Dispatches from District 48
Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category.
Theorum: A media article on a wind or solar project will give its installation costs or the value of its energy produced, but never both.
Corollary 1: One therefore can never assess the economic reasonableness of any green energy project from a single media article
Corollary 2: For supporters of green energy, there is a good reason for Corollary #1.
I am mostly inured to being told I am "anti-science" for thinking manmade global warming will be less than catastrophic. In debate situations (which are increasingly rare, since most colleges where I do most of my speaking no longer want a second side in climate discussions) I usually can demonstrate I know a hell of a lot more about the science than my opponent in the first 3 minutes or so.
But the whole "pro-science" pose of environmentalists is especially funny when they get really excited about some very stupid technology. Environmentalists' support for corn ethanol is a good case in point. Most of them have retreated on this, and the media has pretty much allowed them to pretend they were never really vociferous supporters of this technology that most now consider (and I considered from the beginning) to be environmentally damaging.
Here is the new, latest, greatest example. From Think Progress, where else, but the story has been reprinted all over the hip environmental Left:
The World’s First Solar Road Is Producing More Energy Than Expected
In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.
The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single small household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.
“If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square meter per year,” Sten de Wit, a spokesman for the project — dubbed SolaRoad — told Al Jazeera America. “We predicted [this] as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.”
De Wit said in a statement that he didn’t “expect a yield as high as this so quickly.”
The 230-foot stretch of road, which is embedded with solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass, is built for bike traffic, a use that reflects the road’s environmentally-friendly message and the cycling-heavy culture of the Netherlands.
In the US, we pay about 12 cents a KwH for electricity (the Dutch probably pay more). But at this rate, in 6 months, the solar sidewalk has generated... $360 of electricity. Double that for a year, and we get $720 of electricity a year.
How much did the sidewalk cost? The article doesn't say. You will find this typical of wind and solar articles. If they quantify the installation cost, they will not quantify the value of power produced. If they quantify the power produced, they will never quantify the installation cost. This article says the installation cost was $3.5 million, though I suppose one should subtract from that the cost to build a similar length concrete bike path, but that can't be more than $100,000 for 230 feet. They say they are getting 70kwh per year per square meter, which is $8.40 worth of electricity per square meter per year. Since regular solar panels - without all the special glass overlays and installation in the ground and inverters and wiring - cost about $150-$200 per square meter, you can see this is a horrible investment.
Part of the reason this is a bad investment is that solar panels are simply not efficient enough and cheap enough to be cost effective -- I think they will be someday, but not now. But this project has special problems:
This is just stupid, stupid, stupid. Perhaps if solar becomes more efficient and we have run out of space on every roof in the world, one might possibly maybe (but probably not) consider this. But despite the inherent inanity of this idea, look at all the articles on Solaroad -- Think Progress, the Huffington Post, Engadget, Tree Hugger, Extreme Tech, NPR, Sustainable Business -- they all have multiple, gushing, unrelentingly positive articles about this. Look at all the positively fawning comments on Think Progress. I can't find a single article on the web that is even slightly skeptical.
Update: A reader sends me this epic video takedown of this stupid idea. He did this in advance of the article today. He finds it to be complete BS, despite the fact that he overestimates electrical production by a factor of 2.
The story begins with a discovery that the permit under which Nestle's Arrowhead Water has been collecting water in the San Bernardino National Forest expired in 1988. LOL, oops. Environmental and other Leftish sites are calling for Nestle's head and somehow blaming Nestle for this.
As a permittee with the US Forest Service (USFS) in California and across the country, I can guess with pretty high confidence exactly what happened here. For years I was head of a trade group of recreation concessionaires (think lodges and guides and such) who do business in the USFS under permit. Most of these were located in California. For years, the biggest problem we have had with the USFS in California is that they are years and years behind in nearly all their permit renewals. There are literally hundreds of expired permit in the USFS in California alone.
For reasons that probably go to bureaucratic incentives, despite the Forest Service's huge budget, they are loath to allocate resources to renewing these permits -- they want to fill their organization with biologists and archaeologists and arborists, not contracts people. Making the situation worse, Forest Service and other Federal rules have burdened the permit renewal process with so many legal requirements that each one, even if trivial in size and impact, is absurdly time-consuming to complete.
This is not a new situation -- it has obtained for years. Almost five years ago I met personally with the Chief of the Forest Service in DC and begged for more resources to be assigned to permit renewals, but to no avail. I did the same in a meeting barely a month ago with the head of the USFS's Region 5 (basically California). All of us permittees have been vociferously complaining about this for years.
When you look at these situations, then, what you will see is not some evil private business trying to get over on the public, but a business that is literally screaming in frustration, year in and year out, begging the US Forest Service to address its permit renewal. Generally, local Forest Service staff will give the company verbal assurances that they should keep operating, so they do, continuing to pay their fees and operate within the guidelines of the old, expired contract.
I would be willing to bet a fair amount of money that this is exactly what happened to Nestle.
By the way, the usual groups seem to be piling on Nestle about bottled water from the Sacramento tap water system. A couple of comments:
The invaluable Carpe Diem blog has a compendium of 18 forecasts of doom that were made on or around the first Earth Day in 1970 -- all of which turned out wrong. Here is an example:
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Participants in the global warming debate today will surely recognize the formulation of these statements as representing a consensus scientific opinion.
