Random Observations

1. Ethanol pollutes in Minnesota
I heard in passing yesterday while getting ready for work that something like 5 ethanol plants in Minnesota are being cited and fined for violations to the clean air and clean water laws. The irony is almost too much. I don't have anything against ethanol per se (other than the little issue of state government subsidizing rich farmers and corporations) but wasn't ethanol not only supposed to lessen our dependence on foreign oil but also save the Earth? Hmmm.

2. Gay, Gay, Gay
Is it just me or are you also getting sick and tired of gay issues permeating every single aspect of American life. For God's Sake you'd think 50% of the people in this country are gay! It seems every movie and most the TV shows have to have the obligatory adorable gay character who is above reproach. (I'm pretty sure that was in the new contract after the last Hollywood writers strike) These cuddly gay characters are always far wiser and more pure than the hapless heterosexuals they support.

You can't make any statement critical of any aspect of the gay lifestyle, just ask Carl Paladino. After last week I would vote for candidate Paladino for governor of NY if I lived there! It's a new week and the new topic is "bullying". There will be new laws passed because this such a pressing national concern. I'll give you one guess which special interest group is behind this garbage.

3. Isn't it ironic
By the mid term elections of 1982 in the midst of a recession a popular President had signed significant and popular legislation, but still saw his party lose ground. In the 2010 mid terms we seem to be staring at a repeat... But wait!

An unpopular President signs the Affordable Care Act (unpopular and frankly mysterious), the Recovery Act (wildly unpopular and ineffective), Wall Street reform (confusing and not likely to prevent future financial catastrophes), student loan reform (done by decree with no debate whatsoever), new regulation of the credit card industry (20%+ interests rates and rising, helpful, no?), the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (aka thought crimes). Sorry, but these are not popular or even helpful during an anemic, jobless recovery.

I don't see this as an equivalent situation.

4. Foreclose This!
Does the fact that foreclosure paperwork may have errors, typo's or the wrong signature excuse the "homeowner" for not making the payments he or she agreed upon? The bottom line is this: if you don't pay the bank back they get to take the house. A mortgage is a contract signed by both parties. When it is breached the aggrieved party has recourse. This is contract law which is the basis for our civil society and now we have lawmakers threatening banks with punative legislation if they don't act against their own interests. Yes, it's sad that so many people will lose their houses, but the law is the law and reality is reality. Yes shit happens, jobs are lost, but this is not the bank's fault.

If you find yourself unable to make the payments, call the bank and see if you can't work something out. Simply not paying your monthly bill is a violation of the contract YOU signed.

5. Take this climate change and shove it
Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, reigns from the American Physical Society after 60+ years. What follows is the key paragraph from his resignation letter to Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society:

For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

The problem is that folks like Curtis G. Callan hold the the key to kingdom of grant money that pays the salaries career physicists. The only ones courageous to speak out against this farce are the old men, the ones with nothing to lose. What happens when they are all gone?



CW

It's the Batteries, Stupid

Barring an unforeseen technological breakthrough of monumental proportions we simply have to come to grips with the FACT that we will be dependent on fossil fuels for a long, long time. According to the author of "Gusher of Lies" and "Cronies", Robert Bryce, we are deluding ourselves with talk of energy independence - or more precisely we are being lied to.

Bryce is a high energy individual (pun intended). He is a journalist/author and pulls no punches with the liberal left, the conservative right and especially the fool hardy greenies. He is currently making the rounds promoting "Gusher of Lies" and he is making a lot of sense. His recent CSPAN Book TV appearance was a real eye opener for yours truly.

Politically he hails from the liberal left - but, to paraphrase him - he was a liberal who was mugged by reality. He now considers himself a centrist with conservative leanings when it comes to energy policy. He is extremely critical of the Bush administration, but not for the reasons you'd think. It's the Administration's schizophrenia on energy policy and ecology that gets him wound up. Me too. He is equally critical of the liberals and the "greens" and the whole alternative energy zealotry that abounds in the media today.

His message is not all doom and gloom, in fact he is actually optimistic about the energy future provided we all take off the blinders and act reasonably and realistically.

He believes the decarbonization of fossil fuels - something that has been happening for centuries anyway - is the solution to pollution. Natural gas, methane, butane etc are the fossil fuels of choice. Clean coal and nuclear power are also important components in the energy mix. What he doesn't put any stock in is wind, solar and ethanol to replace a significant portion of our energy needs we now rely on with oil. He has particular ire for ethanol which he believes is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on this country. I tend to agree on the grounds that it is highly subsidized with tax dollars and does very little to help the overall energy situation and/or pollution issues. He thinks using corn for fuel instead of food is immoral. Solar and wind are neither immoral nor effective. Hydro-electric may be the single most effective power source for electricity, emitting no carbon and producing highly reliable energy. But it also is so environmentally destructive that few places outside China are building new hydro dams.

It's the Batteries, Stupid
The problem with renewables is the intermittent nature of the wind, sunshine and crop availability. The Holy Grail in this scenario is the ability to store the energy - make hay while the sun shines - for those times when the wind isn't blowing and the sky is overcast. Bryce's most creative recommendation is the establishment of a Superbattery Prize of $1-10 billion for the development of a super-high-capacity battery system. The prize to paid by the government, of course. The point here is that the government would not be betting on the winner or the loser (read: ethanol) it would "incentivizing" all scientists and inventors in a competition.

