The White House has inserted last-minute changes to a proposed national air pollution rule that distort scientific findings on the health effects of breathing dust, according to a panel of independent scientists that advises the Bush administration. The federal Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee said the effect of the administration's changes is to cast doubt [Heaven forbid!] on key studies that link fine-particle pollution to heart disease, strokes, asthma attacks and shortened lifespans, or "premature deaths."
The committee also said Friday that the administration misrepresented the panel's view on dust pollution in rural areas to support an exemption for mining and farming. The revisions, penned by officials at the White House's Office of Management and Budget, were made in December, shortly before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released the proposal for public comment. The panel of prominent air-pollution experts raised their objections to the changes in a public teleconference Friday. A majority of the advisory committee had recommended that the limits be tightened on annual exposure to fine particle pollution - mainly dust and soot from human activity. Scientists on the panel and other experts, including those with the California Environmental Protection Agency, have said the preponderance of health studies show that tens of thousands of lives could be saved each year by moderately tightening the limits.
But EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson decided that the current limit should be retained and that the standard for coarser airborne particles be dropped altogether in rural areas. In issuing the proposal a few weeks ago, Johnson said, "The evidence to date does not support a national air-quality standard that would cover situations where most coarse particles in the air come from sources like windblown dust and soils, agricultural sources and mining sources."
More here
A REAL BLUE SKY IDEA
The Greenies would probablly find something wrong with it anyway -- not close enough to nature, or something
A Worldchanging post rounds up three different airborne power-generation systems -- a flying windmill, a windmill-equipped zeppelin, and a kite-based windmill. According to their figures, one flying windmill rated at 240kW with rotor diameters of 35 feet could generate power for less than two cents per kilowatt hour--that would make them the cheapest power source in the world. For greater power needs, several units would be operated in the same location--Sky Windpower says that an installation "rated at 2.81 megawatts flying at a typical U.S. site with an eighty percent capacity factor projects a life cycle cost per kilowatt hour at 1.4 cents." And they would have far better uptime than most windmills--since the jetstream never quits, they should operate at peak capacity 70-90% of the time. Output would also be less dependent on location than it is on the ground, simply because terrain doesn't matter much when you're at 35,000ft; however, since the jetstream and other "geostrophic" winds don't blow much at latitudes near the equator, it would be useful primarily for middle- and higher-latitudes.
Source
Update:
A reader writes:
"A real blue sky idea indeed. They are talking about generating 20MW with eight rotors all with wind energy only. Even if you generate at high voltages, say 10KV, that means currents of the order of 2000 A if you generate DC or about 400A if you generate three-phase AC. 400A requires a conductor of at least 1 inch dia, which weights about a pound per feet. That's three copper conductor plus a steel cable to support the whole thing. (Copper is rather weak in tension) Let's be generous: half a pound per feet per conductor times 4 (3 copper, one steel) is 2 pounds per feet times 35,000 feet equals 70,000 pounds or 35 tons of cable only. Even if you use ASCR cable (Aluminum Conductor, Steel Reinforced) we are not going to be far from those 35 tons. Add the weight of the generators and whatever and you are in trouble right there."
MORE ON OFFICIAL BRITAIN'S LATEST BIT OF CLIMATE PROPAGANDA
Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change brings together the material presented at a conference of the same name a year ago in Exeter. The argument put forward is that unless carbon emissions are tackled immediately, average global temperature is likely to rise by between 0.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius by 2050 - with the potential for much bigger changes further down the line. Some of the possible consequences of this include the melting of vast swathes of ice in Greenland and Western Antarctica, the shutdown or shifting of the ocean currents that keep northern Europe warm, the inundation of many low-lying areas, and loss or damage to plant and aquatic life.
More alarming speculation suggests that positive feedbacks might occur, resulting in runaway temperature rises with much more dramatic effects. As UK prime minister Tony Blair states in his foreword to the book: 'It is clear from the work presented that the risks of climate change may well be greater than we thought.'
This is essentially the same material that was so widely publicised in February 2005, but it is interesting how each new report about climate change turns up the volume of screeching fears about our future. For example, Dr Chris Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey suggests that sea levels could rise by 16 feet if the West Antarctic ice sheet were to melt (although this could take up to a thousand years).
The problem with the discussion about climate change is the way in which the politicisation of the scientific debate makes it increasingly difficult to come to a balanced view on what is really happening. We are presented with a message - 'we must reduce carbon emissions drastically and quickly' - without any sense of the caveats and uncertainties in the science. As one attendee at the Exeter conference put it, 'such was the spectacle of pending disaster that anyone who dared - or was allowed - to question whether the sky is really about to fall on us... was branded a "usual suspect"' (1).
For example, the most important single factor in the regulation of Earth temperature is cloud, yet it is still unclear what overall effect cloud will have in the future. Cloud and water vapour may tend to damp down the effects of increased greenhouse gases, or they may act to magnify such effects. In fact, while the science is clearly developing, there are still genuine problems with the computer models, data, physics, even the economics, of climate change that mean that even the best guesses about our future still reveal widely divergent scenarios.
An influential group of climate scientists and environmental campaigners are clearly taking one particular view of the evidence - that we are heading for disaster. In this view, change will be traumatic and the benefits of warming limited and isolated. For this group climate change is not just a big problem, it is the problem. Other problems we face, such as disease and poverty, are seen as subordinate to the need to tackle carbon emissions.
But given the huge potential costs of rapidly shifting to a low-carbon society, the policy of 'wait and see' has a lot going for it. Before we devote so much of society's energies and resources to solving a problem, let's be absolutely sure that we have got one. Before we sign up to hugely expensive attempts to prevent climate change, we should try to work out whether adapting to change, aided by greater economic development, could be more fruitful.
Human adaptability seems to be the missing factor in the whole discussion. The notion that we could use climate change to our advantage is anathema to the doom merchants. Indeed, both sides of the debate are marked by conservatism. There is a tendency among some climate change sceptics to suggest that the current way of organising society's energy supply and transport is the only sensible one, and that reducing carbon emissions will inevitably cause more problems than it solves.
What the debate about climate change desperately needs is a questioning approach that untangles science and politics; a sense of perspective about the scale of the problems; and a large dose of faith in the ability of society to adapt to change in a positive manner. This new book is unlikely to be much help.
Source
EXPORTING POLLUTION?
Post lifted from Marginal Revolution
Long before Larry Summers shocked the elite by suggesting that men and women might be different he signed on to a World Bank memo noting:
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it."
A number of people suggested that the US was doing just this as lower tariff barriers made it easier to export dirty manufacturing industries and import the goods. An NBER paper, however, finds no evidence for this effect. Quoting from the NBER Digest:
Imports overall grew by 318 percent during the period. But according to World Bank data that characterizes industries by their pollution intensity, imports of goods manufactured in highly polluting processes grew at a much slower rate. In other words, just as the U.S. manufacturing sector was growing while simultaneously shifting toward clean industries, the same thing was happening to our imports: they were rising, but the percentage of goods coming from polluting industries was going down. "The cleaner U.S. manufacturing composition is not offset by dirtier imports," the authors write. "Rather, the composition of imports has also become cleaner."
One reason pollution hasn't been exported may be that the dirtier (older) industries have more political power and have resisted tariff reductions. The authors find, however, that even if one eliminated all tariffs on manufactured goods pollution would still not be exported.
It's not that this wouldn't be a good idea, it's just that it so happens that poor countries don't have a comparative advantage in producing the goods that require a lot of pollution. Of course, if we tax pollution in the United States at higher levels it will make more sense to export it - an interesting dilemma.
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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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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