Architecting a Clean, Secure, Sustainable, Non-Carbon and Non-Nuclear Energy Future
Middelgrunden, Denmark, near Copenhagen
Marketplace reported last night that “Massachusetts has launched a program that 
lets home and business owners who generate their own power sell it back to the electric compan” at retail prices, increasing the incentives for the installation of solar and wind energy-producing equipment, and additional incentives for conservation (i.e. additional conservation, which brings net consumption towards zero brings a household closer not just to a zero bill, but payment from utility companies).
Program pays top dollar for extra power, reported by Mitchell Hartman. From the transcript:
[Massachusetts] State Energy Secretary Ian Bowles.
IAN BOWLES: Starting now, if you own solar panels on your home, or you have a small-scale wind turbine, and you want to sell extra power back to the grid, you’ll now be able to do that at a very advantageous rate.
California will do the same thing starting in January and lots of other states are working on similar programs. Massachusetts now leads the pack, because it’s making utilities pay retail rates for the electricity customers generate.
TERRY TAMMINEN: So it really encourages you to become a renewable energy entrepreneur.
California energy consultant Terry Tamminen says these policies encourage alternatives to fossil fuels. But can a bunch of windmills and rooftop solar panels really make a difference?
TAMMINEN: Boston may not be noted for its sunshine, but neither is Germany, and yet Germany is the second-largest user and producer of solar energy in the world.
For years, Germany has been paying customers a premium for the renewable power they generate. Tamminen says that’s largely why it’s jumped ahead.
Mitchell Hartman, Program pays top dollar for extra power.
Via Marketplace, a production of American Public Media.
Brain Trauma Foundation logo
The Brain Trauma Foundation, and its BTF Learning Portal, which provides continuing education for medical professionals, are an excellent resource for anyone concerned with preventing and treating head injuries.The BTF Learning Portal’s courses are CME-accredited in most, if not all, states. To their credit, BTF courses seem to be priced so as to permit them to continue their work rather than, as is sometimes the case, a revenue stream which can lead a non profit off-course, we we’ve seen in other cases.The BTF research led to treatment guidelines for TBI. According to the CDC, the CDC analysis
found that that if the BTF guidelines were used more routinely, there would be a 50% decrease in deaths, improved quality of life and a savings of $288 million a year in medical and rehabilitation costs.
According to the study, “Using a Cost-Benefit Analysis to Estimate Outcomes of a Clinical Treatment Guideline: Testing the Brain Trauma Foundation Guidelines for the Treatment of Severe Traumatic Brain Injury,” just published in the December issue of the Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care, when the BTF guidelines are followed, the proportion of patients with good outcomes increased substantially from 35% to 66%, and the proportion of patients with poor outcomes decreased from 34% to 19%.
Link to BTF press release. (We’ll update this shortly with a direct link to the CDC statement).
US Flag, Constitution, Eagle Statue of Liberty
Human Rights at Home and the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Roughly a year ago, the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy (ACS) published Catherine Powell’sHuman Rights at Home: A Domestic Policy Blueprint for the New Administration. In this plan for reaffirming and implementing the US commitment to human rights, many recommendations were made, including a call for “the ratification, accompanied by fully adequate implementing legislation, of important human rights treaties to which the United States is not yet a party.” Continue reading
The Brundtland Commission defines sustainability as “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” How do you do it? Harnessing processes, not consuming resources. (click here). In Making Sustainability Work, 2008. ISBN 9781906093051, Marc Epstein describes how to do it; the corporate structures needed.
We’ll get there, if the Earth holds out. Continue reading
In China, 407 Coal Miners Died THIS YEAR
. 104 Died THIS WEEKEND in the Xinxing coal mine – described by Chinese authorities as a SAFE
mine. 528 miners were underground at the time of the explosion – in which 19.7% of the miners were killed! China Mine Disaster Continue reading
Ethics in the Workplace Improved During the Recession,
“A national employee survey shows that like the Enron era, ethical conduct improves temporarily during periods of economic stress.
