An Easy Solution Environmentalists Don't Want To Use.

I've often said I'm an not an "environmentalist," as they are radical anti-growth and frankly anti human development people, many of whom want to spare themselves of the pain they push on others. Just recently John Kerry, hypocrite extraordinaire, was actually called out on his use of his private jet to go to one conference after another demanding we stop using internal combustion engines. Like the one in "his" plane and the limo he always rides in. 

In fairness, it was not his plane. It was his wife's. 

I prefer the term conservationist. I believe the Earth's natural resources should be efficiently exploited for the benefit of mankind. That include oil, natural gas, coal, water, and air. Keep the air and water clean, absolutely. Stop using things that work (e.g. automobiles, aircraft, etc) while the hypocrites lecture us from their 200' yachts? I don't think so. 

One point made countless times is there is a source of electricity the leaves no "greenhouse" gases, but many of the enviro nut-jobs want no part of is nuclear power. Legitimately there is an issue of where to store the radioactive waste, but that should have been settled ages ago. Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been designated as a national storage site since 1997, and it's still an open issue after resistance from local politicians. Hopefully a Republican president in 2025 will use eminent domaine to seize the land, establish the final site and name it after a man who's deserved this honor. Let's call it the Harry Reid Toxic Waste dump. 

But I found this interesting. The Army is working on portable nuclear generators to deploy to the field. If we can send these to 3rd World nations, why not  downtown USA? 

Pentagon to build nuclear microreactors to power far-flung bases

Pentagon officials recently announced that the Defense Department will build a nuclear microreactor that can be flown to an austere site by a C-17 cargo plane and set up to power a military base.

A statement released Wednesday by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office announced the construction and testing decision that followed the office’s Environmental Impact Statement work for “Project Pele...”

...The plans call for a 40-ton reactor that can fit in three-to-four 20-foot shipping containers and, once set up, provide 1 to 5 Mega Watts of power on full power operation for up to three years before refueling.

The microreactor will ultimately join a newer type of nuclear fuel being used in the program at the Idaho National Laboratory. Testing and experimentation will occur in 2024, with demonstrations anticipated by 2025, (Program Manager, Dr. Jeff Waksman) Waksman said.

“Advanced nuclear power has the potential to be a strategic game-changer for the United States, both for the DoD and for the commercial sector,” Waksman said. “For it to be adopted, it must first be successfully demonstrated under real-world operating conditions.”

...Waksman responded to that concern with a twofold answer to Army Times this week, saying that the microreactor will be used for austere locations, some of which were identified in the original 2018 Army G-4 report, “Study on the Use of Mobile Nuclear Power Plants for Ground Operations.”

Those include places such as Fort Greely, Alaska, and Lajes Field, Azores.

Second, Waksman said that both the newer designed reactor, a “high-temperature gas reactor,” and its fuel source, known as high-assay low enriched uranium tristructural isotropic fuel, provide more safety measures than older generation reactors and fuel.

The design also has protection features built in that are currently classified, Waksman said. Additionally, commanders can enhance protection with barriers or by burying the reactor underground, he said.

“This thing is very resilient,” Waksman said.

The fuel type offers another layer of protection.

“The uranium is in millions of tiny pebbles, less than 1 mm in diameter, each individually encapsulated,” Waksman said. “Each fuel pellet is its own barrier...”

 

The article is long and there is  a lot of verbiage from opponents such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group of scientist with less credibility on nuclear proliferation than the Southern Poverty Law Center has with "hate groups." Legitimately they raise the issue of exposure to air attack, but this would be less of a threat than they publish. The idea is for this generator to be far behind the lines, not on the front lines. This is where you have air defense coverage, not to mention ground security. 

Progress. Seeing these "scientists" want us to mine for rare minerals for EV batteries in spite of the pollution that causes. Or air conditioning is "destroying the planet" but they don't shut their AC units off. I will remind these "experts" the US came in under the carbon restrictions of the Paris Climate accord thanks to fracking, allowing us to use more natural gas for electricity generation. And it will be business, not idiots with PhDs, who will lead us into a powered future. 

Even for the Manhattan tabloid New York Times, this response to withdrawing from the Paris Treaty is baaaaad.

I actually disagree with the president on this. He should have simply announced, "The Paris Climate agreement is a treaty and before it can be in effect, it must be ratified by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. So I've submitted it to the Senate for 'advise and consent,' so until this is approved, it has no binding on the United States." I know, a quaint idea, having treaties approved by the Senate, rolling the Constitution.

But I've seen this and I almost lost my coffee. Enjoy.

Opinion (COMMENT: At least they called it opinion.)

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision

By BILL McKIBBEN

Read his bio. It's classic!

JUNE 1, 2017

People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon’s big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq....

Yo Billy, where have you been the last decade? Obamacare? The Iran Nuke Deal? B Hussein Obama sticking his nose and ears into Syria, Libya and Egypt? The Iranians taking our boats without consequence?

...But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.

Slight bit of hyperbole there Billy?

Science first. Since the early 1800s we’ve been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates — why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required...

OK Billy, one question. What should the temperature be? If you can say without question it's "warmer than it should be," then you know what it should be. Otherwise, how do you know if the current temp is not the "correct" temp? So please Billy, enthrall me with your acumen.

And now, in this millennium, we’ve watched the warning start to play out. We’ve seen 2014 set a new global temperature record, which was smashed in 2015 and smashed again in 2016. We’ve watched Arctic sea ice vanish at a record pace and measured the early disintegration of Antarctica’s great ice sheets. We’ve been able to record alarming increases in drought and flood and wildfire, and we’ve been able to link them directly to the greenhouse gases we’ve poured into the atmosphere...

I know, a radical few questions. So we never had "drought and flood and wildfire" before we had cars during gas and ships or trains burning coal and diesel? And how were they directly related to "greenhouse gases?" BTY, isn't the largest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere di-hydonated oxide, sometimes know as water?

...This is the largest-scale example in the planet’s history of the scientific method in operation, the continuing dialectic between hypothesis and skepticism that arrived eventually at a strong consensus about the most critical aspects of our planet’s maintenance. Rational people the world around understand. As Bloomberg Businessweek blazoned across its cover the week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into Wall Street, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

Science is not consensus, it's observations, analysis, testing, proofs, review by non-interesting reviewers. And Bloomturd as a source, spare us.

But now President Trump (and 22 Republican senators who wrote a letter asking him to take the step) is betting that all of that is wrong. Mr. Trump famously called global warming a hoax during the campaign, and with this decision he’s wagering that he was actually right — he’s calling his own bluff. No line of argument in the physical world supports his claim, and no credible authority backs him, not here and not abroad. It’s telling that he simultaneously wants to cut the funding for the satellites and ocean buoys that monitor our degrading climate. Every piece of data they collect makes clear his foolishness. He’s simply insisting that physics isn’t real.

Are you one of the people who say biology is just a social construct? There are no male or females?

Read the rest if you want, but it's great. Billy here sounds like he's about to loose it, I would actually enjoy watching him have his stroke (tongue in cheek).

Have a great weekend!

A strange way to prove an article of faith....

