Citizen Power

This city, to be called “Babcock Ranch” would be a great idea if it really were a solar city, and that is the eventual plan.  It looks cool, right?  But according to the Miami Herald, it will only be a solar city by day when the sun is shining and it will get conventionally-generated energy by night.  They haven’t figured out a way to store the solar power yet.  They will though, and if the smart grid is built, it may be easier for them to do that.  Then why do it now?  Well, we  have to start somewhere.  There should be hundreds of these cities all across the country.  The sun shines everywhere, not just in the south. And some of the new photovoltaic solar power cells in development will get more energy out of less sun.   Overall, a solar powered city is a great idea!  The solar power plant, to be a big 75-megawatt plant, will be built regardless of whether the city itself will be built.  (No, it’s not built yet.)

The developers are West Palm Beach-based Kitson & Partners.    My biggest question is:  why do it in Florida, which might be under water soon?  My guess is that Florida has such a temperate climate, it won’t get too hot or cold and therefore the inhabitants will use less energy.  This is a recent headline from a major UK newspaper:

World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree

That article from the Guardian says that in the next century, the planet will warm between 4-5 degrees, bypassing the safer levels of only 2 degrees C.  That means we are on track to a world we won’t recognize, all in 100-200 years.  This rise in temperature seems small, but it’s huge on a global average scale and will lead to a devastating sea rise of between 1 meter and 2.5 meters, by current estimates.  That would put much of Florida and especially its cities near the coastline under water.  We can say goodbye to parts of  Miami and the keys and any at-sea-level city in Florida — and elsewhere — on this planet.

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Not long ago, autism was suspected by lots of people to be caused by mercury in vaccines, or by the preservative thimerosal which contained mercury.  Thimerosal has been removed since then from nearly all (but not all) vaccines. In February, a federal court ruled that there is no obvious cause and effect between mercury in vaccines and autism.  When I heard about the court ruling, my first though was, well then how about mercury in the environment?  There is a lot of mercury in the environment, which people don’t always realize.  In fact, I live in Minnesota, and some lakes in Minnesota’s famous “10,000 lakes” have been determined to be unsafe to take fish from due to high levels of mercury.  Also, our public health department puts out warnings about eating even small fish from these lakes due to concentrations of mercury in the fish themselves.  So my thought was that possibly kids with autism are getting it from something in the environment, and there is plenty of toxic stuff, including mercury, in our environment.

Where does a lot of mercury in our environment come from?  Coal burning  plants.  Coal plants emit about 50 tons of toxic mercury into the air each year.   There are a few very large coal plants in or near my state, which could possibly explain the high levels of mercury in our environment and the high levels of autism here too.  And according to the U.S. EPA,  “Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S.”    And autism rates are now 8 time higher in my state than they were in the 1980s.  Doesn’t that tell us something?

We are poisoning ourselves in more than one way with this cheap, big power source.  Is it worth it?  Not when the EPA has to even warn us about eating too much tuna fish because of mercury, and not when it might be leading to growing numbers of cases of autism.   This hasn’t been proven yet,  but environmental causes of autism have  been suspected for years.

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This isn’t about piracy, although pirates seem to be a huge problem lately.   This is about ocean acidification, a much bigger problem than most people realize.   For one thing, the growing ocean acidification might end a lot of the life in the ocean, especially that associated with coral reefs and with shells, and that would lead to massive food shortages around the world.  Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean as a major food source.  Why is the ocean becoming more acidic, and what is the problem?

This information is from a recent radio interview with Dr. Richard A. Feely, an Oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Laboratory in Seattle, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. His main area of focus is carbon cycles in the ocean, and this very problem.

At a 3-day summit in Copenhagen last month, European scientists warned that we’re creating ocean conditions not seen since dinosaurs walked on the earth, 65 million years ago.   Human beings have recreated these hostile conditions in about 200+ years by burning fossil fuels and with harmful agriculture practices,  and as a result, carbon emissions continue to rise and affect the oceans.

Ocean acidification isn’t complicated.  As we burn coal and oil and natural gas and gasoline for fuel and energy, all that CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  Over about the past 250 years, we have released about 540 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.  About a third of that has been absorbed by the oceans. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that immediately reacts with sea water, and it forms a weak acid called carbonic acid .   This carbonic acid quickly dissociates and releases a hydrodyne, which gives the ocean its acidity. This increase in carbonic acid over time has increased the acidity in the last 200 years of about 30%.  With the projections of the use of fossil fuels in the future, we could see increases in acidity by 150% by the end of this century. This is what has scientists hugely concerned.

