Tuesday, April 30, 2013



1,000 words



This is an iron mine. Steel is made of iron, and wind turbines are predominantly made of steel. So when the anti-uranium brigade bemoans the incurable dangers of mining and then bows to wind turbines, they’re not being straight with you. Mining isn't pretty but thanks to modern technology and smart engineers, it's perfectly safe and absolutely necessary.





Fisker: Free to Make Flashy Cars in Finland

With nearly a year’s worth of exclusive reporting on Obama’s green-energy crony-corruption scandal, you might think we’ve covered them all—but the hits just keep on coming. This week Fisker is in the news due to its failure to meet a Monday payment on their Department of Energy (DOE) loan, with $10 million due, and Wednesday’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing: “Green Energy Oversight: Examining the Department of Energy’s Bad Bet on Fisker Automotive.”

Along with researcher Christine Lakatos, who writes The Green Corruption Files, I’ve addressed Fisker before. In last week’s column, I harkened back to an October 2012 report we did on 2009 stimulus-funded projects that were in trouble. We highlighted two companies on that list: Suntech and SoloPower. Suntech was recently put into bankruptcy and, about SoloPower, we said: “SoloPower’s power is waning.” On April 22, the Oregonian’s headline read: “SoloPower moves to power down Portland factory, gut remaining workforce.”

Fisker, the stimulus-funded company making $100,000+ electric cars in Finland, was also on that October 2012 list. At the time, I wrote: “Though the company has balked at Solyndra comparisons, Fisker may well be on ‘death’s door.’”

Despite defaulting “on loans or investment conditions at least four separate times” and squandering more than $1.3 billion in investment capital and government loan money, the company’s founder and former CEO, Henrik Fisker (Fisker left the company in March over  “disagreements with management”), in testimony before the House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, argued that the company was still viable. In both the opening and closing of his testimony, Fisker used the following statement regarding the company that bears his name: “Fisker still has the potential to build on these achievements if the company can secure financial and strategic resources.”

While Fisker’s testimony indicates that he is proud of the company’s “many notable achievements,” Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), declared in his opening statements: “Fisker should have never received taxpayer money; it was rated CCC+...it was a junk grade investment.”  So why did Fisker get the loan in the first place and continue to receive funding even after it “missed a crucial production target?”

?While Wednesday’s hearing didn’t reveal any smoking gun, and Fisker claimed: “I am not aware and do not believe that any improper political influence was used in connection with the company's loan application or subsequent negotiations with the Department of Energy,” experience in reporting on the various stimulus-funded loan guarantee programs, grants and tax credits indicates otherwise.

True, unlike many of the other stories, no one from the Fisker organization itself served on Obama’s (now-disbanded) Jobs Council, nor is there an obvious connection such as a former DOE staffer sitting on the board. But, surprise, there are political connections nonetheless.

In the case of Fisker, the cronyism comes first in the form of the venture capital firm with private investments that needed government funds to make their 2008 investment good. The company in question? Kliener Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB)—which, according to New York magazine, “has both former Vice President Al Gore and John Doerr, a very big-ticket Obama donor, on its board of directors.” Doerr has had roles inside the Obama White House since early 2009, from jobs, to economics, to crafting the energy sector of the 2009-Recovery Act, from which his firm—KPCB—has been rewarded handsomely. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), in 2008, reported that the Fisker deal was “one of the first deals in which former Vice President Al Gore provided advice for Kleiner.” KPCB’s Managing Partner, Ray Lane, told the WSJ that their investment was more than $10 million and was “one of our bigger investments.”

In an earlier report, I said: “Doerr jumped on the Climate Change bandwagon in 2005 and credits Al Gore for his ‘environmental awakening’—though his conversion may have been more financial than spiritual, as he saw green-energy as the ‘mother of all markets’ and ‘the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.’”

Despite a green-energy push from the White House, these funds haven’t “delivered the returns expected on the timeline expected for most venture capitalists.” In fact, Doerr admitted in a November 2009 speech that the government funding saved them: “If we’d been able to foresee the crash of the market, we wouldn’t probably have launched a green initiative, because these ventures really need capital. The only way in which we were lucky, I think, is that the government stepped in, particularly the Department of Energy. Led by this great administration that put in place these loan guarantees.”

Clearly the Fisker “investment” wasn’t going as well as KCBP expected. In Wednesday’s hearing, a 2009 email from Bernhard Koehler, Fisker cofounder and COO was addressed. In it, he pressured someone inside the DOE, regarding the need for the taxpayer-funded loan, because they couldn’t meet payroll.

The Fisker loan had three specific strikes against it: it had a dismal credit rating—a “junk bond” CCC+; it was initially rejected by the credit review board; and the loan was twice the value of the collateral. While the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program received 150 applications, only 5 were awarded loans—and all had some political connections or ramifications: Fisker—$529 million; Ford—$5.907 billion, Nissan—$1.448 billion; Tesla—$465 million; and The Vehicle Production Group, LLC—$50 million.

Companies without connections didn’t get approved. In November, I reported on XP Technologies, one of those companies whose loan application was rejected. Alleging that “criminal activities did take place by DOE staff and affiliates,” XP Technologies has filed a lawsuit concerning the DOE’s denial. Following the publication of my column on XP Technologies, another applicant, who also didn’t have any political connections, contacted me. This applicant acknowledged that he really didn’t know the system and, therefore, looking back, wasn’t surprised that his application was denied. However, he told me that he received no help or encouragement from the DOE; they did nothing to make it easier for him. It was like they weren’t really interested in anyone but the favored few. Accepting applications was, perhaps, just for cover.

Fisker’s $529 million loan was approved in September 2009, and the first tranche was funded May 2010. But it took a lot of finagling to get there.

Vice President Biden stepped in to move the loan along—we don’t know why, but we know he did. (We also know more about other green-energy projects in which Biden was involved.) In August 2009, Fisker visited in Delaware a GM factory, which was scheduled to be shut down. According to a 2009 WSJ report, once politicians in the state got wind of Fisker’s possible interest, they ratcheted up the pressure. Saving the plant, according to officials involved in the decision, “gave fresh urgency to the DOE’s quest for Fisker.” However, by August, the December 2008 application still wasn’t approved. “Delaware's governor and congressional delegation began peppering U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu with calls on Fisker's behalf. They also had repeated discussions with Vice President Biden and his staff.” Five days after Governor Merkell had a September meeting with Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, “Chu announced the government had signed a provisional agreement” for Fisker’s loan. Part of the deal included, not just the $529 million DOE loan, but also $21 million in grants and loans from the State of Delaware.

On October 27, 2009, Biden toured Fisker’s Delaware plant to tout the DOE's Loan Program. ABC News reported: “Standing in a shuttered General Motors plant in Wilmington, DE, Vice President Biden proclaimed that a half-billion-dollar Department of Energy loan would transform the idled site into a production line for electric cars.”??“Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company, called Fisker, as a bright, new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs,” and stated: “This is seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars in good, new jobs.”

Referencing Delaware’s involvement, the state’s chief of economic development, Alan Levin said: “We had in the vice president a secret weapon.”

In addition to Doerr and Gore championing the Fisker Project, and the Biden “secret weapon,” Fisker had a few other friends in high places. The National Legal and Policy Center reports that Fisker was receiving advice regarding their loan application from Debevoise & Plimpton LLC, a law firm with a history of donating to President Obama and other Democrats—which taxpayers also funded. Too bad XP technologies, and other applicants without connections, didn’t know to hire Debevoise & Plimpton.

Now, we all know that Fisker never made one car in Delaware—or anywhere in the US. The Delaware plant is “absolutely empty.” We know that Fisker lost $557,000 on each flashy sports car it sold and has laid off most of its employees. And we know that Fisker will likely be the next taxpayer-funded green-energy project to go bankrupt.

While we do not know all the political connections that got Fisker a free ride to make flashy cars in Finland, we do know there is crony-corruption. As the WSJ reports: “The Obama Energy Department is keeping tight rein on documents, so we don't know.” We just don’t know.

SOURCE




On Global Warming Advocates and Scientific Consensus

By Victor Morawski

Commenting on John Kerry’s recent trip to China and his emphasis on anthropogenic (i.e. man caused) global warming as one of the most significant problems that the two nations should work together on solving, talk show host Rush Limbaugh voiced an opinion on science and scientific truth that the majority of his listeners and a majority of my readers share: that scientific truth is determined by how much our scientific views conform to the way the world actually is and not by mere human agreement.

Striking back at Kerry’s opinion that the science behind manmade global warming (or climate change if you prefer) is “settled” because a supposed “consensus of scientists” agrees that it is happening, Limbaugh said “science is not up to a vote. It either is or isn’t. Whatever it is, it is or isn’t, but it’s not up to a vote. Global warming doesn’t exist because a ‘consensus of scientists’ agree. Manmade global warming either is happening or it isn’t, but it isn’t up to a vote.”

One main reason for the enormous success that Rush has enjoyed over the years is that he speaks for the common man and, of course, woman.  In his analyses of current events he articulates views his listeners may share but are unable to formulate for themselves with the clarity for which he is now famous.  And this issue is a clear case in point.

To be sure, Kerry has spoken with the Chinese and others about a scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming as the official State Department Press Release on his visit bears out in saying that the “two countries took special note of the overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change and its worsening impacts.”

Investors.com notes that the consensus of scientists claim is a line that global warming alarmists repeat endlessly. And who can forget Al Gore’s continuing insistence on such a consensus as part of his claim that anthropogenic global warming is established science.

Yet it may seem unlikely to readers that these alarmists really mean by the claim what they seem to mean.  Could they actually mean what Rush takes them to mean?  Do they subscribe to the unlikely view that scientific truth is to be determined by the most votes?

Surprising though it may be to some, I am convinced that this is exactly what they mean and what many of them ascribe to as their view of scientific truth.

Most of those who point to consensus among the community of scientists as the determiner of scientific truth do not adhere to the sort of relativism that would make any view true if there is a consensus behind it.

Sometimes called “Cultural Relativism,” this view holds all beliefs to be equally valuable if supported by a cultural consensus.  For science, this extreme form of relativism would set a primitive culture’s view that the earth is flat or resting on the back of an elephant on a par with our own culture’s view that the earth is a sphere, hurtling through space and subject to the laws of Newtonian Mechanics.  Consequences like this make this sort of relativism an implausible candidate for a standard of scientific truth.

Most advocates of truth as consensus in science adopt some form of Instrumentalism, a view that judges the worth of scientific theories not by how well they succeed in describing the world as it actually is but by how useful they are at doing things like making successful predictions.  On this view, the task of a theory is to be a useful instrument in scientists’ hands, not a mirror of reality.  For Instrumentalists, some theories really are better than others not because they reflect reality better but because they are more useful.  So, as science progresses, old theories are rejected and new ones are accepted not because what they say better corresponds to things in the world as they are but because they are more useful and less fraught with problems (anomalies) than the older theories.

But who makes the decision to leave an old theory and go to a new one?  And who decides whether an old theory is too full of difficulties to keep around anymore?  Why, the community of scientists, of course.  Here is where consensus comes in.  Instrumentalism adopts the Pragmatists’ view of truth as usefulness.  As I once heard contemporary Pragmatist Richard Rorty put it, truth is a compliment we pay to theories that we find useful.  It is the community of scientists that pays this compliment to theories that it finds useful.  For people like John Kerry, Al Gore, and a supposed consensus of professional scientists, truth is a compliment we should pay to anthropogenic global warming as a theory.