“Arlington, VA – Do Americans in the workplace behave better in a down economy? Apparently yes, according to the Ethics Resource Center, which today announced the results of its sixth National Business Ethics Survey® (NBES). The full report, Ethics in the Recession, is available here.
“Seventy-eight percent of U.S. employees say they or their colleagues experienced the impact of the recession. Yet key measures of ethical behavior – the amount of misconduct observed, the willingness to report misdeeds, the strength of ethical cultures and the pressure to cut corners – all improved since ERC’s last survey in 2007, shortly before the recession started. Only retaliation against those who reported misconduct ticked upward by 3 percentage points.
How do I interpret the data? People realize that there is more to life than money and material goods. Or –
So if the crooks steal less and do so less brazenly then the general level of dishonesty is lower and the general level of ethical behavior is increased. But, an ethicist might say, for the wrong reasons. They don’t “sin” out of the fear of “Hell” not out of the joy of “Heaven.”
Back in February, 2009, Business Week published my article, Green Energy: Our Future Depends on It. They even asked for a picture – which I was happy to provide. I just learned that it was picked up by other web-sites:
The article is reproduced below. Continue reading
A :”sand table” – as opposed to a sandbox which is elevated,but whose purpose is primarily play – is a flexible modeling area used for planning, briefing, annd the visualization of elevation data.
See:Wikipedia entry for “Sand Table:
This excellent page – “Sand Table Showroom,” which was created by the NWCG Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program, which is, in turn, a program of the National Wildlife Coordinating Group. ((The Wild Fire Leadership Development Program which is described as follows on the “Program Page” under the heading “Program Components”:
This program is sponsored by the participating agencies of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. The program components were developed by adapting “best practices” from a number of organizations that operate in high tempo work environments including the U.S. Marine Corps University; the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania; the U.S. Air Force Human Factors Research Lab; the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command; the N.A.S.A. Astronaut Development Center; the National Fire Academy; and various commercial aviation Crew Resource Management programs.
I don’t know if this is an unnecessarily unwieldy bureaucratic setup – but if they’re cooperating across agency lines, creating curricula, standards and providing training, all in all, that’s a good thing.
We hope to return to this subject – the structure and funding and control of the fire and other responder services in the United States – and to compare it to other countries, particularly Germany – our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Germany has 5-6 tims the number of fire fighters per capita as does the United States.))
For the moment, let’s tour the “Sand Table Showroom.”
The sand tables shown here are primarily used as a platform for delivering Tactical Decision Games. It is important to remember that sand tables can also be used to present briefings, conduct AARs, and teach topography map interpretation. You can build a table as elaborate as a fine piece of furniture or as basic as a hole in the ground filled with sand. All serve the same purpose. Keep it simple and build the table that best suits your facilitation needs. Basic considerations are: mobility requirements, exposure to weather, storage needs, and scale of landscape to be shown. Rule of thumb – the larger the table, the more terrain that can be shown, but the less mobile the table.
Alternate design 1
On The Media, aka OTM, WNYC’s award-winning journalism monitoring journal, reports that television’s coverage of “medical breakthroughs” is, alas, somewhat deficient.
M&M candy in blue, green and other hues
OTM’s awards include a Peabody and a Murrow; see
Bob Garfield, in Prognosis Negative, reports that television coverage of “medical breakthroughs” is. alas, somewhat deficient.
Blue M&M’s may cure paralysis! That’s just one claim made recently in a health segment on network TV. For more than three years, HealthNewsReview.org editor Gary Schwitzer has been methodically reviewing TV health news claims for accuracy and responsibility. But no more; he’s found the vast majority of TV consumer health reports sickening.
Mountaineer Coal Plant, New Haven, W. Virginia, Photo Copyright, NY Times.