For those of you too young to actively follow the news in the 1970s, Mark Perry is not cherry-picking cranks. These fearful quotations are representative of what was ubiquitous in the media of that time.
My school (Kinkaid in Houston) took speech and debate very seriously and had a robust debate program even in middle school. In 1975-1976 the national debate topic was this:
Resolved: That the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization
The short answer to this proposition should realistically have been: "you have got to be f*cking kidding me." But such were the times that this was considered a serious proposal worth debating for the entire year. In fact, in doing research, it was dead-easy to build up suitcases of quotations of doom to support the affirmative; it was far, far harder finding anyone who would argue that a) the world was not going to run out of everything in a few decades and b) that markets were an appropriate vehicle for managing resources. I could fill up an hour reading different sources predicting that oil would have run out by 1990 or 2000 at the latest.
President Obama is preparing to unleash a Colorado-River-sized torrent of stupid. He wants to spend tens of billions of dollars on goofy green energy projects that will have an indiscernible affect on world temperatures but will have a very robust effect on some crony bottom lines. Here is one example:
As part of President Obama’s plans to combat climate change, the White House announced a program on Friday for the U.S. Department of Energy to train 75,000 people to work in the solar power industry by 2020, many of whom will be part of a military veterans jobs initiative called Solar Ready Vets.
Seriously, is the training costs of workers really a substantial portion of a solar installation?
Andrea Luecke, president and executive director of the Solar Foundation, which publishes the annual National Solar Jobs Census, said that Obama’s announcement will not likely increase the size of the solar industry’s workforce but will instead ensure that the industry will be able to find highly skilled workers to fill jobs.
“We’re experiencing difficulty finding more skilled and qualified workers to install and do design work required,†she said, adding that the industry’s workforce has a “skills gap†as well-trained electricians and other workers go back to other construction jobs as the economy gains momentum.
I will translate that trade-group speak for you: We like to pay our workers less than similarly-skilled construction workers so we lose a lot of skilled workers to higher paying construction companies. This program will not add any net employment to the economy but will help us keep wages lower by increasing the supply of qualified workers.
I can't help but think of Henry Ford, who famously raised the wages of his employees substantially. The fake story is that he did this so all his workers could buy his product. The real reason he did this was that he had horrendous labor turnover problems. Like the solar industry, he was training folks who then left for higher paying jobs. So he had to raise his wages to retain trained people. How history would have changed if Ford had instead been able to call Obama and ask him to have the taxpayer pay to feed him with new, trained workers so he wouldn't have to raise his wage rates!
Seriously, did a bunch of technocrats get together and study the whole solar industry and come to the conclusion that solar installation skills were the keystone problem that was holding back the whole industry? Of course not. The solar industry will sink or swim based on panel costs and efficiencies. What happened is someone said, "well the public always seems to like job training programs. Those poll well." And then they called the solar crony association or whatever it is called and they said, "sure, we would love to have taxpayers pay some of our training costs. Thanks, we will be very supportive." And then someone said, "well, won't the Republicans pitch a fit over this?" And then someone had the brilliant idea of making it a veterans program -- "Republicans love soldiers, that will help defuze their opposition." And an expensive crony giveaway was born.
About 5 years ago I said I would be willing to accept a carbon tax whose proceeds were used to reduce various labor tax rates (e.g. social security). Substituting an energy consumption tax for a labor consumption tax was probably at least neutral and maybe even a net positive.
Now, I want to come back to that idea. I don't believe any more than I did then that CO2-driven global warming will be catastrophic. In fact, I am more confident than ever that while CO2-induced warming is a reality, the sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 levels is relatively low. But please, I am willing to fully support a carbon tax that offsets some other existing tax if only we will stop all this stupid crony useless green energy stuff. At least with a carbon tax, the markets will reduce fossil fuel use in the most efficient ways possible. As opposed to programs like this one that will reduce fossil fuel use not at all but will cost a lot of money.
A test of a solar power tower project in Nevada resulted in injuries to over one hundred birds, the federal government is reporting, though the project's owners say they've fixed the problem.
On January 14, during tests of the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Tonopah, Nevada, biologists observed 130 birds entering an area of concentrated solar energy and catching fire. That's according to Rudy Evenson, Deputy Chief of Communications for Nevada Bureau of Land Management in Reno.
Evenson suggested that the birds may have been attracted by a glow the concentrated solar energy created above the project's sole tower.
...According to Evenson, workers testing the plant moved approximately a third of the project's ten thousand mirrors to focus sunlight on a point 1,200 feet above the ground, approximately twice the height of the power tower at Crescent Dunes.
The test started at 9:00 a.m. on January 14, Evenson told Rewire. By 10:30, biologists working on the site began noticing what have become known as "streamers," trails of smoke and water vapor caused by birds entering the field of concentrated solar energy (a.k.a. "solar flux") and igniting.
By the time the test ended for the day at 3:00 p.m., biologists had counted 130 such "streamers." A subsequent test on January 15 reduced the number of mirrors aimed at the focal point above the tower, said Evenson, and that apparently ended the injuries to birds.
Oops. It is amazing how solar gets a pass on things that other industries would be hounded into bankruptcy over. ExxonMobil was fined by the Feds for 85 bird deaths at the company's natural gas facilities. These deaths were spread out over 5 states and over 5 years. This solar plant killed at least 130 birds in one location in 6 hours. ExxonMobil was fined $7000 per dead bird. Anyone want to bet on what the solar guys will be fined? Vegas has set the over-under at zero.