That he indeed thinks that the theory is very useful in its predictions can be gleaned from Kerry’s recent remarks that “We are seeing the science of climate change come back to us now at a rate that is far faster and with far greater levels of damage than anything that scientists predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago,” Kerry said. “Every prediction that has been made is coming true, but coming true bigger and more dangerously.”

Now if truth really is consensus, then maybe Kerry’s followers would agree with him on the truth of his remarks but for those of us for whom truth is conformity with reality, his remarks are simply not borne out by the reality of the situation concerning the abysmal failure rate of modeled predictions on anthropogenic global warming.  My own piece of a few weeks ago here and on Youtube discusses some of these failures in detail.

To return to Rush, in the same show he discussed a recent release by Reuters which points out that in response to the failure of those predictions scientists need to either cling to their theory that human activity has warmed the planet and hope that the warming returns much like an old girlfriend who has unexpectedly left town leaving no forwarding address, give into an opposing view that ocean oscillations might have a lot more to do with global heating and cooling than they figured or abandon their view that CO2 emissions (especially those that are man-caused) are a significant factor in planetary warming.

Fortunately, those who seek a refuge from objective truth in human consensus cannot hide from the truth of failed predictions.  These failures are now making even the Pragmatists wonder whether the theory of anthropogenic global warming is useful enough to keep around.

SOURCE




Greenies would like natural gas  -- if they liked anything

 New data from the Environmental Protection Agency indicates that drilling for natural gas releases significantly less methane (the main component of natural gas) into the atmosphere than previously thought.

Twenty percent less.

This is not seen as good news for the ultra-environmentalists who fervently believe that any fuel made from fossilized plant or animal matter (coal or natural gas) is bad.

Using natural gas as a transportation fuel (especially for heavy-duty trucks, like 18-wheelers) or for the production of electricity dramatically cuts down on greenhouse gasses from burning diesel or coal, but it doesn't cut them to zero.

At one time - "one time" meaning from the year zero to 2009 - the amount of natural gas that America had available was limited. So limited that the chemical and pharmaceutical industry were worried that using it for anything else, like as a transportation fuel or to generate electricity, was a foolish use of a limited resource.

Since the middle of the last century a group called the Potential Gas Committee, that has a connection to the Colorado School of Mines, has issued a biennial report on how much natural gas is available for development in the United States.

Until the 2009 report the PGC's estimates were largely focused on "traditional" natural gas wells. In 2009 the PGC began reporting the amount of natural gas that is available from the huge shale deposits under the continental United States.

In 2007 the PGC reported available reserves as 1,321 trillion cubic feet. In the 2009 report, reserves jumped to 1,836 Tcf - an increase of almost 39 percent.

The conventional wisdom of the time suggested that represented a 100 year supply.

As better geology and drilling techniques have been developed, this year's report suggests reserves of 2,384 trillion cubic feet - another 30 percent bump in the amount of natural gas available under the United States. If the 2009 report represented a 100 year supply, we now have natural gas reserves of more that should last more than 130 years.

We have more energy stored in our natural gas reserves than Saudi Arabia has in its oil.

One of the issues with producing all that natural gas is the amount of methane that is released into the air at the well-head. People who want only battery-operated vehicles (recharged with electricity that is produced solely from non-fossil sources), or hydrogen fuel cells have used this free methane as one of their arguments against using natural gas as a replacement for diesel that is largely made from imported oil.

Oil has a minor role in the production of electricity. According to AP reporter Kevin Bego, "Since power plants that burn natural gas emit about half the amount of the greenhouse gases as coal-fired power, some say that the gas drilling boom has helped the U.S. become the only major industrialized country to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions."

Better mechanical techniques will continue to decrease the amount of methane released into the atmosphere even with more natural gas being recovered.

The EPA reported that 145 million metric tons of methane was released by natural gas drilling in 2011.

The next largest factor? "Enteric fermentation," accounts for another 137 million metric tons of methane released by cows when they … well, when cows are being cows. There is nothing to suggest that cows will become more efficient.

A recent New York Times article recently found that major shippers like UPS are moving away from imported diesel to domestic natural gas. Natural gas is cheaper than diesel, it is about 30 percent cleaner, and it is ours.

SOURCE





Support drilling, fracking, Keystone … and exports

We don’t need to restrict oil or gas exports. We need to open more lands to leasing and drilling

Paul Driessen

The interminable war on drilling, fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline has taken some bizarre turns. Now it’s getting worse, as opponents grow more desperate, and the moon again grows full.

Deepwater drilling, 3-dimension and 4-D seismic (the ability to visualize 3-D over many years), deep horizon horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and other technological marvels have obliterated environmentalist claims that the United States and world are running out of oil and gas – and therefore we need to switch to subsidized, land-hungry, job-killing wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels.

Thanks to free enterprise innovation on state and public lands – and no thanks to President Obama, who has made nearly the entire federal onshore and offshore estate off limits to leasing and drilling – US oil and natural gas production has set an all-time record. The world is on the verge of doing so, as well.

Long-running geopolitics have been turned upside down, as OPEC, Russia and other oil superpowers wonder what hit them. Plastic and chemical manufacturers, steel makers, bus and fleet vehicle operators, and now long-haul truckers are already cashing in on the natural gas bonanza. So are electric utilities, especially with EPA continuing its war on coal, with more unnecessary heavy-handed air and water rules.

Global warming / climate change hysteria is also foundering on the rocks of reality. Average global temperatures haven’t risen in 16 years, seas aren’t rising any faster than 100 years ago, and storms, floods and droughts are no more frequent or severe than over multi-decade trends during the past century.

Evidence and reality simply are not cooperating with IPCC and Mann-made climate models. “Trust the computer models!” the alarmists plead. “If reality doesn’t comport with our predictions, reality is wrong.”

The US State Department has (yet again) said the Keystone XL pipeline poses few environmental problems and should be approved, to bring Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries – creating thousands of construction and permanent jobs, and billions in economic growth and government revenue.

Unacceptable! rants the Environmental Protection Agency. “State underestimated KXL’s potential impact on global warming and needs to do its studies all over again,” says EPA. Never mind that oil sands production would add a minuscule 0.06% to US greenhouse gas emissions and an undetectable 0.00001 degrees C per year to computer-modeled global warming, according to the Congressional Research Service. Do it over, until you get the answers we want, demand EPA and environmentalist ideologues.

Some 70% of Americans and 60% of Canadians support Keystone – and energy security (and jobs) outrank greenhouse gas reduction as a national priority by a 2-1 margin among Americans – says Canadian pollster Nik Nanos.

However, haters of hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty are not ready to surrender. They’ve launched a blitzkrieg flanking attack. This time they are outraged that some Keystone oil could be refined into diesel and other products and exported! to Europe or Asia – while some frack-based natural gas might be converted to LNG and likewise exported! around the globe.

Well, yes. When US refiners transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, asphalt, waxes and petrochemicals, they ship some of these products overseas. Since Americans use less diesel than refineries manufacture (some parts of each barrel of crude can be converted only into diesel), refiners also export their excess diesel to Europe, which uses more diesel than gasoline, and Europeans ship their surplus gasoline to the USA, mostly to East Coast consumers. It’s a win-win arrangement that will be buttressed and safeguarded by Keystone pipeline transport of Canadian oil.

And yes, Cheniere Energy and other companies want to ship liquefied natural gas to foreign markets. It’s hardly surprising that anti-fracking activists would seize on this as yet another excuse for opposing this game-changing technology. It is hardly remarkable that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) and other far-Left legislators would sponsor bills to block LNG exports.

What is shocking is that Dow and Huntsman Chemical, Alcoa Aluminum, Nucor Steel and other companies are joining the no-export campaign. They have convinced themselves that such exports will hurt their own selfish economic interests – and for PR reasons have packaged that notion into assertions that exporting any US natural gas is against America’s and the public’s economic interests. Nonsense.

America has barely begun to tap its vast shale gas and conventional natural gas deposits. It has not yet touched its methane hydrates. Together, these deposits will likely last a century or more. In addition, other countries are racing to develop their own conventional, shale and hydrate deposits – while still others will eventually recognize the folly of keeping their own deposits off limits. All this will gradually reduce demand for US natural gas exports, slow and prolong extraction, and keep gas prices low.

This interplay will also help ensure that more factories and power plants in more countries burn natural gas, thereby replacing coal and providing the economic wherewithal to enable China, India and other nations to install modern pollution abatement technologies on their now dirty power plants. That will greatly improve air quality and human health in countless cities, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing consternation among steadily dwindling numbers of climate alarmists.

American oil and gas development – and exports – will also provide an opportunity for our nation to “give back” to the world community for all the petroleum that our anti-leasing, anti-drilling policies have caused us to take from the world’s petroleum supplies for decades. All this activity will also spur further innovation in technologies to unlock still more energy. It will spur job creation, economic growth and government tax and royalty revenue collection here in the United States … and abroad.

Some 23 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed; 128 million are dependent on various government programs, including 47 million on food stamps; and the United States is more than $16 trillion in debt. Unemployment in the construction trades is 14.7 percent. Black unemployment was 12.7% when President Bush left office; it soared to 16.7% by September 2011 under President Obama, and remains stuck at 14% today for black adults – and an astronomical 43% for black teenagers!

Drilling, fracking and exports can reverse these horrendous, intolerable, unnecessary statistics.

Misguided industrialists should stop railing against exports. They would do themselves and our nation far more good by putting their lobbyists and public relations staffs to work demanding an end to leasing, drilling and fracking bans that continue to dominate eco-liberal thinking, US energy policy (especially under the current administration).

Of 1.8 billion acres on our nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, only 36-43 million are under lease. That’s barely 2% of the OCS. Offshore territory equal to 78% of the entire US landmass (Alaska plus the Lower 48) is off limits! Even the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill cannot justify that.

Onshore, it’s just as bad. As of 1994, over 410 million federally controlled acres were effectively off limits to exploration and development. That’s 62% of the nation’s public lands – an area nearly equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation has gotten progressively worse, with millions more acres – and vast energy, mineral and economic bounties – locked up in wilderness, park, preserve, wildlife refuge, wilderness study, Antiquities Act and other restrictive land use designations, or simply made unavailable by bureaucratic fiat or foot-dragging.

Drilling opponents claim to be protecting the environment. In reality, they simply detest hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty. Commonsense policies will rejuvenate our economy, put Americans back to work, and help fund government programs that Messrs. Obama and Reid profess to care so much about – while safeguarding ecological values we all cherish.

Via email




Russian Scientists: ‘We Could Face Cooling Period For 200-250 Years’

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

"Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth".

Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.

"Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040 but it won’t be as pervasive as in the late 17th century".

Even though pessimists say global cooling will hamper exploration of the Arctic, experts say it won’t. Climate change and the resulting increase in the thickness of the Arctic ice cover pose no obstacles to the extraction of oil and gas on the Arctic shelf. As oil and gas reserves of the Arctic sea shelf are estimated to be billions of tons, countries are demonstrating more interest in the development of the Arctic. Climate change will also have no impact on the Northern Sea Route, which makes it possible to cut trade routes between Europe, Asia and America. Professor Igor Davidenko comments.

"The Northern Sea Route has never opened so early or closed so late over the past 30 years. Last year saw a cargo transit record – more than five million tons. The first Chinese icebreaker sailed along the Northern Sea Route in 2012. China plans it to handle up to 15% of its exports".

As Russia steps up efforts to upgrade its icebreaker fleet, new-generation icebreakers are set to arrive in the years to come. No climate changes will thus be able to impede an increase in shipping traffic via the Northern Sea Route.

