Why is John Sununu a (presumably paid) op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe? Even if we bracket his recent remarks about Obama, has there ever been a Globe op-ed columnist who is also an official representative of a presidential candidate? I’ve been reading the Globe for many years over many elections and can’t think of any. Occasionally, the Globe has published one-time op-eds by campaign spokespeople, but a regular op-ed columnist? Isn’t it time for at least a leave of absence?
Please share widely!
Political opinion is one thing. Repeating demonstrable lies is something different. The graph is perfect.
I’m disgusted with the Globe’s eagerness to publish lies in the apparent desire for “balance”.
who writes an op-ed column for the Globe is the son of the John Sununu who said the president is not american. Otherwise, no difference.
Many of Sununu’s columns raise the possibility of a conflict of interest. During the primary campaign, Sununu, the Gobe informed readers that his father backed Romney. Meanwhile Sununu, the younger, all-but-endorsed Romney via the Globe.
Many of Sununu’s columns have touched on regulatory, tax, and energy issues, even though he has worked with the firm of Akin Gump, which itself declared: “”At Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, our roots run deep in the energy industry.” The Globe has never bothered to inform readers of Sununu’s work for Akin Gump and has rebuffed complaints by minimizing the importance of Sununu’s work for the form.
I wondered about their relationships
Jeff Jacoby is also a talking point amplifier. It’s as though the Globe editorial board is committed to including conservative opinions but not to the extent of putting any effort into finding *good* conservative columnists. Maybe the sad state of conservatism today is that there simply aren’t any conservative writers who offer reality-based and interesting analyses, but I find that hard to believe.
Should we be up in arms? Graph may prove what happens when there is an active sun throwing out solar flares. Be careful relying on temperature readings. I saw a tv show where temperature readings are taken near airports or a/c units which register artificially higher temps.
We all know about the emails where data was manipulated a few years ago, hiding the decline in temps. Climate is always changing, no sense giving up our standard of living and comforts on a theory.
I love how John Travolta pushes global warming, yet flies around in private jet, or Al Gore in his mansion, including an indoor swimming pool.
We don’t live on Mars. Venus is extremely cold. We don’t live on Venus either. Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore! We don’t live on Pluto.
We live on Earth. What is happening on Earth is what matters. Our climate’s average temperature is going up. It’s not due to solar flares, it’s due to the Greenhouse Effect. This is established, Republican American politicians [and, to a lesser extent, their colleagues in Canada and Australia] notwithstanding. We know it’s caused by CO2 and other GHGs, and we know that human activity is releasing far more GHGs than have ever been released in humanity’s history. And by we, I mean damn near every expert in every field even tangentially related to atmospheric science.
The image above isn’t raw data — it’s adjusted data. It’s adjusted to account for El Nino, volcanic activity, and… wait for it… solar flares and other solar activity. When you adjust for all of things, what’s left is what we’re doing to the climate. We’re cranking up the heat.
Good god. Would you openly throw out random medical tidbits to question a panel of the world’s best brain surgeons if they found consensus of the cause of seizures? What makes you think that you know better than 10s of thousands of scientific experts around the world?
Just a theory? Gravity is just a theory for God’s sake. In science, “theory” does not mean “idle hypothesis.” A scientific theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.” (NAS, 1999). Climate change is real, it’s going to be extremely expensive, and it’s being caused by humans. That’s science, and it’s clear. If you want to argue that we shouldn’t do anything about it with public policy, that’s fine. Argue that. We’re free to disagree there. We’re not free to disagree about the existence of climate change or it’s man-induced cause, because that’s a freaking theory. It’s what we know to be true. There’s simply no competing idea which holds up.
Sununu was probably referring to the graph once it has been adjusted for human activity, carbon release from fossil fuels, electricity use, factory farming and other causes of global warming that didn’t exist before the industrial revolution. Once it’s adjusted for those, then it’s flat.
What a rebuttal! I saw a tv show once as well. Al Gore has a swiming pool so global warming doesn’t exist? Really? Could you possibly make a more lazy argument?
When those that rail against fossil fuel are themselves, the biggest “polluters”.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
I also read the ice caps are expanding here on planet earth.
http://www.news.com.au/antarctic-ice-is-growing-not-melting-away/story-0-1225700043191
Somebody has been lying to you, danfromwaltham.
Since there’s no extra energy from the Sun, it’s not at fault for the Earth’s warming. Dan, you should go after these websites that gave you false information–they are deceiving, and that’s just not decent.