I refuse to assume (contrary to the modern practice) that someone who disagrees with me is either stupid or ill-intentioned or both [OK, I did call people idiots here -- sorry, I was ranting]. Intelligent people of goodwill can disagree with each other, and the world would be a better place if more people embraced that simple notion.
Anyway, I won't blame lack of intelligence or bad motivations for the following statement from Bill Maher. He seems to be a smart guy who is honestly motivated by what he says motivates him. But this statement is just so ignorant and provably false that it must be the result of living in a very powerful echo chamber where no voices other than ones that agree with him are allowed.
HBO’s Bill Maher complained that comparing climate change skepticism to vaccine skepticism was unfair to vaccine skeptics before attacking GMOs on Friday’s “Real Time.”
“The analogy that I see all the time is that if you ask any questions [about vaccines], you are the same thing as a global warming denier. I think this is a very bad analogy, because I don’t think all science is alike. I think climate science is rather straightforward because you’re dealing with the earth, it’s a rock…climate scientists, from the very beginning, have pretty much said the same thing, and their predictions have pretty much come true. It’s atmospherics, and it’s geology, and chemistry. That’s not true of the medical industry. I mean, they’ve had to retract a million things because the human body is infinitely more mysterious” he stated.
Climate science is astoundingly complex with thousands or millions of variables interacting chaotically. Separating cause and effect is a nightmare, because controlled experiments are impossible. It is stupendously laughable that he could think this task somehow straightforward, or easier than running a double-blind medical study (By the way, this is one reason for the retractions in medicine vs. climate -- medical studies are straightforward enough they can be easily replicated... or not, and thus retracted. Proving cause and effect in climate is so hard that studies may be of low quality, but they are also hard to absolutely disprove).
It is funny of course that he would also say that all of climate scientists predictions have come true. Pretty much none have come true. They expected rapidly rising temperatures and they have in fact risen only modestly, if at all, over the last 20 years or so. They expected more hurricanes and there have been fewer. They called for more tornadoes and there have been fewer. The only reason any have been right at all is that climate scientists have separately forecasts opposite occurrences (e.g. more snow / less snow) so someone has to be right, though this state of affairs hardly argues for the certainty of climate predictions.
By the way, the assumption that Bill Maher is an intelligent person of goodwill who simply disagrees with me on things like climate and vaccines and GMO's is apparently not one he is willing to make himself about his critics. e.g.:
Weekly Standard Senior Writer John McCormack then pointed out that there are legitimate scientists, such as Dr. Richard Lindzen, who are skeptical of man-made climate change theories, but that there were no serious vaccine-skeptic professors, to which Maher rebutted “the ones who are skeptics [on climate change], usually are paid off by the oil industry.”
I will point out to you that the Left's positions on climate, vaccines, and GMO's have many things in common, as I wrote in a long article on evaluating risks here.
...because CO2 is the least of its pollution problems. See here. As the West has proven over the last century, it is entirely possible to have economic growth and modern technology while maintaining clean water and soot-free air. So why don't we let China focus on that? It is entirely unproven whether modern technology will allow economic growth without CO2 production, yet that is what we spend all of our time pestering China to do.
Skeptics like myself often see parallels between environmentalism (as practiced by many people) and religion. Now, they are going one step further to actually establish a state church:
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made national news last year when he fought to pass and signed a tax bill that levied a tax on Marylanders, businesses and churches for the amount of “impervious surface” they have on their property.
Though the O’Malley administration calls it a “fee,” it is commonly called the “rain tax” throughout the state. It is wildly unpopular and the promise to fight to repeal the tax was a large factor in Maryland electing Republican Larry Hogan governor this month.
Now Prince George’s County is offering a way for churches to avoid paying the tax, which is estimated to be an average of $744 per year for them — preach “green” to their parishioners.
So far 30 pastors have agreed to begin “‘green’ ministries to maintain the improvements at their churches, and to preach environmentally focused sermons to educate their congregations” to avoid being hit with the tax, The Washington Post reports.
The government claims to be making huge profits on its greentech loan program, despite losses at companies like Solyndra.
The U.S. government expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from the renewable-energy loan program that funded flops including Solyndra LLC, supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.
The Department of Energy has disbursed about half of $32.4 billion allocated to spur innovation, and the expected return will be detailed in a report due to be released as soon as tomorrow, according to an official who helped put together the data.
The results contradict the widely held view that the U.S. has wasted taxpayer money funding failures including Solyndra, which closed its doors in 2011 after receiving $528 million in government backing. That adds to Obama’s credibility as he seeks to make climate change a bigger priority after announcing a historic emissions deal with China.
Even Kevin Drum calls partial BS on this:
And yet....I'd still remain a bit cautious about the overall success of the program. Out of its $32 billion in approved loans, half represent loan guarantees to nuclear power plant developers and Ford Motor. These are not exactly risky, innovative startups. They're huge companies that could very easily have raised money without government help, and which represented virtually zero danger of default. If DOE is including returns from those loans in its forecast, color me unimpressed.
The genuinely risky half of the loan program is called Section 1705, and it includes everything that most of us think of as real renewable energy projects (wind, solar, biofuel, etc.). DOE hasn't broken that out separately.