SOURCE

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Monday, April 29, 2013




Greenhouse gas levels highest in 3m years

And yet temperatures are not rising!  Funny, that!

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere are on the cusp of reaching 400 parts per million for the first time in 3 million years.

The daily CO2 level, measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, was 399.72 parts per million last Thursday, and a few hourly readings had risen to more than 400 parts per million.

''I wish it weren't true but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400 ppm level without losing a beat,'' said Ralph Keeling, a geologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US, which operates the Hawaiian observatory.

The 450 ppm level is considered to be the point at which the world has a 50 per cent chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. Any higher and the odds of avoiding searing temperature rises of 4 or 5 degrees by the end of the century become prohibitively risky.

The rise in greenhouse gases corresponds with the extra amount of CO2 known to have been emitted by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. More greenhouse gases means more heat builds up at the Earth's surface.

The last time CO2 reached the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere - in the Pliocene era - temperatures rose by between 3 and 4 degrees and sea levels were between five and 40 metres higher than today. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily since constant measurements began at the Hawaiian observatory in 1958, when the level was about 317 parts per million.

Levels of more than 400 parts per million have been recorded at a few polar monitoring stages in the past year but the Mauna Loa Observatory readings are considered the most definitive.

SOURCE



British Ministers 'not totally committed' on carbon

A parliamentary advisory committee has accused the Government of being only "half-committed" to low-carbon energy generation, warning that the UK is likely to miss emissions reduction targets as a result.

David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said Britain needs a huge investment in renewable, or clean, power infrastructure if it is to hit its target of a 50 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2025 on 1990 levels.

Emissions are currently a fifth lower than in 1990. While the recession has caused emissions to fall, the underlying trend in CO2 output is flat when it should be declining, Mr Kennedy said. "We won't be able to meet that target without significant measures – and they have to be taken now if it's going to happen by the mid-2020s."

He said potential investors in low-carbon energy – from wind-turbine blade makers to nuclear-power project developers – "need to know there is a market" for clean power. Unless they are confident about their likely returns – for example through guaranteed subsidies and the Government's commitment to hitting renewable energy targets – they are unwilling to risk investment.

"We don't know how the low-carbon technology market will look in the 2020s because the Government will not commit, and that uncertainty is stopping investment," Mr Kennedy added. "The Government is only half-committed to the future, and that is the worst of all worlds. This report reinforces the fact that there is a lot more to do to reduce our footprint, and the Government should not be patting itself on the back."

The CCC has published a report showing that Britain's carbon footprint has grown by 10 per cent in the past two decades, as a rapid rise in CO2 emissions generated by making the UK's imports outweighed reductions in those produced in this country.

Britain is the second biggest net importer of carbon emissions, after Japan, because much of its manufacturing industry has moved abroad.

SOURCE



British big brother to switch off your fridge: Power giants to make millions - but you must pay for 'sinister' technology

Fridges and freezers in millions of British homes will automatically be switched off without the owner’s consent under a ‘Big Brother’ regime to reduce the strain on power stations.

The National Grid is demanding that all new appliances be fitted with sensors that could shut them down when the UK’s generators struggle to meet demand for electricity.

Electric ovens, air-conditioning units and washing machines will also be affected  by the proposals, which are already backed by one of the European Union’s most influential energy bodies. They are pushing for the move as green energy sources such as wind farms are less predictable than traditional power stations, increasing the risk  of blackouts.

Last night critics:

*    Condemned the principle that outside forces should be allowed to control appliances.

*   Warned the new sensors would add £40 to the average price of white goods for consumers.

*   Hit out at the energy giants who would make millions of pounds extra profit under the scheme, as it would save them from firing up reserve generators or paying  factories to switch off furnaces to quell demand. There is no suggestion that consumers will be compensated for having their appliances shut down.

The sensors will automatically detect spikes in demand for power that the grid is struggling to  meet, and temporarily shut off  the appliances.

Viktor Sundberg, energy strategy manager at Electrolux, warned: ‘This is Big Brother technology on a grand scale. The device inside the fridge or freezer will automatically change the way the appliance operates in response to the output of the grid.

‘This method of shutting down household appliances could to be carried out almost instantly, saving the energy companies millions because they won’t have to start up the turbines or pay huge industrial companies to cut production. Consumers are not benefiting at all and will be left paying more when they buy the appliances, as well as having their private goods controlled by outside forces.’

David Davis, the former Tory leadership candidate, said: ‘There is a Big Brother element to this – and it also shows the energy suppliers passing down their incompetence to the customers. They should be supplying energy as customers need it, not the when they want to give it.

‘There is something Soviet about this. It’s a ridiculous idea and it should be opposed. I hope the Government puts its foot down.’

Nick Pickles, director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘This sinister plan smacks of over- the-top intrusion into people’s houses. It should be the choice of consumers  if they want to sign up to it, not slipped into our homes through fridges  and freezers.’

The  National Grid – a private company that made £2.6 billion profit in 2011 – is required by law to balance supply and demand in the network.

However the EU has set a target that 20 per cent of all electricity will be generated from green sources by 2012 – but these are unreliable, making the task more difficult.

The solution proposed by the National Grid, along with its counterparts in 34 European countries, is to install the controversial devices.

The National Grid supplies alternating current to homes at 240V and an frequency of 50 hertz (Hz). But because electricity cannot be stored in bulk, there are fluctuations in this.

When demand starts to outstrip supply, the frequency drops – when there  is more power than needed, it rises.

Sensors in domestic appliances would check this frequency every 0.2 seconds, and if it fell to 47Hz – a level that would risk blackouts – the devices would kick in and shut fridges, freezers and ovens down. Across millions of homes, this would cut demand significantly and so restore the balance.

Presently, the National Grid can shut down power to industrial firms to balance the grid. They are compensated in such cases, but there is no proposal to pay consumers if they face similar interruptions

The sensors could also be used if supply of electricity outstripped demand, putting power stations in danger of ‘tripping’ and shutting down temporarily. If the frequency of the supply nudged towards 52Hz, the devices could make fridges become cooler, increasing demand and balancing out the system.

The move comes on top of separate initiatives to put ‘smart meters’  for gas and electricity in all British homes by 2019, giving energy firms real-time information on individual households’ usage.

The proposals were contained in a 63-page document drawn up by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). It has been agreed by the EU-wide body of energy regulators and was sent to the European Commission on March 27.

It is set to deliver its verdict on the proposals within three months, and they could then go to the European Parliament to be turned into legislation that would force manufacturers to install the monitors.

Appliances containing the sensors could be in shops within three years.

In its proposal, ENTSO-E stressed that shutting off appliances would only be a last resort, but admitted it could happen.

It argued: ‘The accumulated effect of switching off a large number of temperature-controlled devices will give a substantial reduction of load in the system.

‘In this way it should be able to prevent ..... large scale blackouts.’

The authorities insist appliances would only cut out for a few seconds, and that consumers will be able to set acceptable temperature ranges so fridges would not be switched off if they were already warm, and therefore food would remain fresh. But if ovens are switched off temporarily, it could affect the cooking time of meals.

Presently, the National Grid can shut down power to industrial firms to balance the grid. They are compensated in such cases, but there is no proposal to pay consumers if they face similar interruptions.

Experts believe household bills would not be affected because the scheme would just alter the time at which appliances are used, not their total energy consumption.

Adam Scorer, of Consumer Focus UK, said: ‘There is a lot more work that needs to be done before these proposals become acceptable for consumers. The costs and benefits need to be clear, the right consumer protections in place, people’s privacy assured and arrangements made so that consumers get paid for any services they provide to networks.’

Consumer groups throughout Europe have expressed ‘serious concern’ in a letter to ENTSO-E.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change admitted last night that the Government was unsure how the new technology would work.

He said: ‘There could be benefits to consumers, it could open up  new ways to save on energy bills, but we also need to consider all other factors before responding to the Commission.’

A spokesman for National Grid said: ‘One of the proposed requirements is for a limited number of [future] temperature controlled devices such as fridges and freezers to have the capability to assist  the real time balancing of electricity supply and demand by automatically switching off devices for  short durations.

‘This should result in benefits to consumers as it will lead to a reduced requirement for additional back-up electricity sources.

‘It will have no material impact on the operation of fridges and freezers switching will be for a few  seconds and only occasionally.  ‘Consumers’ produce will remain cool in their fridges and frozen in their freezers.’

SOURCE






Brainwashed Berkeley senior  student shows appalling ignorance in her Global Warming Essay

But that's UCB

Every now and again, magazines and papers will let some enthusiastic young writer loose on the burning issues of the day. Kind of a “voice of the future” thing. Of course, the essays submitted are almost always excruciating; full of wild generalisations, logical fallacies, and naive suggestions of the “Why don’t we just make everything better?” variety, as though no one had ever thought of that before. A recent op-ed in The Daily Californian by Cody Dunitz, a senior at UC Berkeley, provides an instructive glimpse into how the global warming propaganda campaign has succeeded in foisting some dubious claims on to unquestioning young students.

Cody’s thesis is that global warming presents an imminent threat to the food supply because – get this – global warming is making winters warmer. “Sure, it’s nice that it’s sunny and warm in the winter now,” she argues, “but global climate change is negatively affecting agriculture around the world”. And for Californians that means warm winters where pests aren’t killed off, according to Cody.

Fact Check: as the UN’s FAO reported recently, it is expecting a “record wheat harvest” this year, and notes that prices for grains and sugar are “plummeting” because of availability.

Fact Check: As The Huffington Post reported, Californians have been shivering through  ”very unseasonable freezing temperatures”. Outside of heated university dorms, it was a cold winter for most of California.

She warns that one result of the warmer winters caused by global warming is increased pesticide use as farmers battle an increase in pests. These pesticides, she tells us, “can stay on food even once they have reached the grocery store, may cause people to become sick”.

Fact Check: Recent figures from California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation show that none of the samples of fruit and vegetables had dangerous levels of pesticide residue. In fact, most fruit and veg checked had “no detectable pesticide residues” at all! So even if you subscribe to the “run to the hills” branch of pesticide scaremongering, you can’t argue that there’s a problem when the latest liquid chromatography mass spectrometry techniques show no pesticide residue whatsoever.

But (non-existent) pesticide residues are only one of Cody’s concerns. There’s the threat that global warming poses to the cherry supply for one. Oh yes. And avacodos, almonds, and even potatoes -

    "Do you like cherries? Well, get ready to kiss their juicy deliciousness goodbye. You see, cherries need time to chill in order to grow. And to chill, they of course need cold weather. Since temperatures have grown warmer, there has been less chill time for cherries. This means that cherries have not been growing as well. If this continues, it could severely deplete the cherry supply. And no cherries to grow means no cherries for us to eat . . .

    In California alone, the amount of almonds, walnuts, grapes and avocados are predicted to decrease significantly because of climate change. And not only that, scientists say that the crop yield for almost every single crop grown in California’s Central Valley will plummet nearly 30 percent in the near future."

I’m not even sure what to say about this. Cherries are going to disappear because of global warming? Then how was it that last year was a “bumper harvest” for cherry growers in Queensland, Australia, where the average winter temperature is around 86 Fahrenheit? Some varieties of cherry need a chill in the winter, some don’t. But cherries are grown all around the world, even in semi-tropical areas which don’t have a “winter” to speak of at all

In response to the demise of the cherry, and the reduction of other crops by a third “in the near future” Cody says that there are no easy solutions. She recommends only buying local food rather than those “vine-ripened tomatoes from Mexico”.