I've long believed "Global Warming," or "Climate Change," or "Climate Disruption" (or whatever it's called this week, has the ALGORE sent out his message yet?) is more religion than science. You bring out the most obvious point to question it, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a gas that is critical to life on the Earth, and the zealots go nuts.  Or if you point out that the same people who say the earth is warming used to say the earth is cooling, because of, get this, too much CO2 in the atmosphere.  And in both situations, the solution is the same, taxes and control of the economy in the hands of the federal government.

Now I really find this interesting. Here is an environment activist, better called a eco-terrorist, broadcasting him (and others) committing a felony. Notice the text at the beginning, "The man wants to prove climate change is not debatable, and his latest actions to do so could get him 20 years in prison."

No, destroying thousands of dollars of private property, possibly causing a spill of oil in the ground or water in no way proves or disproves carbon dioxide causes the earth to heat.  It proves he is a criminal by destroying another person's property.

He got a hung jury and I can only assume there will be another trial in the future.  I'll try to update this as needed.  What scares me is he will be called a hero by many an idiot calling themselves a teacher, not the criminal he is.  

LAPD is trying out a new toy.....

I could make some comments about spending limited money on flashy toys (those will come later! :<) .) but LAPD is often the test bed for new equipment. And how they are looking at a new vehicle. Coal, excuse me, electric powered.

The LAPD Could Someday Chase You Down in a Tesla

More and more electric vehicles are taking to the streets of Los Angeles, and that includes the vehicles that police the streets of Los Angeles. The LAPA is testing a Tesla Model S P85D as a high-speed pursuit vehicle, Electrek reports.

This is just a test for now. The police department has a pair of P85Ds that it's using as part of a longstanding effort to see how electric cars can integrate with the rest of the police fleet. If the LAPD decides to start driving electric, it'll be another three to five years yet. It's clear that the department is moving in that direction, though, having already investigated using electric scooters and electric motorcycles like those by Zero.

P85Ds are hot-rodded all-wheel-drive versions of the already fast Model S that can run to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds when they have "Ludicrous Mode." We're guessing the governed top speed of 155 mph will be removed for the police.

Oh, I think I see an issue or three with this:

According to Kelly Blue Book, the cost is something like 70K. That's a base model. Add on lights, sirens, radios, etc, and you're looking at minimum 5K more. In comparison the new Chevy Tahoe and Ford Explorer police vehicles are around 30K. So you at least doubling the cost.

But I'm actually wrong. Per KBB, the actual cost is:

For the high-horsepower Model S P85D, with its Ludicrous mode, you'll shell out $106,200.

My mistake. Three cars for one.

Other issues. This supposedly has a range of 250 miles. That's with a normal driver. Cops don't drive normally. We idle a lot followed by high speed and then ludicrous speed. Fact of life on the street. If you get 200 miles out of it, it will be a miracle.

Also, one vehicle is generally used for two or three shifts in a day. With a gas engine, you take five minutes to tank it up and it's ready to go. Electric engines take hours to recharge. So at best you will get two shifts and you need a break between them (e.g. day followed by night, blow off evening).

What idiots thought of this...wait, the cereal state, California. Land of Fruits, Flakes and Nuts.

Thanks Mike K for the link.

Energy, the market, and liberty.

A few years ago I was discussing fracking with a friend in the oil industry and he mentioned the break even point for shale is 60-65 a barrel. They Jim said something that really blew me away, “Mike, we’re only getting 8-9% out of that rock right now…” Less than 10% and we had overtaken the entire oil market, become the largest producer of crude, forced Saudi Arabia to try to destroy our fracking industry at the cost of billions. And forced a alignment between Middle East oil producers and militant environmentalists in attack fracking with propaganda. See “Promised Land”, a piece of anti-fracking propaganda funded by the UAE. And multiple lawsuits from the environmental extremists.

Jim make the obvious point, “Mike, what will happened when get get 20-25% out of that rock..” and that, to anyone with any brains, is obvious. The energy market will be completely reconfigured. And for many in the government and the Middle East, that cannot be allowed.

Since the 1970s, two tenants have driven oil policy in the the West. One, we have a limited supply of it and it’s mostly from unstable countries in OPEC (Iran, Iraq, etc). And two oil, by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, is causing global cooling, err global warming, no, climate change, oh, wait, global climate disruption.

So both these interests have aligned to destroy the fracking industry and so far they have been unsuccessful. Fracking mainly started on private lands where the EPA cannot get it’s dirty hands on it and the genie is out of the bottle. Saudi Arabia has flooded the market in hopes of destroying the fracking industry, but they cannot stop it with temporarily forcing down prices. Eventually they will have to close their spigots to bring prices up so they don’t go broke, and US domestic oil is back again. Their only hope is to use government and non-governmental groups to destroy fracking by legal and regulatory schemes. And again, so far, it’s not worked. Then again the B Hussein Obama regime is on overdrive in the last few months of it’s existence.

But one point is not made often enough, what is the real point of the leftist envliroomentatl movement. Not the conservation movement that wanted to preserve our national treasures, (e.g. national parks, etc) but the anti-progress/degrowth movement. It is to control people and limited energy has provided an excellent angle of attack for that movement. What has happened since the 70s because of “limited oil”? The government, mainly through the EPA has inflicted one set after another of fuel economy standards on us, making vehicles smaller, less safe and limited our choice for cars. We have entire cities and states moving to limit the ability of people to use cars in there daily lives (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Portland), which controls the ability of people to move. An open secret of the left is the technology they really despise is the automobile because it allows people to go when and where they want, no permission required.

So back to this article. Assume we get thought the B Hussein Obama regime and neuter the EPA so fracking continues, brings oil down to prices were the US can flood the market and sell to the world. What would be the results:

1. Americans all over the country would ask, “Why the hell do I want to buy a golf cart when I can buy a SUV, be comfortable and be able to bring the entire family somewhere. I’ll buy a Tahoe, screw the Volt!”

2. Americans may finally start asking, “Why am I paying billions to solar, wind and electric car companies from the federal treasury when it is not needed.”

3. Iran, the largest supporter of terrorism in the world and working on being another nuke power (Thanks B Hussein Obama and John Kerry) will have it’s only source of income severely cut back. Nukes cost money, so do ICBMs and other weapons. Hard to support that with oil in the 30s for a barrel.

4. Saudi Arabia, and OPEC, will loose its ability to control us. We’ve needed their oil for generations. We provide our own, sorry guys, you can go back to what you were doing before we showed you how to get money from the ground.

So yes, you can see this cannot be allowed. If this works, get ready for another round of law suits from big environmental, more politician shopping from OPEC and other attempts to stop it.

Oil firms promise new life for shale
Cheap re-fracking key to the pursuit of revolution

Shale oil producers from West Texas and North Dakota have harvested enough crude to overwhelm the global oil market and force Saudi Arabia’s oil cartel to play offense on the world’s energy stage.

But U.S. producers have recovered only a small fraction of the oil that’s trapped in those rocks, and though the oil-market crash has put the nation’s energy boom on hold, some oil-technology companies are pursuing what they say will be a second American shale revolution.

That belief lies partially in re-fracking — giving oil shale deposits a second blast of water, chemicals and sand — to get more oil out of depleted or under-performing wells. The process could be up to two-thirds cheaper than drilling a new well, which is an alluring possibility for cash-strapped U.S. producers who are straining to keep operational costs down and drilling operations intact.

