News and Commentary on Space
Some of my co-conspirators at People’s Press Collective have been having a little fun with the “global warming insurance” video…
“It’s not like you’re gonna give up your whole paycheck, it’s just a few bucks a month [that you're gonna give up]“.
Dude…it’s not your money to take.
[hat tip: WhoSaidYouSaid]
Yeah, I know: short trip.
According to Bruce Gagnon, NASA’s upcoming LCROSS “moon bombing” is a test of first-strike space weapons.
No…seriously…he actually believes this.
When the space craft arrives near the moon it will fire a missile, at twice the speed of a bullet, from the spacecraft into the moon’s surface. NASA maintains that the “test” will displace several miles of lunar material in order to find out if water is present on the moon’s surface.
NASA will then have the $511 million mission’s mother satellite circle the moon for at least a year creating a detailed map of the moon’s surface. NASA says the new maps will be crucial for identifying possible landing sites for astronauts in future years as permanent bases are built on the moon for the eventual mining of helium-3. Scientists have long suggested that helium-3 could be used for fusion power back here on Earth and would make the profits of the oil industries pale in comparison. [emphasis added]
Words fail.
Compare this:
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
With this description of the re-wilding of present day Detroit:
His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man’s teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman’s hand.
Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots…
“This city is going back to the wild,” he says. “That’s bad for people but that’s good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard.”
Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.
A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.
And throw in these photoessays from the ruins of the city’s once-thriving downtown for illustration – lots more links at BoingBoing. I disagree emphatically with the BoingBoing commenter who claims that this is the result of ‘hypercapitalism having its vampiric way’ – it was capitalism which built all of these now-ruined buildings and the now-decaying wastelands of Detroit. The ruination came in degrees as Detroit’s industrial giants were increasingly hamstrung by unions and Detroit’s government increasingly fell victim to corruption and identity politics – if there were any vampires preying on “The Twentieth-Century Motor City”, they were from the union hall and the city hall.
As most of you know, just over two years ago, my organization, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, found that the knuckleheaded leader of the global warming alarmism movement, Al Gore, consumes 20 times more electricity in his home than the average American household.
Since Earth Hour was recognized today, Saturday, March 28 from 8:30-9:30pm, I thought I’d see how the hypocritical, fear-mongering former Veep was celebrating at his home.
I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.
In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)
The kicker, though, were the dozen or so floodlights grandly highlighting several trees and illuminating the driveway entrance of Gore’s mansion.
I shit you not, my friends, the savior of the environment couldn’t be bothered to turn off the gaudy lights that show off his goofy trees…
If you’re unfamiliar, Earth Hour is where socialists and patchouli-dabbing tree-hugging hippies unite to dismiss electricity, fossil fuels and the modern conveniences that allow for historically unrivaled prosperity, longevity, health and quality of life throughout the world.
I guess I’d almost maybe be sort of a little surprised by this, if Drew Johnson hadn’t already revealed how Gore’s mansion consumes twenty times as much energy as the average american home...and even more than that after renovations aimed at improving its energy efficiency paradoxically increased energy usage by more than 10%.
Personally, I think Al Gore is perfectly within his rights to use as much electricity as he likes, so long as he is paying the bills himself…even during “Earth Hour”. I find this amusing because it illustrates the hypocrisy of the environmentalist elitists like St. Al. I do not know whether or not Gore was personally pushing “Earth Hour”, and it doesn’t really matter – Johnson merely used the occasion to check up on the latest electrical goings-on at the Gore mansion and discovered that, “Earth Hour” or no, Gore’s lights were on, but no one was home.
One more illustration of why solar is not ready for the big time, despite it’s eco-trendiness as part of the Left’s goofy “green economy” fantasies – it isn’t anywhere near economically viable without significant state subsidies:
Before signing the $787 billion stimulus package into law on Feburary 17, 2009, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden toured an array of solar panels on top of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The photo-op allowed the President to once again extol the virtues of the coming “green” economy.