Fact Check: Even the Worldwatch Institute notes that local food isn’t more environmentally friendly than food shipped in. This is because the final delivery from the producer or packer to the supermarket or store accounts for a very low percentage of greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production – around 4% according to a study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, of Carnegie Mellon University.

So local food isn’t going to help, contrary to what our eager young correspondent asserts. But not to worry, because buying local food was only the first part of her prescription. The kind of action Cody really wants to encourage in her readers is “getting involved in your local climate change organization, educating yourself on agricultural policies, voting for change and emailing your congressional representative to let them know you care about our food”.

So, after all the wild claims, the unfounded assertions about disappearing cherries, after all that, the only real, tangible idea Ms Dunitz has is to join a local global warming group, “vote for change” (whatever could that mean?) and writing to politicians to tell them that you care about food (I’m sure they’ll be fascinated). In short, this is about pushing a political ideology under the guise of environmental urgency.

Don’t mistake me: I’m absolutely sure that Ms Dunitz earnestly believes that she’s advocating for the environment. What this undergraduate essay shows is the way in which global warming is a political and cultural ideology, not a scientific theory, for those who espouse concern over it. It’s become a meme, an idea that is self-replicating, being used to draw impressionable young people into a set of political beliefs and ideas which don’t stand up even judged by their own claims.

In summary, then, this is the result of allowing activism into academia and the classroom, of allowing organisations to push simplistic messages of environmental catastrophe to trusting children. Dunitz’s essays shows no critical thinking at all. There’s no questioning of what she’s obviously been told, or imbibed from pamphlets and websites of climate change groups, no grappling with the issues. Instead, there’s a loose handful of vague suggestions such as buying fair-trade bananas (from the Carribean or Africa one assumes, both thousands of miles away) and not tomatoes from Mexico, literally just across the border from California. More critical thinking needed, less unquestioning acceptance of what lobby groups and well-funded organisations spoon-feed you.

SOURCE




From Hunters & Fishermen to Greenies on Earth Day: “You’re Quite Welcome!”

“More than four decades after the first Earth Day,” declared President Obama in an address this week, “millions of Americans have answered the call to protect the environment. Today, let us do so again by joining together, raising our voices, and standing up for our planet and our future.”

But only last week, when millions of these very Americans “raised their voices,” an angry President Obama insulted them as “willful liars.” I refer, of course, to the defeat of the President’s pet gun-control bill at the hands of the so-called gun-lobby, made up (mostly, but not exclusively) of American sportsmen.

During his first presidential campaign Obama insulted many of these Americans as bitter yahoos who “cling to guns and bibles.”

Now stand back for an item willfully unknown or willfully ignored, by greenie-granola types:

For the last couple of decades hunters and fishermen have contributed over $1.5 billion per year towards environmental protection in the most genuine sense. To date, hunters and fisherpersons have shelled out over $20 billion for this worthy cause. A study by the National Shooting Sports Foundation found that for every taxpayer dollar invested in wildlife conservation, American hunters and fishermen contribute nine.

The Pittman-Robertson Act (1937), you see, imposed an excise tax of 10 per cent on all hunting gear. Then the Dingell-Johnson act (1950) did the same for fishing gear. The Wallop-Breaux amendment (1984) extended the tax to the fuel for boats. All of this lucre goes to “protect the environment” in the form of buying and maintaining National Wildlife Refuges, along with state programs for buying and maintaining various forms of wildlife habitat.

So please note: to "preserve nature," they don’t tax Birkenstock hiking boots and Ying-Yang pendants – but do tax my shotgun. They don’t tax Yoga manuals and Tofu tid-bits wrapped in recycled paper – but do tax my 30.06 deer rifle. They don’t tax binoculars or birding Field Guides with cutesy photos of the red-cockaded woodpecker and spotted Owl – but do tax the shotgun shells I blast at Mallards before arraying on my grill as Duck-K-Bobs (cooked rare and lovingly basted with plenty of butter, Cajun seasoning and teriyaki sauce).

Going further, they don’t tax Kayaks and rock climbing picks and ropes – but do tax my compound bow and rifle scope. They don’t tax the plastic water bottles on Mountain bikes (or the mountain bike itself, come to think of it) or the cutesy spandex shorts these yo-yos wear – but do tax my duck decoys and camo pants. They don’t tax Yanni and Enya CDs – but do tax the arrows I fling at Bambi before he sizzles on my grill as Bambi-burger (lovingly draped with thick bacon slices that dribble their appetizing fat into the meat while cooking. Then a chunk of cheddar cheese melted on top.)

You talk about a "Cheeseburger in Paradise," Jimmy Buffet! Try one from Bambi!

Ten cents of every dollar I spent on my hunting and fishing toys (I'd cite the total but my wife might read this) funds Federal and State "conservation" programs. From my guns and ammo to my duck calls and decoys, from my rods and reels to my lures and gaffs, from my trolling motor to the very fuel for my outboard – ten cents of every dollar in this ghastly expenditure funds habitat for Spotted Owls, Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, Bald Eagles, Ospreys, Manatees, Snail darters, Black-Footed Ferrets, California Condors, Florida Panthers and Sea Otters.

None of these creatures (from what I hear) make a decent Gumbo or even a passable Chili. I must be crazy. But I have no choice. And this avalanche of tax dollars comes on top of those I fork over for the stacks of licenses, and permits, and stamps I'm required to have before I set a foot afield or set my boat afloat. Last season these totaled $500. (But sweetie! There are huge fines for hunting and fishing without them!)

And all the above is on top of my voluntary dues and assorted donations to such as Ducks Unlimited. (But snookums! I thought you loved the duck print I brought home at 2: 45 AM from the DU Banquet/auction? And especially the picture of me with the nice Hooters girl who worked the keg in her camo bikini?) According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation these donations to such as DU, Pheasants Forever, etc. total $300 million a year.

As mentioned, just last year, hunters and fishermen (not birdwatchers, not rock-climbers, not kayakers, not nature-hikers) "contributed" $1.5 billion "big ones" “dollarinies,” “donuts” (to quote Steve Martin as The Jerk) to purchase and maintain places for greenie-weenies to frolic and nature-watch.

You'd think some thanks might be in order from these freeloaders – from the smarmy crowd not forced to buy any "Bird-Watching stamp" or "Hiking stamp," or "Kayaking stamp", or "Rock Climbing Stamp," or Yanni-Listening Stamp," or "Quartz-Crystal-Gazing-Stamp." You'd think Tofu-munchers might appreciate us hunters' funding habitat for their spotted owls, kangaroo rats, snail darters and louseworts, and bankrolling the scenery on their "nature trails" as they self-righteously plod along in their "earth-friendly" Birkenstocks and granola-flecked frocks., quartz crystals rattling in their pockets en route to a hillside Sunrise worship, crystal-gaze and Enya-listen.

We pay our way – in fact, we pay the hikers and bird-watchers way too. But rather than going afield as passive voyeurs, rather than regarding nature as a Disney cartoon, we accept nature's diktats. We revel in our role as full-fledged participants in her cycle of fang and claw (but add bullets, buckshot, broadheads, treble hooks and gaffs to the primal drama.)

You'd think the voyeurs might throw us a bone every now and then? Well, think again. Here's the Sierra Club's official position: "Wild animals should not be valued principally in terms of whether they can serve as targets. As members of the family of life, we should respect the moral right of all creatures to exist, to be free of unnecessary predation.”

Good because my family and friends regard my predation as absolutely necessary-- for family meals and dinner parties (Gumbo, steaks, burgers, nachos, fajitas, Chili, Po-boys, and on, and on…)

Anyway, you’re quite welcome, Greenies!

SOURCE



A fevered Leftist imagination: 'Capitalism is trying to kill the planet, but the people are rising up’

From the Socialist Worker:

    "Among them was the first featured speaker, Jill Stein, the Greens’ presidential candidate in 2012. “This is an incredible outpouring of support of those not going forward with Obama, but forward with the 99 Percent for system change and fundamental justice,” she said. “Capitalism is trying to kill the planet, but the people are rising up.”

    Her remarks reflected the view of many participants that organizers of the February 17 mass demonstration had weakened the protest’s impact by presenting it as an expression of support for Obama, echoing his “forward” and “clean energy” slogans, for example. As several speakers noted, the Democratic administration now seems very likely to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

    The February 17 action thus showed both the power of environmental protest and the futility of relying on the Democrats. As Jill Stein said, “The demonstration told Obama, ‘We’ve got your back,’ and then he stabbed us in the back.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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Sunday, April 28, 2013




Opposed to Drilling, Fracking, Keystone…and Exports

Paul Driessen

The interminable war on drilling, fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline has taken some bizarre turns. Now it’s getting worse, as opponents grow more desperate, and the moon again grows full.

Deep water drilling, 3-D and 4-D seismic (the ability to visualize 3-D over many years), deep horizon horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and other technological marvels have obliterated environmentalist claims that the United States and world are running out of oil and gas – and therefore we need to switch to subsidized, land-hungry, job-killing wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels.

Thanks to free enterprise innovation on state and public lands – and no thanks to President Obama, who has made nearly the entire federal onshore and offshore estate off limits to leasing and drilling – US oil and natural gas production has hit an all-time record. The world is on the verge of doing so as well.

Long-running geopolitics have been turned upside down, as OPEC, Russia and other oil superpowers wonder what hit them. Plastic and chemical manufacturers, steel makers, bus and fleet vehicle operators, and now long-haul truckers are already cashing in on the natural gas bonanza. So are electric utilities, especially with EPA continuing its war on coal, with more unnecessary heavy-handed air and water rules.

Global warming/climate change hysteria is also floundering on the rocks of reality. Average global temperatures haven’t risen in 16 years, seas aren’t rising any faster than 100 years ago, and storms, floods and droughts are no more frequent or severe than over multi-decade trends during the past century.

Evidence and reality simply are not cooperating with IPCC and Mann-made climate models. “Trust the computer models!” the alarmists plead. “If reality doesn’t comport with our predictions, reality is wrong.”

The U.S. State Department has (yet again) said the Keystone XL pipeline poses few environmental problems and should be approved, to bring Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries – creating thousands of construction and permanent jobs, and billions in economic growth and government revenue.

Unacceptable! …Rants the Environmental Protection Agency. “State underestimated KXL’s potential impact on global warming and needs to do its studies all over again,” says EPA. Never mind that oil sands production would add a minuscule 0.06% to US greenhouse gas emissions and an undetectable 0.00001 degrees C per year to computer-modeled global warming, according to the Congressional Research Service. Do it over, until you get the answers we want, demand EPA and environmentalist ideologues.

Some 70% of Americans and 60% of Canadians support Keystone – and energy security (and jobs) outrank greenhouse gas reduction as a national priority by a 2-1 margin among Americans – says Canadian pollster Nik Nanos.

However, the haters of hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty are not ready to surrender. They’ve launched a blitzkrieg flanking attack. This time they are outraged that some Keystone oil could be refined into diesel and other products and exported! to Europe or Asia – while some frack-based natural gas might be converted to LNG and likewise exported! around the globe.

Well, yes. When US refiners transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, asphalt, waxes and petrochemicals, they ship some of these products overseas. Since Americans use less diesel than refineries manufacture (some parts of each barrel of crude can be converted only into diesel), refiners also export their excess diesel to Europe, which uses more diesel than gasoline, and Europeans ship their surplus gasoline to the USA, mostly to East Coast consumers. It’s a win-win arrangement that will be buttressed and safeguarded by Keystone pipeline transport of Canadian oil.

