Living the American Green

Credit to Greenpeace for this AWESOME image

After all that tom-foolery the other day ’bout Ethanol, Mark made a good point on the entire discussion: Show me the numbers!

Well, interestingly enough, Tuesday’s New York Times showed off some numbers — only I don’t think they were the the numbers Mark was looking for.  No, these numbers where far more sinister.   These are numbers about Ethanol and that fantastic enviro-buggaboo: Big Oil.

A charitable reading of that article: These two former arch enemies are starting to see eye to eye on how they can work together to solve the energy problems confronting this country.  A less charitable reading: Oil Companies are co-opting the movement because they 1) realize they need to green up some, 2) see a potential for profit, and 3) see that bio-fuels don’t require them to dramatically shift anything: cars can still run, gas can still be pumped, and no one has to really re-invest or rethink how they live.

Meanwhile, they are bringing there massive and terrifying lobby power to bear on an issue where the statistics can make them seem like they are turning over a new leaf.

Number Times

Ok, enough.  Mark, here are some of them numbers.

• 36 billion — the number of gallons of Biofuels that Congress mandated to be produced by 2022.  That’s three times the current amount, and essentially guarantees that Ethanol in some format will be a cash crop — even if it’s never as energy efficient as it needs to be.
• $1.5 billion — the amount that BP has invested in Biofuel research over the last 2 years.
• 3 billion — the approximate number of bushels of corn that went into Ethanol production in 2007 .
• 330,000 — estimated number of barrels of Petroleum, per day, replaced by Ethanol in 2008.

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While I am still recovering from the grief of my vanished dissertation of a post, here are two slightly less interesting but still ponderable cow-related stories of late. 

Happy Cows: Not Just a Depressing Corporate Slogan

Researchers in Newcastle (a moment of silence for their football squad) came up with something interesting recently: out of 516 dairy farmers in England, almost half gave their cows names and, on average, reported an annual yield of milk over 500 pints greater per cow. Now, chances are there’s more correlation than causation going on here – farmers who choose to name their cows are probably also more likely attentive to their cows individual needs and conditions, making the cows on average healthier. Nevertheless, it does provide an interesting rejoinder to the all-too-modern agricultural perspective that would define livestock as machines that simply need to be calibrated correctly and allowed to produce and produce and produce. Agribusinesses that do not acknowledge the elements of uniqueness belonging to what are, without legitimate counter-argument, individual organisms, will remain successful through cut corners, antibiotic warfare, and sheer bulk of production – but at significant cost to quality both culinary and moral. I hope we can see that the relationships between farmer and livestock is not the sole purview of sentimentalists, but a basic fact of the craft of farming that has largely fallen by the wayside of American production methods.

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Ethanol production

It’s tricky to get a handle on.  Many forward looking environmentalist types have decided that it’s a past fad; that essentially Corn Ethanol production was a dead end given it’s land and water use, and the amount of energy that goes into it.  People who were very excited about the potential of corn as alternative fuel in the 90’s can’t BELIEVE that people haven’t moved past it in the 2000’s.   More nuance: we might not have DQ’ed things like production of Ethanol fuel from Algae, so over-all reaction against it seems like a bad idea.

However, like everything else, there is a huge lobby for Corn Ethanol, (which has some valid points!) and many Midwestern Democrats are completely unwilling to hear about anything that might touch the status quo of cash for that cause.  It doesn’t matter if it’s good green policy (and evidence suggests that it is not) — it matters if it is good pork.

It’s a mess, to be sure… but a mess worth sinking the Waxman-Markey environmental bill over?

Yup.

Once again, Congress is the place that great ideas go to die.  Look, I realize that the Cap and Trade program is going to be hard on some folks.  But this quibbling, this exempting and counter exempting, this hijacking of the debate over things that are not central to the discussion — this is why the tax code is millions of lines long.  This is why you need a PHD in stupid to begin to track the reasoning that suggests that a bill designed to get this country on track to start combating global climate change issues is getting nickled and dimed into irrelevance by stupid riders and past gripes.

Peterson and the 26 Democrats on his committee say they will vote against climate change legislation passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week unless it better addresses several concerns raised by farmers, including reversing the EPA decision.

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As the title suggests: this hasn’t been much of a vacation day for the Fun-employed, but LtAG will take a moment out of a busy schedule to thank our troops and our vets for their service to this country.  Where it that we could dedicate an entire day to mediation on the subject!

Also: sorry, but the Internets have decided that Thamuzzy is not going to post today — there is nothing quite as frustrating as writing a complex and well thought out post and watching it dissapear into the nether regions of ones and zeros.  Doh!