According to the Denver Post’s article on the event, “The sun generates enough energy on the museum rooftop to power about 30 homes.” However, that claim cannot be verified at this time, and in fact, seems to be belied by the scant information provided by the museum and other sources. Laura Holtman, Public Relations Manager for the Museum said in an email, “Because the array generates less than 5 percent of the Museum’s power, [the purchased energy] is not a particularly large bill.”
…The solar array is not owned by the Museum, however. It is owned by Hybrid Energy Group, LLC. HEG owns the solar array, sells the electricity to the Museum, and receives tax incentives from the state and federal governments, while also receiving “rebates” from Xcel Energy. The rebates are funded by a surcharge collected on the monthly bill of every Colorado Xcel customer.
A 2008 article in the Denver Business Journal sheds further light on the subject. The article notes the total price of the solar array was $720,000. And Dave Noel, VP of operations and chief technology officer for the Museum, was quoted as saying, “We looked at first installing [the solar array] ourselves, and without any of the incentive programs, it was a 110-year payout.” Noel went on to say that the Museum did not purchase the solar array because it did not “make sense financially.” [emphasis added]
Additionally, most solar panels have an expected life-span of 20 to 25 years.
So how can Hybrid Energy Group afford to own a solar array that not even the museum would buy? In part, HEG gets “rebates” from Xcel’s “Solar Rewards” program. The Solar Rewards program is a response to Colorado voters passing Amendment 37 in 2004. The Amendment mandated that Colorado utilities procure a certain percentage of their power generation from renewable resources like wind and solar.
That’s right – renewable sources like solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, small hydroelectricity, hydrogen fuel cells, unicorn smiles, kitten farts, and magical pixie dust that turns Priuses into perpetual motion machines. The purpose of Amendment 37 was never about curbing carbon emissions – else it would have included nuclear power as an alternative.
Along with this month’s power bill came an interesting letter from the utility…interesting in how politically incorrect it is:
How long we will be able to freeze our rate depends upon federal and state energy policies. Many in Congress see a CO2 cap and trade scheme or carbon tax as a lucrative source of potential government revenues, payable by electricity consumers. Special interests at the state and federal level are pushing to require subsidization of uneconomical and inefficient power sources.
During the first quarter of 2008, we conducted a survey seeking our members’ views on subsidies proposed by lawmakers. A carbon tax – which would increase energy costs across the board – was opposed by 84% of the questionnaire respondents. 77% opposed a tax to fund energy conservation, and 65% of our members opposed paying for solar subsidies. They agreed with the Board of Directors that consumers benefitting from lower electric bills after installing a solar array should pay for the system themselves rather than requiring their neighbors – many of whom are already having difficulty paying their bills – to pay for it.
This year, new legislation is being proposed that would promote tiered rate structures. Such rates would cause the per kWh cost to increase as you use more energy… The purpose of the tiered rates is to impose energy conservation. However, the effect is to reduce the revenues needed to run the business [ie: the utility company] with the end result being rate increases for everyone.
Our members’ comments clearly indicate they can’t afford higher taxes and they want IREA to keep rates low; also that “rebates” (in fact, subsidies) disproportionally affect the poor and those on fixed incomes. Since these new proposals – cap and trade, tiered rates, or a carbon tax – would result in trillions of dollars of additional power costs nationwide, devastating our economy and quality of life whil yielding little or no practical benefits, we plan to actively oppose such proposals.
The letter goes on to rally members to help the co-op fight such measures.
Nice to see a company whose business is targeted by environmentalist do-gooders actually fighting back against the directives and non-value-adding costs said do-gooders are trying to impose on them — and us.
I see nothing wrong with “alternative” energy, but I do think it’s wrong to mandate the adoption of alternative energy when the technology is not yet (and may never be) capable of competing with existing sources through equivalent or better reliability, availability, and affordability. If subsidies are required to make such technology even remotely economical, and if significant, economy-wrecking penalties need to be applied to existing sources of energy to “incentivize” the switch to alternatives, the alternatives are clearly not ready for widespread adoption.