And yes, Cheniere Energy and other companies want to ship liquefied natural gas to foreign markets. It’s hardly surprising that anti-fracking activists would seize on this as yet another excuse for opposing this game-changing technology. It is hardly remarkable that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) and other far-Left legislators would sponsor bills to block LNG exports.

What is shocking is that Dow and Huntsman Chemical, Alcoa Aluminum, Nucor Steel and other companies are joining the no-export campaign. They have convinced themselves that such exports will hurt their own selfish economic interests – and for PR have packaged that notion into assertions that exporting any US natural gas is against America’s and the public’s economic interests. Nonsense.

America has barely begun to tap its vast shale gas and conventional natural gas deposits. It has not yet touched its methane hydrates. Together, these deposits will likely last a century or more. In addition, other countries are racing to develop their own conventional, shale and hydrate deposits – while other nations will eventually recognize the folly of keeping their own deposits off limits. All this will gradually reduce demand for US natural gas exports, slow and prolong them, and keep gas prices low.

This interplay will also help ensure that more factories and power plants in more countries burn natural gas, thereby replacing coal and providing the economic wherewithal to enable China, India and other nations to install modern pollution abatement technologies on their now dirty power plants. That will greatly improve air quality and human health in countless cities, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing consternation among steadily dwindling numbers of climate alarmists.

American oil and gas development – and exports – will also provide an opportunity for our nation to “give back” to the world community for all the petroleum that our anti-leasing, anti-drilling policies have caused us to take from other nations and the world at large for decades. All this activity will also spur further innovation in technologies to unlock still more energy. It will spur job creation, economic growth and government tax and royalty revenue collection here in the United States…and abroad.

More than 23 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed; 47 million are on food stamps, 128 million dependent on various government programs; the United States is more than $16 trillion in debt. Unemployment in the construction trades is 14.7 percent. Black unemployment was 12.7% when President Bush left office; it soared to 16.7% by September 2011 under President Obama, and remains stuck at 14% today for black adults – and an astronomical 43% for black teenagers!

Drilling, fracking and exports can reverse these horrendous, intolerable, unnecessary statistics.

Misguided industrialists should stop railing against exports. They would do themselves and our nation far more good by putting their lobbyists and public relations staffs to work demanding an end to leasing, drilling and fracking bans that continue to dominate “progressive” thinking, US energy policy (especially under the current administration), and attitudes in California, New York and too many other states.

Of 1.8 billion acres on our nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, only 36-43 million are under lease. That’s barely 2% of the OCS. Offshore territory equal to 78% of the entire US landmass (Alaska plus the Lower 48) is off limits! Even the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill cannot justify that.

Onshore, it’s just as bad. As of 1994, over 410 million federally controlled acres were effectively off limits to exploration and development. That’s 62% of the nation’s public lands – an area nearly equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation has gotten progressively worse, with millions more acres – and vast energy, mineral and economic bounties – locked up in wilderness, park, preserve, wildlife refuge, wilderness study, Antiquities Act and other restrictive land use designations, or simply made unavailable by bureaucratic fiat or foot-dragging.

Drilling opponents claim to be protecting the environment, but in reality simply detest hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty. Commonsense policies will rejuvenate our economy, put Americans back to work, and help fund government programs that Messrs. Obama and Reid profess to care so much about – while safeguarding ecological values we all cherish.

SOURCE  




No lonely planet

There won't be an overstuffed world, after all

Malthusians can breathe a sigh of relief: If current trends hold, human beings won't fulfill doomsday predictions by making like rabbits after all. Thanks to the success of incessant fear-mongering, the world's population is expected to peak soon and then begin a long slide downward. That's fewer of us "defacing" the planet.

A research team from the Autonomous University of Madrid and CEU-San Pablo University in Spain predicts the global population will begin to decline by the middle of the 21st century. Their study, published in the scientific journal "Simulation," used computer models to project population based on current fertility and death rates. It predicts that global population will reach its high-water mark around the middle of the century, then decline. By 2100, there will be only about 6.2 billion of us, about the same number as in 2000.

Only yesterday, on Oct. 31, 2011 (Halloween, as a matter of fact), the United Nations announced the birth of the 7 billionth baby - not in celebration, but in alarm. The U.N. called it the "Day of 7 Billion," and sounded "a call to action to world leaders to meet the challenges that a growing population poses." The U.N. Population Fund marked the occasion with a report that included a graph projecting a steep increase in the rate of human growth, and asked the scary question: "Will my grandchildren live in a world of 10 billion?"

The U.N. has spent decades and billions of dollars to bend the rate of childbirth downward, particularly in Third World nations, where large families are often considered essential to work the fields and hence survival. The new population study confirms the global body's success in persuading humans that less is more. "Overpopulation was a specter in the 1960s and '70s, but historically the U.N.'s low fertility-variant forecasts have been fulfilled," writes Felix F. Munoz, researcher and co-author of the project.

Behind population-control schemes lurk the pessimistic belief that one human being is a consumer; a billion is an environmental disaster. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century Anglican clergyman, taught that population growth would eventually reach a tipping point and that famine and disease would kill numbers that threatened sustainability: "The increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence."

Malthus could not have predicted the miracles of the 21st century. Stephen Hawking, a famous theoretical physicist, has lived his 71 years with Lou Gehrig's disease, which has left him a quadriplegic. Modern medicine has redefined "the means of subsistence," allowing Mr. Hawking to project influence from his motorized wheelchair. He is living proof that efforts to limit human growth are foolhardy when a universe of God-given potential lives to be tapped within each person.

An empty world would represent failure for the human race, not success. Better to face the future with courage than be taken in by the doomsayers. Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.

SOURCE




Japan turns back to coal-fired power plants

The Japanese government is moving to speed up the environmental assessment process for new coal-fired power plants as its power sector struggles with a surging energy bill in the wake of the forced idling of much of the country's nuclear power plants following the Fukushima power plant meltdown in 2011.

At present, it can take up to four years for approvals for new plants to be processed.

According to Japanese media reports, the government intends to make 12 months the maximum period for assessing and approving new coal-fired power plants as its utilities seek to develop more power stations to stem surging energy supply bills.

The closure of much of the country's nuclear power capacity following Fukushima has forced the utilities to restart idled oil-fired power plants, which has pushed up energy bills significantly since oil is the most expensive fuel source.

And with the government considering the closure of much of the installed nuclear capacity over the medium term, the spotlight is back on coal as the cheapest energy source, notwithstanding plans to cut carbon emissions.

A commitment to slice 2020 carbon emissions by 25 per cent from their 1990 level will be revised by October, according to Japanese newspaper reports.

Tokyo Electric, which operated the Fukushima complex, is adding an estimated 2.6 gigawatts a year of coal-fired generation capacity from two new plants that started operation this month.

It is also sourcing electricity from two coal-fired plants operated by Tohoku Electric Power Co that have been restarted after being repaired following the devastating March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The No.2 unit at Tokyo Electric's Hitachinaka plant, with 1000 megawatts of capacity, began operating this month, along with the 600MW No. 6 unit at its Hirono power station. The utility is also purchasing half of the output from the No. 1 and No. 2 units at Tohoku Electric's Haramachi plant in northern Japan, each of which can generate 1000MW.

In total, these coal-fired power plants are expected to consume about 11.5 million tonnes of coal in a full year of operation.

The government's move to speed up the assessment process coincides with Tokyo Electric's call for tenders for the construction of new coal-fired power stations with 2600MW of capacity, which it wants to have in operation by the end of the decade, to replace lost nuclear capacity.

Of Japan's 50 nuclear power plants, just two are in operation at the moment. All were shut for a review of operating procedures after the Fukushima accident.

SOURCE




Americans Bothered By The Way The Government Spends Taxes

Every year, April 15 is tax day. The morning's news shows featured last minute tax tips and other tax-related information. A new poll was discussed. When asked: "Thinking about paying taxes, which one of the following bothers you the most?" Surprisingly, "What you pay" received the lowest response, while the "Way the government spends taxes" was the highest. "Feeling that some don't pay fair share" was near the top and "Complexity of system and forms" was near the bottom." So people understand that it takes money to run the government and generally don't object to paying their taxes. It is what the government does with that money that frustrates us.

When asked about the way government spends taxes, responders were likely thinking of the green-energy crony-corruption spending on flawed ventures like Solyndra and the, now, fifty-plus other green-energy embarrassments that received taxpayer dollars as a result of President Obama's 2009 Stimulus Bill (as well as other green-energy funds) that poured nearly $100 billion into the pet projects of his donors.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in September 2011. It was just the bellwether; the first of many to come.

A year later Christine Lakatos and I profiled nearly 20 green-energy stimulus-funded companies that had gone bankrupt. The next week, we highlighted the other bookend: "companies/projects that received funding from various loan guarantee programs (LGP), grants, and tax incentives. These are projects that are still functioning, but are facing difficulties." One of those troubled companies was A123 Systems. One week after our report, A123 filed for bankruptcy. Nearly two months later, A123 was purchased by a large Chinese auto parts maker that has renamed the lithium-ion battery company B456. (Note: A123/B456's biggest customer is another company on our troubled list: Fisker Automotive-manufacturer of the $100,000+ electric sports car made in Finland-is now facing bankruptcy itself after efforts to find a Chinese investor "stalled.")

Wait. In his 2008 campaign, didn't Obama promise to "create five million new energy jobs over the next decade--jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced"? But our tax-payer dollars created jobs in Finland and have benefitted a Chinese company-Obamanomics outsourced. No wonder the "way the government spends taxes" tops the list. And most have no idea that the Obama administration is responsible for steering billions of our tax dollars from the stimulus and other clean energy programs to foreign-owned entities, of which big chunk was doled out in the form of free cash via the 1603 stimulus grant program.

But there's more-new news the poll respondents probably didn't even know about.

One day after the poll was taken, CNN Money reports: "China's Suntech Power has put its largest subsidiary into bankruptcy." What they don't mention is that China's Suntech Power benefitted from Obama's 2009 Stimulus Bill-receiving a $2.1 million credit from the Energy Department's stimulus-funded Advanced Energy Manufacturing (48C) Tax Credit. (Suntech was included in our 2012 "troubled" list.) In her blog, The Green Corruption Files, Lakatos states: "according to the Heritage Foundation, in November 2012, Suntech shed some employees, claiming that it was the 'U.S. International Trade Commission's 35.95% tariff on Chinese solar panels that was partially responsible for the 50 impending layoffs at its Arizona production facilities.'" Suntech was even blamed for the Solyndra debacle. In December 2011, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported: "China's major solar panel companies-whose low-cost products led some American factories to close, helped create the Solyndra controversy, and spawned talk of a trade war-were bankrolled in the United States by the world's largest investment banks." Those "investment banks" include some the same ones we have profiled in our previous reports that have deep ties to the Obama campaign and administration, and many green-energy projects that received loans, grants, and special tax breaks representing billions in stimulus money.

Suntech has more interconnections. Arizona's Mesquite Solar Project, which received $337 million in taxpayer money despite its non-investment grade rating by Fitch, was to be built with Suntech's solar panels and the power was to be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric-which has strong political presence in Washington, DC, and connections to billions in stimulus funds. California's PG&E, a company with "an extensive network of former high-ranking employees holding influential positions in government agencies at the federal and state level, has benefitted handsomely from government financing of green energy projects." The most controversial former PG&E employee to hold an influential government post is Cathy Zoi, a former energy analyst for the company, who we profiled in our report on George Soros.

There is much more that can be found in Lakato's Suntech report.