Over the next few years, thousands of wells could be in play for re-fracking, said Priyesh Ranjan, who manages the re-frack business and technology development at Halliburton.

“There’s so much low-hanging fruit,” Ranjan said in describing the oil left behind in many wells. “There’s an obvious push for everybody to think about how to achieve more with less.”

The technique has its skeptics. Re-fracking the wrong well or in the wrong way can damage it or the wells nearby. But this ongoing oil downturn might be the right time for experimentation, because the industry must learn how to coax more oil for fewer dollars, engineers say.

The oil bust this year has claimed thousands of jobs in Houston and across the globe, and oil companies have gutted spending budgets in North America because costs to drill shale wells are higher than older, vertical wells. The industry is now entering what may be the most ruthless phase yet of the downturn, as banks prepare to curtail oil companies’ credit lines and as billions in corporate debt weigh heavily on their balance sheets.

“All this will force companies that are over-levered to take drastic action,” said Stephen Trauber, an investment banker at Citigroup. The next few months, he said, will likely see more oil firms sell themselves or default on their debt.

A wave of re-fracking is one way companies could help mitigate the effects of the downturn, by pumping more oil for less money, oil field service companies say.

A little-advertised truth about the American shale movement is that, in each well, drillers have left behind all but about one tenth or less of the oil and gas stored in shale. That’s because in recent years, $100 oil spurred producers to adopt a “pump-and-pray” mentality that produced many nearly infertile wells in Texas and elsewhere. Refracking didn’t grab oil companies’ attention because it would have diverted resources from the non-stop drilling boom. But that sentiment is changing.

“Operators are moving away from a factory approach,” said Hans-Christian Freitag, vice president of integrated technology, global products and services at Baker Hughes. “They’re putting a lot more emphasis on understanding the reservoir. It’s a big change.”

Re-fracking can boost a well’s productivity by a third to half, reaching up to 12 percent of the oil stored underground. “Which is still quite deplorable,” Freitag said. But it’s comparable to amounts early oil companies were able to extract from sandstone nearly a century ago. The oil is down there, and as technology improves, drillers will eventually be able to reach it, he said.

More planning, engineering

At a Baker Hughes lab in Tom-ball, northwest of Houston, engineers from different fields of the oil business got a glimpse of the latest key ingredient used in refracking.

With fracking, which is the common term for hydraulic fracturing, producers deploy fleets of trucks with high-horsepower pumps to blast payloads of water, chemicals and sand underground to crack open shale plays and release oil and gas.

Elizabeth McCartney, a product champion and pressure pumping specialist at Baker Hughes, presented containers with so-called diverter chemicals

— solid fine-grain biodegradable substances — that temporarily block the flow of oil and gas from existing fractures in a shale well-bore.

“In re-fracturing, we can pump these diverters and plug off existing fractures so we can access parts of the formation that haven’t previously been fracked,” McCartney said.

In other words, the second blast of fluid will go where the engineers want it to go, toward fresh rock that hasn’t been drained of oil and gas, and away from old pathways that naturally draw fluids because of their particular rock properties and subterranean pressure.

Out in the field, whether near Midland in Texas or Williston in North Dakota, a re-fracking job doesn’t look much different than the first one, except for the addition of the diverter chemical. But re-fracking requires more upfront planning and engineering.

Oil field service firms are using massive databases on hundreds of thousands of American oil wells to find the right candidates for a re-frack job. New programs can tell engineers if a poor-performing well was drilled in a productive region, or whether one highly productive well in another area suggests a whole batch of poorly performing wells nearby could benefit from a re-fracking job.

The march of technology

“We’re trying to reproduce those results across a large set of candidates — that’s what’s going to create the re-frack boom,” said Matt Lahman, a Halliburton specialist in enhancing oil and gas production.

Talk of re-fracking has grown in recent months, but it hasn’t hit it big yet.

Oil companies have re-fracked about 600 wells since 2000 — not a large number considering the 50,000 U.S. wells that got a first round of fracturing in the last few years.

For years, the problem has been that re-fracking is a gamble, even for wildcatters. If a driller re-fracks a well too close to an adjacent well, the fluid from the fractures may begin to spill into one another and ruin both wells, a phenomenon called a frack hit. The wells could start to produce water or natural pressures could dissipate.

“This technology is very much in its infancy and it’s not going to be something that’s going to change the game or move the needle at least in the near term,” said Jonathan Garrett, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

Nevertheless, re-fracturing has a lot of potential as research on the process continues to expand, said Christopher Robart, an analyst at IHS.

“It’s still early days,” he said. “What will make it more successful is undertaking a significantly larger number of re-frack jobs. A lot of that comes down to the E&P’s confidence and appetite for doing science with not-fully proven techniques on their own wells.”

With the oil bust, that appetite is starting to grow, technology companies say. Executives at the Schlumberger and Halliburton, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 oil field service companies, recently told investors U.S. energy producers are increasingly willing to take up technology used to re-stimulate wells.

Private equity firm BlackRock has promised to put up $500 million over the next three years to pour into Halliburton’s refracking operations, Halliburton President Jeff Miller announced during an earning conference call last month.

Schlumberger CEO Paal Kibsgaard said his firm is willing to change the way it sets up service contracts, and bear the up-front costs of re-fracking as a way to show it is confident in its technology, in exchange for more of the upside when the oil starts flowing.

Oil companies’ demand for new technology is much higher than in any previous downturn, Kibsgaard said, as more technological breakthroughs emerge to help firms bring more oil out of the formations.

“In the rear-view mirror, we think, ‘That was easy,’ ” Baker Hughes’ Freitag said. “It was never easy. Fifty or sixty years ago, it was difficult to extract oil and gas, but we figured it out.”

I've always wanted to live in a Deluxe Apartment, in the Sky!

Coming from South Louisiana, I've known about about above ground burial my entire life. But this takes it to a whole other level, pardon the pun. And it makes sense in a small country with historical significance like Israel. May Jews living outside of Israel want to buried in their traditional homeland, but the country only had so much space.

Israel raises the dead with skyward cemetery

This Oct. 6, 2014, photo shows a new vertical part of the Yarkon cemetery outside of the city of Petah Tikva, Israel.
 (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

PETAH TIKVA, Israel (AP) — At first glance, the multi-tiered jungle of concrete off a major central Israeli highway does not appear unusual in this city of bland high-rises. But the burgeoning towers are groundbreaking when you consider its future tenants: They will be homes not for the living but rather the dead.

With real estate at a premium, Israel is at the forefront of a global movement building vertical cemeteries in densely populated countries. From Brazil to Japan, elevated cemeteries, sometimes stretching high into the sky, will be the final resting place for thousands of people. They are now the default option for the recently departed in the Holy Land.

After some initial hesitations, and rabbinical rulings that made the practice kosher, Israel's ultra-Orthodox burial societies have embraced the concept as the most effective Jewish practice in an era when most of the cemeteries in major population centers are packed full.

"The source of all this is that there is simply no room," said Tuvia Sagiv, an architect who specializes in dense burial design. "It's unreasonable that we will live one on top of the other in tall apartment buildings and then die in villas. If we have already agreed to live one on top of the other, then we can die one on top of the other."