According to Kevin Riddell, in the New York Times, (click here for article) the 20 MW carbon sequestration subsystem at the Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, West Virginia, will cost “well over $100 million.” Ridell says:
American Electric Power is spending $73 million on the capture and storage effort, which includes half the cost of the factory. Alstom, the manufacturer of the new equipment, paid for the other half of the factory, hoping to develop expertise that will win it a worldwide market. Alstom would not say what it spent, but public figures indicate that the two companies are jointly spending well over $100 million.
I pulled out my trusty pencil and paper, and did some calculations. If “half the cost” of the facility is $73 million, then the other half is also $73 million. That “well over $100 million” adds up to about $146 million. For a 20 mw facility, that means $7.3 million per mw. It’s not clear from the article whether this is the cost of the carbon sequestration facility or the costs of the turbine plus the carbon sequestration facility. The article also mentions that the energy costs of the carbon sequestration operation are projected at 15% to 30% of the plant’s output. “More expensive than solar or nuclear.” Utility scale Solar is $6.5 billion per mw, 89.0% of the cost of this facility, even before you factor in the costs of fuel, mining, and clean-up.
At the risk of seeming insufficiently cynical, I’m not sure that I understand the change in accounts from the initial (female officer, wounded, shoots shooter) to later (both wounded officer and second officer shoot, second officer’s shots may have been what dropped him). Maybe Sgt. Munley didn’t know that Sgt. Todd arrived on the scene. We’re talking about a live gun battle, not a choreographed scene in an action movie. Things happen real fast. One second you’re doing nothing out of the ordinary, the next second you’re shot. In the case of Sgts Munley and Todd, one second they arrived on the scene, the next second they were shot at, the next second they were running. Hasan allegedly chased and shot Munley, she shot back, Todd showed up from around a corner, shot at Hasan. See
James C. McKinley’s careful account in the The New York Times , Second Officer Says He Brought Fort Hood Gunman Down – NYTimes.com.
…. the initial story of how she and the accused gunman went down in an exchange of gunfire now appears to be inaccurate.
Another officer, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, 42, said in an interview Thursday that he fired the shots that brought down the gunman after Sergeant Munley was seriously wounded. A witness confirmed Sergeant Todd’s account.
In the interview, Sergeant Todd said he and Sergeant Munley had pulled up to the scene in separate cars at the same time. He said they began running up a small hill toward the building that held the processing center where unarmed soldiers reported for check-ups and vaccinations before deployment. The gunman was already outside, Sergeant Todd recalled.
A poll in the Summit Daily News
, Colorado website asks if we need more wilderness areas. The questions:
“Yes, we need more wilderness area protection.”
“No, it’s too much land taken from other public use.”
“Don’t really know too much about it.”
“Need to know more about the plan, first.”
To add your voice, Summit Daily News
.
Via Inhabitat: NASA Unveils Chemical-Sniffing Device for the iPhone:
Chemical-sniffing ipod - image via Inhabitat
NASA’s cheap, low-power device senses chemicals with help from a “sample jet” and a silicon-based sensing chip that has 16 nanosensors. Once detection data is confirmed, the phone can send it on to any other device — or the government — via Wi-Fi.
There are a number of uses for the chemical sensor: it could provide early information on a chemical attack, confirm suspicions of methane emissions from local factories, or just give users information about the chemicals present in their everyday environments.
The chemical sniffer isn’t NASA’s first foray into iPhone apps. The agency recently debuted an app that aggregates and sends recent information, pictures, and video from NASA to the user’s phone. Here’s hoping NASA continues to deliver educational and useful apps to our cell phones!
Via Popular Science
Chris Dorst, Charleston, WV Gazette.
According to Mortality Rates in Appalachian Coal Mining Counties: 24 Years Behind the Nation, by Michael Hendryx, of the Department of Community Medicine, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV <pdf>, mortality is 10.21 % higher in Appalachia than elsewhere in the US, and 18.45 % higher in in coal mining counties where 4 million tons or more of coal are mined. (See also Coal Tattoo.)
Part of the problem is poverty, lack of education, smoking, and other factors, but these are all related to the coal economy.