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Former skeptics in Congress are realizing that climate change has to be dealt with and some of them are ready for action!

Representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) recently went to Antarctica with a small Congressional delegation. Scientists that work there showed him ice cores, and those ice core samples clearly showed the high spike in CO2 levels that are now warming the Earth. Inglis was a former skeptic, but he is now convinced: “The evidence is compelling: Global Warming is a real, human-caused problem,” he said .

What a difference that is from the Michele Bachmann (R-MN)  approach. She gets her talking points from the GOP, and repeats her claim that global warming is not happening without exploring any of the science or visiting Antarctica or even Greenland.  I applaud Congressman Inglis for taking the steps to gather the information he needed to determine that global warming is real, even though his Republican party doesn’t want to admit it.

Bachmann, who is my Congresswoman, gave a “climate change” forum today in my city and not only refused to take questions, she had a lawyer from the right-wing think tank - CEI - give us propaganda on global warming.  He doesn’t believe in it, so he made up all kinds of fairy tales about Ice Ages and how the sun is causing global warming, and how much of this is also to blame on methane from cows and CO2 from the ocean. (The ocean is actually a carbon sink, it’s not causing global warming as he claimed).   It was all propaganda to further the CEI and GOP agenda of no new taxes.   He even denied that the climate is getting warmer at all.  In reality, from January 2008 to January 2009, the planet warmed a remarkable 0.37°C (see data here).   (That’s a lot.)

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Today I read that GM is looking seriously into bankruptcy.  Meanwhile, this little Segway vehicle might be what this former car giant has been reduced to.  GM might be mass-producing these soon.  It’s called the PUMA, for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility.  Not a bad idea, but shouldn’t GM invest in something a little more serious to save itself?

This little vehicle (a prototype) will eventually use “vehicle-to-vehicle technology”, whatever that means, and supposedly be able to navigate it’s own way through tough traffic situations on regular city streets.  I don’t think this is terribly likely. It will just take one of these little things squished between a city bus and a semi truck and that will be the end of that.  They should have their own little bike path-like roads,  and in fact I can see cities accommodating tiny vehicles like that in the future.

Last week President Obama gave GM more or less an ultimatum:  shape up and make a viable plan for the future,  or no more public money loans.   That means they can and probably will go into bankruptcy and this is what should have happened a long time ago.  GM was a great car company at one point, before anyone knew what CO2 or Peak Oil even was.  Then after we knew what it was, and gas prices rose, GM continued to churn out big gas-guzzling monster SUVs and big pickups.  People wanted smaller more fuel-efficient cars in the last 20 years, but GM didn’t respond with what they wanted.  If they had, it’s possible that  hundreds of people would have lost their jobs because GM had no contingency plan.  No “Plan B”, no plans for better cars (except the EV1).    Even when they were failing and the government gave them the first two ultimatums to shape up, GM didn’t take it seriously.  Now GM is in serious danger of failing for good.  But these little Segway vehicles won’t save them.

It didn’t have to be this way!  America had electric cars in the 1930’s.  Why didn’t GM start seriously making lots of hybrid vehicles and electric cars years ago?

Well, they did. In 1996  they made a very cool-looking electric car that was wildly  popular and a best-seller, called the EV1, pictured above.

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Ken Salazar was a one-term senator from Colorado when he was nominated to be the  Interior Secretary by President Obama.  I remember at the time there was a lot of trepidation from people on the left that he wouldn’t be “progressive” enough as the new secretary.   It doesn’t make any difference to me whether he’s a “conservative” Democrat or not as long as he does a good job protecting the environment.

The Interior Department secretary is a very important job for the environment — it oversees energy resources, natural resources, drilling for fossil fuels on public lands, and oversees the country’s parks and wilderness areas.   Salazar has turned out to be very good so far, protecting a lot of wilderness in many states and showing he cares very much for the environment, as someone in this position should.  There is a good article in Rolling Stone about the accomplishments and viewpoints of Salazar so far that is definitely worth reading.  He’s not afraid to stand up to the big energy companies either, something that was completely lacking during the Bush administration.