His other thrust is the continued growth of Natural gas usage as a huge part of the solution for the so-called greenhouse gas problem. CO₂ emissions from natural gas are half of those of coal. Natural gas is being found at a rate faster than that of new oil reserves, it is relatively abundant, and our reserves are longer lived than our oil reserves. As Bryce explains in his interview in Mother Jones Magazine "And yet, in the current energy discussion, natural gas is kind of the redheaded stepchild. It does not get the kind of attention it deserves."

As it stands right now oil is king. Nothing short of the aforementioned breakthrough is going to supplant it. Many analysts conclude that it is going to take a mix of approaches to get us to the promised land without said miracle. The current alternatives in the renewable arena of solar, wind and bio-fuels combined will not amount to a hill of beans as the world population increases and steadily moves out of poverty. As for his particular ire for ethanol Bryce makes some good points:

...the stickiest question about ethanol is this: Does making alcohol from grain or plant waste really create any new energy?

The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask. The ethanol lobby claims there's a 30 percent net gain in BTUs from ethanol made from corn. Other boosters, including Woolsey, claim there are huge energy gains (as much as 700 percent) to be had by making ethanol from grass.

But the ethanol critics have shown that the industry calculations are bogus. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser.

All this on top of huge subsidies from federal, state and local governments. There are many other irons in the fire when it comes to making bio-fuels that look far more promising than corn based ethanol. Are they getting the attention they deserve? No. Even after reading Herbet Meyers impassioned defense of bio-fuels I still can't get past the subsidies and the tariffs imposed on imported ethanol.

Meyers rightly points out that fuel and food price spikes are more a result of increasing demand as more and more people on this planet rise out of poverty. This is fine, but it still doesn't explain our country's totally insane energy strategy or lack thereof.

One thing that Bryce says that is entirely true: the energy business is the most important and the most complicated of human institutions. I don't entirely agree with all his conclusions or his slash and burn style, particularly when it comes to politics, but, the points he raises and the evidence he cites is compelling food for thought.

Could advanced battery technology be the breakthrough we are waiting for? I for one hope so.




CW

Time to Get Angry

That's alls I can stands, I can't stands no more... Popeye

It's time for all of us to get angry about what is going on with the economics of this country. We are continuously being sold a bill of goods by the powerful elite and what we get for our money is appalling.

Look at the price of gas: Record highs at $3.20 a gallon this week. We are hearing that $4.00 by summer is possible. Is it any wonder that the economy is tanking. Gas and diesel affect every single aspect of our lives and if the price doubles as it has in the past few years eventually the wheels are going to start coming off.

So what is being done? Do you suppose they (meaning the powers that be) are authorizing new drilling and refining of the vast oil reserves in this country - say, like in Alaska at ANWR, or maybe the oil rich waters of the Gulf of Mexico where the infrastructure already exists to process it. No, of course not.

What our illustrious politicians are doing is placating farmers and environmentalists. Democrats and Republicans alike are going "green" and suckering us into believing that ethanol is a good deal for everyone. Oh yes, big business is playing right along. I mean to tell you it's a sham. It's a bigger and more dangerous sham than the Global Warming /Climate Change sham.

So, here we are as a nation sitting on billions of barrels of oil in Alaska, beneath our coastal waters and in oil shale in the western states and what are we doing? We are converting our food into fuel for our cars. It ought to be a crime. It's immoral. Frankly, it's insane.

Nearly a third of all the corn grown in the United States last year was made into ethanol. This is our food, ladies and gentleman. Food prices at the grocery store are skyrocketing. Soon enough, poorer third world countries will succumb to famine so that our politicians and environmentalists can feel good about themselves. Talk about selfish bastards.

Business does what business does - it exploits opportunity. We have 80 or 90 new ethanol refineries being built and touted as responsible patrons of the planet while oil refineries are opposed at every turn. The amount of energy wasted to make ethanol alone, not mention the highly subsidized costs should be enough for wise men and women to see the folly of it. This is economics 101. If is costs more to produce than what we get in return it's a loser! These refineries also pollute the air and water. Try living near one as thousands of residents in St. Paul's West Seventh St. neighborhood did before the state shut down the Gopher State plant a few years ago. The stench was unbearable.

Still, the sham continues. We see all the car makers pushing cars that run on "green" fuel while in the same glossy magazines they push bigger and bigger engines, and larger and larger vehicles as if gas was still $1.50 a gallon. This is flipping insane. Electric cars are just around the corner we are promised - they're always just around the corner.

I would bet that if you could dig it out you'd find the same people sitting on the boards of Exxon, BP, Ford, GM, ArcherDanielsMidland and all of them with multi-million dollar lobbies in Washington DC and all the state houses. It's an intertwined club with vested interests in keeping our elected officials fat and happy.

That be said it's no secret that various governments around the country are subsidizing ethanol production to the tune of 9 billion dollars a year while simultaneously erecting high tariffs on imported ethanol. If it is so good for the environment then why keep the price artificially high with protectionism? Silly question, I withdraw it...

It's time to get angry. It's time to start writing and calling our elected officials and demanding a stop to this. We are going to destroy the one thing that has allowed this country to grow and prosper: the ability to feed our population at a reasonable price.

Please consider this the next time you fill up your gas tank on the way to the grocery store...



CW