Environmentalists who are sincerely concerned with CO2 emissions and environmental damage from the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and who want to actually make headway against those things, would be taken much more seriously if they endorsed nuclear power – the real alternative energy. It’s a pity that our local co-op is too small to build a nuclear reactor of its own.
This article at the Grauniad is noteworthy not for its routine America bashing or overwrought environmental panic-pimping, but for the laughably unsubtle parroting of the equally laughable (and undoubtedly calculated) misuse of the word “virgin” to describe wood materials derived from unrecycled sources.
Extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply toilet roll made from virgin forest causes more damage than gas-guzzlers, fast food or McMansions, say campaigners…
“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests…
More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz…
Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin forests.
Which is a flat-out lie based on a deliberate conflation of terms: “virgin forests” are those which have never been harvested. It is not the same thing as “virgin fiber”, which is apparently an industry term for unrecycled wood-derived material:
“For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides,” Dixon said. “It’s the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect.”
You’d think the spokesman for Kimberly-Clark would be a little more cautious with his word choice – whether or not it’s technically accurate or common industry jargon, the use of the emotionally-loaded term “virgin” in this context makes him appear to be accepting the environmentalists’ distorted premise that such wood fiber is from previously unharvested forests.
The comments to this article are typical of the (mix and match) anti-American, anti-capitalism, anti-civilization, anti-Western, anti-industry attitudes one expects to encounter among the “citizen of the world” sheeple who read the Grauniad, but the one good dissenting comment in reply is worth reproducing here in full:
Looks suspiciously like an attempt to inflame the ignorant by obfuscating the language.
For years environmentalists (including me) have been fighting the fight to keep virgin forests intact … virgin being synonymous for “old growth” forests or forests that have never been logged commercially.Now, the word — with its previous emotional baggage — is being applied to any unrecycled fibers. Sorry, but that’s the kind of intentional slippage I expect from the multinationals of the world, not so-called environmentalists.
Toward the (pardon the pun) bottom of this piece, it finally comes out that “virgin” in this context is wood from tree farms (generally fast-growing pine) that are renewable resources (and wonderful carbon traps).
Given the energy expended on recycling v. that expended on tree-farm harvesting, I doubt there’s really much difference … just an attempt by an increasingly profit-oriented, horribly cynical environmental industry to scare the, ummm, crap out of people.
And as Alston Chase describes, given the forestry practices of pre-Columbian native Americans, there are few if any forests that can even be considered untouched by Man. Not that being untouched by Man is such a great thing for a forest – as Colorado is about to find out to its sorrow, when the vast and overgrown pine forests here go up in firestorms at some point in the near future because of the kneejerk environmentalist opposition to thinning them out by logging and to spraying to contain the now-epidemic pine bark beetle infestation.
Meet Namaste Solar Electric, aka “The Twentieth Century Solar Panel Company”:
“We did have a lot of skeptical, raised eyebrows at the beginning,” Jones said of his company, which installs solar power systems in Colorado.
“We even have had business schools bring teams of MBA students to come to do a case study,” he said. [but of course: it helps to study failures in order to avoid them in the future - ed.]
Outsiders were baffled by some of these company plans:
- Environmental concerns would be a driving force in every aspect of the company.
- Six weeks of paid time off.
- A concept called FOH — frank, open and honest — to help eliminate gossip and grudges.
- Employees, no matter what their job description, have the same pay scale.
- One percent of yearly revenues goes to solar systems donated to community groups.
- All major decisions would be made by consensus of all company employees.
That is so close to the work environment that spurred John Galt to “stop the motor of the world” in Atlas Shrugged that it reads like a parody.