Another sparsely reported solar-power embarrassment was covered by Fox News on the same day the aforementioned poll was taken. "SoloPower, which makes thin-film solar panels at a new plant in Portland, OR, opened September 27 with an upbeat ribbon-cutting ceremony. Local and state politicians gushed about the company eventually operating four production lines and creating 450 well-paid green jobs." After its grand opening just months ago, SoloPower's power is waning: "The first production line was never completed," and "in January, the company had a round of layoffs."

This is not a surprise to those of us who watch the green-energy crony-corruption scandal. SoloPower was one of the worst-rated loans. One month before it received a $197 million loan guarantee to "support the retrofit of an existing building to operate a thin-film solar panel manufacturing facility in Portland, OR," Standard and Poors (S&P) gave SoloPower a credit rating of CCC+.

On March 29, 2012, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report titled "The Department of Energy's Disastrous Management of Loan Guarantee Programs" which states: "S&P predicted that SoloPower will fail to meet its debt obligations." DOE emails, released on October 31, 2012, reveal that James McCrea, Senior Credit Advisor Loan Programs, called SoloPower "a completely uninspiring project."

Yet, in addition to the $197 million of US taxpayer money SoloPower was given from the DOE through the 1705 LGP, this European firm also received $40 million from Oregon taxpayers. Then in December 2012, "despite unfulfilled job and production promises and signs the Portland solar panel factory was sliding even further behind," Oregon officials tripled the "taxpayer's stake," said the Oregonian. Business Oregon approved a $20 million tax credit for SoloPower-which SoloPower then exchanged for $13.5 million in cash. After a management shake-up, Fox News reports, SoloPower is "trying to raise money by selling some of its equipment through a third party and is attempting to restructure its $197 million federal loan guarantee."

With the bad credit rating, the "uninspiring" label, and poor performance, why did SoloPower receive federal, state, and city funding-ultimately paid by the taxpayers? Because as the Oversight Committee report states: "What SoloPower lacked in economic value, it made up for in political connections."

Suntech and SoloPower are just two recent stories, part of a long list of bankrupt and/or "troubled" politically connected green-energy projects.

When President Obama released his FY2014 budget, it included new spending of nearly $1 billion "to support deployment and long-term development in the clean energy industries." Renewable Energy World appears gleeful. "It's been said before and it bears repeating that Obama has done more for solar than any previous US President." And: "The support of the federal government has led to an explosion in the amount of solar across America." Do you think?

In contrast, Tom Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, pointed out that the budget "represents the administration's desire to double down on bad energy policy." And, "calls for fast-track permitting for renewables" while never mentioning the Keystone pipeline. Pyle concludes his comments by saying: the President "hopes that the American people will forget the failures of the past four years, higher gasoline prices, skyrocketing electricity rates, bankrupt renewable firms, and billions in wasted taxpayer money on politically connected industries."

No wonder the "way the government spends taxes" tops the list of taxpayer's frustrations. Perhaps if "government's inability to learn from its mistakes" had been on the list, it would have been the number one choice.

SOURCE




More Environmentalist Confusions

Tibor R. Machan

The New York Observer reported in its April 15, 2013, issue (B 1) that Leonardo DiCaprio is teaming up with Christie's in New York City, to hold a "major philanthropic auction." I am not interested in the details, which appear to me a kind of kiss up to fellow celebrities on the political/cultural Left. But the following statement from the actor is quite instructive:

The Observer reports: ''The world's forests, oceans and biodiversity provide us with innumerable benefits like oxygen to breathe, clean water to drink, and an abundant food supply,' Mr. DiCaprio wrote in a letter to artists asking for donations, on his foundation's stationary, the promotional item mentioned above. 'And yet our planet and these vital ecosystems that sustain life are under enormous pressures from modern civilization'."

Trouble is that from an environmentalist viewpoint the enormous pressure of which DiCaprio speaks is itself part of the environment, not some independent natural force. In short, modern civilization is part of the system! If it causes harm, that means the system itself is causing harm.

This is an inescapable fact. Environmentalists have no justification for removing people, including the people of modern civilization, from the environment. From their viewpoint, we are all in it together. We are all parts of nature, as well.

Interestingly a good many environmentalists are also animal rights champions and their argument includes the idea that human beings aren't different from other animals in crucial respects. Tom Regan has argued that non-human animals possess virtually the same level of consciousness as we do and thus ascribing to them basic rights such as human beings have is justified. The other main advocate of treating animals like humans are treated, which justifies "liberating" them, holds that the feelings and interests of non-human animals differ very little from those of human beings, something that once again warrants ascribing to them basic rights akin to those we ascribe to ourselves.

All this suggests that animal rights advocates who are environmentalists place human beings within the realm of nature. So the enormous pressure from modern civilization-i.e., people-is actually just one additional natural pressure, namely, evolutionary pressure.

The bottom line is that for environmentalists the contributions people make to environmental developments are natural ones and cannot be rejected as something alien. Pollution, technology, modern agriculture, etc., etc., are all part of nature as far as environmentalist are concerned (including Mr. DiCaprio). From his point of view, then, even the environmental movement is but an aspect of nature! Its battles are natural battles, no different in principle from hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.

I point out all this mainly to reduce the rhetorical heat emanating from too many environmentalists whereby what they like about the world counts as natural but what they do not counts as alien. That just will not do.

SOURCE




Wind turbines 'could allow enemy jets to sneak into British airspace'

The Ministry of Defence is fighting plans for two giant wind turbines over fears the towers could mask enemy jets entering British airspace.

Officials at the Ministry of Defence say the 115ft towers are so big they could look like planes on monitoring equipment.

The MOD say radar could classify the turbines as a threat – automatically sending in fighter jets to investigate and allowing real enemies to sneak in.

They say the green energy devices would confuse computer systems designed to protect the UK – and don't want them put up.

Plans for the turbines have been submitted by Richard and Ian Lobb, who want to install the 50kW towers on their neighbouring farms in St Ewe, Cornwall.

But their application prompted a written objection from the MoD which warned the installation would cause "unacceptable interference" to an air traffic control (ATC) radar 30 miles away in Wembury, Devon.

Radar operators have to treat any unidentified object as a genuine threat – and could even have to scramble fighter jets to investigate.

Their objection said: "Wind turbines have been shown to have detrimental effects on the performance of MoD ATC radars.

"These effects include the desensitisation of radar in the vicinity of the turbines, and the creation of 'false' aircraft returns which air traffic controllers must treat as real.

"The desensitisation of radar could result in aircraft not being detected by the radar and therefore not presented to air traffic controllers."

MoD chiefs said controllers relied upon accurate radar readings to distinguish between military and civilian aircraft.

Their letter added: "The creation of 'false' aircraft display on the radar leads to increased workload for both controllers and aircrews and may have a significant operational impact.

"Furthermore, real aircraft returns can be obscured by the turbine's radar returns, making the tracking of conflicting, unknown aircraft much more difficult."

The wind farm proposal has also provoked opposition from locals who say the towers will be a blot on the picturesque Cornish landscape.

Graham Chaplin, who owns a smallholding near the proposed site, has collected signatures of 109 villagers calling on Cornwall Council to reject the plan.

He said: "The turbine will really be right on top of us. It's so close that we are going to suffer from noise pollution. But what's more worrying is that there is a public safety issue with these turbines.

"The MoD clearly says that operators cannot assume that it's just the wind turbine. They have to deal with it as if it was a real problem."

Cornwall Council is due to report back on the application by May 13.

A spokeswoman said the council does not comment on undecided applications.

SOURCE

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Friday, April 26, 2013




How rich Rockefellers battle the people’s pipeline

Americans concerned about gasoline prices were encouraged by the Pew Research Center’s new poll, whose headline blared, “Keystone XL Pipeline draws broad support.” A score box showed 63 percent supporting and only 23 percent opposing the pipeline that would transport oil from Canada’s vast Alberta oil sands deposits through the Plains states to Texas refineries.

“Every one-cent increase at the pump steals about $1 billion from the larger economy that consumers would have otherwise saved or spent on something else,” the Wall Street Journal has pointed out. High gasoline prices thus translate into lost jobs, lost tax revenues and lower living standards. Americans are beginning to understand that, as the Obama “recovery” gives them real-world economic lessons.

Unfortunately, the Pew report quickly deflated optimism over this support, when it tersely identified who the minority is: “liberals” — stanchions of Big Green’s circus tent. We have seen time and again that the liberal 23 percent can be a “majority” to President Obama, who wields executive orders to bypass the people.

As his administration approaches a decision, lame-duck politics says he could go either way — even with his own State Department’s second favorable environmental impact report on the KXL’s construction permit. Even with Alberta Premier Alison Redford saying that an Obama rejection would damage U.S.-Canada relations. “Canada relies on the U.S. for 97 percent of its energy exports,” Redford said, and “sees the new pipeline as critical to its economic well-being.” And even with ten governors and 22 lieutenant governors sending letters to the President, urging pipeline approval.

What is Obama likely to do? Some 82 percent of Republicans favor the pipeline, so revenge is not an unthinkable motive for a possible rejection. However, 70 percent of independents and 54 percent of Democrats also favor the KXL. Fogging the crystal ball is the ideological split among Democrats: 60 percent of the party’s conservatives and moderates support building the pipeline, compared to just 42 percent of liberal Democrats. That considerably flattens Obama’s upward slope toward a potential rejection, but doesn’t level it.

Obama’s decision may hinge on pleasing his base of global-warming advocates. This whole Keystone XL controversy was carefully conceived and organized as a “globally significant response” to global warming. Shutting down Alberta’s oil sands — by blocking both the US-bound Keystone XL pipeline and any other Alberta oil conduit, particularly a proposed link to Vancouver, British Columbia harbors and oil tankers bound for Asia — would supposedly reduce global warming. That’s propaganda, not reality.

As Environment Canada has observed, oil sands production contributes a mere 0.14 percent of global greenhouse gases, notes, and would add an undetectable 0.00001 degrees C per year to global warming, even if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases really do drive climate change.

The anti-oil sands campaign — activists call them “tar sands” to evoke ugly images — was devised by the New York City-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund, using earmarked grants to recruit “a network of leading US and Canadian NGOs” and establish a “coordinated campaign structure” to act as its public face, according to a leaked PowerPoint presentation.

The first slide says, “The Tar Sands Campaign, Michael Northrop, Program Officer, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, July 2008.” Seven slides drive home the message that Rockefeller wants its paid campaigners to emphasize: Oil sands and Keystone represent “a globally significant threat” — with “Global Warming,” and “Oil Addiction” as the two “thought leader slogans” in the parade of old shibboleths that trigger brain freeze in Big Green followers. The rest was a coldly calculated, very practical plan to destroy Canada’s single most important export, with Rockefeller giving $7 million per year to activist groups to do the job.

Thinking people understand that being “addicted to oil” is like being addicted to breathing, better living standards, improved health and life itself. Just try getting along without it in a world where fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) contributed 82 percent of US energy use in 2012. The “green alternative” (wind and solar) provided a mere 3.3 percent of our overall needs in 2012; the rest was nuclear, hydroelectric and biomass (mostly wood). Relying on the “green alternative” is like trying to inhale only 3.3 percent as much as you usually do. There’s an energy gap there we need to account for.

Canadian researcher Vivian Krause exposed the Rockefeller funding for campaigns against Canadian energy exports in her October 2010 Financial Post story, “US foundations against the oil sands.” Five US foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, funneled vast sums of money through the Tides Foundation’s Canadian organization, Tides Canada. The Tides family of operations is a notorious California-based funder of left-wing activists.

Krause wrote, “A large part of Tides Canada’s funding comes from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These are The Big Five. They give away about US$1.2-billion every year.” In a chilling reminder, she concluded, “If these foundations decide to undermine a foreign industry, they probably can.”