I call further BS. It turns out this program is actually losing money, not making money.
All of this leaves out the inherent cronyism of the whole exercise.
** I would argue that in many of these loans, and despite interest rates charged in the 0-2% range, the government was taking an equity risk. Worse than equity risks -- these are essentially venture capital investments risks with T-bill returns (note the one private comment on the returns in the Bloomberg article is from a venture capital investor in greentech). The taxpayers are bearing all the risk but getting none of the returns. Any discount rate for these risks under 15-20% is far too low.
Readers will know of my pet peeve on this issue. It turns out this has come up as a viewer complaint at the BBC several times and they actually have a policy on it, though like many media organizations they don't consistently follow their own guide.
You can see many examples simply by searching google images for "air pollution". The people riding bikes with masks are in actual pollution. The rest of the photos on the first page are mainly steam plumes. Note how the photographers like to catch the steam at dusk or backlit so they look dark and sortof smokey.
Kevin Drum quotes Politico about a coming series of Administration environmental diktats:
...The administration was committed to its upcoming deadlines many months ago, in some cases under court order, after postponing a number of the actions until after the 2012 or 2014 elections. Now that Obama is almost out of time, they’re coming all at once.
The whole "under court order" and "our of time" thing is an scam. The Administration colludes with environmental groups to sue them demanding some regulation the Administration wants but knows it can't get through the regular legislative or regulator process. The Administration immediately rolls over in the suit and settles, agreeing to implement the regulation it wanted in the first place. Then it can claim the settlement of the court suit "requires" them to proceed with these regulations. I can't tell if I should be embarrassed for the reporter writing this that they are so ignorant of how these suits work or angry that the reporting is essentially colluding in this deceptive practice.
I often wonder if Democrats really believe they will hold the White House forever. I suppose they must, because they seem utterly unconcerned, even gleeful in fact, about new authoritarian Presidential powers they would freak out over if a Republican exercised.
Coyote's first rule of government authority: Never support any government power you would not want your ideological enemy wielding.
I got an email today from some random Gmail account asking me to write about HyrdoInfra. OK. The email begins: "HydroInfra Technologies (HIT) is a Stockholm based clean tech company that has developed an innovative approach to neutralizing carbon fuel emissions from power plants and other polluting industries that burn fossil fuels."
Does it eliminate CO2? NOx? Particulates? SOx? I actually was at the bottom of my inbox for once so I went to the site. I went to this applications page. Apparently, it eliminates the "toxic cocktail" of pollutants that include all the ones I mentioned plus mercury and heavy metals. Wow! That is some stuff.
Their key product is a process for making something they call "HyrdroAtomic Nano Gas" or HNG. It sounds like their PR guys got Michael Crichton and JJ Abrams drunk in a brainstorming session for pseudo-scientific names.
But hold on, this is the best part. :
Splitting water (H20) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O.
This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.
We took a different approach by postulating that we could split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.
A specific low energy pulse is put into water. The water molecules line up in a certain structure and are split from the Hydrogen molecules.
The result is HNG.
HNG is packed with ‘Exotic Hydrogen’
Exotic Hydrogen is a recent scientific discovery.
HNG carries an abundance of Exotic Hydrogen and Oxygen.
On a Molecular level, HNG is a specific ratio mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen.
The unique qualities of HNG show that the placement of its’ charged electrons turns HNG into an abundant source of exotic Hydrogen.
HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen.
Some basic facts:
- HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions
- HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars.
- HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second.
- Oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame.
- HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the center thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
- HNG is stored in canisters, arrayed around the emission outlet channels. HNG is injected into the outlets to safely & effectively clean up the burning of fossil fuels.
- The pollution emissions are neutralized instantly & safely with no residual toxic cocktail or chemicals to manage after the HNG burning process is initiated.
Exotic Hyrdrogen! I love it. This is probably a component of the "red matter" in the Abrams Star Trek reboot. Honestly, someone please tell me this a joke, a honeypot for mindless environmental activist drones. What are the chemical reactions going on here? If CO2 is captured, what form does it take? How does a mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules in whatever state they are in do anything with heavy metals? None of this is on the website. On their "validation" page, they have big labels like "Horiba" that look like organizations thave somehow put their impremature on the study. In fact, they are just names of analytical equipment makers. It's like putting "IBM" in big print on your climate study because you ran your model on an IBM computer.
SCAM! Honestly, when you see an article written to attract investment that sounds sort of impressive to laymen but makes absolutely no sense to anyone who knows the smallest about of Chemistry or Physics, it is an investment scam.
But they seem to get a lot of positive press. In my search of Google, everything in the first ten pages or so are just uncritical republication of their press releases in environmental and business blogs. You actually have to go into the comments sections of these articles to find anyone willing to observe this is all total BS. If you want to totally understand why the global warming debate gets nowhere, watch commenter Michael at this link desperately try to hold onto his faith in HydroInfra while people who actually know things try to explain why this makes no sense.
Update: If you want an actual nano-material that absorbs various pollutants, this may be one.
