FAMOUS LADY GOES GREEN



By the end of this month, 100 percent of the electricity that powers the Old Lady in the Harbor and Ellis Island, where millions of Americans first set foot in America, will be "green power." Windmills in West Virginia and Pennsylvania will supply the electricity [Let's hope the wind keeps blowing!] that powers up the floodlights that shine on Miss Liberty's torch and the air conditioning that keeps all those immigration records from mildewing. "It's a powerful public-policy statement to fuel such an important symbol in that way," says Jim Coyne, a renewable energy expert at FTI Consulting in Cambridge, Mass.

In some ways, shifting away from the heavy use of oil and natural gas is part of the US government's energy strategy. President Bush said wind power could provide up to 20 percent of the nation's electricity. The General Services Administration (GSA), which runs US government facilities, has been switching over to green power for some time. In the Northeast and Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) regions of the country, 33 percent of the electricity usage, or about 75 million kilowatt hours, are now renewable energy. These include buildings such as the Peter Rodino Office Building in Newark, N.J., and New York's 26 Federal Plaza, which houses the GSA and the FBI. Until the latest contract was signed, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island received half their electricity from green sources. The GSA also notes that going green is not costing taxpayers more money, because it buys electricity in bulk. "It's a wash," says Emily Baker, a spokeswoman for the GSA in New York. "Plus, there are so many other benefits such as the money farmers get from leasing their land for windmills."

Alternative sources of energy are still relatively small in the US energy picture, representing only 1 to 2 percent of US electricity use. But the industry is growing quickly: A record 2,400 megawatts were installed in 2005, enough to support the annual consumption of 650,000 homes. This year is expected to top last year, says Mr. Coyne.

The Statue of Liberty won't be directly hooked up to the windmills. [How did I know that? We wouldn't want the lights to go off and on all the time, would we?] The GSA is purchasing a renewable energy credit. The electricity the windmills produce is fed into the nation's electrical grid, offsetting the same amount the government uses. The process reduces the amount of electricity that needs to be produced by the conventional means of oil, gas, or coal. The statue and Ellis Island consume same amount of electricity used by 1,000 homes for a year, according to Pepco Energy Services, which is supplying the power to the statue. Although Ms. Lazarus had no idea the Statue would ultimately use clean energy, she wrote: "Give me ... your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Her words now take on new meaning.

Source






STUPID ETHANOL TECHNOLOGY

The stupidity that happens when your farm lobby makes you use good ol' American corn as a feedstock instead of the vastly more practical sugarcane. Brazil uses ZERO fossil fuels in producing ethanol and already does so on a large scale. Something to learn there?

Late last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel of the future. There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day to turn corn into ethanol - the first US plant of its kind to use coal instead of cleaner natural gas.

An hour south of Goldfield, another coal-fired ethanol plant is under construction in Nevada, Iowa. At least three other such refineries are being built in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota. The trend, which is expected to continue, has left even some ethanol boosters scratching their heads. Should coal become a standard for 30 to 40 ethanol plants under construction - and 150 others on the drawing boards - it would undermine the environmental reasoning for switching to ethanol in the first place, environmentalists say. "If the biofuels industry is going to depend on coal, and these conversion plants release their CO2 to the air, it could undo the global warming benefits of using ethanol," says David Hawkins, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

The reason for the shift is purely economic. Natural gas has long been the ethanol industry's fuel of choice. But with natural gas prices soaring, talk of coal power for new ethanol plants and retrofitting existing refineries for coal is growing, observers say. "It just made great economic sense to use coal," says Brad Davis, general manager of the Gold-Eagle Cooperative that manages the Corn LP plant, which is farmer and investor owned. "Clean coal" technology, he adds, helps the Goldfield refinery easily meet pollution limits - and coal power saves millions in fuel costs. Yet even the nearly clear vapor from the refinery contains as much as double the carbon emissions of a refinery using natural gas, climate experts say. So if coal-fired ethanol catches on, is it still the "clean, renewable fuel" the state's favorite son, Sen. Tom Harkin likes to call it?

Such questions arrive amid boom times for America's ethanol industry. With 97 ethanol refineries pumping out some 4 billion gallons of ethanol, the industry expects to double over the next six years by adding another 4.4 billion gallons of capacity per year. Tax breaks as well as concerns about energy security, the environment, and higher gasoline prices are all driving ethanol forward.

The Goldfield refinery, and the other four coal-fired ethanol plants under construction are called "dry mill" operations, because of the process they use. The industry has in the past used coal in a few much larger "wet mill" operations that produce ethanol and a raft of other products. But dry mills are the wave of the future, industry experts say. It's their shift to coal that's causing the concern. Scores of these new ethanol refineries are expected to be built across the Midwest and West by the end of the decade, and many could soon be burning coal in some form to turn corn into ethanol, industry analysts say. "It's very likely that coal will be the fuel of choice for most of these new ethanol plants," says Robert McIlvaine, president of a Northfield, Ill., information services company that has compiled a database of nearly 200 ethanol plants now under construction or in planning and development.

If all 190 plants on Mr. McIlvaine's list were built and used coal, motorists would not reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions, according to an in-depth analysis of the subject to date by scientists at University of California at Berkeley, published in Science magazine in January....

Coal may end up being merely a transitional fuel in the run-up to cellulosic ethanol, including switch grass and wood, says another RFA spokesman. While ethanol production today primarily uses only the corn kernel, cellulosic will use the whole plant. Cellulosic ethanol, mentioned by President Bush in his State of the Union speech, could turn the tide on coal, too, by burning plant dregs in the boiler with no need for coal at all. "It's a fact that ethanol is a renewable fuel today and it will stay that way," says Matt Hartwig, an RFA spokesman. "Any greenhouse-gas emissions that come out the tailpipe are recycled by the corn plant. I don't expect the limited number of coal-fired plants out there to change that."