The Yarkon Cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv has been his flagship project. As the primary cemetery for the greater Tel Aviv area, its traditional burial grounds are at near capacity with 110,000 graves stretched across 150 acres. But thanks to an array of 30 planned vertical structures, Sagiv said the cemetery will be able to provide 250,000 more graves without gobbling up any more land, providing the region with 25 years of breathing room...

...Cemetery overcrowding presents a challenge the world over, particularly in cramped cities and among religions that forbid or discourage cremation. The reality of relying on finite land resources to cope with the endless stream of the dying has brought about creative solutions.

The world's tallest existing cemetery is the 32-story high Memorial Necropole Ecumenica in Santos, Brazil.

Rhe Necropole Ecumenica Memorial stands tall in Santos, Brazil. When
completed, the five building memorial known as a vertical cemetery will hold 180,000 bodies. 

In Tokyo, the Kouanji is a six-story Buddhist temple where visitors can use a swipe card to have the remains of their loved ones brought to them from vaults on a conveyer belt system.

Versions of stacked cemeteries already exist in some shape or form in places like New Orleans and across Europe, in Egypt's Mountain of the Dead, in China and in the amphitheater-like Pok Fu Lam Rd Cemetery in Hong Kong.

But the future will likely look more like the ambitious plan of Norwegian designer Martin McSherry for an airy cemetery skyscraper that looks like a gigantic honeycomb with triangular caverns.

Other plans for cemetery towers have been presented for Paris and Mumbai. In Mexico City, another big project has been proposed: the Tower for the Dead, which will combine a vertical necropolis and an 820-foot-deep (250-meter-deep) subterranean complex. In China, Beijing residents have been provided subsidies to buy space in vertical cemeteries.

But only in Israel does the phenomenon appear to be part of a government-backed master plan. Aside from those who have already purchased their future plots, individual outdoor graves are no longer offered to the families of the more than 35,000 Israelis who die each year.

The first space-saving option is to put graves on top of each other — separated by a concrete divider — and have a shared headstone. This is common among couples and even whole families, and every new pit dug in Israel has room for at least two graves in it. The second option is stacking the dead above ground into niches built into walls, a bit like in a morgue, but adorned with headstones. The third, and most revolutionary option, is to be buried in a building where each floor resembles a traditional cemetery, without the blue sky above.

For this upheaval to take off in Israel, though, the blessing of the rabbis was needed. Israel's rabbinical authorities oversee all burials of Jewish Israelis.

The Jewish burial ritual is based on the passage in Genesis in which God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden: "For dust you are — and to dust you shall return." Jewish law stipulates that all bodies be buried separately on a layer of dust and earth.

Yaakov Ruza, the rabbi of the Tel Aviv burial society, a semiofficial organization that oversees Jewish burials, said the new forms of burial have been endorsed by leading Jewish ultra-Orthodox figures.

The towers, for instance, have pipes filled with dirt inside their columns so that each layer is still connected to the ground. In many ways, Ruza said the new types of burial represent a return to the Holy Land's ancient origins of burying inside caves and catacombs.

"This is an artificial cave," he said. "Once they used to build a cave into a mountain. Now we are taking these artificial caves and turning them into a mountain."

Jerusalem's burial society even has plans to dig an actual underground cave to find more room for the dead....

Didn't think of the part about all bodies being buried between a layer of dust and earth, but hey, it's working to handle a real issue. In discussions I get with the members of the Church of the Environment, they often scream "we are running out of room!" and we need to recycle, in spite of that costing more than landfill disposal of waste. Some people just don't understand the huge size of America as opposed to small countries like Israeli, France, Spain, Great Britain, etc. And I can see the usual suspects screaming we need this for the same reason, reality be damned. But for small countries, this is a great option.

ALGORE must have been scheduled to testify!

Federal government closings: Global warming hearing cancelled - POLITICO.com

The snowquester has claimed yet another casualty: Wednesday's House hearing on global warming.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee announced early Wednesday that it's postponing its environmental subcommittee's scheduled 10 a.m. hearing on the state of the science behind climate change. As a reason, it cited "weather."

The panel hasn't announced when the hearing will take place.

The session was apparently designed to shore up the knowledge of subcommittee members ahead of expected new carbon regulations from President Barack Obama. As of Tuesday evening, a committee spokesman had insisted the show would go on.

From the start, the idea of holding a climate hearing during a paralyzing D.C. snowstorm seemed ripe for snarky comments.

Don’t buy into global warming science? Here’s your March snowstorm — call up Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his grandchildren for help with your Al Gore igloo project.

Think the U.S. needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions and adapt in the face of climate change and ever more bizarre weather patterns? Aside from forecasts for fast-falling snow and warm air temperatures, D.C. residents could experience "thundersnow."...

Cool...pardon the pun. Gonna have a good laugh on this one!

The Great Green Fleet and other signs of squander

It's not like we have multi-trillion dollar deficits, we're cutting the defense budget by billions and we're wasting hundreds of millions to retrofit submarines to allow women in them. We are now spending 26 dollars a gallon for bio fuel for our ships!

White House holds 'pep talk' on biofuels - The Hill's E2-Wire

Sensing increasing resistance to a Navy biofuels testing program, the White House on Wednesday convened biofuels proponents for a strategy session about the energy source.

Ex-military, agriculture, industry and government officials all met in the Roosevelt Room for the talk, retired U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Cheney said Thursday at a Washington, D.C., event hosted by The Truman Project.

Though the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, has said the Armed Forces need biofuels for energy security, lawmakers have made it more difficult for the DOD to procure biofuels.



“When they cut it out of the NDAA (defense authorization bill), that caught people’s attention,” Cheney said of biofuels in an interview with The Hill after the event. “It was kind of like saying, ‘Well, we don’t care about this anymore.’ And we do.”

The meeting, which Cheney called a "pep talk," reflects a growing malaise regarding biofuels, which have attracted criticism from fiscal hawks. Reports of a $26-per-gallon biofuel and petroleum mix being tested by the Navy’s “Great Green Fleet” aircraft carrier strike group through a $12 million Navy biofuels program riled lawmakers, pushing the Senate Armed Services Committee to pass amendments from Republican Sens. James Inhofe (Okla.) and John McCain (Ariz.) that limit the Defense Department’s ability to buy biofuels.

Michael Breen, vice president of The Truman Project, said lawmakers ignored that the $26-per-gallon fuel purchase was only meant for testing. The price would have been lower if it were an operational buy, he said. That $26-per-gallon price tag was also for the biofuel alone. Once blended with traditional petroleum, that figure comes down to $15 per gallon.

The defense establishment sees biofuels through a security lens. More options, especially domestically produced ones, mean less dependence both tactically and strategically on foreign nations, they said. Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Norman Seip commented Thursday that unbudgeted fuel costs diverted $2 billion last year from military operations...

..The administration has stood behind biofuels on national security grounds. It combined with the Energy, Defense and Agriculture departments to propose a $510 million investment in biofuels with a private sector match through the Defense Production Act, which couches the need for biofuels on a national security logic.

LTG Seip, may I respectfully suggest we would not have that issue if we were drilling off the coast of the US (like China is), building the Keystone Pipeline to get oil from more reliable sources, etc. All these acts would increase the supply of energy which then drives down the cost.

