We now see radioactive particles in food and soil in Fukushima Prefecture. The United States government recommended an evacuation of a 50 mile radius from the plant – this is a semi-circular no-man’s land of 3,927 square miles. It would be 7,854 square miles but the plant was on the coast and therefore half of this radioactive no-man’s land is in the Pacific Ocean. The environmental ramifications of radioactive materials spreading over Japan and flowing into the Pacific Ocean are not known (Popular Logistics click here, here, here), however, liabilities to TEPCO and Japan are estimated to $100 Billion (click here). In the United States, two nuclear power plants on the Missouri River, the Fort Calhoun and Cooper plants, were shut-down when the Missouri River flooded (Popular Logistics, here). Eight nuclear power plants from South Carolina to Connecticut were shut down in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck with an epicenter in Virginia August 23, 2011, and Hurricane Irene a few days later (Popular Logistics, here). In the words of Mycle Schneider, describing the World Watch Institute report he authored, “The industry was arguably on life support before Fukushima. When the history of this industry is written, Fukushima is likely to introduce its final chapter,” (click here). However, the three melt-downs at Fukushima, coupled with the melt-down at Chernobyl in 1986 and the partial melt-down at Three Mile Island in 1979, suggest a probability of one melt-down every 14 years.
South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, August, 2011. Hurricane Irene covered an area of approximately 170,000 square miles, or about the size of California.”
Washington, DC, December. 2011. After 4,000 Americans were killed, about 50,000 were wounded, and $1 trillion was spent over 8 years, President Obama ended the American mission in Iraq that Congress authorized in October, 2002, President Bush started in March, 2003 and declared “Accomplished” in May, 2003 (for a timeline, click here).
Washington DC, Abbottabod, Pakistan, May, 2011, American soldiers, on orders from the White House, found and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan (NY Times, click here).
Yemen, In summer, 2011, American military forces, using a drone aircraft piloted from the ground via remote control, from the ground, targeted and killed Anwar al Awlaki, an American born Al Queda operative in Yemen (NY Times, click here).
The hacking group “Anonymous” broke into the computers of the security consulting group “Stratfor” and found 44,188 Encrypted Passwords, of which roughly 50% could be easily cracked. 73.7% of decrypted passwords were weak” (NPR, click here).
The “Stuxnet” computer worm virus, harmelss on PC’s runing MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and other computers, appears to have targeted centrifuges used in the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. While the viruses were discovered in 2010, they became understood in 2011. The virus caused the centrifuges to spin out of control, wrecking themselves (NY Times, here, NPR here, CNET here, Wikipedia here). Continue reading →

"Beyond Fuel" at the Space Coast Green Living Festival

Green Living Festival

Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Sp ace Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.

The festival is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott.

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Clean Energy, Good Jobs, and a Vibrant Economy … But

courtesy NASA (our tax dollars at work)

Tweet It sounds too good to be true:

*   100 gigawatts of offshore wind, $300 Billion,
*   100 gw of landbased wind, $200 Billion,
*   75 gw of solar, $300 Billion,
*   75 gw of geothermal, $200 Billion.
*   200 gigawatt equivalents of efficiency – $200 Billion.
*   100 & Clean, Renewable, Sustaianble Energy: 1.2 Trillion.
*   2.7 Million New Jobs and a Healthy Economy: Priceless!

This is happening, slowly, inexorably, by the “invisible hand of the market.” But it will happen faster if the “invisible mind of the community” acts. This means the government!

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Keynes, Reluctance to hire, & 21ST Century Energy

in black and white, because some ideas are.

Tweet During the Great Depression the Classical Economists said “Unemployment is voluntary. Business owners will not voluntarily keep the means of production idle.” While he had been a student of classical economics, John Maynard Keynes observed that the data didn’t fit the theory. And, he reasoned, if the observable data don’t fit the theory, the theory must be flawed. “Business owners are risk averse,” he saw. “A employee needs to be productive, needs to make widgets. But if no one is buying widgets, then contrary to classical theory, factory owners will fire workers and keep capital idle rather than hire workers to create excess inventory. That’s just common sense.”

We see this today.

When unemployment was low, for example in the United States during the tech boom of the 1990’s, people acted on the premise that “There is so much work that we could hire and good people and train them.” Today hiring managers seem to be acting on the premise that “There are so many people looking for work that they can wait for the perfect candidate.” Perfection being unattainable, jobs go unfilled. This is ok, in this context, because

“Budgets are tight.”
“The future is uncertain.”
“Money not spent on a new hire can be saved or used to pay down debt.”

Keynes also observed that the government is an employer that does not need to worry about going out of business. Building infrastructure is government employment that is investment for the future. These observations are as valid today as they were 80 years ago.

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Renewable Energy & Efficiency Expo + Policy Forum

Taken from the web site:

The Sustainable Energy Coalition, in cooperation with Members of the U.S. House and Senate Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Caucuses, invites you to the 14th annual Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency EXPO + Policy Forum. This year’s EXPO will bring together more than 50 businesses, sustainable energy industry trade associations, government agencies, and energy policy research organizations (see list below) to showcase the status and near-term potential of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Members of the U.S. Congress, Obama administration, and exhibiting organizations will give presentations on the role sustainable energy technologies can play in stimulating the economy, strengthening national security, protecting the environment, and saving consumers money. Click here for video and other details from last year’s EXPO.

This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required.

Agenda

9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Exhibits open for viewing
9:30 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. Morning speakers (located in Room 340, next to the EXPO)
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Presentations by Members of Congress (to be announced)
12:50 p.m. – 2:05 p.m. Presentations by Executive Branch Speakers
2:20 p.m. – 4:20 p.m. Afternoon speakers (located in Room 340, next to the EXPO)

More details:

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Earth Day, 2011, Where Are We?

