funds – Page 6 – Alan Flurry

June 22, 2009

Keep ’em Coming

In the same way that having Insurance company executives testify on camera before Congress about what their companies do is be the best way to guarantee passage of universal health coverage, Republican opposition to climate legislation written by the coal lobby will likely be its best friend, as well.

House Republicans are circulating a PowerPoint document that purports to show the regional breakdown of costs for energy consumers under the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (ACES). The header: “Most States Lose Under the Pending Climate Bill.”

The catch? It appears to have been authored by the coal giant Peabody Energy. [Note: It was actually authored by the National Mining Assocation; see updates below.]

The document was discussed on a conference call held by the “Rural America Solutions Group” within the GOP caucus on Thursday, hosted by group co-chairs Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Sam Graves (R-Mo.), and Doc Hastings (R-Wash.). According to a press release, the call was meant to “highlight how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax will make it more expensive for rural Americans to fertilize the crops, put fuel in the tractor and food on the table.”

It isn’t that this is anything more than run-of-the-mill skulduggery, which it is, by and large. The interesting point about it is just how out-to-lunch this approach is to governing, in terms of using government to enact solutions to massive problems that require a centralized organization. Like a government. Industry shills and bought-and-paid for politicos are our connection to the Gilded Age proper. If you’re a romantic and wonder what it was like, this is what is was like.

Its excesses and corruption were its undoing and eventually led to reforms. Our excesses being a little more poisonous in terms of waste and emissions, and our corruptions enlarged to include the intellectual, our undoing is likely to be far more jarring than a matter of a few reforms.

So it is enlightening, in its way, to have chief polluters and fiscal looters advocate and agitate for the policies that have enshrined their advantageous positions. They’re as likely as any of us to be perfectly frank about their successes and points of view. Not always truthful, but you’d be amazed.

These strategies keep our refusals to change right in front of us, which is where they need to be. The longer we/they keep people right out in front spouting nonsense about the how costs of staying healthy or using less energy are too great to bear, the more effective measures to protect health and save energy can be.

April 27, 2009

Recycled Oil Rigs

So as the Obama administration delays a Bush faux-solution to expand torture drilling, the Interior department is focused on developing offshore wind power. Coincidental to this, researchers report that one “unexpected quirk” of climate change is that wind speed is picking up off the coast of England.

Based on information taken from Nasa satellite images, the research found that average annual wind speed in the southern part of the North Sea had increased from about 7.5 metres per second in 1990 to 8.5 metres in 2008. In contrast, wind speeds in the northern part of the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, have remained constant during this period.

If these trends continue, in a decade the south could be windier all year round than northern areas and double the power generated by wind farms off the coast of East Anglia and Essex.

For those poised to make a buck, why not jump in where you can make three? Apparently the sites off the Nantucket Sound are attractive not only because of significant sustained winds, but the shallow waters keep installation costs down. A major cost of installing the turbines is the offshore foundations themselves, such that the British government just launched a £20 million competition to accelerate a 30% cut in costs for deep water foundations. But, wait – we just read that

Until now, developers have relied on wind-speed levels taken on oil and gas installations or have used meteorological masts planted offshore. The Met Office has only limited satellite data to track offshore wind speeds in the North Sea but is working with wind-farm developers to produce a comprehensive set of data of the last 30 years. A spokeswoman admitted it would take two years to develop.

Duncan Ayling, head of offshore renewables at the British Wind Energy Association, said: “There have been wind-speed measurements on oil and gas installations that give some localised historic data, but a lot of the rest of it is extrapolation. If this technology provides an accurate measurement, it would be very exciting. More wind equals more money for projects. It would enable wind-farm developers to more accurately forecast revenues and have more certainty about the expected return on their investment.”

Emphasis mine. Oil and gas installations that are… already out there in the windy North Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of California and elsewhere. Many of these are abandoned or likely to be tapped out soon. What happens to them when the spigot from down below runs dry? Can’t they be topped with a wind turbine, gigantic and lovely? Doesn’t fix everything or end the discussion, though we stipulate that neither of these is the point; also, far superior to highly-stylized schools of thought centered around 1) doing the same things and expecting different results and 2) Let’s Do Nothing!

Plus reuse is PR gold so this fulfills the implicit double entendre requirement for what green means. Please make checks payable to the editor.

April 27, 2009

Recycled Oil Rigs

Based on information taken from Nasa satellite images, the research found that average annual wind speed in the southern part of the North Sea had increased from about 7.5 metres per second in 1990 to 8.5 metres in 2008. In contrast, wind speeds in the northern part of the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, have remained constant during this period.

If these trends continue, in a decade the south could be windier all year round than northern areas and double the power generated by wind farms off the coast of East Anglia and Essex.

Until now, developers have relied on wind-speed levels taken on oil and gas installations or have used meteorological masts planted offshore. The Met Office has only limited satellite data to track offshore wind speeds in the North Sea but is working with wind-farm developers to produce a comprehensive set of data of the last 30 years. A spokeswoman admitted it would take two years to develop.