The White House sent Heather Zichal, the administration’s deputy assistant for energy and climate change, to the Energy Department’s annual biomass conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., with a message that Congress “needs to get beyond short-sightism” on biofuels. She touted Panetta’s views on biofuels during that speech.

The administration also announced $62 million in new biofuels funding earlier this month.

Lawmakers are treating the Navy biofuels testing program as a “political football” for uncertain reasons, a White House official told The Hill on Friday.

Some lawmakers, mostly Republicans, have pushed against biofuels. They say cheaper domestic fuel options that do not require government support, such as natural gas, can supply a good portion of U.S. energy needs. That could spin off into transportation fuel, they say.

I looked at her bio and this 36 year old woman is nothing but a political hack. She graduated college, started in Democratic politics and is now a high Obama regime official. Sounds about right for the career path but she is clueless about energy policy. Now this I found interesting.

Citigroup predicts U.S. oil self-sufficiency by 2020 as a result of those new natural gas supplies, and once Canadian imports are factored in, Ed Morse, managing director and global head of commodities research at Citigroup, said Thursday at a D.C. event hosted by the New America Foundation.

Here is someone who actually knows energy...forgive me Heather, but you are clueless. I remember when Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Congress established the Department of Energy with one purpose: To get America off of foreign oil. Our reliance on foreign sources has doubled while we have cut off our domestic sources. We are funding the Iranian nuclear program buy keeping oil prices high with the added benefit of harming our economy in the process.

Got some more stuff in the article and but I go back to the cost of fuel posted in the article. For this boondoggle the Navy is paying 26 dollars a gallon for bio fuel. It goes down to 15 dollars a gallon in a blend with diesel. The cost of a gallon of maritime fuel diesel is currently less than 4 dollars a gallon.

Is it January 20, 2013 yet?

A Democrat does something right....by accident of course!

I love the title of the article!

N.C. Lawmaker Fracks Up Her Vote

A veto by North Carolina's Democratic governor was overridden Monday night because a Democrat in the state House cast the deciding vote, by accident.

The lawmaker, Becky Carney, accidentally pushed a green button at her desk voting for the override, instead of a different button. Under state rules, legislators can change their votes if they make a mistake, but only if the changed vote wouldn't affect the result.

In Carney's case, she was the 72nd person to vote for the override, the exact number needed to do so.

Just after the vote, Carney's voice could be heard on her microphone, saying, "Oh, my gosh. I pushed green."

Because of Carney's blunder, a fracking bill that Gov. Beverly Perdue had vetoed is now law.

In Obama's home state! I love this.

Last year I posted on how there was an oil boom in North Dakota with fracking and how people were leaving the "solar industy" for real jobs.

Now to add insult to injury we're looking at the next oil fracking boom. In Illinois!

Fracking Fairfield: New technology moving in southern Illinois

FAIRFIELD, Ill. ——

BMWs, Lincolns and other cars with Louisiana, Texas and Colorado license plates fill so many parking spaces around the Wayne County Courthouse that it's tough for residents to find spots for their pickups.

Two blocks west, lunchtime business at Jemini Coffee House nearly doubles on some days with new customers who are a little secretive.

And fresh phrases are creeping into the local vernacular — vocabulary such as "lease hound" and "modern-day Clampetts," a reference to the hit 1960s TV comedy "The Beverly Hillbillies," about a backwoods family that strikes oil.

Wayne County, a rural locale about 270 miles south of Chicago, is experiencing a land rush thanks to a controversial effort to tap into hard-to-reach oil and gas deposits.

A relatively new twist on a 65-year-old technology, horizontal hydraulic fracturing may enable energy companies to hit pay dirt in southern Illinois. And representatives of those companies — many from the big oil states — are descending on the region, digging through land records at courthouses, then offering leases to farmers and other owners of mineral rights.

As much as $100 million has been spent on leasing rights in the region, according to one industry representative. Wayne County, population 17,000, is the state's hot spot. At least six companies are there acquiring leases.

Amid the excitement and mystery, however, is a measure of anxiety. A regional group is scrambling to muster opposition as state lawmakers rush to stitch together regulations. Looming over Wayne and several other southern Illinois counties is a national debate that, at the extremes, pits the promise of energy independence and economic gain against the specter of environmental catastrophe.

"Nobody knows for sure what's going on with all this," said Jim McGill, owner of Jemini. "It's kind of hard to tell right now what it's going to look like."

Fracking, the common term for freeing oil and natural gas by pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into rock deep beneath the surface, has been around for decades. The high-pressure injections are administered more than 4,000 feet below ground, fracturing the rock cobweb-style and allowing fossil fuel to be channeled with the sand, water and chemical mix through the well and to the surface.

Crews then extract the oil and gas and dispose of leftover, toxic liquid.

The relatively new wrinkle that raises both hope and concern is horizontal drilling. In the last decade, companies have been drilling vertical wells, then turning that drilling horizontally through the shale layer, fracking for oil and gas along the way.

The technique has led to speculation that enough fossil fuel can be extracted below the surface of the United States to meet the nation's energy needs for decades. It also has frightened and angered environmentalists.

"Once you look at it, you're like, 'Oh my God, this is horrible,'" said Liz Petula, coordinator of Southern-Illinoisans Against Fracturing our Environment, or SAFE, a grass-roots group that has organized opposition in six counties and is working to gain a foothold in Wayne. She called the combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling "catastrophic."...

No kidding Liz, you're an enviro nutcase. Anything that leds to progress, economic growth, etc in this nation you are against. To paraphrase Archine Bunker, "I'm as liberal you! I'm against everything that's right!"

Good article and it shows how the private sector is doing everything to bring energy to the market. In direct opposition of the efforts of the Obama regieme. Remember green jobs are our future. Yea, right. I have one question that never gets asked or answered by our objective media. How does a solar cell or windmill power a jet? Please Cokie Roberts, ask that of B Hussein Obama next time instread of questions about a "War on Women"!

News from the Global Cooling, err Global Warming, oh Climate Change, what now, Global Climate Disruption....dammit, will people stop changing their minds on this crap!

It's good to know there are still people out there who look at a falsehood and say "I don't think so!"

India bans its airlines from paying EU carbon tax

India has barred its airlines from complying with the European Union carbon tax scheme, joining China in resistance to plans that have caused a backlash among the EU's trade partners.

The European Union imposed a carbon levy on air travel with effect from January 1, but no airline will face a bill until 2013 after this year's carbon emissions have been tallied.

Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh told parliament on Thursday that "the imposition of carbon tax does not arise" because Indian airlines would simply refuse to hand over their emissions data.

"Though the European Union has directed Indian carriers to submit emission details of their aircraft by March 31, 2012, no Indian carrier is submitting them in view of the position of the government," he said.

India's resolution to boycott the scheme follows China's decision last month to prevent its airlines from complying with the EU directive....

..The 27-nation EU has said the carbon tax will help it achieve its goal of cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and that it will not back down on the plan...

...Industry insiders have expressed concern that the scheme could spark a trade war between the EU and the countries opposed to the tax.

The chief executive of European plane manufacturer Airbus, Thomas Enders, called for a "freeze" on the EU plan Thursday, saying that it would otherwise cost the sector thousands of jobs.