Yesterday, when writing about the US Forest Service (USFS) restrictions on commercial photography in wilderness areas, I discussed the contradictions that make their policy problematic
The USFS has undermined their own argument by making exceptions based on the purpose of the filming. Apparently only commercial filming hurts ecosystems, not amateur photography. And apparently commercial filming that has positive messages about the USFS are OK too. Its just commercial filming that goes into a beer company ad that hurts ecosystems. You see the problem. If it's the use itself that is the problem, then the USFS should be banning the use altogether. By banning some photography but not all based on the content and use of that photography, that strikes me as a first amendment issue.
Despite working with the USFS on lands management every day, this policy was new to me. I hypothesized
[There is a] large group in the USFS that is at best skeptical and at worst hostile to commercial activity. They would explain these rules, at least in private, by saying that anything commercial is by definition antithetical to the very concept of wilderness that they hold in their heads, and that thus all commercial activity needs to be banned in the wilderness because it is inherently corrupting.
Reading Overlawyered, I saw this US Forest Service quote from the Oregonian to explain their position on commercial photography:
Liz Close, the Forest Service's acting wilderness director, says the restrictions have been in place on a temporary basis for four years and are meant to preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness.
Close didn't cite any real-life examples of why the policy is needed or what problems it's addressing. She didn't know whether any media outlets had applied for permits in the last four years.
She said the agency was implementing the Wilderness Act of 1964, which aims to protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain.
"It's not a problem, it's a responsibility," she said. "We have to follow the statutory requirements."
So it appears that the purpose of the Wilderness Act is interpreted by the USFS as "protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain."
But the Wilderness Act makes just a brief mention of commercial activity (It was written back in the day when laws did not have to be 2000 pages long, so you can read the who thing here). Its main purpose is to keep the lands wild and the ecology as free as possible from man's intervention
In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For this purpose there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to be composed of federally owned areas designated by the Congress as "wilderness areas," and these shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness...
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
There is nothing in this that in any way shape or form should be affected by photography (unless the photography has some sort of heavy footprint, like making a Hollywood movie with hundreds of people and equipment and catering trucks, etc.).
The Wilderness Act is not primarily about protecting the Wilderness from commercial gain. It is about protecting the natural operation of ecosystems from intervention of any sort by man. Commercial activity is barely mentioned, and only as a minor aside deep into the legislation. But many US Forest Service employees have an antipathy to commercial activity and have sort of reinterpreted it in their mind as being an anti-commercialism act. Here are the only mentions of commercial activity in the law:
Except as specifically provided for in this Act, and subject to existing private rights, there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness area designated by this Act and except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act (including measures required in emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area), there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area. ...
Commercial services may be performed within the wilderness areas designated by this Act to the extent necessary for activities which are proper for realizing the recreational or other wilderness purposes of the areas.
In this usage (I am not an attorney so there is likely a long history of how the term "commercial enterprise" is understood in the law) my sense is this means that people are not to be conducting commerce -- trading goods and services for money- within the boundaries of the wilderness area. Essentially, they don't want a gift shop or McDonald's there. Grouped with the bit about roads, this is a paragraph about facilities and equipment and having a footprint.
So is a lone person taking pictures a commercial enterprise within the area? I doubt it. The actual commerce is conducted outside the park and there is nothing about photography that impairs the wilderness nature of the park. My interpretation is that taking pictures is OK but setting up a photography store is forbidden. But by the US Forest Service's definition, I suppose they should also ban people from collecting material for a book. If I walk through the wilderness area taking notes for a book I want to write, and then leave the area and write it and sell it, I am not sure how this is any different from commercial photography. And does this mean that I can't wear any clothes or bring any equipment into the wilderness area that I purchased commercially?
PS- Beyond a skepticism about capitalism, there is an other reason public lands people might want to shortcut the Federal Wilderness Act as "preventing commercial activity" -- it lets them off the hook. The Wilderness Act was about preventing meddling in the ecosystem (an impossible goal, but we will leave that for another day) and this applied to all groups -- commercial, government, educational. By shortcutting the Act as being about commerce, it helps folks forget that the same strictures should apply to agency personnel as well. I was up in Yellowstone listening to discussions of reintroduction of the wolf and the ongoing killing of thousands of non-native fish in Yellowstone Lake and various streams. The goal of these interventions is to reverse past interventions, but even so they strike me as violations of the Federal Wilderness Act.
Equal protection means that the same law applies to everyone, at least in theory. But compare these two stories:
1. Exxon fined $600,000 for 85 bird deaths in five states over five years
Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest.
The fine amounts to about $7,000 per dead bird.
The oil company pleaded guilty to causing the deaths of waterfowl, hawks, owls and other protected species, which perished around natural gas well pits or water storage areas in Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas over the last five years....
“We are all responsible for protecting our wildlife, even the largest of corporations,” said David M. Gaouette, the United States attorney in Colorado, in a statement accompanying the Justice Department’s announcement.
We are all responsible for protecting our wildlife... except if we are politically-favored solar companies with strong ties to the Obama White House
2. No fines for solar power plant that may be killing 28,000 birds a year
A common sight in the sky above the world's largest solar thermal power plant is a "streamer," a small plume of smoke that occurs without warning. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the source of the smoke is a bird which has inadvertently strayed into the white-hot heat above the plant's many reflecting mirrors. Because the BrightSource Energy plant near Ivanpah uses supercritical steam rather than photovoltaic energy, the sun's heat is reflected off more than 300,000 mirrors to a single point, which is used to drive a steam turbine. The downside of that, of course, is that it's lethal for any wildlife that strays into the picture -- a problem that was recognized well before the facility opened, but now the government has gotten involved.