Honestly, can anyone tell me why we would still listen to what Dick Cheney has to say?

His image is plastered on LtAG too

His face is currently (10:31pm, Thursday Evening) plastered all over the news, generally making him into a rhetorical counter to Obama.  Here’s the problem: he makes things up.

Cheney, on the other hand, built a case on straw men, red herrings, and lies. In short, his speech was classic Dick Cheney, with all the familiar scowls and scorn intact. The Manichean worldview, which Cheney advanced and enforced while in office, was on full display.

Dear Dick: I’m sorry, but you failed.  All of your bluster and all of your prevaricating fail to make a convincing case as to why you needed to drag America through the muck.  You work in a democracy, and as such you need to realize that the people have voted against you.  You controlled everything in terms of message and media for most of your eight years, but eventually the stark reality, the facts of what you had wrought, knocked you off your perch.  You have no one to blame but yourself!

Ok, so why is this on LtAG?

Because I am interested as to why Cheney gets equal airtime to the President, and is viewed as speaking against him with an equal voice.  At what point does what has happened — I’m going to call this “reality” — start to make a difference?

Again, this all has to do with Global Warming.  It all has to do with the fact that everyone is used to having the GOP out there as “equal and opposite” to the Democratic party, so both view points are given equal time.   That’s because we work in an environment that says that journalism = opposition, expounded on.  It’s stupid and damaging, because there are times when that sort of equalization is a bald faced lie.

When the opposition is being responsible, that this sort of journalism makes sense.  Check this, from the New York Times:

The objections of the Republican opponents were summed up in the words of Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, who said the bill would mean sharp increases in energy costs and the loss of millions of jobs.

“This is the biggest energy tax in the history of the United States,” Mr. Rogers said.

That makes sense to me, because that seems like something I can believe in, and seems like opposition based on the principle that an argument is in good faith.   I don’t agree, but I see how the position can be tenable.  Dick Cheney? The dude doesn’t even believe that himself.  He’s pure spin, total political crap.  Even if he once belived what he was doing, his speech today is point for point designed to obfuscate and confuse.  Global Warming?  Same deal — you can’t really believe they have taken the time to read the science, because if they had… well, they could still disagree, but it wouldn’t be along the lines of HOW they disagree.  “Wind Farms are bad because they slow wind down, thus heating up the globe.”  Really?  That’s the sort of thing that is not good faith opposition.  But it’s covered as if it’s the same.

I need to stop writing this.  I’m getting all worked up, and this point is a broken record for me anyway.  Maybe I should go take a long hot bath to relax… or maybe I could go find a homeless person in the street to beat up.  You know, I’ve heard of people doing both things to relax.  They must be about the same — both are valid, it’s just a difference of opinion.

Absurdity — Thy name is Texas Rep. Joe Barton.  This dude is the RANKING Republican member on the  energy committee.  While he is the official point person on the Environment for the Republicans in the house, he calls the science of global climate change “pretty weak stuff”.   But here we are on the Waxman bill, and even the Republican Party top brass realizes this thing shouldn’t come down to a war on the Science of the thing.  They realize that they are loosing that fight, and think they have traction by painting the Carbon Cap and Trade as a huge tax on the… someone.  Probably the small business owners: they are usually trotted out when the specter of a tax is brought up.

Except, Joe Barton might not have gotten the memo.  Yep, his plan is to keep claiming that there isn’t any science behind global warming science, and play neato tricks like making Waxman read the entire bill.  Really?  You wonder why people think politics are boring: for some reason their is a rule that you can make people read the entire bill on the floor of the senate or congress while everyone waits around.  And then, Barton plans on crashing the party by adding 300+ ad ons to the bill.

I’m all for the rule that lets a minority party put up some sort of defense (and I wish the Dems had done some stuff like this when they were rocking through the Bush years), but there should be a rule that says that one individual can’t hijack the entire proceedings.  I know I might be over reading this thing, as Barton might be given more power in this article then he actually has.  But man, I’m frustrated that some goofball from Texas is holding up what should be the most important legislation of my lifetime.

*(Db = Douchebag)

Sounds like someone has been suckling at the sweet teat of Van Jones’ vision for the next wave of environmentalism, one which embraces and transformes the economy rather than raging against it. The quote here isn’t anything new, but I hope it proves emblematic of an approach that is becoming more and more mainstream, more and more well-recognized as basic economic good sense rather than a wingnut effort.