Later that fall, Krause testified before a Canadian House of Commons committee, prompting an audit of the Canadian arm of the Tides Foundation by the Canada Revenue Agency (Canada’s equivalent to the IRS). By Krause’s calculations, Tides, a co-funder of the Rockefeller oil sands campaign, has distributed $19 million to anti-Keystone groups since 2008.

Krause explains that the campaign strategy is intended to foster renewable energy by shifting investment capital away from so-called “dirty oil” and toward so-called “clean energy.” To this end, she said, “they ‘educate’ media, consumers and voters. They stigmatize fossil fuels as bad, thereby facilitating the positioning of renewables as good. It’s basic product positioning and ‘depositioning’ the competitor.”

Not surprisingly, the “education” is slanted. “We get only bad news about fossil fuels and good news about solar and wind,” Krause observes. “We don’t get the whole story.” What gets left out are the advantages of fossil fuels — and the limitations and harmful effects of renewables, like the tiny amount of energy they provide, and the terrible impacts they have on birds, bats and wildlife habitats. “Furthermore, some of the information that is perpetuated is out-dated, and some is plainly false.”

I asked Krause why the Rockefeller presence behind the anti-XL propaganda campaign was virtually invisible. She told me that it has been done quietly but not secretly. “The grants have been disclosed in online databases for years,” she said. “But nobody bothered to add them up and connect the dots.” Krause connected the dots to the networks of foundations that work together on targeted projects.

She directed me to a revealing but obscure source, “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming,” which was sponsored by six of “the usual suspects” I have learned to expect to find behind any global warming campaign: the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Energy Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Oak Foundation, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Another source was, “A Strategy Planning Tool for Western Conservation,” prepared for the Hewlett Foundation by the Redstone Strategy Group, a brain pool of Ivy League hotshots not to be trifled with. Their strategy is to create eight massive national parks, each the size of Switzerland, as a way to stop the development of fossil fuels. Just fence industry out with parks — or Antiquities Act designations.

Anyone who thinks their local grassroots green group just pops up spontaneously in occasional protests needs to read either of these documents. They will find that the “roots” under the environmentalist “grass” are fertilized with bales of hundred-dollar bills. Rockefeller’s actions are quite open, if quiet. Krause said, “The strategy is articulated in discussion papers, but who reads them?”

Nobody except Vivian Krause, evidently. Her Twitter account, @FairQuestions, says, “I follow the money & the science behind enviro campaigns.” Her research and writing are impressive. Her blog profile states, “I work from my dining room table, using Google, on my own nickel. Not part of any political party, any industry, or any campaign.” Her work deserves more attention in the United States.

Krause’s discovery and exposé of the Rockefeller millions behind the anti-Keystone XL campaign could become a factor in Obama’s pipeline construction decision. It has already created Canadian suspicion of environmental groups dancing on the strings of US foundation money.

It’s not the money itself Canadians fear. It’s the way bales of US foundation cash can buy pressure by proxy, to impose undue foreign influence over Canada’s national energy policy and sovereignty.

One must hope Mr. Obama does not wish to be suspected of dancing on the same Rockefeller policy puppet strings as the Big Green bigwigs who were recently arrested protesting at his front door.

SOURCE



Are you sure this is going to work? Scotland's first 'solar meadow' opens under grey skies and rain

They were built to slash a college's carbon emissions and save them tens of thousands of pounds in energy bills.

But some people must have been left wondering if the new 'solar meadow' will live up to its billing as it opened today under grey and rainy skies.

The site at the Midlothian campus of Edinburgh College in Dalkeith is Scotland's first solar meadow and one of the most northerly locations for the green technology in Europe.

The five-acre site cost Å“1.2million to build and was designed by SSE Energy Solutions.

It promises to decrease the college's carbon emissions by 300,000kg a year and meet all the campus' electricity demands.

But dignitaries who turned out for the grand opening had to walk through the rain with not a beam of sunlight in sight.

Dressed in bright hi-viz jackets, the group including local MSP Colin Beattie, staff, students and business leaders, were pictured holding umbrellas aloft as they inspected the site.

Backers of the project also hope it will become a local attraction.

Wildflowers and various grasses are to be planted in the meadow to increase the site's biodiversity.

Professor Steve Tinsley, vice-principal of Edinburgh College, who is leading the project, said: 'We believe the solar meadow also looks great and will become a significant attraction for local people as well as visitors to the capital.

'It is also fantastic that the project has enabled the college to engage with schools and local community groups to develop their own renewable energy projects.  'It really is giving something back to the local community in more ways than one.'

The solar meadow, which can still generate energy under in overcast conditions, will also be used as a teaching facility for students.

'[The solar meadow] will help not only to provide the next generation of engineers with essential skills, but also allow the college to become less reliant on fossil fuel energy,' said Prof Tinsley.

The meadow will also be used as a research centre where the interaction between biodiversity and solar technology is analysed, including the effect of environmental conditions on the output from the solar panels such as weather and pollen.

Richard Chandler, SSE's head of green deal and energy solutions, said: 'The solar meadow will not only generate around 560,000 kWhrs every year, enough energy to power 170 homes, but is also a fine example of how industry and education can work well together.

'This project will bring benefits to the college, its students and the wider community as well as further strengthening Scotland's renewable energy resources.'

SOURCE





Global COOLING Era to Bring Food Shortages and Social Upheaval Says New Climate Report

The inaugural edition of the recently published Global Climate Status Report (GCSR)¸ by the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC), headquartered in Orlando, Florida, discloses startling new information about global food shortages and widespread social upheaval that is just around the corner; all the cause of the new global cooling era. This single source document from the SSRC details an apolitical, fact-based version of the Earth's climate status as measured by twenty four climate parameters. The summary conclusion of the report shows that the planet is heading into four decades of potentially dangerous, cold weather.

Mr. John L. Casey, SSRC founder, Editor of the GCSR, and author of the internationally acclaimed climate book, "Cold Sun" was recently named "America's best climate prediction expert" by Watchdogwire.com.

He elaborates on the stunning conclusions of the GCSR by saying, "The news isn't good, especially for those who still believe in manmade global warming and that mankind's CO2 emissions have a major role in climate change. They will be totally unprepared for this new cold era. Though we had issued a press release in February to announce the climate report, the specific findings from the full report and their implications for everyone on the planet are still largely unreported by the media and unknown to our leaders. It is certainly still surprising that what is likely one of the most important news stories for the next fifty years is completely ignored by the mainstream media, including most science periodicals.

For these reasons, I want to be very clear about what this report is saying. Here in the United States, we face the real prospect of major crop damage and food shortages as we get closer to the bottom of the next cold era estimated to be 2031. We should fully expect to see substantial crop losses during the 2020's along with accompanying food riots, and social unrest, especially in every major US city. That means we may have seven years, and likely less, to set aside the food we will need or make adjustments to our national food production and consumption practices in order to get through the global cooling onslaught with minimal damage.

This situation will be made much worse because the current administration of President Obama has its head in the sand on this global threat and unbelievably is still telling the world that the Earth is warming because of man's industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Nothing could be further from the truth according to the overwhelming evidence that climatologists and solar physicists around the world have compiled and is discussed in our global climate report for all to read."

SOURCE




Scientists find heat-tolerant coral reefs that may resist climate change

Amid all the flim-flam below there is only one solid fact:  Corals can survive higher temperatures -- as has often been shown elsewhere

 Experts say that more than half of the world's coral reefs could disappear in the next 50 years, in large part because of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change. But now Stanford University scientists have found evidence that some coral reefs are adapting and may actually survive global warming.
 
"Corals are certainly threatened by , but this research has really sparked the notion that corals may be tougher than we thought," said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.

Palumbi and his Stanford colleagues began studying the resiliency of reefs in the Pacific Ocean in 2006 with the support of a Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project grant. The project has expanded and is now being funded by Conservation International and the Bio-X program at Stanford.
"The most exciting thing was discovering live, healthy corals on reefs already as hot as the ocean is likely to get 100 years from now," said Palumbi, director of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station. "How do they do that?"

Coral reefs form the basis for thriving, healthy throughout the tropics. They provide homes and nourishment for thousands of species, including massive schools of fish, which in turn feed millions of people across the globe.

Corals rely on partnerships with tiny, single-celled called zooxanthellae. The corals provide the algae a home, and, in turn, the algae provide nourishment, forming a symbiotic relationship. But when rising temperatures stress the algae, they stop producing food, and the corals spit them out. Without their algae symbionts, the reefs die and turn stark white, an event referred to as "coral bleaching."

During particularly warm years, bleaching has accounted for the deaths of large numbers of corals. In the Caribbean in 2005, a heat surge caused more than 50 percent of corals to bleach, and many still have not recovered, according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, an international collaboration of government officials, policymakers and marine scientists, including Palumbi.

Havens of healthy reefs

In recent years, scientists discovered that some corals resist bleaching by hosting types of algae that can handle the heat, while others swap out the heat-stressed algae for tougher, heat-resistant strains. Palumbi's team set out to investigate how widely dispersed these heat-tolerant coral reefs are across the globe and to learn more about the biological processes that allow them to adapt to higher temperatures.

In 2006, Palumbi and graduate student Tom Oliver, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, traveled to Ofu Island in American Samoa. Ofu, a tropical coral reef marine reserve, has remained healthy despite gradually warming waters.

The island offered the perfect laboratory setting, Oliver said, with numerous corals hosting the most common heat-sensitive and heat-resistant algae symbionts. Ofu also has pools of varying temperatures that allowed the research team to test under what conditions the symbionts formed associations with corals.

In cooler lagoons, Oliver found only a handful of corals that host heat-resistant algae exclusively. But in hotter pools, he observed a direct increase in the proportion of heat-resistant symbionts, suggesting that some corals had swapped out the heat-sensitive algae for more robust types. These results, combined with regional data from other sites in the tropical Pacific, were published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series in March 2009.

Global pattern

To see if this pattern exists on a global scale, the researchers turned to Kevin Arrigo, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and an expert on remote satellite sensing of marine microalgae. Arrigo gathered worldwide oceanographic data on a variety of environmental variables, including ocean acidity, the frequency of weather events and sea-surface temperature.

Oliver then compiled dozens of coral reef studies from across the tropics and compared them to Arrigo's environmental data. The results revealed the same pattern: In regions where annual maximum ocean temperatures were above 84 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit (29 to 31 degrees Celsius), corals were avoiding bleaching by hosting higher proportions of the heat-resistant symbionts.

Most corals bleach when temperatures rise 1.8 F (1 C) above the long-term normal highs. But heat-tolerant symbionts might allow a reef to handle temperatures up to 2.6 F (1.5 C) beyond the bleaching threshold. That might be enough to help get them through the end of the century, Oliver said, depending on the severity of global warming.

A 2007 report by the United Nations International Panel on concluded that the average surface temperature of the Earth is likely to increase 3.6 to 8.1 F (2 to 4.5 C) by 2100. In this scenario, the symbiont switch alone may not be enough to help corals survive through the end of the century. But with the help of other adaptive mechanisms, including natural selection for heat-tolerant corals, there is still hope, Oliver said.

"These findings show that, given enough time, many corals can match hotter environments by hosting heat-resistant symbionts," he explained. "While hopeful, the work also suggests that modern environments are changing so rapidly that corals may not be able to keep up. It comes down to a calculation of the rates of environmental change versus the rates of adaptation."