Government wildlife inspectors believe that insects are drawn to the highly reflective mirrors, which in turn lures local birds to their doom. BrightSource feels that the issue has been overblown, claiming that only 1,000 living creatures will die in a year, but the Center for Biological Diversity believes the actual figure is closer to 28,000. The US Fish and Wildlife service is pushing for more information and an accurate calculation of the deaths before California grants the company any more permits for solar plants.
You can see from the last line that the Feds don't seem to be even considering a penalty, but are just considering whether they should permit such plants in the future. If the 28,000 figure is correct, this company should be getting $196 million in fines (the Exxon rate of $7000 per bird) if there was any such thing as equal protection. Even the company's admitted figure of 1,000 a year is almost 60 times as high as Exxon was penalized for, despite the fact that Exxon experienced the deaths across hundreds of locations in five states and this is just one single solar plant.
The same alternate standard is being applied to the wind energy industry, as I wrote a while back here.
This is good news - the Oklahoma Attorney General is challenging sue and settle endangered species listings as a violation of the required rules-making process.
Environmentalists are trying to list such ubiquitous species as prairie chickens in order to halt oil and gas development in most of the west. Presumably, wind farms would be given a special exemption.
Update: If you want to understand how deep the fraud runs, make sure to watch the 60 second video below with the US environmentalists caught on tape plotting their fraud.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said today that the second-largest U.S. oil company provided enough evidence that a 2011 judgment on behalf of rain forest dwellers in the country’s Lago Agrio area was secured by bribing a judge and ghostwriting court documents. Kaplan oversaw a seven-week nonjury trial over Chevron’s allegations.
“The decision in the Lago Agrio case was obtained by corrupt means,” Kaplan said in an opinion that gave Chevron a sweeping victory. “The defendants here may not be allowed to benefit from that in any way.”
Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, was ordered to pay $19 billion to a group of farmers and fishermen by the Ecuadorean court. The award was reduced to $9.5 billion on Nov. 12 by the Ecuadorean National Court of Justice, the nation’s highest tribunal. That's almost half of its 2013 profit.
The Ecuadorean villagers, and activists working on their behalf, argued the oil producer should be held financially responsible for pollution of the Amazon rainforest by Texaco Inc. from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, claims the company already paid $40 million to clean up its share of the drilling contamination....
In its racketeering case before Kaplan, Chevron alleged that a U.S. lawyer leading the Ecuadoreans, Steven Donziger, and members of his team engaged in “repeated acts of fraud, bribery, money laundering” and obstruction of justice in pursuit of a multibillion-dollar payout.
I don't think there is any doubt that Chevron owed the Ecuadorans some clean up, since even they have agreed to doing work there. And it is not unreasonable to be skeptical that Chevron's actions were perhaps incomplete. But the $19 billion judgement always has smelled, particularly when the judge in the Ecuadoran case publicly admitted he had been bribed.
There was deep corruption in this case from the start, corruption that never will be adequately covered in the media because it "was for a good cause." Similar levels of corruption by Chevron would have led the front page of the New York Times for weeks.
As a reminder, let me quote from an earlier story. Please watch the short video, it is amazing:
The clip below is an outtake from the environmentalist movie "Crude", which purported to document the environmentalist's case against Chevron in Ecuador. Apparently, between takes of earnest and un-selfinterested environmentalists saving the world from greedy corporations, these self-same environmentalists discussed lying about the science and duping the courts in order to score a big payday for themselves.
The video is doubly interesting because, as Anthony Watts explains, the woman in the video taking money to make up untrue findings was recently confirmed to the NAS, where there is a good bet that we will see her as the source for "evidence" that fracking is contaminating groundwater. These three folks are all the subject of a civil suit from Chevron but all three should be subject to criminal charges for fraud and conspiracy.
Several of the environmentalists involved, including Dr. Ann Maest, have since recanted their corruption, sort of. They claim they were "misled" in this New York Times story, but the clip above certainly belies that. Donziger did not mislead her, he is seen convincing her that in Ecuador they can get away with lying. All for a good cause, of course.
Dispatches from the echo chamber: Mother Jones was on this story full force for years. Then suddenly stopped reporting at all when it became clear that allegations of fraud were credible. Check out the articles.
Update: More here
The new Bank of America building near me has all kinds of plaques inside about how it is LEED certified. How? Well, I don't know the whole plan, but out front there are four reserved parking spaces for electric vehicles. There are not any charging stations mind you -- those might cost money -- just parking spots for electric vehicles, right next to the handicapped spots. LEED is a points based system and you can score a lot of points doing mindless, useless, zero-value stuff like this.
So I am not at all surprised to read this:
Washington, D.C. may have the highest number of certified green buildings in the country, but research by Environmental Policy Alliance suggests it might not be doing much good.
The free-market group analyzed the first round of energy usage data released by city officials Friday and found that large, privately-owned buildings that received the green energy certification Leadership in Energy Design (LEED) actually use more energy than buildings that didn’t receive this green stamp of approval.
LEED is the brainchild of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a private environmental group.
Washington, D.C.’s Department of Environment made the capital the first city in the nation to mandate LEED certifications in the construction of public buildings. The standards are now being phased in.