Source








SOLAR FORCING OF CLIMATE CHANGE SIGNIFICANTLY STRONGER THAN THOUGHT

(From World Climate Report, 21 March 2006 -- including several reasons why the "models" have got it wrong)

Just when you were starting to believe that variations in the amount of energy coming from the sun weren't responsible for much of the observed surface warming during the past 20 years, comes along a paper in Geophysical Research Letters from two researchers at Duke University, Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West, that concludes otherwise:

We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted.

Scafetta and West arrive at their conclusions after applying a mathematical scheme that allows the cycles in solar variations to explain the cycles in temperature variations. They find this empirical method far superior to theoretical (i.e. climate models) methods because empirical methods take advantage of real behavior while theoretical methods are just that-theories-which very likely do not capture all of the real-world intricacies relating solar energy to climate processes. The authors summarize:

The sun played a dominant role in climate change in the early past, as several empirical studies would suggest, and is still playing a significant, even if not a predominant role, during the last decades. The impact of solar variation on climate seems significantly stronger than predicted by some energy balance models.The significant discrepancy between empirical and theoretical model estimates might arise because the secular TSI [total solar irradiance] proxy reconstructions are disputed and/or because the empirical evidence deriving from the deconstruction of the surface temperature is deceptive for reasons unknown to us. Alternatively, the models might be inadequate because of the difficulty of modeling climate in general and a lack of knowledge of climate sensitivity to solar variations in particular.

In fact, theoretical models usually acknowledge as solar forcing only the direct TSI forcing while empirical estimates would include all direct and indirect climate effects induced by solar variation. These solar effects might be embedded in several climate forcings because, for example, a TSI increase might indirectly induce a change in the chemistry of the atmosphere by increasing and modulating its greenhouse gas (H2O, CO2, CH4, etc.) concentration because of the warmer ocean, reduce the earth albedo by melting the glaciers and change the cloud cover patterns.

In particular, the models might be inadequate: (a) in their parameterizations of climate feedbacks and atmosphere-ocean coupling; (b) in their neglect of indirect response by the stratosphere and of possible additional climate effects linked to solar magnetic field, UV radiation, solar flares and cosmic ray intensity modulations; (c) there might be other possible natural amplification mechanisms deriving from internal modes of climate variability which are not included in the models. All the above mechanisms would be automatically considered and indirectly included in the phenomenological approach presented herein.

The bigger the observed solar impact, the smaller the observed human impact. The smaller the human impact, the less sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions. The less sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions, the less the impact greenhouse changes (and greenhouse gas emissions restrictions) will have in the future.

Reference: Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, (2006). Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L05708.

(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article referred to above is here)






ONLY IN JAPAN

As Britain faces a miserable summer of hosepipe bans and drought, households in some of Japan's most densely populated cities are to be "punished" for saving too much water. The national drive to cut down on water usage - galvanised by having the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on the environment signed on its doorstep - has been a catastrophic success. A drop in consumption of up to 10 per cent over the past five years has shocked even the water authorities and several plan to impose an emergency 20 per cent price rise next week to protect their revenues.

Unlike Britain, Japanese water boards are tacitly hoping that the conservation trend reaches a plateau soon. "The Government cannot, of course, tell people to use more water but there is rising concern over how far the average monthly water bill might fall," a senior member of the Government's committee on natural resources said. The concern is financial and, say experts, exposes the legacy of Japan's worst pork-barrel excesses. The water boards have spent the past two decades in an expensive orgy of dam construction and river management.

Even last year, amid calls from the Ministry of Finance to reduce the number of public works projects, there remained 200 dam projects on the go, sucking about 400 billion yen (2 billion pounds) from the public purse. Seven years ago the number was twice as high. The Government, via the water boards, has borrowed heavily to finance the spree and long-term payment plans to the dam builders were based on the stability of revenues.

Kazuhiko Arita, the leading Japanese expert on the water industry, believes that the country has undergone an overnight change of mindset and become less wasteful of water. "The use of tap water is decreasing everywhere. Now we have to pay for the fact that the country based its planning on the excessive demand forecast and kept building completely useless dams."

Sei Kato, of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, admitted that the burden of paying for all the dams and other engineering projects was catching up with the water boards, but insisted that the projects were all undertaken to ensure stable supplies. The local boards have also spent heavily on maintaining the system itself: total leakage in metropolitan Tokyo in 2004 amounted to about 4.8 per cent, and the authorities believe that this can be reduced to 4 per cent by the end of this year.

Unfortunately for the Government, the need to meet loan payments coincides with a surge of environmentally conscious product development by the country's biggest manufacturers of white goods. Sharp, Matsushita and Sanyo have all based recent marketing on water efficiency, and the buying public has been hooked.

Many houses filter the water as it leaves the kitchen tap - a process that usually wastes a lot of water because the filters empty themselves every two minutes. A new version made by Panasonic stores the water for ten minutes, and manages to save each household a tonne of water a year.

Most striking has been the steep rise in the use of dishwashers. Where ten years ago the machines were a relative rarity in Japan, they have now become commonplace. In the days of hand-washing the pots and pans, Japanese would tend to leave the taps running and got through about 150 litres a day on washing-up. The average dishwasher does the same job with about 10 litres. The dishwasher boom has also coincided with technological advances in the science of lavatories. The two biggest bathroom equipment makers have developed lavatories that use six litres of water per flush - half the amount used in 2001. Even more water is saved because 80 per cent of lavatories in homes have as standard a sink on top of the cistern, which allows the water that would be refilling the system anyway to be used for handwashing. An Inax spokesman explained that the eco6 lavatory will save a family of four about a bath full of water every two days - the equivalent of about 45,000 litres a year.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************