Shortly after taking the job, Salazar canceled  77 oil and gas leases Bush authorized near Utah’s national parks, including ones that would have put oil wells in eyesight of major landmarks in the parks.  Can you imagine going to a national park and seeing oil wells nearby?  I would much rather see windmills in the distance, if anything.  Salazar also delayed the rush into offshore drilling and he said a big “NO”  to Bush’s plan for oil-shale mining in the Rocky Mountains.  Salazar’s already proven himself to be worthy of the job of Interior Secretary.

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The economy is bad everywhere. Where I live, unemployment is now about 10%.  Early last week one day when it had snowed a lot,  I was out in the backyard with my new puppy. While I was watching her, a man in his 30s walked through the alley with a shovel.  He paused when he saw me, seemed to hesitate, and then asked, “Do you need anything shoveled?”  At first I thought, “what a nice person”, even though I told him “No thanks”. Then I realized he was asking me for a job.  He was probably unemployed, and looking for a few dollars here and there shoveling snow for people in my neighborhood.  Then I felt sorry for him, but he probably wasn’t the only man trying to use the snow to get some work that day.

This recession is driving people to make money from jobs kids used to have. How many older people do you see stocking shelves at local stores, or delivering newspapers these days?  It’s really kind of depressing because you know that isn’t the type of work they were doing a year ago.  It’s hard to believe the economy will get even worse, but that’s what we hear is coming.  If it does get worse, I really fear for people, and what might happen to them.

Even so, there is optimism that the green energy and jobs revolution we were hoping for will still happen.  In fact, it could really help the situation!  Even the Wall Street Journal   has noticed that green jobs could help the economy.   I’ve noticed a few articles about environmental issues lately from their website.  And like the mayor of San Jose just said, “We’ve got to create not just green jobs but green careers.”  We need long-term green jobs to really help the economy and people, not just jobs that start now and end in a few months.  You can read a WSJ story on green jobs here.

I agree that a jobs and energy revolution should include long-term plans for a real green revolution, not just create busy jobs like repairing roads and building bridges.  That won’t even help global warming,  because it might even encourage more car traffic, and right now that’s not a good idea.  Let’s not get too carried away with transportation-related work and instead focus more on planning for what U.S. transportation should look like in 50 years.

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This is about where not  to get energy.   Look at this photo — it was once beautiful green mountains.  Appalachia mountaintop explosions still happen, caused by coal mining by large coal companies .  Huge amounts of TNT are used to blow the tops off the mountains in a few southeastern states.    Boulders and dirt roll down the rolling green mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia, and North Carolina.  This type of coal mining literally removes the tops of mountains. The results are moonscapes — miles and miles of vegetation free, flattened hills where mountains once graced the landscape.   These beautiful natural landscapes  are now literally ruined forever because of coal mining, and the irresponsibility of coal mining companies.

This is environmental devastation in so many ways.  The toxic runoff from the procedure kills wildlife and poisons drinking water.  This is nothing less than a crime.  Why do people allow this to happen?  I Love Mountains is one  activist group and website trying to change these practices.  I like promoting their site because it’s a good portal to more information on this terribly damaging coal mining in an area of the U.S. that not too many people know about.  The coal plant nearest to me, in South Dakota, uses coal from this area of the U.S.

Last Christmas millions of tons of coal fly ash from a holding pond in Tennessee broke through its levees and devastated the area around the holding pond for miles and miles. This created a disaster the scope of which is still being discovered.  The sheer volume of this coal slurry itself was 48 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of about 20 years ago.   At least two rivers, and the groundwater, were contaminated with many different pollutants,  including radioactivity,  and arsenic and barium.   This spill was a major catastrophe, and yet when is the last time you heard the mainstream media in the U.S. write about this spill in terms of catastrophe, or in any way at all?  It’s not yet been cleaned up. Not even close.   When is the last time you heard the mainstream media talk about coal waste as radioactive, or about mountain top removal, or about how damaging coal mining is?  Oil shale mining is nearly as bad.

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Usually I write about energy, power, or climate change, or politics. Today’s topic is about a different kind of power — too much power in the hands of one company to destroy most of a person’s web presence.

This is not my only blog — I have several websites,  and a forum,  and three art/photo galleries, and two podcasts I host on one server hosting account with this one company.   I’ve accumulated these sites  over the last 5 years or so, like a lot of people have.   That means one company, my current host, has a lot of power over the existence of my websites.