The results are measured in EUI’s, a unit that relates a building’s energy consumption to its size; the higher the number, the more energy is expended by a smaller building.
Take the Green Building Council’s Washington headquarters. Replete with the group’s top green-energy accolade, the platinum LEED certification, the USGBC’s main base comes in at 236 EUI. The average EUI for uncertified buildings in the capital? Just 199.
Certified buildings’ average comes in at 205 EUI, still less efficient than that didn’t take home the ultimate green trophy.
“LEED certification is little more than a fancy plaque displayed by these ‘green’ buildings,†charged Anastasia Swearingen, LEED Exposed’s lead researcher on the project. “Previous analyses of energy use by LEED-certified buildings have consistently shown that LEED ratings have no bearing on actual energy efficiency.â€
Hilariously, the problem cited with the certification program by government regulators is not that it is ineffective - after all, they can't admit that after requiring LEED certification in DC buildings. Their only problem is that it is a private program outside of government control. I am sure the folks who gave hundreds of millions to Solyndra would do much better managing the program.
The problem with LEED is the same problem that many ISO 9000 programs had -- it puts too much emphasis on process an inputs, and not enough on results.
Postscript: One wonders why if there is a perfectly good "output" metric like EUI why people even bother with input-based systems like LEED. If the government really wants to regulate here, the lightest touch would be to require architects and builders to estimate EUI of buildings for clients. Then the owners themselves can decide if they are comfortable with their potential energy bills or want so more design work.
California is about to implement a new climate tax via a cap and trade system, where revenues from the tax are supposed to be dedicated to carbon reduction projects. Forget for a moment all my concerns with climate dangers being overhyped, or the practical problems (read cronyism) inherent in a cap-and-trade system vs. a straight carbon tax. There is one improvement California can and should make to this system.
Anyone who can remember the history of the tobacco settlement will know that the theory of that settlement was that the funds were needed to pay for additional medical expenses driven by smoking. Well, about zero of these funds actually went to health care or even to smoking reduction programs (smoking reduction programs turn out to be fiscally irresponsible for states, since they lead to reduced tax revenues from tobacco taxes). These funds just became a general slush fund for legislators. Some states (New York among them, if I remember correctly), spent the entire 20 year windfall in one year to close budget gaps.
If California is serious that these new taxes on energy should go to carbon reduction programs, then these programs need to be scored by a neutral body as to their cost per ton of CO2 reduction. I may think the program misguided, but given that it exists, it might as well be run in a scientific manner, right? I would really prefer that there be a legislated hurdle rate, e.g. all programs must have a cost per ton reduction of $45 of less -- or whatever. But even publishing scores in a transparent way would help.
This would, for example, likely highlight what a terrible investment this would be in reducing CO2.
We have never really been able to look at trees as the agricultural crop that they are. I am reminded of this fact from this forest watch site at Google, which purports to track deforestation around the world.
I have no problem calling activity in the Amazon where old growth is logged out in a tragedy of the commons "deforestation". But the map is odd to me in the Southeast US. While there likely is some reduction in forested lands around urban areas, overall the US has actually been increasing its forest cover since the early 1900's. But the Google map of the southeast shows lots of forest "loss". It also shows about as much forest "gain". (red is loss, blue is gain, click to enlarge)
Why is that?
Of late, I have spent a lot of time in the southeast and what I have observed are a lot of private forest lands that are harvested for timber. One plot is harvested one year, and fast growing trees are replanted. Then the next year a neighboring plot is harvest, etc, until it all starts over with the first plot. In a large sense this is no different than any other kind of farming, just with a 15 year growing season instead of a one-summer season.
Calling harvested lands in this area "forest loss" and new growth "forest gain" makes about as much sense as calling land held fallow for a season in Iowa as "corn loss" and newly planted land as "corn gain." There is a difference between farming trees and strip-mining them that gets lost in this data.
I have not written much about climate of late because my interest, err, runs hot and cold. As most readers know, I am in the lukewarmer camp, meaning that I accept that Co2 is a greenhouse gas but believe that catastrophic warming forecasts are greatly exaggerated (in large part by scientifically unsupportable assumptions of strong net positive feedback in the climate system). If what I just said is in any way news to you, read this and this for background.
Anyway, one thing I have been saying for about 8 years is that when the history of the environmental movement is written, the global warming obsession will be considered a great folly. This is because global warming has sucked all the air out of almost anything else in the environmental movement. For God sakes, the other day the Obama Administration OK'd the wind industry killing more protected birds in a month than the oil industry has killed in its entire history. Every day the rain forest in the Amazon is cleared away a bit further to make room for ethanol-making crops.
This picture demonstrates a great example of what I mean. Here is a recent photo from China:
You might reasonably say, well that pollution is from the burning of fossil fuels, and the global warming folks want to reduce fossil fuel use, so aren't they trying to fight this? And the answer is yes, tangentially. But here is the problem: It is an order of magnitude or more cheaper to eliminate polluting byproducts of fossil fuel combustion than it is to eliminate fossil fuel combustion altogether.
What do I mean? China gets a lot of pressure to reduce its carbon emissions, since it is the largest emitter in the world. So it might build a wind project, or some solar, or some expensive high speed rail to reduce fossil fuel use. Let's say any one of these actions reduces smog and sulfur dioxide and particulate pollution (as seen in this photo) by X through reduction in fossil fuel use. Now, let's take whatever money we spent in, say, a wind project to get X improvement and instead invest it in emissions control technologies that the US has used for decades (coal plant scrubbers, gasoline blending changes, etc) -- invest in making fossil fuel use cleaner, not in eliminating it altogether. This same money invested in this way would get 10X, maybe even up to 100X improvement in these emissions.