“It was…something that happened at that first meeting at the Twentieth Century factory. Maybe that was the start of it, maybe not. I don’t know…The meeting was held on a spring night, twelve years ago. The six thousand of us were
Namaste is in the process of remodeling a 15,000-square-foot warehouse for its offices.
And it is doing it to the highest of green building standards, the LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. That involves everything from the use of natural light to the recycling of building materials to the access to the building by public transportation.
And yes, all the building’s electricity will be provided by a solar system Namaste installs. Most of the panels will be on the roof, but there will also be a solar awning.
One wonders if there will be impressive etched glass doors in the executive washroom, and an exclusively-soybean menu in the company cafeteria.
[via Michelle Malkin]
ADDENDUM: Looks like the snivelers at Media Matters don’t much care for the company being called “socialist” by Glenn Beck. If they think that socialism is such a dirty word, maybe they should stop running interference for people who support it.
Also, David Corn – in between schoolgirl gushings about the unparallelled stupendicality of the Obamessiah – provides a little more info about the “alternativity” of Namaste’s business model.
Uh-oh, it looks like Galt’s ”ray screen” was no match for the “Don’t Be Evil” crowd – Google Earth has found Atlantis:
From what it sounds like, a British aeronautical engineer was playing around with the new Google Earth 5.0, which includes undersea data, and noticed something funny off the coast of Africa, about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands, that resembled a pattern of a street grid. According to the United Kingdom’s Press Association, the pattern of streets equated to an area the size of Wales.
In case you’ve had more important things to read about for the past few thousand years, Atlantis was a legendary island city first mentioned by Plato, allegedly a hard-core naval power located somewhere near North Africa that disappeared when it sank into the ocean.
Oh wait…they’re talking about the Atlantis of newage superbeings, not the Atlantis of striking capitalists. Never mind.
Seriously, though, this appears to be an artifact of Google’s data integration. If Google has the same trouble with integration of the ever-growing body of Mars survey data at Google Mars, I have to wonder how many sleepless nights the Hoagland crowd has spent poring over pixels looking for artificial structures, and how many long minutes of in-depth analysis they have wasted verifying the authenticity of these “anomalies”, only to be frustrated yet again with the announcement that their latest “evidence” is only a fluke of how data from different instruments was integrated.
Not that it would stop them from believing they’d found the holy grail of ancient astronauttery, of course.
More methane on Mars:
“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,” said Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.” Mumma is lead author of a paper describing this research that will appear in Science Express on Thursday.
Methane, four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom, is the main component of natural gas on Earth. Astrobiologists are interested in these data because organisms release much of Earth’s methane as they digest nutrients. However, other purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron, also release methane.
“Right now, we do not have enough information to tell whether biology or geology — or both — is producing the methane on Mars,” Mumma said. “But it does tell us the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It is as if Mars is challenging us, saying, ‘hey, find out what this means.’ “
Previous posts on Mars methane here and here.
As I’ve said before, extant life on Mars (or just the possibility of it) is a mixed blessing.
On the positive side, a solid indication of life would focus more scientific attention on Mars, and could provide justification for sending humans to explore the planet in person. The benefits from this would be the development of new space technologies and operations experience, and the possibility that humans could, having finally gotten there, maintain a permanent presence as settlers. (And yes, there are no doubt better means of accomplishing the same goal than another wasteful and politics-conflicted government program – or worse, a program based on international kumbayaaism. Just thinking overly-optimistically here of the potential for such a program to disrupt the chicken-egg problem and provide us with the minimal technology set required to establish a beachhead.) Plus, it would be interesting as a scientific curiosity, regardless of the origin to which the methane is ultimately attributed – though obviously more interesting if it turned out to be biogenic, since that attribution would merely answer one question while opening up thousands more – and for its potential to completely derail antiscientific nonsense like intelligent design and creationism.
On the negative side, a solid indication of life could prompt arguments to prevent further direct exploration of Mars by landers or (especially) humans, and take settlement of the planet completely off the table. