Dispatches from District 48
Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category.
The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money, has rolled out with an EPA MPGe of 52. But this number is bogus. The true MPGe is worse than a Ford Explorer. Learn why in my Forbes.com piece.
I am willing to believe that the initial push into alternative energy subsidies was undertaken with good, honest (though misguided) intentions to change the US energy mix. But once such a program is begun, it inevitably gets turned into cronyism.
The best example is probably corn ethanol. A combination of subsidies and mandates have pushed an enormous proportion of our food supply into gas tanks, for little or even negative environmental effect. Environmentalists and the Left turned against it, but for a few large corporations like ADM, the subsidies have become life and death, and they do anything they have to to get Congress to maintain them.
The best evidence that corn ethanol shifted from a green program to pure cronyism was the imposition of large import tariffs. The only possible purpose of these tariffs was to enrich farmers and a few manufacturers. After all, if one really cared any more about getting more ethanol in the fuel supply, one would welcome low cost imports.
Well, the Solyndra debacle has started to make clear that cronyism has taken over solar subsidies as well. Every day we find yet another high-ranking Obama supporter with his thumb on the scales tilting the DOE funding decision toward Solyndra.
Now we will see the ultimate test:
A group of U.S. solar-panel makers Wednesday called on the federal government to punish Chinese rivals with extra duties for allegedly dumping their products on the U.S. market…
The U.S. makers are asking the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission to impose a duty on panels imported from China, a market that totaled $1.6 billion in the first eight months of 2011. SolarWorld accused Chinese manufacturers of selling solar panels at less than half of what the production costs would be in a comparable free-market economy, and is asking for tariffs to make up the difference.
One could argue that this is in direct response to the Solyndra failure. Solyndra's failure has been blamed on low cost panel manufacturing in China. Again, if we care just about energy, we should be thrilled about low-cost Chinese solar panels. If the Chinese government wants to somehow subsidize our consumption of solar panels, great!
Watch this proposal. Any politician that jumps on this solar tariff bandwagon will be saying "My statements about wanting to see more solar usage is just a bluff, I only really care about subsidizing a few selected businesses."
David Roberts (via Kevin Drum) gives us a simply outstanding view of the mind of a statist:
In these grim economic times, one U.S. industry has defied gravity. Not only is it growing, it's thefastest growing industry in the country. It now employs 100,000 Americans at 5,000 mostly small businesses spread across all 50 states. Unlike in so many others, in this industry the U.S. has a positive trade balance with China; it is a net exporter of high-tech manufactured products....
The startling counter-cyclical growth of this industry had been unleashed by a modest bit of economic stimulus: a cash grant program that helps project developers compensate for the crippling credit crunch. In contrast to the familiar tax credits -- which tend to go to large, mature companies that have enough profit to benefit from them -- cash grants help small, innovative, growing businesses that are plowing revenue into growth. In fact, a recent study found that they work twice as well as tax credits. In 2009, this cash grant program pulled in $4.50 of private capital for every public dollar it invested.
The cash grant program expires at the end of the year. Extending it for a single year could support 37,000 additional jobs over and above the industry's baseline. And here's the capper: Since the cash grant program is simply repurposing money that's already devoted to a tax credit program, it requires no new federal revenue.
So you'd think this would be a home run, right? At a time when jobs are at the top of every politician's mind, surely a bit of low-cost economic stimulus that doesn't increase the deficit and leverages tons of private capital and creates tens of thousands of jobs can serve as the rare locus of bipartisan cooperation. Right?
Except the industry in question is the solar industry. And because this industry involves clean energy rather than, I dunno, tractor parts, it has been sucked into conservatives' endless culture war. Rather than lining up to support the recession's rare economic success story, Republicans are trying to use the failure of a single company -- Solyndra -- as a wedge to crush support for the whole industry. Odds are they're going to succeed and the cash grant program (Sec. 1603) won't be renewed next year.
Do you see the basic assumption -- if we don't take money from taxpayers and give it to businesses in a certain industry, that means we don't like that business. Really? That means that there is not a single industry in this country that I like, since I don't support subsidies for any of them. Unless you believe the state is mother and father to us all, the fact that I don't support state subsidies does not mean that I don't like the industry somehow. Kevin Drum even goes so far as to say that opposition to solar power subsidies is an aspect of the culture wars. Huh? Oh and by the way, the politicization of this loan process is just amazing to me. More and more people at Solyndra seem to be fund raisers for Obama, and here is a story of how a cleaning products company turned donations to Democratic candidates into taxpayers subsidies for themselves.
It is interesting that he would mention tractor parts. Guess what, folks who don't like the solar subsidies probably don't support subsidies for tractor parts either. I was going to say something like, "guess what, we don't subsidize tractor parts" but in our screwed up corporate state, we probably do at some level, like with some special export program snagged by a John Deere lobbyist. But I can pretty much guarantee that we don't subsidize anywhere near the total value of the tractor parts industry like we do the solar industry.
In one silly passage, he says
"In addition to being successful, this industry is wildly popular with the American public, across regions, demographics, and political parties. It has been embraced by mainstream institutions from Walmart to the U.S. military"
I could say the same thing for iPods too, but no one is rushing to provide grant programs for their manufacture. If it is so wildly popular, why does its use require so many government incentives and subsidies. Because the author pulls the trick of looking at one narrow solar program, and attributing the entire solar industry growth to that one program. And then he says, see, look how much benefit we get from this tiny sensible expenditure.
But solar's growth (I don't have the data, but I am willing to be real money that his "fastest growing industry" claim is BS) is due not to just this tiny programs but to a plethora of federal, state, and local subsidies and mandates. The government gives money to capitalize companies, and then then provides tax credits for up to 30-50% of their customer's purchase, and then through public utility commissions enforce above-market feed-in tariff rates for solar power. One reason we export so much (the export market for US solar is nearly entirely to Europe) is that European governments have feed-in tariffs for solar power more than 5 times higher than the market rate for electricity. They are paying something like 70 cents a kilowatt for solar electricity.
So of course solar is growing. If the government were to buy small cars for $150,000 each, there would be big growth in car manufacturing. This does not mean the product makes sense -- in fact, the necessity for so many government supports at every step of the process means almost by definition that it does not make sense economically. Look at corn ethanol. Corn ethanol is the stupidest product ever, but it has grown like crazy due to the same combination of government subsidies, price floors, and mandates.
By the way, I am a huge fan of solar, in theory. I honestly think that solar will some day be the power system of choice in this country, as companies figure out how to roll solar sheets out of the factory as cheaply and quickly as carpet comes out of Dalton, Georgia. We are not there yet, and I am not at all convinced that the current approaches are anything but dead end technologies. Beyond wasting a lot of money, there is a real risk the government actually slow ultimate implementation of sensible and economic solar, just as I would argue they did by forcing manned space flight and the transcontinental railroad ahead of their time.
“[Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.’”
The irony is that if you grade the equivalent mpg of electric cars by the methodology outlined by Chu's own energy department, the number would be about a third of that. Only by the EPA's flawed methodology do we get equivalent MPG's for electric cars anywhere near 130.
I wrote about this whole sordid mess of inflated MPG numbers for electric cars here.
I was going to leave this topic behind, but I just couldn't resist after Krugman's bit of snark on the topic. Please see my new Forbes column here. One bit, actually off topic from the rest of the article, that I added as a postscript:
Perhaps the worst Administration decision of the entire Solyndra affair has yet to receive adequate scrutiny. Just 6 months before Solyndra failed, the Administration allowed Argonaut, the largest shareholder, to grab the senior debtor position from the US taxpayer in exchange for $75 million in new financing. The Administration’s argument was the loan was needed to buy time, but buy time for what? Solyndra’s relative cost position was getting worse, and it was experiencing a huge loss on every unit sold. No one involved has been able to say what the company was counting on to save it in the 6 months this loan bought it, except perhaps the opportunity to cajole another half billion out of the US taxpayer.
But the loan did accomplish two things. First, it gave Solyndra time to sell every liquid asset it owned that might have been of value to…. Argonaut. And once this bit of self-dealing was complete and the company was cleaned out, the bankruptcy process could be entirely controlled by Argonaut such that it will likely end up with all the assets, most important of which seems to be a $500 million dollar tax loss carryforward. If Argonaut can take advantage of these tax shelters, it will end up costing the US taxpayer an additional $150 million or so.
In short, the taxpayer got rolled. Again.
Update: Marc Morano:
'When we had (Gulf) oil spill, we immediately had moratorium on off shore drilling. The oil industry was demonized & literally shut down'
'But after the green energy debacle, they are being feted and rewarded -- $9 billion more is being sent out to 14 more companies...Solar power is less than 1% of our electricity, yet this is being feted'
But [Solyndra] is indeed a terrible scandal, because the private sector never ever puts money into ventures that end up failing:
And then he puts up an ad from Pets.com, a very famous private equity disaster. My quick thoughts
...government loan guarantees go only to those companies who the free market has chosen NOT to fund. If the free market was willing to toss another half billion into Solyndra, its owners would not have been burning a path back and forth to Washington. So by definition, every single government loan guarantee in this program is to a company or a technology that the free market, knowledgeable investors, and industry insiders have rejected as a bad investment. For the program to work, one has to believe that Obama, Chu, and some career energy department bureaucrats have a better understanding of commercializing technologies than do private investors (who are investing with their own money) and industry experts.
This is an interesting and frustrating article describing the efforts by environmental groups to ban thermal paper with BPA in it. The argument is that thermal paper receipts touch money, contaminating the paper money supply such that people will have BPA pass into their bloodstream by dermal absorption from money.
Of course, this is only scary if you have absolutely no common sense about doses. The exposures are simply absurdly small, from a chemical that it is not even clear has long-term harms (the article talks about nano-grams of exposure -- when you start talking nano-grams, you might as well just count individual molecules). And, as an added bonus, its ban in thermal paper simply pushes manufacturers to use chemicals that are not necesarily safer, just less studied and without the "BPA" name that the media has tarnished so badly. Incredibly, at least one state, Connecticut, actually followed through on this useless ban scheme.
You don't have to convince me money is dirty -- I am sure any bill in my pocket is crawling with viruses and bacteria and other weird stuff. Carrying around money is like toting around pieces of clothing someone else has worn for 6 months without washing. So I am sure the bills in my pocket are icky, but to get worked up about BPA rubbed off from my last Home Depot receipt is just insane.
This is like the third one in just a few weeks:
Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.
"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website....
Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs. The President visited the facility in May of last year and said "it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. And you guys all represent that. "
The federal government offered $535 million in low cost loan guarantees from the Department of Energy. NBC Bay Area has contacted the White House asking for a statement.
Beyond the whole green jobs boondoggle, trying to compete at low-cost manufacturing of a commodity product in California of all places is simply insane.
This is from an environmental writer who criticises climate skeptics as being anti-science:
I can't be the only one who thinks about how strange cancer is: It seems sometimes like a giant "dislike" button the heavens push when humans engage in behaviors we weren't built for, even seemingly natural things like sun-bathing — until you remember that Northern Europeans didn't, evolutionarily speaking, have a lot of sun to deal with.
This notion that somehow cancer is a punishment from Gaia for our high-technology and lifestyle choices and eating habits actually seems pretty prevalent among environmentalists.
The author, in reporting on some really interesting research about cancer as an independent parasitic lifeform rather than a disease, makes this statement:
The new view depicts cancer as a new species — one for whom our unhealthy lifestyles are a growth market. Humanity's radical manipulations of nature can create just this sort of unexpected power vacuum.
The first nine words of this graf do accurately reflect the gist of the article he is linking. The rest is pure fantasy and supposition, his own biases applied to his reporting. He pretends it came from the study, but of course no such thing can be found in the source. But we don't need any proof, because we know that cancer and parasites and all other unhealthy things only began with the incorporation of Dupont. Thank God the black death did not come along today, or I am sure it would be blamed on Exxon.
PS- by the way, interestingly enough, there is a school of thought that the black death was made far worse by climate change, in this case global cooling and the end of the Medieval warm period. In the 1330's, the end of the warm period brought wet and cold weather which killed crops and caused great famines, which may have weakened the population for the black death a decade later.
It is really, really funny sitting in on a Medieval history course and having the professor have to say things like, "I know this is not what you hear in the news, but in the Middle Ages, warmth brought prosperity and cold brought death."
Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins has helped score hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money from the Obama administration to help subsidize Kleiner investments. More corporate welfare for billionaires.
It is a nice touch, therefore, that the first tangible result of these sizable public subsidies will be... a new family car for Ray Lane (the car is from Fisker Automotive, a Kleiner investment and recipient of $529 million in taxpayer subsidies. It appears to be a cool car, but an iPhone is a cool piece of tech too but you don't see me advocating taxpayer money for Apple.
I should have known early reports of the death of ethanol supports in Congress were too good to be true. Ethanol appears to be the un-killable zombie menace. It used to be a Baptists and bootleggers issue but even the Baptists (the environmentalists, in this case) have turned against it. But still it lives on, probably as long as Iowa is a critical step in the Presidential nomination process.
Thune and Klobuchar's bill takes the tax revenue gained from ending the VEETC (which, again, doesn't help ethanol producers), and dedicates most of the money to other ethanol subsidies, such as tax credits for small ethanol producers and for ethanol blender pumps to be installed at gas stations. The bill, of course, leaves in place the mandate, which is by far the biggest ethanol subsidy.
Lobbyists for the American Coalition for Ethanol and the Renewable Fuels Association applaud the bill -- which tells you just about all you need to know.
President Obama wants a 56.2 mile per gallon standard for cars by 2025. Both advocates and opponents of this say the only way to make this is if everyone drives an electric car or plug in hybrid. But the fact of the matter is, even those don't get 56.2 mpg, except through an accounting fiction.
A while back I ran the numbers on the Nissan Leaf. According to the EPA, this car gets an equivalent of 99 MPG. But that is only by adopting the fiction of looking only at the efficiency in converting electricity to power in the wheels. But the electricity comes from somewhere (the marginal kilowatt almost certainly comes from a fossil fuel) and the new EPA methodology completely ignores conversion efficiency of fuel to electricity. Here is how I explained it at Forbes:
The problem is that, using this methodology, the EPA is comparing apples to oranges. The single biggest energy loss in fossil fuel combustion is the step when we try to capture useful mechanical work (ie spinning a driveshaft in a car or a generator in a power plant) from the heat of the fuel’s combustion. Even the most efficient processes tend to capture only half of the potential energy of the fuel. There can be other losses in the conversion and distribution chain, but this is by far the largest.
The EPA is therefore giving the electric vehicle a huge break. When we measure mpg on a traditional car, the efficiency takes a big hit due to the conversion efficiencies and heat losses in combustion. The same thing happens when we generate electricity, but the electric car in this measurement is not being saddled with these losses, even though we know they still occur in the system.
Lets consider an analogy. We want to measure how efficiently two different workers can install a refrigerator in a customer’s apartment. In both cases the customer lives in a fourth floor walkup. The first installer finds the refrigerator has been left on the street. He has to spend much of his time struggling to haul the appliance up four flights of stairs. After that, relatively speaking, the installation is a breeze. The second installer finds his refrigerator has thoughtfully been delivered right to the customer’s door on the fourth floor. He quickly brings the unit inside and completes the installation.
So who is a better installer? If one only looks at the installer’s time, the second person looks orders of magnitude better. But we know that he is only faster because he offloaded much of the work on the delivery guys. If we were to look at the total time of the delivery person plus the installer, we’d probably find they were much closer in their productivity. The same is true of the mileage standards — by the EPA’s metric, the electric vehicle looks much better than the traditional vehicle, but that is only because someone else at the power plant had to do the really hard bit of work that the traditional auto must do itself. Having electricity rather than gasoline in the tank is the equivalent of starting with the refrigerator at the top rather than the bottom of the stairs.
The DOE has actually published a better methodology, going from "well to wheels," creating a true comparable efficiency for electric cars to gasoline engine cars. By this methodology, the Nissan Leaf all electric car only gets 36 MPG! In fact, no current electric car would meet the 56.2 MPG standard if the accounting were done correctly. Which is why the EPA had to create a biased, inaccurate MPG equivalent measure for electric vehicles to artificially support this Presidential initiative.
Our rulers are pretty good at finding tricky ways to expand their power
...several environmental groups that have received millions in EPA grants regularly file suit against that same agency. A dozen green groups were responsible for more than 3,000 suits against the EPA and other government agencies over the past decade, according to a study by the Wyoming-based Budd-Falen Law Offices.
The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that, among other things, explains how to sue the agency under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws. The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute — has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past decade.
And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act.
"The EPA isn't harmed by these suits," said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from political heat."
This is pretty hilarious. Environmentalist and global warming advocate Chris Mooney writes
My latest DeSmogBlog post is about how climate skeptics basically seem to believe that their opponents are driven by socialism and communism. We aren’t, of course–duh–but it is fascinating to listen to how they explain this, in their own words.