@Dan
None of your assertions about climate is true? Where do you get your information? Whatever the source, it is apparently devoted to lies.
I appreciate you and Joel’s feedback. There are other opinions out there and I am a skeptic. Even if we enacted every alternative energy proposal, I have read it would not make a dimes worth of difference in global temps. So I ask, why suffer/do with less?
Your comments are actually such a caricature of a right-wing crazy that I feel as though I’m reading drafts of a Cobert script.
You apparently didn’t bother to actually READ the National Geographic piece you cited (emphasis mine):
While I confess that I get a certain perverse pleasure from some of your astonishingly ignorant rants, Colbert is better.
So many insults like “ignorant” are hurled at me, but whenever I return fire, I get Dave and Bob warning me that I am about to be bounced out of the blog for using “personal insults”, usually by Demintfan or kbush.
I don’t mind being called ignorant or troll or supporting racist ideas like voter ID, nothing bothers me, rhino skin I guess. But I hope the owners of this blog are not like former WWF referee, Danny Davis, and play favorites. You have the foul-mouth centralmassdad down below who thinks we are in a bar with the language he uses.
I thought the link was pretty fair, no cut and paste, all black and white.
a) You are an ignorant fool
b) Your rant is astonishingly ignorant
One attacks the person, the other attacks the comment.
But I hope to keep it above board and refrain from calling ones opinions “ignorant”.
I must say, I have leaned much by being here, some posts make me think, others have me scratching my head.
“No, I cannot tell the difference.”
… classification and need not be insulting. I am ignorant on a great many things. Embracing your ignorance is the first step to discovery. You, for example seem to have been somewhat ignorant of clean coal. Stomv illustrated below exactly what you were ignorant of. Similarly, your comment that the clean coal is the “Best thing”, could be called an ignorant comment in that it belies considerations that should be in the ‘best thing’ calculation but are apparently not.
When you see ‘ignorant remark’ think ‘mistaken’. That’s all an ignorant remark is – it’s mistaken for the particular reason of a hole in knowledge.
These droughts, heat waves & fires are terrible–people are succumbing to the heat, losing their crops, losing their business, losing their homes. And if we keep burning more coal & oil, it will get much worse. So we should change to more solar & wind power, to get on a better path.
Personally, I was once about 250 lbs and it was because I did not need the 4 slices of pizza at one meal that I was eating, nor the donuts as dessert after eggs & toast. I made do with less… and I feel better about myself now that I eat less. I weigh less, and my lower back doesn’t hurt the way it used to. When you’re doing too much, it’s a good thing to limit yourself a little, to sacrifice a little. That goes for our nation’s energy consumption.
Conservation should be our number 1 priority.
Thank you for bringing up conservation. It’s important for the technoprogressives here to absorb: we won’t be able to sustain our current consumption of energy on alternative sources. Usually the refrain is “technology will save us, the scientists will solve it. We just have to give them more money to do more experiments and build a John Galt Motor.” Yes, that;s the same Ayn Rand fantasy that deniers on the Libertarian Right cling to.
We won’t be able to conserve as much as we need to, either, so we should certainly be seriously ramping up solar and wind to generate electricity. But if we hope to use that electricity to keep all the cars on the roads and all the movies in the theaters and television shows on the air, we’ll be disappointed.
btw, is there a formula for how much electricity can be generated from a mass dropping a certain distance and powering a generator?
potential energy = mass times gravity times height
I’d bet you read that it would not make a dimes’ worth of difference in global temps at the same websites with the deceptive information about Mars.
That’s a lot of misinformation those guys are putting out.
That’s just wrong of them to treat you that way, Dan.
The webpage for my rooftop PV array says that since it was connected to the grid in 11/10, the system has offset 13666 pounds of CO2. That’s almost 7 tons of CO2 that has not been put into the atmosphere because of my electricity use. Imagine if some noticeable percentage of the citizenry of the worlds largest consumer of electricity did the same. Even 10% or 5%. I bet it would make far more than a dime’s worth of difference.
Here’s an idea: take all the money we now hand out to the fossil fuel industries as tax deductions, and spend it on tax deductions for businesses to install PV solar arrays on the roofs of their buildings. PV cannot replace 100% of the fossil fuels we now burn, but it can replace a huge portion of them.
Give us some citation about how if “we”* enacted every alternative energy proposal it would not make a dimes worth of difference.
While it’s not linear, it is increasing: the more GHGs we release, the worse off we’ll be. The less, the better. Every single thing we do to release less GHGs makes us better off, at a cost which could be positive, zero, or negative. Energy efficiency, for example, has a net negative cost.
* which “We”? Massachusetts? USA? USA+EU? USA+EU+Canada+Mexico+Brazil? +Russia? +India? +China?
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/5314
“Mitigating any global effects of climate change through a cap-and-trade program in the United States is unlikely to have much impact owing to problems of free riding and enforcement in other countries, notably China and India. And it is certain to be costly.”
Some dude makes a claim in an article free of technical analysis, and you repeat it as if it were true. Good grief man.
Not only is it silly since the US is a major GHG emitter, (20% to 25%), but it ignores that if the USA decides to cut GHG emissions substantially to join the EU, it makes putting political, economic, and other pressure on China, India, Russia, and Brazil even more substantial. Actions don’t happen in a vacuum — they have reactions. If tUSA cuts GHG emissions substantially, you can be damn well sure that we’ll make others do it too by joining up with the EU to insist on it.
that I did not include Mr. Waltham on my list of non-idiots in my comment on the META post.
LESS discussion of whether climate is changing, and more discussion of whether various policies are worth it. Bogging that interesting discussion down with chickenshit like that posted above is, I think, trolling, no doubt.
I think there is likely some room for debate about how much A there is in AGW, as opposed to non-A. But it is not possible to have that discussion here without descending into the horsehit chasm. So don’t.
As the West reduces fossil fuel use, China is increasing, and increasing at a rate that makes the economic development of North America look positively glacial. They seem to be fond of their coal, them.
“Net negative cost” sort of glosses over some rather significant initial investment, even if you are convinced that EVERY measure will have infinite benefits. Significant investment that necessarily means NOT spending on other things that could be important, such as national security infrastructure or a social safety net.
… conservative policies to address climate change or GHGs that are not non-starters for the GOP? The only one I can think of is cap and trade, but they hate that now too. My experience on climate change policy seems to be that as soon as you invite the GOP into the discussion, it stops being useful at all. Wish and hope to be wrong, but not holding my breath.
Who cares?
At the moment we have precisely two positions:
1. This is the single gravest crisis in the history of all human civilization and must be addressed in every conceivable way right now, at any cost.
2. That is a hoax.
Neither of these positions is particularly illuminating at this point.
I have long wondered whether, if it is true, as has been argued, that we are well past the point of no return (commitment to warming), whether it is worth it to spend huge amounts of money subsidizing changing two centuries of infrastructure to adapt to alternative energy sources when this expenditure may not actually change anything. Especially since the developing world is going to continually develop, and it is going to do so by burning copious amounts of coal.
At that point, spending an extra ten grand on an uncomfortable hybrid car, and sweating out the summer to avoid the A/C, or paying $10/gallon for gasoline seem more like penitent monasticism than useful policy.
Likewise, “energy efficiency” seems to be a fools errand. When we make more efficient LCD displays, we build bigger HDTVs. When cars get better mileage, we drive more. Effeciency is great, but it will never decrease energy use; it will only increase the things we do with the energy used. Consumption of energy in the aggregate is going to ramp up on the same slope that it has since the invention of the steam engine.
… “more discussion of whether various policies are worth it.” So I’m a bit perplexed why you now point out “Who cares?” I thought I was addressing a particular complication that the GOP presents accomplishing a goal that you had asked for. Simply put, I tried to imagine that conversation and couldn’t figure out where a GOP proponent would fit in.
Your points are well taken otherwise.
You’re right. I withdraw the comment.
There isn’t any GOP room for discussion. Which sort of kills the entire discussion at a policy level.
What I meant by who cares is that I would prefer to read a discussion of that rather than a Monty Python Argument Clinic “Yes you did” “No you didn’t” thread on how Mars shows that the phenomenon is caused by sun spots.
And so, yes, I find myself wishing for some conservative pushback on the question that does not fly off into BS.
I might as well wish for whirled peas.
Let’s edit comments
I mean fools errand from the perspective of reducing GHGs. Energy efficiency is a economically useful in the sense that getting more from less is how prosperity works.
But if we succeed in achieving dramatic increases in, say, lighting and air conditioning, that won’t reduce energy consumption. It will increase the demand for electronic toilet seats.
So long as there is elasticity [and in this case, there is], efficiency gains will never be gobbled up 100% by newly created demand. Look at the MWRA — their water consumption [total, per household, etc] is way down over a 40 year period, and getting smaller by the year. They’ve bent the curve. Water efficiency has cut water use far faster than modern conveniences like lawn irrigation have increased them.
If we don’t reduce our emissions, the temperature will go up. And then more. And then more.
If we do reduce our emissions, the temperature will go up [a little]. And then stop going up.
We may well have to spend money on mitigation, but we can’t only mitigate, because the temperature will just keep going up and up and up.
China is the world’s largest investor in solar energy technology development. They now dominate that industry. While China’s use of fossil fuel is still climbing, it has slowed significantly from the trajectory it was on. It will slow further (or reverse) as its investments in solar energy technology bear fruit.
When the (coal) dust settles, and if the players continue on our current paths, then China will control the world’s energy supply technology and the US will be a distant, poor, and declining former world power.
Our steadfast refusal to face the reality of fossil fuel supply limits and invest in renewable energy technologies will be our downfall if we don’t reverse course — and it may already be too late for that.
Don’t we have 200 years supply of coal? Sequester the co2 or whatever you believe is making the earth warm, and use our “cheap” natural resource. Clean coal is what it’s called. Best thing, keeps jobs at home!!
1. We’ve got lots of coal
2. New England tends to use coal from South America, as it’s cheaper to float it here from there than it is to get rail through the congested NYC-metro corridor.
3. Coal isn’t clean. Ever. Burning it releases SOx, NOx, Hg, etc. Modern pollution controls reduce but don’t eliminate it.
4. Mining coal is awful. Lots of accidents and injuries, both immediate [see national news from time to time] and, more commonly, slowly and painfully [black lung disease is actually on the rise]. It’s also terrible for the surrounding area, as the water gets full of nasties. It sure as hell isn’t pretty to look at:
5. CO2 sequestration technology is in infant stage, and it’s tremendously expensive. Coal plus pollution controls plus carbon sequestration is far more expensive than renewables.
6. There are remarkably few jobs in coal. Open pit and mountaintop mining have eliminated most of them.
If you agree that CO2 emissions must be curtailed and that we shouldn’t pollute our air and water with other criteria pollutants and you believe that we should meet our electricity demand with low cost, then you simply have to conclude that we should be building renewables and conservation — neither coal with sequestration nor nuclear can match wind and PV and CHP and energy efficiency on price per MW or per MWh.
“The International Energy Agency has just released some data that green-minded fans of shale gas should appreciate. The organisation’s latest figures show that America’s carbon-dioxide emissions from generating energy have fallen by 450m tonnes, more than in any other country over the past five years. The turnaround has been welcomed by many, and Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, ascribes much of the credit to a shift away from dirty coal towards cleaner gas, according to an article in the Financial Times”
We still need affordable energy and natural gas has become a fairly clean and cost effective way to generate electricity.
High energy prices puts pressure on US firms to either cut cost or send manufacturing overseas – the low cost of natural gas is a very positive thing for our economy.
Why aren’t we drilling for natural gas off our coastline? Canada has a huge gas exploration not too far north from here. And if by luck we hit oil, great.
We aren’t drilling for natural gas off our coastline because that’s not where our new-found sources of natural gas are located:
Our increased natural gas production is coming from shale gas — accessed using “the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing”. That’s “fracking”, and it wreaks havoc on the local environment. Earthquakes, polluted wells, buildings blown up, that sort of thing.
Most of the shale gas reserves are distributed across the heartland. Specifically, they are located in highly-populated areas where the environmental impact of accessing the shale gas (fracking) is immediate and extreme. The process uses horizontal drilling, which means that shale gas in one parcel can be accessed from a drill pad up to a mile away. We are not, therefore, talking about a “grasshopper” in a cornfield. We are instead talking about a landowner in densely-built suburbia who sells his or her parcel so that a drilling company can extract shale gas from all his or her neighbors (not necessarily with their knowledge or consent).
This process re-raises a HOST of complex legal issues around “severed mineral rights” — perhaps some of our attorneys can elaborate on the implications for a typical suburban homeowner. They aren’t pleasant. I think you’ll find that a very large portion of the counties/towns affected on the above map don’t even have mineral rights provisions in their by-laws. Exploiting these resources will cause an explosion in real estate legislation, litigation, and title disputes.
Natural gas is better than coal. Solar is better than natural gas.
1. It’s illegal, although that expires in 2017
2. To my knowledge, there’s not much gas near MA’s coasts, although there may be some offshore between Georgia and New Jersey.
3. We do a lot of this in the Gulf of Mexico. Remember BP? On a much slower time scale, the crisscross pipelines to get the gas on land has decimated the marshy areas around LA, AL, and the FL panhandle, which has dramatically increased exposure to sea surges and other flooding. There’s no doubt that Katrina’s intensity would have been lessened by a more robust collection of off-shore islands, marshes, and so forth — which existed 50 years ago before the gas production pipelines destroyed them. I don’t know if the erosion problem maps well to Atlantic Ocean waterfront.
It’s generally considered to be less-bad than coal. There are concerns from methane leaks resulting in a total GHG level being much closer to coal than previously thought, but I believe that a chunk of that can be managed with tighter regulations on blowback, pipeline leaks, flaring, and so forth. Fracking also clearly needs tighter and more consistent regulations.
We’re going to use natural gas to generate electricity [and building heat] for a long time. Combined cycle plants are efficient — and if you add in combined heat and power, even more so. Even when we get to massive amounts of solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and hydro on the grid, we’ll still need natural gas to firm, to load follow, to provide regulation up, to heat the air coming out of compressed air storage so it can be used in a turbine, etc.
Still, it’s clear that an appropriately installed wind turbine, PV panel, etc. is even less bad than a natural gas facility. The risk for gas is that prices may not stay low. Gas prices are historically quite volatile. The price of wind and sun and rain remain free, so more of those provides more price stability. Average price of energy is important, but so is low volatility, because it provides investors with more certainty.
There is no credible case whatsoever for continuing to deny global warming or for continuing to reject the fact that human production of greenhouse gases is causing accelerating global warming or climate change. Politicians and pundits who refuse to accept this are utterly irresponsible and are conducting a one-time experiment on the only planet we have. Their expressions of concern for kids are laughable given their willingness to destroy their environment, so that the fossil fuel industry can make money now. It is unbelievable that Scott Brown is allowed to get away with refusing to take any stand whatsoever on this issue, and it is unbelievable that Mitt Romney is viewed as a remotely serious candidate when he has moved away from his own prior acceptance of climate science to claim that we just don’t know anymore what leads to climate change. Jut to be ‘fair and balanced’ I’d like President Obama to be more energetic in making the case for action, and I would also like to see many liberals devote 1/10th the passion to doing something about climate change that they devote to other issues.
We are supposed to believe that there is an enormous conspiracy among an enormous number of scientists whereby they’ve all sworn to uphold a preposterous proposition — so preposterous that R. Limbaugh doesn’t believe it. It likewise seems to me that these conservatives have met no scientists: Scientists, after all, are no easier to herd than cats and are as conformist as artists.
The only more difficult thing to believe is the even bigger conspiracy theory that underlies creationism.
redundant, value-free, typical of all dialogue with the extreme right wing and doesn’t even bother to address to point raised in the post.
I’m sorry, we’re looking at a data set from 1980 to 2010? How is this meaningful in 10,000-year time-frame climatology?
I’m no professional climatologist, nor do I have a PhD in statistics, but the study’s methodology does not make sense; why do they “adjust” the base data to remove climate variables such as El Nino, La Nina, solar oscillations and variability, volcanic aerosols, etc? If one were to regress lower-troposphere and surface temperatures against these factors, one would likely get a great deal of correlation. What’s the point?
Filter those factors then what are their “temperature anomalies” measured against? Some notion of AGW? A three decade timeline? It’s statistical masturbation.
More telling, here’s their presumptuous, fit-the-hypothesis conclusion, along with my editorial comments:
I hope this study was not taxpayer funded. If it was, I want a refund.
Most upsetting is BMG’s posting of this graph as ammunition to be used against any intellectual and scientific challenge to this community’s ecumenical belief in AGW. I’m sure any good statistician can use the same base data, apply their own transformations, and turn the graph downward. While we’re at it, let’s run it logarithmically and prove earth is rapidly getting colder.
Don’t you ever wonder how you all turned AGW, whatever the scientific reality may be, into a political loser?
Perhaps you can offer a link to someone who IS a professional climatologist, or who DOES have a PhD in statistics, in which they “use the same base data, apply their own transformations, and turn the graph downward”. Let’s see how well their result holds up to fact-based scrutiny.