Heat-resistant corals also turn out to be more tolerant of increases in ocean acidity, which occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere--another potential threat to coral reefs. This finding suggests that corals worldwide are adapting to increases in acidity as well as heat, Oliver said, and that across the tropics, corals with the ability to switch symbionts will do so to survive.

Future protection

The problem of coral bleaching comes down to a collapse of the algae at the cellular level, Oliver explained. But the molecular biology of corals and their zooxanthellae under stress is shockingly understudied, he added.

To examine the corals and their symbionts at the molecular level, the researchers are collaborating with John Pringle, a professor of genetics at Stanford. Pringle and his lab have set up tanks where anemones, corals and their algae are exposed to a variety of treatments, including changes in temperature, acidity and light. That research is ongoing.

"What I hope is that we will learn some really deep and interesting things about the cellular and genetic mechanisms that allow this symbiosis to function, and about the mechanisms that come into play when the symbiosis is breaking down under stress," Pringle said. "The longer-range hope is that having that understanding will contribute to efforts in coral conservation."

The ultimate goal is to find protein biomarkers that indicate signs of heat stress and potential heat resistance, Oliver explained. Then coral reef managers could go to a reef, take small coral samples and test for the presence of the biomarkers to see how resilient the reef will be to higher temperatures.

"With this tool, managers could identify existing populations that may be more resistant to climate change and potentially prioritize their protection from everything else that kills , like fishing and [agricultural] runoff," Oliver said.

"Although we are doing things to the planet we have never done before, it's hard to imagine that these corals, which have existed for a quarter of a billion years, only have 50 years left," Palumbi said. "And part of our job might be to figure out where the tougher ones live and protect those places."

SOURCE





Main Multiple Proxy Study Confirms "Global Warming" Skeptic Views - Modern Temps Not Unprecedented, Not Global

I commented briefly on this hokum on 22nd, pointing out some obvious problems.  I also anticipated that more detailed critiques would be forthcoming and that such critiques would be scathing.  And we see below that it is so.  -- JR

Anti-science alarmists and pro-global warming ('AGW') scientists are very enamored with multi-proxy temperature reconstructions, which allows "researchers" to statistically blend and torture different forms of data to force a "confession" that modern warming has been "unprecedented" - however, as expert skeptics have discovered, these studies are often found to be empirically and statistically-challenged garbage and end up being a cornucopia of unintended contradictions...the new PAGES2K paleo-torture study is the latest example

The new Kaufman et al. study (aka as the 'PAGES2K' research) is getting its initial web-wide forensic review in multiple articles across the web, including here, here, here, here and here.

The chart on the left depicts those areas of the world that experienced modern warming supposedly greater than any warming over the last 2,000 years; and, the chart on the right represents those areas where modern warming was less than that of certain periods during the past 2,000 years. Both charts have the past 2,000 year atmospheric levels superimposed (the pinkish curve) on them.

It is from the Tisdale analysis that it first becomes apparent that the law of unintended consequences has interestingly come into play - the study's authors have actually built a case (be it likely an unforced error) that supports the views of the majority of catastrophic global warming skeptics/lukewarmers.

From the study itself, and a close review of the above images, we now know the following:

* First, as even the New York Times points out, this study determined that the Arctic was warmer during the 1940s to 1970s than during years of the late 20th century.

* Second, the study determined that periods prior to 1000AD had warmer temperatures in Europe. Confirms view of skeptics, check.

* Third, this study finds Antarctica was warmer, from the 2nd through 13th centuries, than during our modern era.

* Fourth, this study points out that true global warming has not taken place in the modern era, but regional strong warming has. Of the 7 regional areas analyzed, only 3 exhibit a strong warming (more likely only 2, see point #11 below). The other four regions, not so much. Confirms view of skeptics.

* Fifth, the study clearly indicates that major climate change is taking place at all times, in different manners, across the globe. Climate change is not some new modern phenomenon. Confirms view of skeptics.

* Sixth, the study shows atmospheric CO2 levels are not a cause of past major climate change. Throughout most of the last 2,000 years, CO2 levels are stable yet climate change is constantly happening. Confirms view of skeptics

* Seventh, the study documents that unprecedented regional warming takes place regardless of low/high atmospheric CO2 levels.  Confirms view of skeptics

* Eighth, this study, in combination with the known recent global temperature trend (subsequent to this study's ending date of 2000AD), clearly makes an indisputable case that recent modern global warming is not as claimed: unprecedented; unequivocal; irrefutable; irreversible; nor dangerously accelerating. Confirms view of skeptics.

* Ninth, this study affirms that periods of "unprecedented" warming do not cause the IPCC's urban legend of "runaway," "tipping point," dangerous global warming. Of course, the hottest period ever recorded (Minoan era) in the ice cores over the last 4,000 years already proved that the mythical "tipping point" is just that. Confirms view of skeptics, check.

* Tenth, this study again provides proof that the AGW-alarmist researchers will use each and every attempt to remove and/or minimize the exceptional Medieval Warming Period that the vast majority of local/regional paleo research studies, and the historical literature, have well documented. It is simply freaking amazing that this group of researchers would present an analysis of Europe's past warming without the extreme and extended warming of the Medieval era (see chart of right).

* Eleventh, this study clearly proves to the public that the proponents of AGW-alarmism will utilize excessive cherry-picking of empirical paleo research to fabricate their "scientific" claims of modern "unprecedented" warming. Not only did this study exclude the preponderance of paleo-scientists' research that documents past extreme warming, but this study was brazen enough to include paleo temperature reconstructions that even a peer-reviewed science journal ultimately rejected because of its statistical flim-flam.

Without the infamous, widely discredited Gergis et al. study, it is highly likely that the "Australasia" region of the above chart on the left would have to be moved to the chart of the right, above - thus leaving just 2 regions of the world that may have had modern "unprecedented" warming in the 20th century, and only a single region of the world that had "unprecedented" warming since 1970 (recall that this study confirmed the Arctic was warmer from the 1940s to the 1970s). Confirms view of skeptics.

Conclusion: This multi-cherry-picking proxy study has many claiming that modern temps are the "hottest" across the globe, over the last 1,400 years. In fact, as the above information clarifies, some regions of the world had strong modern warming (that is, supposedly), while the majority did not.

As this study itself determines, global warming, cooling and climate change are not done in some lock step manner across the world in a monotonous cause and effect relationship with CO2.

Skeptics of both the IPCC's catastrophic global warming hysteria and the elites' CO2-kills fanaticism have pointed this out for years (if not decades).

The geological and historical records/datasets support the essentials of the non-hysterical skeptic/lukewarmers' analysis of climate change, and now this study suggests the alarmist community has inadvertently accepted many of the same views.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

New paper finds global sea levels will rise only about 5 inches by 2100

A new peer-reviewed paper by sea level expert Dr. Nils-Axel Morner concludes that Australian government claims of a 1 meter sea level rise by 2100 are greatly exaggerated, finding instead that sea levels are rising around Australia and globally at a rate of only 1.5 mm/year. This would imply a sea level change of only 0.13 meters or 5 inches by 2100. Dr. Morner also finds no evidence of any acceleration in sea level rise around Australia or globally.

From the conclusion of the paper:

In view of the data presented, we believe that we are justified to draw the following conclusions:

(1) The official Australian claim [2,3] of a present sea level rise in the order of 5.4mm/year is significantly exaggerated (Figure 3).

(2) The mean sea level rise from Australian tide gauges as well as global tide gauge networks is to be found within the sector of rates ranging from 0.1 to 1.5 mm/year (yellow wedge in Figure 3).

(3) The claim of a recent acceleration in the rate of sea level rise [2,3,12] cannot be validated by tide gauge records, either in Australia or globally (Figure 3). Rather, it seems strongly contradicted [19,21,24,39-41]

The practical implication of our conclusions is that there, in fact, is no reason either to fear or to prepare for any disastrous sea level flooding in the near future.
Present-to-future sea level changes: The Australian case

By Nils-Axel Morner & Albert Parker

We revisit available tide gauge data along the coasts of Australia, and we are able to demonstrate that the rate may vary between 0.1 and 1.5 mm/year, and that there is an absence of acceleration over the last decades. With a database of 16 stations covering only the last 17 years, the National Tidal Centre claims that sea level is rising at a rate of 5.4mm/year.We here analyse partly longer-term records from the same 16 sites as those used by the Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Project (ABSLMP) and partly 70 other sites; i.e. a database of 86 stations covering a much longer time period. This database gives a mean trend in the order of 1.5 mm/year. Therefore, we challenge both the rate of sea level rise presented by the National Tidal Centre in Australia and the general claim of acceleration over the last decades.


Related: NOAA 2012 report finds sea levels rising at less than half the rate claimed by the IPCC

SOURCE

Businesses don't want carbon tax: Abbott

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says businesses will be better off without a carbon tax, as power companies warn the coalition's climate policy will be tough to implement.

Power companies say the coalition's alternative "Direct Action" policy will be more difficult to run than Labor's carbon pricing mechanism, which Mr Abbott has vowed to repeal if elected prime minister.

The Energy Supply Association of Australian supports an emissions trading scheme (ETS), and says falling electricity demand will force the coalition to review its climate change policy if elected, The Australian Financial Review reports.

A number of business groups, including Wesfarmers Ltd and the Australian Industry Group, have recently called for the carbon tax to be scrapped and replaced with an ETS with a floating carbon price.

Mr Abbott said no business wanted to pay more tax than less.

"Obviously, every business that is currently paying the carbon tax, either directly or indirectly, will be better off without it," he told reporters in Victoria.

Scrapping the carbon tax and four agencies associated with it would make "life more affordable and more simple for everyone", he added.

The coalition insists its climate policy uses the market to tackle global warming via a carbon buyback approach that rewards innovation and initiative while meeting Australia's climate targets.

Its Direct Action Policy is designed to directly funds activities that reduce CO2 emissions - known as abatement - at the lowest possible cost.

SOURCE

Business bogged down by a dud carbon tax

Greg Hunt

AUSTRALIANS are being dudded by the carbon tax and the crash in the European market last week confirms it.

Sadly, the consequences are felt in lost jobs and increasing power prices while Europe heads in the other direction.

And here is just one example. Last Thursday morning I met with a cafe owner and the owner of a small local supermarket just south of Ulladulla. Both said the 15 per cent increase in their electricity prices due solely to the government's carbon tax was coming straight out of their pockets because they couldn't pass on the increases.

So in order to try to cut costs, the cafe owner had reluctantly let one young staffer go and was instead coming in at 5.30am and staying late into the evening to make up the gap.

The other had deferred hiring a staff member and was increasing his already long hours.

These are the real consequences of the carbon tax for people's lives - working longer and laying off staff - that the Prime Minister and Treasurer have ignored. Now however, they must finally take their heads out of the sand and acknowledge the real world impact of the carbon tax.

With the collapse of the European carbon price, to what The Economist called junk bond status, the Australian carbon tax is now about six times higher than the European price. While the European price has plummeted to $3.50, the Australian tax is $23. And while the European price is plummeting, Labor has locked in two more carbon tax rises. So the carbon tax goes up again on July 1 and then again next year. Two simple messages come out of this.

Firstly, the Australian tax is completely out of line with the rest of the world. Secondly, Treasury's own modelling assumes the carbon tax is set to soar to $37 per tonne by 2020. In the meantime the government has spent this money - in the same way it spent the mining tax before it was received.

Either government modelling is correct and we will be even more out of line with the rest of the world, or the carbon tax will face a multi-billion-dollar black hole and the deficit will get much worse.

The government's own figures show the carbon tax doesn't even reduce our emissions. At the cost of $9 billion a year it doesn't even achieve its policy objective.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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