After some participation years ago in this kind of finger-pointing over motivations in the climate debate, I have of late found such activity to be worthless at best and have tried to stay away from it.
But this became funny when Mooney's readers started commenting on the post. In effect, they wrote "we are anti-growth socialists." Mooney was forced to write, in comment #32:
yes. i guess my side loses this round, thanks to this thread. depressing
Thanks to Climate Depot for the tip.
Coke has a billboard covered in some kind of plants that it claims absorbs 46,800 pounds of CO2 a year. Forgetting for a moment whether we should care about CO2 abatement, I have a question for Coke: What are you going to do with the plants after you take down the billboard and/or after they die? Are you going to shrink-wrap them and bury them deep? Because otherwise, when they die, they are just going to give up the carbon back to the atmosphere as they decompose. If you really want to abate carbon with plant growth, go build some wood-frame houses.
Update: Incredibly, as the 13th commenter on the linked post, I was the very first who did not think this was an awesome step for the environment.
I still contend that wind is, except in a few niche applications, probably the worst alternate energy source. Other forms of energy like solar have issues, but there is a lot of reason to believe these a fixable over time with better technology. Wind is just a plain dog.
One of the biggest problems with wind is the need for backup power. Because wind's lapses are hard to predict, a lot of fossil fuels have to be burned in spinning, hot backup capacity ready at a moment's notice to take over. In Germany, the net effect has been very little substitution of fossil fuel burning despite an enormous wind investment
As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.
As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously to around 4% (FIGURE 7). In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.
Natural gas makes this situation a little better, as natural gas turbines can be brought up much faster than, say, an oil or coal-powered plant. But the duplicate investment is still necesary
Britain's richest energy companies want homeowners to subsidise billions of pounds worth of gas-powered stations that will stand idle for most of the time.
Talks have taken place between the Government, Centrica, owner of British Gas, and other energy companies on incentives to build the power stations needed as back-ups for the wind farms now being built around the country.
It is understood 17 gas-fired plants worth about £10 billion will be needed by 2020.
The Energy Department has been warned that without this massive back-up for the new generation of heavily subsidised giant wind farms, the lights could go out when the wind dies down.
Sam Laidlaw, chief executive of Centrica, said renewables, such as large-scale wind energy, were intermittent and required back-up generation, a role gas was uniquely qualified to fill.
But as power stations that operate only intermittently would not be financially viable, Laidlaw said: 'The building of new gas-fired capacity must be incentivised so that gas can fulfil its role as a bridging fuel.'
Great. So we have wind power, which is not financially viable so it must be subsidized, that required backup power plants to be constructed, which will not be financially viable so gas plants must be subsidized.
I have an idea, why not have gas plants which are financially viable serving the base load and just get rid of wind and this double subsidy all together?
This year, US oil refiners will pay more than $6 million in fines to the EPA for not using a product that doesn't exist. Refiners are required to blend at least 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol this year, or pay a fine to the EPA of $1 per gallon of this target not met.
But here is the funny part - no cellulosic ethanol exists for refiners to buy, even by the EPA's own analysis. The product simply does not exist in any more than pilot plant / experimental volumes. But that is not stopping the EPA from imposing the fines, which will get passed on into gasoline prices.
Here is the saddest part, from a defender of the cellulosic mandates:
Next-generation ethanol advocates say that small-scale commercial production of the fuel is just around the corner. When the EPA proposal was released yesterday, one advocate blamed the oil and gas industry for slow progress.
“America’s advanced and cellulosic ethanol industry is rapidly progressing with many technologies proven and biorefinery projects shovel-ready. Yet, advanced biofuel producers continue to sail into a head wind created by tax policy favoring oil and gas,” said Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Ethanol Council, in a statement.
What in the hell are they talking about? Their plants get their construction subsidized with public financing, the oil industry is required to buy their product, trade barriers exist to limit foreign competition. These guys are not fighting a headwind, they are trying to hit a golf ball downwind in a hurricane and they still can't clear the lady's tee.
This has gotten a fair amount of play around the Internet, but it's crazy enough to re-link in case you have not seen it. A proposal in Australia to earn carbon credits by shooting wild camels. Because when living, breathing creatures are dead, the environment is protected. Take that to its logical conclusion. All that time those folks were clubbing harp seals, they were saving Mother Nature!