Duncan Ayling, head of offshore renewables at the British Wind Energy Association, said: “There have been wind-speed measurements on oil and gas installations that give some localised historic data, but a lot of the rest of it is extrapolation. If this technology provides an accurate measurement, it would be very exciting. More wind equals more money for projects. It would enable wind-farm developers to more accurately forecast revenues and have more certainty about the expected return on their investment.”

Plus reuse is PR gold so this fulfills the implicit double entendre requirement for what green means. Please make checks payable to the editor.

April 24, 2009

Slowness

There are at least a couple of things to which we might accede:

Through the twin slow-motion catastrophes of resource depletion and environmental degradation, human activity will be forced into a different scale than our post-industrial age trajectory has otherwise led us to infer.

General recognition of a need, if not regard, for a lessened carbon footprint is growing. We increasingly recognize the wisdom of native populations, for example, in being proper, long-term stewards of the earth, as opposed to our standard operating procedures. The extents to which we create fetish and fashion from some of native practices, as absurd as they may seem, often represent the initial entree some of these practices have into a society which made them obsolete. Micro-biotic is just a fancy name for eating locally, par ex.

The tragi-comedy kicks in as we try to imagine moving toward reconciling these realities, but on our terms. We want to ‘go green’ and live more sustainably, but we still want all of our stuff. The heavy contradiction here is re-enforced as some of our stuff begins to disappear as a simple consequence of the above conditions.

Not that any of it will magically be taken away. It’s painfully slow, just as absolutely everything was, from our perspective, up until about 100 years ago. The whole concept of slow is a modern artifact itself; even more, the modifier adding duress to it. But, we begin to let a few things go away here and there as we move back into the greater slip-stream of biotic activity on earth.

Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud’s three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to “descent from an animal world”; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush – a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.

The current availability of information is such that we seem to get what we can from a little news here and there and hope for the best. It’s quite a place to find ourselves – so surrounded by means and so trapped by their implications. We see these things happening in the world, but we continue on with much the same map that brought us here, altering our route slowly, because our terms dictate what we can and cannot live without, as such. Is optimism knowing just enough to keep the jury out indefinitely? Abstract issues like energy and pollution bear down on us in some ways, but with a little information, we can trust that someone somewhere is doing something about it – that, as this one runs out, technology might deliver us to the next free energy plateau that will permit our thriving to continue. The missing part of the picture, obscured perhaps by the massive amounts by which we make inferences about the smallest things, is the scale down. Living differently in ways that we require less will conjure all sorts of changes and many of them will be very positive.

I’m trying to fight the tendency to offer a summation on these points, but how does something end and continue on at the same time? In other words, this is our post-industrial age trajectory.

April 2, 2009

A Fool and His Primer

So… mrs. green and I speak often about how newspapers will be able to support themselves going forward, now that their revenue model has gone up in Craig’s List smoke. The supposition is that at some point, through collusion or other such cartel-like agreement, the larger and dependable online sources of actual reporting will have to start charging for content. This allows that some of them will be able to charge for content, with the inferred assumption that this is true as long as they don’t destroy their brand.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A ‘LIGHT-SWITCH TAX’…. In an apparent effort to be an even more shameless hack, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) argues in a Washington Post op-ed today that “all American families will get stuck with a new ‘light-switch tax’ on electricity bills that is in the president’s budget.”

It’s not just Gregg. While President Obama cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans, a standard Republican talking point is that Obama is also raising taxes on everyone who uses electricity. The new GOP catch phrase popped up about a week ago, when the House Republican Conference said in a press release that the administration supports “a light switch tax that would cost every American household $3,128 a year.”

As is too often the case, the difference between Republican rhetoric and reality is overwhelming.

The extent to which established and dependable media sources commit to undermining their brand will have as much effect on their long-term viability as the bad decision-making of the corporate owners.

Also note the tendentious application of tax rhetoric to what is, sad to say, only an imagined attempt to create incentives to influence energy demand. It’s like the ‘death tax’ BS. Republicans can and do choose to see everything through the prism of taxes, but this childlike construct requires a grand gesture at the outset – primarily setting up the government as some separate, antagonistic entity, out to get you and your hard-earned winnings.

In the interest of brevity, a foolish and naive primer: We support the country, literally, by funding the government. It’s patriotic, sure, but also practical. We use it for all kinds of things we can and do disagree about – fighting wars, picking up the trash, putting out fires, educating our youngsters. Yet, through the magic of funding activities like these, we discover the handy ability to encourage or discourage behaviors by charging ourselves more or less for doing or not doing certain things – from littering to using lead paint, for example, but also having children, buying a home.

So despite this ‘light-switch tax’ scare-mongering, and it will get worse, taxing carbon emissions will be the route away from carbon-centric energy sources and toward affordable renewable energy. Whatever the costs, we will create a funding regimen that ultimately rewards sustainability. That’s not optimism – it’s what the system is supposed to do. The country is us – we fund the government.

April 1, 2009

Ugly Green Ties to the Past

Not that one, specifically, but not altogether different, either.

I’m as skeptical as anybody about clean coal, but as a fan, of sorts, of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, I’m willing to give him and cc its due when he goes to links to take it seriously. Following routes we ostensibly mistrust, after all, is what open mindedness is about, n’Green pas?