Earth from Space, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

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Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch Institute, the New York Times, and the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency, I want to make a few points.

Our energy policy is “when you flip a switch, the juice gotta flow.” It ain’t magic. It’s engineering and classical physics, with an understanding of radioactive fission and decay and a profound lack of long term thinking. It ain’t magic, but it might as well be. But we really need to base our energy policy on an understanding of ecological economics and sustainability.

We’ve had a few problems with nuclear power and fossil fuel in the last few years. Yet, there’s some light on the horizon.

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Cape Wind, Leadership and Vision

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On Friday, March 25,2011, Cape Wind LLC‘s CEO Jim Gordon spoke at Columbia University about the long delayed project. When he started the project, back in 2001, the Europeans were 10 years ahead of us. Today the Europeans are 20 years ahead of us, and the Chinese too are years ahead of us.

Mr. Gordon quoted Theodore Roosevelt, IV, as saying, “I live on the Cape. If we don’t do this, in 50 years the Cape will be under water.” Cape Cod’s highest point is about 300 feet above sea level so Mr. Roosevelt was exaggerating. His home may wind up under water, but at least some of the Cape will be one or more islands. Speaking of islands, Nantucket, which in 2006 had the highest median property values in Massachusetts, rises some 30 feet above sea level. If sea level rises 30 feet, Nantucket will get washed away.

Mr. Gordon said, “Cape Cod has the most polluted air in New England. When you harness the wind you get clean electricity: No arsenic, lead, mercury, thorium, uranium, or zinc or carbon dioxide like you get from burning coal. No barges of oil that can spill. No radioactive waste like you get from nuclear power. Last year we read about the coal mine disaster in West Virginia. Then the Deepwater Horizon. Now we’re reading about the disaster in Japan. With wind there is no possibility of a disaster, Zero.”

And, he added, “Fossil fuels are a finite resource. New England has neither coal, oil, or natural gas – but there is a tremendous amount of wind. When you factor in the costs of storms and sea level rise – you would think it’s a no-brainer.” The question is not “Can wind power provide base line capacity?” But “How can wind power provide base line capacity.”

Mr. Gordon told how during a trade mission to China, one of his engineers was grilled about wind power, offshore wind, engineering, costs, and siting. After the end of the grilling his hosts said “we read Cape Wind, by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb. We would never allow that here.” In 2009 China built a 100 mw wind farm off the coast of Shanghai – completed the project quickly. By the end of 2010 they had 41.8 gigawatts of nameplate capacity wind power – enough for about 45 million Americans (wikipedia). Continue reading →

21 Century Energy or Business As Usual?

NY Times Special (Business As Usual) Energy Section

Clifford Krauss’ “Can We Do Without the Mideast?” sets the tone for the “Special Energy Section” in the NY Times, March 31, 2011. “The path to independence – or at least an end to dependence on the Mideast – could well be dirty, expensive and politically explosive.” Is this an April Fool’s Day joke? The path to sustainable energy requires vision and hard work. a solar array on every roof and insulation in every wall and every attic. It will be better for the economy, better for the environment, and better for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. Continue reading →

Google announces Biggest OffShore Wind Project

Schematic Map of Atlantic Wind Connection

Google is putting its money where its mouth is. Back in early September, 2008, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said, “We have a total failure of political leadership, at least in the U. S., and perhaps the world.” He then called for 100% of U. S. power to come from green energy in 20 years – with 500,000 wind energy jobs. (See “Google’s Eric Schmidt Details Energy Plan, Chides Lack of Leadership,” by By Katie Fehrenbacher, Sep. 9, 2008, on Gigacom.) Schmidt combined Al Gore’s call for 100% clean electricity in 10 years with Intel CEO Andy Grove’s call for millions of plug-in hybrid cars. (I would like to add that they should be plug-in hybrid biofuel, with the fuel coming from sewage and factory farm waste, not food crops.)

Recently, 10/12/10, Erick Schonfeld at GreenTech (onTechCrunch) wrote Google Backs Biggest U.S. Offshore Wind Project:

“Using its cash to kickstart renewable energy businesses, Google is now backing the largest U.S. offshore wind farm project to date. The Atlantic Wind Connection is a proposed string of offshore wind turbines that will stretch 350 miles off the Atlantic coast from Virginia to New Jersey. Once completed, the project will produce 6,000 megawatts of power, which is equivalent to 60 percent of all the wind power built in the U.S. last year. The wind project will serve nearly 2 million homes. Continue reading →

September 11, and the Future of Energy

Combined Cycle Power Plant

The Combined Cycle Power Plant, “Kombikraftwerk” can harness wind, sunlight, water, and biofuels to meet ALL Germany’s electric power needs, 365 days per year, regardless of weather conditions. And if it “werks” in Germany, it will work here.

Professor Jurgen Schmid and his colleagues at the Institute for Solar Energy Supply Systems of the University of Kassel, in Germany, with funding from Enercon GmbH, SolarWorld AG and Schmack Biogas AG, have developed the Combined Cycle Power Plant, or “Kombikraftwerk” and proven that they can use wind, solar, biomass and hydro to meet ALL Germany’s electricity needs around the clock regardless of weather conditions. Schmid says.“If renewables continue to grow as they have done in the past, they’ll provide around 40% of Germany’s electricity needs by 2020. We could therefore achieve 100% by the middle of the century.” Information on the Combined Cycle Power Plant is here, and here, at “Germany’s Renewable Energy Information Platform. Continue reading →