"Delay it, freeze it for one or two years," he said according to Dow Jones Newswires, arguing that the scheme "will do nothing but induce strife... retaliation and counter-retaliation."...

Mr Enders, what's the problem? Those thousands of jobs will be replaced by green jobs in bankrupt companies. Works real good...just ask the guys at Solyndra.

But for a more serious look at this BS movement, check this article out.

Climate Fund Seeks UN-Style Diplomatic Immunity

The Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year to lower global greenhouse gases, is seeking a broad blanket of UN-style immunity that would shield its operations from any kind of legal process, including civil and criminal prosecution, in the countries where it operates.

There is just one problem: it is not part of the United Nations.

Whether the fund, which was formally created at a UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa last December, will get all the money it wants to spend is open to question in an era of economic slowdown and fiscal austerity.

Its spending goal comes atop some $30 billion in "fast start-up" money that has been pledged by UN member states to such climate change activities.

A 24-nation interim board of trustees for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is slated to hold its first meeting next month in Switzerland to organize the fund's secretariat and to get it running by November, as well as find a permanent home for the GCF's operations.

The board expects to spend about $6.7 million between now and June of next year...

...Despite its name, the UNFCCC was informed in 2006 by the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs that it was not considered a UN "organ," and therefore could not claim immunity for its subordinate bodies or personnel under the General Convention that has authorized UN immunity since the end of World War II...

...According to an official of the US Treasury, which strongly supports the existence of the GCF, the full extent of the immunities still remains to be worked out by the fund board, although the wording of various UNFCCC resolutions indicate that immunities like those held by the UN are clearly envisaged.

Hundreds of billions of dollars over the years by an unacceptable bureau at the UN that will have major effects on our trade, industry, life. Why should anyone be nervous on this? After the UN is now looking into Voter ID laws in the states and had Libya on the Human Rights Commission. The same group that praised Libya's record on human rights but comdemns the only democracy in the Middle East.

I used to say this was tin foil hat stuff but I've had a change of thought. US out of the UN and UN out of the US. Without US, the UN is nothing. And America will be much better without this group of leaches.

Only in California

Gotta love it.

From the Western Outdoor News.

CAT’S OUT OF THE BAG — California Fish and Game Commissioner Dan Richards is taking intense heat from animal rights activists for engaging in a legal Idaho mountain lion hunt and then committing the “crime” of sharing his success with fellow outdoorsmen in a hunting and fishing publication. Grandstanding state assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, and a candidate for congress in outdoorsman rich coastal northern California, is all over the San Jose Mercury News calling Richards’ resignation. Why? He told a constituent the photo was akin to a full-blown public statement. Ridiculous, but for fellow hunters and anglers, here’s another photo.

Assemblyman Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, has issued a letter calling on Dan Richards to resign his post on the Fish and Game Commission. As of Friday afternoon, 40 state assemblymen had signed on, all Democrats, just one shy of the majority Hueso needs should he advance to a recall vote.

Last month, Richards celebrated a successful and legal Idaho mountain lion hunt with a photo shared in WON.  Within days, critics ranging from animal rights activists to state assemblymen unleashed furious invective, death threats, and calls for Richards’ resignation or forced ouster. The issue: California preservationists are outraged that a state commission appointee participated in a hunt legal across the Idaho border, but beyond their tolerance here at home.

The Hueso resignation demand letter reads in part, "Your actions have raised serious questions about whether you respect the laws of the people of California and whether you are adequately fit to enforce those laws. Your actions… show a lack of judgment and a disregard for how such action would be perceived by California citizens, many of whom find such actions offensive."...

But its gets better.

Das Williams Proposes Strip Club Tax

Assemblymember Das Williams recently proposed legislation to tax certain California strip clubs at a rate of $10 per customer. The money would fund programs that treat victims of sexual assault and human trafficking, and help pay for forensic rape kits.

It would be up to the clubs to determine how they pay, whether by taking steps to increase profit (i.e., creating a cover charge, upping drink prices, etc.) or simply absorbing the cost. The tax, however, may not be passed to the entertainers, the bill says. “There is a clear nexus between alcohol consumption and violence against women,” Williams said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee. “This [bill] only affects those that serve alcohol.” The two gentleman’s clubs in Santa Barbara County — the Spearmint Rhino locations in the City of Santa Barbara and Santa Maria — don’t serve booze and wouldn’t be affected...

A man legally shots an animal outside of the state and a close to majority of the Assembly (and the moron now Lieutenant Governor, former Mayor of LA) want to remove him. It's not like the state is on the verge of bankruptcy, loosing industries left and right, having a population drain of its productive class while getting a growing welfare class. No, they need to worry about a man's hobby and if they can tax business some more. This idiot Das Williams really think a tax will not be born by the customers or employees. What planet is he is? Oh yea, California.

I've got a real bad feeling about this...

As I drink my morning coffee, catching up on the news and watching The Redeye, more news on Super Tuesday and how Romney will do so well and likely cripple Santorum or Gingrich. So we'll have another Bob Dole/John McCain. Great....

Now I see how, shocking, the North Eastern RINO's RINO, after months of telling the Republican base he's not a worshiper of the church of climate change may grow in office. From Politico.com.

Will Mitt Romney flip-flop on climate change if he’s elected president?

Some big donors are betting on it.

Romney and his super PAC have taken millions from funders with strong green streaks — despite the fact that the former Massachusetts governor has run to the right in the primary, proclaiming doubts about global-warming science and trashing President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas emissions policies.

Julian Robertson, founder of the Tiger Management hedge fund, helped put cap-and-trade legislation on the map with $60 million in contributions over the past decade to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Now, Robertson has given $1.25 million to Romney’s Restore our Future super PAC, plus the maximum $2,500 to the Romney campaign.

Other green-minded financial backers may not be giving as much as Robertson, but they still share the view that climate-change science and a solid environmental agenda wouldn’t be a lost cause if Romney won the White House.

“My feeling is that on these issues that people learn,” said former Gov. Thomas Kean (R-N.J.), who maxed out last fall to Romney with a $2,500 check. “And my hope is, as time goes on, he will understand that not everybody agrees on how you deal with these issues, but I hope he will agree with 99 percent of the scientists who believe this is an issue that we have to deal with.”

As president, Kean said he hoped Romney could duplicate his Beacon Hill successes in building coalitions with Democrats on issues such as energy and the environment. In addition, Kean noted that Romney wouldn’t face the same gridlocked climate debate of recent years, in large part because of the boom in domestic natural gas production that’s helped lower the nation’s greenhouse gas emission levels. “The whole game has changed,” Kean said.

...Among the other green Romney donors is Texas businessman and philanthropist Trammell S. Crow, founder of Earth Day Dallas and winner of the Republicans for Environmental Protection’s Green Elephant Award in 2007...

...“I am voting for Mitt Romney and I believe in global warming,” Crow said in a statement to POLITICO...

Romney will learn about global warming. He will probably learn about nationalized health care, Wall Street bailouts, etc. Hey, it's like Obama, just with better taste in clothes.

Why do I think come November 6th I will be drinking a lot...thanks Republican Party. You went into this campaign season coming off a historical victory in 2010 and promptly stabbed the people who put you in office in the back. The Republican Establishment (the one that George Will, etc swears doesn't exist) have offered up another gutless RINO and said "This or the really open socialist..." Obama will drive this country off the cliff in overdrive...Romney will do it in second gear.