The movie Gasland last year attempted to document the dangers of fracking in natural gas fields. The accusation is that the procedures opens up paths in rock for gas and fracking chemicals to contaminate drinking water, even through thousands of feet of impermeable rock. I don't know much about the topic, but I was suspicious the movie was yet another example of environmentalists opposing any sort of energy source.
The most memorable part of the film was when the move makers showed how tap water in one town, I suppose near some recent fracking activity, actually could be lit on fire due to the methane in it. Wow, this looked compelling. Somehow gas was getting in the water system -- must be the fracking, no?
Well, it turns out tap water in this area has had problems with methane since at least 1936, over a half century before fracking ever came into use. Reports from the 70's from state agencies discussed the problem.
Well, of course the director of the movie would be embarrassed and would look into it, right. Hah, just kidding. Just as Erin Brokovitch didn't want to hear about scientific studies disproving her so-called cancer clusters, the director actually knew about this history and ignored it. Specifically, he said the historic information about methane in the water was "not relevant."
Phelim McAleer has the whole story, including a video the Gasland director is working hard through legal channels to suppress.
From the Thin Green Line, an environmental blog I often criticize for it incredible credulity in accepting bizarre figures, comes this whopper:
Is Ganja green? TGL has covered the issue before, but a new study undertaken by a Lawrence Livermore scientist gives us some real numbers (H/T New York Times Green)....
In California, indoor cultivation is responsible for a whopping 8 percent of household electricity usage. But, California grows only about a fifth of the nation's bong hits and much of what we grow goes to out-of-state consumers....
The study, written by Evan Mills on his own (non-government-funded) time, makes the case for legalizing and regulating grow operations, suggesting that if marijuana didn't have to be grown in secret and indoors, efficiency could be improved by as much as 75 percent.
Readers of this blog will know that I am all for marijuana legalization. But how can anyone accept this figure. Eight percent? Really? This would be larger than the total residential electricity use of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, solely for pot growing in California. I am calling BS.
Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.
The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.
Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.
“It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all”, said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. “It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration.”
Hmmm. There is a big gap between thoughtful conservation and fetishism for the primitive.
Update: By the way, the article says this is being driven by climate change already experienced in Bolivia. I suppose it is possible that rainfall has changed, I don't have the numbers for Bolivia, but temperatures in the tropics have shown no trend up or down for decades. Most of the warming the Earth has seen over the last 50 years (whatever the cause) has been in the Northern Hemisphere and in fact in the upper portions of the Northern Hemisphere. Here are the temps for the tropics. The spikes in 1998 and 2010 are El Ninos years.
Wind is not the worst form of alternative energy -- that probably has to go to corn ethanol. But it is close. The consistent experience of European countries that have more wind power than the US is that, because wind is so unreliable, hot backup fossil fuel generation capacity nearly equal to wind capacity needs to be maintained. This means that even when the wind is blowing, it is not reducing fossil fuel consumption in any meaningful way. In other words, billions are spent on wind but without any substitution of existing power sources. Its just pure wasted money.
Anyway, here is a recent study by an environmental group, no less, that found that Britain's wind generation plants are running well under the promised efficiency. That is, of course, when they are even operable and not just broken down. In the latter case, companies go for the quick bucks of up front subsidies, then find that the units are not worth the repair costs when they break.
Earlier today, the California Assembly passed a bill that would oblige state utilities to get a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. It is one of the most aggressive standards in the world.
The Senate passed the legislation in February, and Governor Brown is expected to sign the bill.
How big a deal is it? Well, according to Peter Miller, a senior scientist at NRDC, "As a result of the RPS program, renewable energy generation in California in 2020 will be roughly equal to total current U.S. renewable generation, and supply enough clean energy to power nearly 9 million homes" or, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, drive 3 million cars.
This is an absolutely amazing case of wishful thinking. Note the "will be" in the last paragraph. Really? Can I have the other side of that bet? The California legislature can legislate a unicorn in every garage but that does not mean it will happen by 2020.
Forgetting for a moment the absolutely horrible cost and/or reliability position of most "green" energy technologies, there is no way, absolutely no way, that California can permit and construct a replacement for a third of its electric generation in 9 years. And I shudder to even think how large of a broken window obsoleting and forcing replacement of a third of electrical generation capacity will be.
A final thought, via Dilbert:
Ross McKitrick on "Earth Hour" via Bishop Hill
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
Update: Here is the whole thing