(P.S. The link above takes you to a really solid source for international news related to renewable energy and the economy. They’re based in England and keep their fingers on the pulses of both the innovator and the investor communities.)

A few words, Mr. President?

“Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy. We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can confront what countries in Europe and Asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity: The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.”

Monday been all crazy, so in lieu of a complex article, I’m gonna clean out some links that I been meaning to show ya’ll.

You know the Honda Insight?  The dream car of the Future?  Gas Mileage to die for, a sleek new look, delightfully low price tag?  Well, they seem to have forgot one crucial aspect: driving the thing.

“So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more”

Ouch.

Well, maybe all is not lost: the Honda might blow goats for quarters, but new and improved cars are going to have to have better gas mileage.  Across the board, significantly better.  At least, starting with the 2011 models.

Main Man Mark Winston Griffith, Chicago Mayor Richard Daily, plus a bunch of other Green Roof aficionados rocked out at today’s DMI Marketplace of Ideas.  Check out the video below: it’s all ’bout why New York needs to be on the Green Roof Train now.  Like Chicago do.  Miquela Craytor, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx… Take it AWAY!

And finally, this week’s amazing graph, showing the relative Global Climate change on the Y axis, and the number of Pirates in the globe on the X.  There are some problems with the logic: shouldn’t the recent uptick in pirates in the Somalia area correspond to a dramatic downturn in global temperatures?  Shouldn’t the #’s of pirates conform, in some way, to an actual scale?  But sometimes Science can do that for you: it’s a complex thing sometimes.

So a few weeks ago I posted the energy breakdown for how most Delawareans receive their energy. In DE most households purchase energy from the Delaware public utility, Delmarva Power. Each Delawarean can choose to purchase their energy supply from another company and just pay transmission fees to Delmarva, but most people just take the easy route and let Delmarva figure it out. I have listed below the year to year comparison for 2007 and 2008 to see how DE is doing in its’ goal of achieving the 10% renewable energy quota by 2018 :

2007 percentages                       2008 percentages

coal                      55.9                                                   55

gas                          7.3                                                    7

nuclear                34.2                                                34.8

oil                            .5                                                      .3

methane                .2                                                     .3

hydro                      .9                                                     .9

solar                         0                                                      0

solid waste            .6                                                     .6

wind                        .2                                                      .9

wood or biomass  .2                                                   .2

carbon-free production is up by 1.2%, mostly due to new wind farms and cranking up the juice at the Salem nuclear plant. At this rate Delaware will be a carbon nuetral state by somwhere around 2057. Also, the Salem nuclear plant is pretty much maxed out now (most nulcear power plants are run at less than maximum output, but last year there was a significant spiek in energy usage and a resulting need to increase production at most plants) with no current plans for a new nuclear power plant, so we won’t have the .5% boost we got from that this year. BlueWater wind is still fighting to develop offshore wind turbines, that they claim will produce 29% of Delaware’s energy needs in the near future.  This project has met with resistance from both Delmarva, and from the beach-going community. This resistance seems to have largely been dealt with however, and a power-purchase agreement was signed in June 2008. The agreement was only for 200MWs however, and not for the 600MWs which the site could potentially produce. 200MWs is not really very much electricity, it would be about 1/5 of what the nuclear plant kicks out, and would only produce about 6-10% of Delaware’s energy needs. I am hoping that the site will eventually ramp up to provide the full 600MWs, which would result in a pretty significant chunk of DEs energy, and would power over 100,000 homes (there are only 750,000 people in DE, so that is a good percentage of DE households.) If you are interested in hearing more about the project, the link is as follows:  http://www.bluewaterwind.com/delaware.htm

My prediction is that Delaware will in fact reach its’ very modest goal of 10% renewables. I believe that we will beat that by a long shot. The Blue Water project alone gets DE past 10% by 2012 if everything goes according to plan. Also, I have met with several local solar energy company owners who all feel the same way; solar energy is going to take off over the next several years. I have been seeing the panels pop up here and there, and I believe that with coming federal cap and trade legislation Delaware solar will take off big time. The problem will be less the viability and feasibility of solar, and more the stress this will cause to suppliers of the basic inputs for solar panels. Production of highly-refined silicon is already stretched to the max, and new suppliers in Taiwan and China are coming online slowly. My bet, if I were a betting man, is that by 2018 Delaware is getting at least 1/3 of its power from renewables, and 20-25% from nuclear. Of course, this may not result in much of a real reduction in carbon output however, as our energy needs are still growing as a whole, and it may be that just the NEW demand is covered by renewables, but that the amount of overall carbon we produce reduces by only 10-20%.