Today, they abused that power.  Big time.  This account is with a company I will not name because now I’m afraid they’ll sue me if I reveal who they are, but it rhymes with Blue Toast.  So this company, which I will call Blue Toast, today pulled down all of my websites. Without warning!    If you were to go to them today you would have seen a blank screen with “Account Suspended” in giant letters.  All my sites were gone - vanished.  I have been a good paying customers of theirs for almost five years and today, with no notice of any kind, they simply suspended all my websites.    They notified me of this by an email that said basically — “Your accounts are suspended.  Call customer service.”

So I called them in a serious panic.   I found out that a long time ago, over a year ago, I made two folders with “backup” in the title in this account, and that was a violation of their “terms of service”.   Strictly forbidden.  I guess I shouldn’t have done this, but they should have checked with me first to see what kind of folders these actually were.   The customer service rep. told me “we are not a backup service!”  OK, fine, I said, but let’s be reasonable–  I’ve been a good customer and this is what you do to good customers?  A simple, harmless mistake that you call a terms of service violation that deserved a warning — not immediate suspension of my account which resulted in all my sites down and inaccessible!    I was mad, as you can probably imagine.

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Let’s get back to the basics, and look at the differences between fossil fuels, clean fuels, renewable energy, and alternative energy.

There are many types of real renewable energy.  Renewable energy means it comes from a source that renews, and will not run out — a natural source that is more or less infinite and free,  like energy from the sun and the wind and water.  Non-renewable energy comes from oil and gas and coal, and because they are running out, they are finite.  Makes sense, right?  We might have less than 50 years worth of coal left.  It’s finite.  So is oil and gas. We might have reached the other side of “peak oil” already and as demand is increasing due to the short-sightedness of car makers and humans in general, oil, gas, and coal will probably all run out in a few decades as use increases. That’s just a fact.   These things will run out during the lifetimes of many people alive right now.  And then what?  We might as well start to use real renewable energy now and save what oil is left for plastics and other things future generations will need it for. Oil is used in hundreds of products, not just for energy.

It may surprise some people that renewable energy does not mean “natural gas” as the current misinformation from some politicians (Nancy Pelosi) and oil men billionaires (T. Boone Pickens) would have you believe.  Even more astounding, the new GOP budget contains much talk of renewable energy as being offshore oil drilling!  It’s on page 11 if you care to download that ridiculous document from the GOP website**.  (See quote below.)

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Now that April fool’s day is almost over, I can assume that no one will be fooled by the above picture, which appeared on the Whole Foods website.  Yes, it was a joke, but I bet someone would buy it if it wasn’t!   Too bad the site will remove the silly stories tomorrow, because they were pretty funny.  Including stories like “When milk goes bad: 12 daring recipes“.  While I was enjoying the funny stuff on their site I was listening to a radio show (the Jeff Farias show, which isn’t exactly on the radio) that  mentioned sour gas.   I wasn’t familiar with this so I had to look it up and I was disgusted.  Sour gas isn’t something your grandmother produces after a large meal.  Sour gas is not a joke!    It’s a deadly, toxic gas that can kill people.  And yeah, it’s related to the drilling of natural gas, the very fossil fuel that T. Boone Pickens and his “army” of tens of thousands are pushing on you and me and the rest of the world.  They want us to drive around with this in our gas tanks, or at least fill the gas tanks of large trucks with it.  Why?  So T. Boone Pickens can make a lot of money, that’s why.  Unfortunately, natural gas isn’t going to help us with climate change or our energy problems in the long run.

A sour gas well produces deadly hydrogen sulfide during the process of drilling for natural gas. This is perfectly fine with many natural gas energy companies.  They have no problem sickening people with this deadly gas.  “Sour gas” by the way is the actual term for this gas and yes, it stinks, as its name implies..   Here is the wikipedia explanation of what sour gas is, exactly.

And it is making people sick.  One family in Texas especially has a problem and has become sick from sour gas drillling,  because they don’t own the mineral rights to their 100 acres of land. So there are 4 natural gas “sour gas” wells on their property.  I can’t imagine how angry I’d be if some energy company put 4 wells on my property and their drilling was making my family sick on top of that.  Hydrogen sulfide, or H2S, is supposedly burned off during the process of drilling for natural gas, but in this case, in January,  the hydrogen sulfide leak lasted 13 days.  The legal limit is 10 days. So if you live in Texas and some big corporation wants to drill for natural gas on your property, they can sicken your family with deadly hydrogen sulfide, legally, for 10 whole days. 

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