By pressuring China on carbon, we have unwittingly helped enable their pollution problem. We are trying to get them to do 21st century things that the US can't even figure out how to do economically when in actuality what they really need to be doing is 1970's things that would be relatively easy to do and would have a much bigger impact on their citizen's well-being.
We have all read the scare stories that tell us how many chemicals we are exposed to in X food or Y activity. No evidence of harm from exposure is given, but the very number of chemicals is used to scare us -- certainly something in there must be bad!
Well, prepare to be really frightened of this common food product:
What they found ...[were] over 4,000 different non-volatile compounds across the different samples, results which he presented today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. “It’s very complex,” Collins says of the chemistry.
What is he discussing? Whiskey. I will add that it also has a lot of dihydrogen monoxide too.
California regulators have launched an investigation into offshore hydraulic fracturing after revelations that the practice had quietly occurred off the coast for the past two decades.
The California Coastal Commission promised to look into the extent of so-called fracking in federal and state waters and any potential risks.
Hydraulic fracturing has been a standard tool for reinvigorating oil and gas wells for over 60 years. While it gets headlines as something new, it decidedly is not. What is new is its use in combination with horizontal drilling as a part of the initial well design, rather than as as a rework tool for an aging field.
What California regulators are really saying is that they have known about and been comfortable with this process for decades**, but what has changed is not the technology but public opinion. A small group of environmentalists have tried to, without much scientific basis, demonize this procedure not because they oppose it per se but because they are opposed to an expansion of hydrocarbon availability, which they variously blame for either CO2 and global warming or more generally the over-industrialization of the world.
So given this new body of public opinion, rather than saying that "sure, fracking has existed for decades and we have always been comfortable with it", the regulators instead act astonished and surprised -- "we are shocked, shocked that fracking is going on in this establishment" -- and run around in circles demonstrating their care and concern. Next step is their inevitable trip to the capital to tell legislators that they desperately need more money and people to deal with their new responsibility to carefully scrutinize this decades-old process.
**Postscript: If regulators are not familiar with basic oil-field processes, then one has to wonder what the hell they are going with their time. It's not like anyone in the oil business had any reason to hide fracking activity -- only a handful of people in the country would have known what it was or cared until about 5 years ago.
After my post the other day on how new award-winning supposedly environmentally sustainable parks are far more resource intensive than the old parks they were replacing, I have gotten a lot of feedback -- this is obviously a topic that strikes a chord with folks. In particular, a reader (I always forget to ask if I can use their names) sent me this article on the new LEED Platinum-certified building in New York
When the Bank of America Tower opened in 2010, the press praised it as one of the world’s “most environmentally responsible high-rise office building[s].†It wasn’t just the waterless urinals, daylight dimming controls, and rainwater harvesting. And it wasn’t only the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification—the first ever for a skyscraper—and the $947,583 in incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also had as a tenant the environmental movement’s biggest celebrity. The Bank of America Tower had Al Gore.
The former vice president wanted an office for his company, Generation Investment Management, that “represents the kind of innovation the firm is trying to advance,†his real-estate agent said at the time. The Bank of America Tower, a billion-dollar, 55-story crystal skyscraper on the northwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, seemed to fit the bill. It would be “the most sustainable in the country,†according to its developer Douglas Durst. At the Tower’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gore powwowed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and praised the building as a model for fighting climate change. “I applaud the leadership of the mayor and all of those who helped make this possible,†he said.
Gore’s applause, however, was premature. According to data released by New York City last fall, the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan. It uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building. It also performs worse than the Goldman Sachs headquarters, maybe the most similar building in New York—and one with a lower LEED rating. It’s not just an embarrassment; it symbolizes a flaw at the heart of the effort to combat climate change...
“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want—namely, green publicity, not energy savings,†John Scofield, a professor of physics at Oberlin, testified before the House last year.
I will go out and get a picture today of our local Bank of America branch. It is LEED certified at some level, proudly displaying the certificate in the lobby. Out front it has two parking spaces near the door for electric cars - it does not have a charger for them, just reserved preferred parking. I am sure they got their LEED points this way.
Postscript: I am not religious but am fascinated by the comparisons at times between religion and environmentalism. Here is the LEED process applied to religion:
It takes 3 points to get to heaven. Which path do you chose?
The wireless electric vehicle charger. Sure it's cool. And convenient. But as I understand it, the main selling point of electric vehicles is their energy efficiency (I personally like the driving feel of a torque-y electric motor, but that does not seem to be the advertised selling point). If this is the case, then why the hell would one accept a 30% energy loss (wireless charging is generally considered to be about 70% efficient) because they were too lazy to plug in a cable?
This is against the backdrop of most electric vehicle owners having no freaking clue if they are actually saving energy and money or not (all they know is that they see the costs to fill their gas tank but don't see little numbers spinning when they fill their electric car). As I have written before, they likely are not saving energy vs. a similar size gasoline engine car but may be saving some money due to the lower cost of fuels like natural gas and coal (vs. gasoline) used in electricity production.