God, how did it ever get this bad.

Electric Car Parking

I have little use for the Chevy Volt or other electric cars out there. They may have limited use for a concentrated area but as a general use vehicle they are worthless. I personally commute over 60 miles a day and this will not work. And I know people who commute more.

Now a question. Is the use of a charger at the Wal-Mart a privilege or a perk of using the over glorified golf cart? Let's see.

Electric car parking: Perk or privilege?

They drive whisper-quiet cars, zing past you in the parking lot, and use dedicated charging stations just a few steps from the front entrance. Electric car owners enjoy many perks, and there’s a growing frustration among owners of conventional cars about the charging stations popping up at places like Ikea, Whole Foods, Walgreens, and other stores -- especially when the spots in front of them are empty.

“This makes me think drivers of electric cars must be a little disabled,” one customer who did not want to be identified told FoxNews.com about the charge ports at a Goodwill store in St. Paul, Minn. “They are usually health freaks, so I wonder why they don’t mind walking a half-mile back to a charging station.”

Meanwhile, charging stations are being installed at public libraries, sports stadiums, and even airports. In some cases, the electric vehicle-only parking spots are located closer to the front entrance than the handicapped spaces. Yet, even an advocate for green living says the charge ports are superfluous.

“If stores and organizations wish to minimize their environmental footprint then they can give priority access to bicyclers and pedestrians,” says Ozzie Zehner, a visiting scholar and the University of California-Berkeley, and author of Green Illusions, an upcoming book that pokes holes in alternative energy practices. 

Zehner says EV charge stations just reinforce eco-fetishism and urban sprawl.

“American taxpayers give electric car owners tax breaks and credits to buy their vehicles as well as priority parking and special freeway lanes even though there’s no evidence they’ve done anything positive for the environment in return," Zehner says. "In fact, the mining, heavy metals, and other side effects of electric car production and operation are likely worse for the environment."...

...Not every EV owner is an advocate of front-of-the-parking-lot privileges, however. Angela Miller, an IT executive in San Diego, owns a Nissan Leaf and says she would not mind parking in a back lot and walking. She says it will be less likely that a massive gas-chugging SUV will take her spot.,,

Rarely do I agree with an environmental nutcase like Zehner but he has legit points here. Electric vehicles use regular electrify (usually coal) for charging. That really helps with pollution right? But more to the point I am paying for this POS with my tax dollars or my other money I spend at places like BestBuy. But more to the point these EV morons piss me off because hey expect others to pay for there electrify. I'm paying over three dollars a gallon for gas right now, in large parts because of enviro-morons and the policies they push. But again, I am paying for it. The no brain enviro whack brains like to live in their city like New York or Seattle, take an electric car they could only afford with tax breaks I paid for and on top of that expect me to pay for the electrify at the library or other "municipal charging station". An example:

All told Houston, working with its partner ECOtality, will install 28 additional public charging stations at city libraries and parks. Another partner, GRIDbot, will handle the installation of an additional 28 municipal charging stations in the parking garage underneath Tranquility Park, for the fleet of city vehicles.

A city that is broke as Houston cannot afford this crap. But please, don't let reality get in the way of a good press event.

What the Environmental Movement is really about.

An excellent article on the hypocrisy of the environmental movement. Instead of really being liberal they are the most conservatives. They like things as they are and their opposition is not to use of the environment but to progress.
Environmentalism and the Leisure Class By WILLIAM TUCKER

In playing Keystone cop, President Obama protects his environmental flank for no good reason.

This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The decision did not win him one new vote but was crucial in protecting his environmental flank. The movie stars and Sierra Club contributors were getting restless and had drawn the line in the sand.

In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being "liberal" and "against big business," environmentalism's main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs -- who are established in the environment, so to speak -- are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer.

It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature.
Gee, like an idiot ex-vice president who majored in government at Harvard but for some reason is now considered a genius on environmental issues. Even though he avoided science and math class in college because he sucked at them.

...In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper's called "Environmentalism and the Leisure Class," my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time -- born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 -- but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun's rays.

My story in Harper's was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.
Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands' spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to "Save Storm King" was the nation's first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council.

...What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is justly famous for coining "conspicuous consumption" and "conspicuous waste," there is a lesser-known chapter entitled "Industrial Exemption" that perfectly describes the environmental zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to embrace any further industrial progress:

The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized industrial community.… [A]s a consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative class.

...It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, "We don't need to build any pipelines. We've already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine."
Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves as purveyors of "green jobs." But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the "two Americas," the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In- Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life.

This article fives numerous examples of why the environment movement is more against progress than anything and worth the read.

Preparing for the end....

I spent several hours today working in the garage and one of the good things was getting stuff organized with some new shelve units. The two are set up for nonfood and food items. On top of the nonfood shelve...

Yes, over 100 light bulbs. I have stock piled over 100 non-mercury, inexpensive not requiring a hazmat team to clear up incandescent light bulbs. It's absurd I have to do this but I really don't like the curly fry bulbs. And in the most advanced nation on earth, the greatest empire in history and the world's largest economy they are banned. With this I should be OK until a new administration comes in and repeals the ban on real light bulbs.

Happy New Year!

Professor Obama and his world view...

I've often made the point you should not confuse intelligence and education. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did not finish college yet arguably they changed the world for the better. And no one questions their intelligence. And many a moron I know has the title PhD after his name. Paul Krugman comes to mine immediately.

Now here is a great article on the destruction of a great industry by the geniuses of today.

Obama's Electric Car Aid Goes Bust
No one, no matter how bright, can possibly know what is in the best interest of

If Tolkien was right that the burned hand teaches best, then a question arises: Will President Obama ever learn?

In a recent appearance on 60 Minutes, Obama traded in his old analogy about the car in the ditch for a new one, about a ship in rough seas. No matter how well the captain—Obama—steers it, if the ship is being tossed about with violent abandon, then the passengers will not enjoy the ride.

The implication is that Obama is doing a fine job, so don’t blame him. The president is right, in part: The voters should not blame him. But he is wrong about why. It’s not because the president is a great economic helmsman. He is an awful one. Consider his performance in just one sector: energy. The Obama administration has shoveled boxcars full of money to “green” energy, with demonstrably deplorable results.

Those results go well beyond Solyndra. Take the administration’s policy of pushing electric cars, in which it has invested billions of taxpayer dollars. As The Washington Post reported recently, “analysts say the risk is rising that taxpayers in many cases will not see a return on their money soon, if ever. Instead, they warn that some federally subsidized companies could be forced to shut down in coming months.” A123 Systems, a battery maker the administration supported to the tune of nearly $400 million, recently announced layoffs “instead of up to 3,000 new Michigan jobs as Obama and the company had predicted,” the story reported.

Despite a $7,500 tax credit for each vehicle sold, in October GM unloaded about 1,000 Chevy Volts out of 187,000 total cars sold that month. Even if the administration’s rosy prediction of 1 million electric vehicles by 2015 proves correct, that is a drop in the bucket in a nation with 250 million cars, so the effect on greenhouse-gas emissions—the ostensible justification for all this intervention—would be negligible.

