SOLAR PROGRESS?

Pity if you want to turn on your lights at night, though

Both inventors and investors are betting that flexible sheets of tiny solar cells used to harness the sun's strength will ultimately provide a cheaper, more efficient source of energy than the current smorgasbord of alternative and fossil fuels. Nanosys and Nanosolar in Palo Alto -- along with Konarka in Lowell, Mass. -- say their research will result in thin rolls of highly efficient light-collecting plastics spread across rooftops or built into building materials. These rolls, the companies say, will be able to provide energy for prices as low as the electricity currently provided by utilities, which averages $1 per watt.

While all three companies provide prototypes for large corporate research labs and government agencies, company representatives and investors are reticent to predict when nanotechnology-powered solar systems will be commercially available. Industry watchers, however, say that achieving mass production of these products may take five years or longer. "We take the long view, although we're not averse to having products very quickly," said Bryan Roberts, general partner at Venrock Associates in Menlo Park, a leading Nanosys investor. "Whenever you're developing a novel technology platform, you're looking at a four- to six-year time frame rather than a three- to four-year time frame."

A study released by the Energy Foundation in March suggests that the United States could produce 2,900 new megawatts of solar power by 2010 -- enough to power 500,000 homes -- if the cost is significantly reduced. Solar energy ranges between $4 and $5 per watt. The report suggests market expansion will require $2 to $2.50. If the price breakthrough occurs, says Wooley, the report's assumed price structure represents a $6.6 billion annual market opportunity. The Energy Foundation report also says that solar energy could furnish much of the nation's electricity if available residential and commercial rooftops were fully utilized. According to the Energy Foundation, using available rooftop space could provide 710,000 megawatts across the United States, whose current electrical capacity is 950,000 megawatts.

High production costs are among the reasons solar energy hasn't become a major source of electricity. The black, glasslike photovoltaic cells that make up most solar panels are usually composed of crystalline silicon, which requires clean-room manufacturing facilities free of dust and airborne microbes. Silicon is also in short supply and increasingly expensive to produce, so high manufacturing costs are the main reason behind high wattage prices. As a result, the cost of panel installation typically equals four to five years of expensive energy before production costs are recovered and systems begin paying for themselves. With nanotechnology, tiny solar cells can be printed onto flexible, very thin light-retaining materials, bypassing the cost of silicon production.

If the technical hurdles can be cleared, the biggest money will be found atop buildings. According to Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at New York's Lux Research, "The ultimate prize is rooftop distribution applications," in which residential and commercial buildings would generate most of their own power.

"The problem is distribution. Nanomaterials could provide a way to transmit energy as well as capture it." Until the distribution issue is solved, Nordan says, solar energy will not be able to meet its potential of supplying vast amounts of power.

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GREENIE COERCION AT WORK

A coalition of environmental and liberal lobbying groups is planning a boycott of Exxon Mobil products to protest the company's challenges to warnings about global warming and its support for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The boycott is part of a public relations campaign to brand Exxon Mobil, the nation's biggest oil company, as an "outlaw," the groups say.

A spokesman for Exxon Mobil said in an e-mail message that the company did recognize the risk of climate change. The spokesman, Russ Roberts, said Exxon Mobil had committed to "investments and strategic planning that address emissions today, as well as industry-leading research on technologies with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future." But the company has also supported groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose work has challenged some generally accepted scientific models that predict the speed of climate change and the severity of its consequences.

On the question of Arctic drilling, Mr. Roberts wrote, "We believe that with more than 30 years of industry experience on Alaska's North Slope and with recent technological advancements, ANWR can be developed with little threat to the ecology of the coastal plain."

Energy enterprises have long provoked environmentalists' opposition over specific projects. But it has been a long time since one has been the target of a nationwide boycott. Lee R. Raymond, Exxon Mobil's chief executive, has been an outspoken skeptic about the widely held view among climate scientists that human activity is responsible for the current warming trends.

Among the groups involved in the campaign, scheduled to begin on Tuesday with nationwide press conferences and a new Web site, www.exxposeexxon.com, are the U.S. Public Interest Group, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and MoveOn.org Political Action. Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director, said the goal was either to get Exxon Mobil to change or "to encourage other oil companies" to improve their environmental stewardship. The company was chosen, organizers said, because its record is worse than its competitors'. "The other oil companies have aspirations" for environmental performance, Mr. Pope said.

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DUBIOUS ASBESTOS STUDY

A new study should help move the debate over living near asbestos veins from whether the situation is potentially dangerous to how people should best respond to the hazard, the study's lead scientist said Tuesday. Dr. Marc Schenker, a UC Davis public health scientist, said the findings strongly support the hypothesis that low-level, non-workplace exposures to naturally occurring asbestos cause mesothelioma, a rare and highly lethal cancer of the lining of the chest. While the odds of getting the disease are low, they are comparable to the risks of getting lung cancer from breathing secondhand tobacco smoke [i.e. negligible], a hazard that has captured much more attention from public health officials, he said.

Mesothelioma kills at least 2,500 people a year in the United States, compared with an estimated 3,000 deaths attributed to secondhand tobacco smoke, Schenker said. "Public efforts should now shift to understanding the (mesothelioma) risk, and how we can protect people from this preventable malignancy," said Schenker, who chairs the UCD Department of Public Health Services.

The scientist joined fellow researchers and lung health advocates at a university press conference in Sacramento on Tuesday to speak in detail for the first time about a study that links living near asbestos-bearing rocks in California with higher rates of the rare cancer. In areas closer to rocks that frequently contain asbestos - mainly serpentine - the researchers found more cases of mesothelioma, while farther away, they found fewer and fewer. In California, serpentine, a greenish rock with a waxy surface, occurs mainly near earthquake faults in the Sierra foothills, the Coast Range and the Klamath Mountains.

Many of the asbestos areas are in the path of some of the most rapidly growing areas in the state, creating a potential hazard as housing and road construction tear into the veins and release fibers, which are small enough to reach deep into the lung, yet large enough to lodge there for life and cause cancer 20 to 40 years later. Schenker called for more aggressive efforts in educating the public, reducing exposures and pinpointing where the most dangerous types of asbestos occur.....

EPA officials said the findings support the agency's decisions in recent years to investigate El Dorado Hills and other areas of the country laden with asbestos-containing rock. "The study by a respected researcher who is unaffiliated with the EPA underscores and reinforces our concern about the potential risk to environmental exposure to naturally occurring asbestos," said Dan Meer, an EPA official who supervised air test studies at schools and parks in El Dorado Hills.

EPA test results released in May showed that bicycle riding, playing baseball and other everyday recreational activities at the town's Community Park kick up fibers of a particularly toxic type of asbestos in concentrations many times higher than if there were no activity in the area.

One thing the study does not do, Schenker said, is provide enough information to tell a young family whether to live near naturally occurring asbestos. "The risk to any individual is actually quite low," the scientist said, so families would have to weigh what risks they might face in other locations, as well as the exact nature of the mineral near their homes and their own personal risk tolerance...

The latest, peer-reviewed asbestos study by Schenker, UC biostatistician Laurel Beckett, and others from UC Davis and Harvard University was posted online last month by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and is expected to be printed in the journal this fall. Researchers looked at almost 3,000 California cases of mesothelioma and compared their geographic distribution with pancreatic cancer - a control strategy to designed to rule out such risk factors as genetics and lifestyles.

Other scientists who track the issue have called the work provocative, but not conclusive. So far, most asbestos research in the United States has focused on exposures on the job, such as to insulation workers handling asbestos- containing materials or, more recently, on asbestos exposures to people living near mines and mineral processing plants.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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