This is all concerns FutureGen, a public-private partnership to build a first-of-its-kind coal-fueled, near-zero emissions power plant.

The article somehow manages to wax agnostic about the merits of living with the contradictions of the above statement.

Stephanie Mueller, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a statement after Monday’s meeting leaving no doubt about Chu’s interest. “Secretary Chu believes that the FutureGen proposal has real merit,” Mueller said. “In the coming weeks, the department will be working with the Alliance and members of Congress to strengthen the proposal and try to reach agreement on a path forward.”

If the project is revived, it will have plenty of company internationally. Three similar IGCC projects figure among a dozen schemes that European leaders last month deemed eligible to compete for €1 billion in stimulus funds set aside to support commercial-scale application of CCS in coal-fired power plants. Of those projects, six will be selected to receive funding. Meanwhile, a consortium of Chinese power generators has initiated construction of the GreenGen project, which was inspired by FutureGen.

I cringed repeatedly about Obama’s invocation of cc on the campaign trail; it sounded exactly like the dreamy sort of pandering with which his critics have tried to paint him, to little effect thus far. But here comes the administration again, continuing to strike a serious posture with an expensive, non-serious solution.

The idea of outfitting new coal-fired power plants with carbon storage and sequestration technology should be a minimal point of entry into our energy supply; that the coal industry can and does tout this as the next greatest thing speaks to bar height for the industry and the candle power of politicians as much as anything. As we have said, the cheapest power plants are the ones we don’t have to build. Measures to flatten demand should at least accompany gargantuan efforts to make a dirty power clean.

And even on 4/1 this is not a joke.

March 26, 2009

Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

What if there was a way to provide a limitless and environmentally friendly source for generating electricity? For a time, a handful of chemists around the world thought there was; it was called ‘cold fusion’ and its arrival turned out to be a lesson in how not to release research results.

But since this week is the twentieth anniversary of that premature announcement and the American Chemical Society is holding a national symposium called “New Energy Technology” complete with fresh results from experiments in re-branded cold fusion (now known as low-energy nuclear reactions), it might a good time to look back, even as we struggle forward.

The first report on “cold fusion,” presented in 1989 by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, was a global scientific sensation. Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. Scientists had been striving for years to tap that power on Earth to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Everyone thought that it would require a sophisticated new genre of nuclear reactors able to withstand temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

Pons and Fleishmann, however, claimed achieving nuclear fusion at comparatively “cold” room temperatures — in a simple tabletop laboratory device termed an electrolytic cell.

But other scientists could not reproduce their results, and the whole field of research declined.

Umm… so close, and yet I guess it’s good to know that some chemists haven’t given up on this elusive solution, quite the contrary. I guess when you spend most of your adult lifetime thinking about something wonderful and it just doesn’t work, no matter how logical it seems, I guess you’re powerless to convince yourself to give up on it.

Okay… if you were not made uncomfortable with the direction of that last statement, I politely suggest that you are spending too much time in front of the screen with the blue glow.

March 5, 2009

Flowr powr

Not that kind, but it will be increasingly important to sidestep the common stereotypes that have barnacled themselves to the various ‘isms’ promoting the environment, marginalizing its proponents as merely dirty hippies, hopeless and idealistic, man.

One of the cognitive leaps, and there will be a few, about embracing a new energy future is imagining what that future will be like and getting familiar with yourself and your surroundings within such a mental space. Then the climb down in consumption likely begins to seem more natural and preferred rather than punitive and lesser. Much as we self-identify with our cars now, you have to become one with several ideas, including but not limited to input problems related to carbon emissions and recognizing that the energy issues must cease to be framed by thinking that fossil fuel is energy rather than a material substance that has chemical energy.

How might we go about this? Maybe one of the places to make inroads on both counts is video games. This flies in the face of my own instincts, which is why I’m offering it up so deliberately, to both show and try to tell why this might work, in some small way. Because both issues referred to above are psychological, we seem to want to understand them less than we might be able, settling for merely what we know. It’s the crucial under-performance at which we excel. Present company emphasized.

So this game company, actually that game company, came up with this concept, and part of their description stuck out at me.

The game exploits the tension between urban bustle and natural serenity. Players accumulate flower petals as the onscreen world swings between the pastoral and the chaotic. Like in the real world, everything you pick up causes the environment to change (emphasis added). And hopefully by the end of the journey, you change a little as well.

So… I don’t know, and am willing to stand corrected. But I think that’s part of it.

Via.

January 31, 2009

The joneses, keeping up with

This is exactly what I was talking about in this week’s column. Admittedly it does involve foreign concepts like nonprofit utility boards and conscientious people, but this

The utility thinks behavior modification could be as effective in promoting conservation as trying to get customers to install new appliances is, Mr. Starnes said, and maybe more so.

is universal. Set aside ethical sympathies about the environment. Shame people into keeping up with their neighbors and they’ll take care of the imaginative/innovative part; you just put the comparative graphs on their bill. Okay, and the frowny faces, too.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”