What’s more, electric cars get their juice largely from coal-fired power plants, making claims about emissions highly dubious. Battery disposal is a huge environmental problem. Electric cars and plug-in hybrids are dangerous and expensive to work on. (Ask your local mechanic for an education on that score.) And they are hugely impractical. The Volt, a four-door compact, averages 30-40 miles on battery power alone. Then it needs to recharge for 10 hours.

Clara Ford, Henry Ford’s wife, owned an electric car. There’s a reason the idea has been collecting dust for the past century. Electric cars one day may take their place alongside the Internet as one of the great life-changing innovations of our time. But right now it looks as though they will join what Jimmy Carter called the “keystone” of his energy policy, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, in the rogues’ gallery of gawdawful government flops.

In short, then, the president is using political power to reallocate economic resources to make people adopt an inferior technology that nobody wants. So much for his stellar performance as captain of the economy.

But Obama is less concerned with what the public wants than what he thinks is best for it. This is modern liberalism’s chief project: empowering a cognitive elite to correct what it sees as the poor choices of the stupid, venal masses. (Energy Secretary Steven Chu neatly summarized this approach when he argued for new lightbulb standards by saying, “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”) And the president is more cognitively elite than most. Or at least he thinks he is, referring sometimes to “teachable moments," i.e., occasions for people to be given the gift of his enlightenment.

As California Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat, wrote recently in The Hill, “President Obama has behaved more like Professor Obama,” constantly lecturing others about their shortcomings and trying to impose his will on them. “In the president’s first year in office, his administration suffered from what I call ‘idea disease.’ Every week, and sometimes almost every day, the administration rolled out a new program for the country.” You don’t get to the Oval Office through a surplus of humility. Still, it takes a remarkable amount of hubris to come up with so many great new ideas about how other people ought to live their lives.

No one, no matter how bright, can possibly know what is in the best interest of everybody. Nor can any government, no matter how large, possibly manage the monumental complexity of the modern economy, or even one sector of it. Much of the current economic mess is indeed beyond Obama’s control. The trouble is, he doesn’t think so. And the harder Washington tries to run everything, the more likely it will bollix everything up. The pages of history are littered with case studies, which now include Solyndra and (probably) electric cars.

Perhaps one day Obama will look back on them as teachable moments, too.

I remember one of the other things the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, excuse me, Dr. Steven Chu, PhD, said "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,". In Europe gas cost 7-10 dollars a gallon. That would destroy this economy but then again that is the purpose of the administration. God help us if this idiot is reelected.

Don't challenge Mother Nature

She is usually up to the tasks.

Scotland has been hampered by 165 miles an hour winds recently with a spate of bad weather. This is a fascinating report on the power of nature. Now I really love what it shows at 1:00 and 1:15:



At 1:00, the Occupy Glasgow movement has been pretty much unoccupied.

At 1:15 you see what Mother Nature thinks of wind power.

Hopefully Scotland gets through this and gets back to what they are needed for...whiskey!

And let this be a lesson to any fool who says man can control nature!

It's the end of the world as we know it....I feel fine!

Friday morning, coffee and the dog jumping on me and the wife in bed and another story from the objective AP on how we're all gonna die.

Biggest jump ever seen in global warming gasses

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.

It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.
Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.

"It's a big jump," said Tom Boden, director of the Energy Department's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Lab. "From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over."

Boden said that in 2010 people were traveling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor of man-made climate change.

Got it. In a recent blog debate with a science teacher I made the point (he's a believer of the Church of the ALGORE on Global Cooling, err Global Warming, oh Climate Change) where he is pushing what is at best a questionable hypothesis as "settled science". And so is the AP.

Now I find this interesting.

...In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel. Those forecast global temperatures rising between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century with the best estimate at 7.5 degrees.

Even though global warming skeptics have attacked the climate change panel as being too alarmist, scientists have generally found their predictions too conservative, Reilly said. He said his university worked on emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what would happen. The IPCC's worst case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.

Chris Field of Stanford University, head of one of the IPCC's working groups, said the panel's emissions scenarios are intended to be more accurate in the long term and are less so in earlier years. He said the question now among scientists is whether the future is the panel's worst case scenario "or something more extreme."

OK, these overeducated morons who live off of federal/state/rich liberal grant money are putting out propaganda temperatures but conveniently it's more accurate in the "long term", i.e. when they are already dead, the economy is in shambles and the politicians who are really pushing this crap (and paying for it with out tax dollars) are gone.

Hey Seth boy, how about this. Ask one of these clueless academics who know to the degree what the Earth's temperate will be in 2100 one simple question. "What will the high temperature be in Houston on January 14, 2012? I mean if you can get something out a century a few months should be no sweat"

I think we will not hear the question either asked or answered.

Now at the bottom of this waste of electrons article there is a link to a government agency. The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center aka CDIAC. I wonder if any of the Republicans running for president would want to cut this out from the budget? What a waste of oxygen and tax dollars.

This is global cooling, err global warming, err climate change

Right

From the Northeastern US.

New York gets more than inch of snowfall before Halloween for the first time EVER as early snow storm cuts power to tens of thousands on East Coast
Earliest New York City one-inch snowfall since records began

More than 250,000 customers lost power in Pennsylvania and Maryland

More than 1,000 flights in or out of America cancelled

Experts predict up to 10 inches of snow to fall across North East

Only fourth time since Civil War that snow has fallen in NYC in October

Snowstorms already hitting Massachusetts and New England

Parts of Connecticut could get a foot of snow this weekend

New York has today been hit by more than one inch of snowfall before Halloween for the first time ever - with experts predicting much more on the way.

A classic nor'easter is chugging up the East Coast at an unusually early period and expected to dump up to 10 inches throughout the region.

Some places in mid-Atlantic states saw more than half a foot of snow and approximately 250,000 customers lost power in Pennsylvania and Maryland, requiring utility crews from Ohio and Kentucky to fix it.

More than 1,000 flights into or out of the United States were cancelled today, with New York particularly affected. JFK airport had around 230 called off by 5pm local time.

Around 60 million people will experience the rare October snowstorm, which should unleash heavy, wet snow and wind, causing fallen tree branches and potential travel chaos.

This weekend looks set to see huge amounts of sleet and snow covering the North East, invariably causing power outages and travel chaos. Some areas bracing for up to a foot of snow.
By 2pm, 1.3 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park; never before in October has an inch of snow fallen on a given day in New York City, AccuWeather reported.

The website reported that 10 inches in Ogletown, Pennsylvania, 9.5 inches in Frostburg, Maryland, and 8.5 inches in Lost River, West Virginia.

New York has received measurable snow before Halloween only three times since 1869 - and never more than one inch, as happened today.

The heaviest snow, though, is forecast for later in the day on Sunday in the Massachusetts Berkshires, the Litchfield Hills in northwestern Connecticut, southwestern New Hampshire and the southern Green Mountains.

'It's going to be wet, sticky and gloppy,' said NWS spokesman Chris Vaccaro. 'It's not going to be a dry, fluffy snow.'

The storm comes on a busy weekend for many along the Eastern Seaboard, with trick-or-treaters going door-to-door in search of Halloween booty, hunting season opening in some states and a full slate of college and pro football scheduled.


Fans in State College were making the most of what school officials said was the first measurable snowfall for any October home game since records began being kept in 1896...