The entire world wonders how the American right wing turned AGW into a political loser, given what the scientific reality IS.
… a Phd Physicist at the issue funded by Koch. Of course after looking at it, he decided the other climatologists and scientists actually got it right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz8Ve6KE-Us
I tend to follow climate change rather closely (on another blog).
I figure our deniers will be publishing commentary from Joe Bastardi any time now.
I thought he destroyed Bill Nye the Science Guy in a debate. Let me know if you want the YouTube link.
“The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope.”
I question your photo of mountaintop clearing b/c the excavators, one would think, would smooth out the area, resurface and regrade and plant trees. In 10 years, almost look good as new.
Dr. Lindzen is (or was) the poster-boy of the climate denier set. What has he done for you lately?
Is that strawman quote the best you’ve got? Nobody claims that the climate is static or unchanging. The complaint (from bostonshepherd) that started this branch was that the adjustments to filter out those changes were wrong. Has Dr. Lindzen published a different or better set of adjustments?
How about any recent peer-reviewed publications from Dr. Lindzen? How about checking the accuracy of the assertions he made in prior publications?
When he went nose to nose and toe to toe with Nye, Lindzen blew him out of the water. I believe Lindzen is retired but still making his valid points and contributions in the scientific community.
Who cares what happened in some televised “debate” five years ago? I also don’t doubt that Dr. Lindzen is still making his points and contributions to the scientific community (although it has been some time since he published).
The point is that he’s provided NOTHING that contradicts the analysis offered in the thread-starter.
That’s what you’ve got? He beat up on a newer version of Mr. Wizard?
Weak Tea. Laughable actually.
Do you hear yourself? You question “my” photo of mounainttop removal [not clearing]? One would think what exactly?
Read a book. Hell, spend 30 minutes reading about the topic online. Don’t just guess. I’m sure you’re an intelligent person, but you’re street smarts and book learnin’ combined don’t make you an expert or even particularly knowledgeable.
Quit guessing, and quit being idly skeptical. Get off your arse, do your homework, and then come back with legitimate questions, concerns, and debate backed with citable references. Show some integrity for Pete’s sake.
https://www.google.com/search?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&q=mountaintop+removal+before+and+after&revid=649038130&sa=X&ei=YgMKUO7NJqLk0QGUtpmGBA&ved=0CFUQgxY&biw=1227&bih=638
…
…above the tree line?
Who would get an operation if they saw what the doctors do to a person? Nobody wants to see a body cut open in the middle of heart/organ transplant. Same thing with coal excavation. When it’s complete, they plant trees and bushes, grass, or whatever the landscape requires. Is it the same, no. But what is shown above or the link I clicked, reminds me of a horror show and I just don’t buy it.
All I hear is no to coal, nukes, and oil and even natural gas. Yes to wind an solar. Well, I don’t have a south facing roof nor $30K to blow in solar panels. An engineer told me we could litter the oceans with turbines, and still not generate enuff power for our needs. He seemed like a smart old timer and i believe him. What you folks are selling reminds me of an old WW II movie. The German general, I think Romell, was having a meeting with the German politicians. These pols said to Romell they have jet airplanes, best tanks, and guns. What Romell was shown were model airplanes and displays. He said to them “you want me to defeat the Americans with toys”? That is what wind and solar solutions remind me of.
I will take what is proven and gets the job done, at a price I can afford.
substantive comment. I often think the same thing about people who show photos of aborted fetuses. Show a picture of liposuction and people would want to outlaw that too.
Unfounded, baseless opinions and assertion of unsupported claims is now “substantive?” Or is it the anecdotes about what “some engineer” told him, or a half-remembered scene from a nameless movie? All used to denigrate the people telling him things he doesn’t want to hear.
I sure hope that the bar for substantive hasn’t actually been dropped that far.
… with enough reasoning behind it to actually allow back and forth addressing of the issues. Even without an evidentiary start, back and forth can start from instincts or conjecture. In his above comment, there is enough material there about the reasoning behind his stance that conversation about what is right or wrong about his reasoning is possible.
Atypical to be sure, but there it is.
Better put than my comment.
The idea is that bad appearances don’t necessarily mean bad effects.
You don’t seem to acknowledge the staggering scale of these desecrations. We’re not talking about an isolated plot of land here and there, as these photos show. These operations destroy entire mountain ranges.
I think your metaphor is misplaced. A better one is the amputation of legs and arms. Nobody does that if there is any alternative. No matter how hard doctors try, the best prostheses in the world don’t begin to compare with the limbs that have been removed.
Just to stay with your example of General Romell and his toys, you’ll note that he DID NOT get what he demanded and the Germans LOST the war. Stomping feet and demanding things doesn’t work for three year olds, it didn’t work for General Romell, and it won’t solve our energy problems.
We need to do better. If wind and solar solutions are “toys” (which they are not), then we need to create wind and solar solutions that work. Raping our mountains for coal is not an acceptable answer.
…that coal extraction companies who do the mountain top removal extraction are actually repairing the mountain tops when they are done? Or are you just imagining that they are? Because from what I’ve seen, those companies are decimating mountain tops and leaving a mess behind, there’s no remediation being done – please show some proof that there is.
As far as solar is concerned, you say it’s not proven, and you don’t have $30K to “blow” on it – did you know that I sell solar power systems for my living? Did you know that I can put solar panels on your roof, even one that doesn’t actually face south, that will provide over 90% of your electricity needs for a monthly payment that is about the same as what you’re currently paying to the utility? Such a system would lock in your electricity rates at today’s rates for the next 20 years, after which you would own the system outright and it will continue to produce power for another 20 years or so. Would you like me to stop by and give a free, no obligation solar analysis and price quote?
Like it never even happened.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/razingappalachia/mtop.html
I knew someone sold solar panels. Let me think about it, I do have lots of trees south and west of the home. I will let my sister know about you, I believe she is interested. Will Bob or Dave let you post your business website or something?
john (at) tehans (dot) com
I spell it that way to keep email harvesters from finding it.
As to your link, did you read the accompanying text? MTR is a terrible method of mining:
Like it never happened? Hardly – like the land has been torn asunder, more like…
Yeah, you got non-functional flesh-colored prostheses. Big deal.
Calculations for a manufacturing facility I support. We use 41,000 KWH a month – assume 8 hours days – that’s 128KW average use. I see a capacity factor for a Hannaford supermarket solar installation of 17%
So for the facility to run at net zero energy I would need 752KW – assume 7 watt per foot of solar power I would need 107,000 square feet of panels – a lot bigger than this building I would assume this would be a $1M+ installation.
Though I could see using a smaller set of panels to reduce our peak demand factor.
BTW – after 20 years doesn’t the efficiency of the panels drop ?
A handy rule of thumb is to multiply the solar power system’s capacity (measured in kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours) by 1.2 to determine how many megawatt-hours of power it will produce. For example, a system with 20 panels, each rated at 250 watts, will have a capacity of 5,000 watts, or 5 kilowatts. 5 x 1.2 is 6, so such a system will produce roughly 6 megawatt-hours of power annually.
Your assumption of 7 watts per square foot is way off. I sell panels that are just under 18 square feet, and they are rated at 327 watts, over 18 watts per square foot.
Working backwards from your electricity usage, at 41,000 kWH per month, you’re using 492 megawatt-hours annually. Divide 492 by 1.2 and you get a system size of 410 kW, or roughly 1250 of our 327 watt panels. 1250 panels x 18 sq ft per panel = 22,500 sq feet of panel space – of course, there has to be additional space between and around the racks so that no panels are shaded, so call it 35,000 sq ft. At $5.00 per watt, a 410,000 watt system would cost $2,050,000, but I think the price for a commercial installation of this size would be less than $5.00 per watt. I do residential installs, I can ask the commercial sales guys what price they’re seeing if you’re truly interested.
Assuming the worst case, a $2 million system cost, how long will it take to recoup that money? That depends on a variety of factors, and again, I’m not familiar with them because I do residential. Until the end of last year, the Treasury 1603 grant would provide a lump sum grant in lieu of tax credit for 30% of the system cost, but I think that program ended on 12/31/11, and I’m not sure if there’s anything comparable. Assuming a $0.139 per kWH net-metering credit, your avoided cost of electricity would be $68,388 annually. Assuming $300 per Solar Renewable Energy Certificate, your SREC income would be $147,600 annually. The system would pay for itself in just under 10 years, and the panels will continue to produce power for 30 years after that. If the price is $4.00 per watt, it would take about 7.5 years to pay for itself.
The system performance does degrade over time, by about 1/2 of a percent per year, and the panels are guaranteed to deliver at least 80% of their rated capacity for 25 years.
Most of this is a “back of the envelope” calculation, but I’m reasonably sure it’s accurate. Hope that helps!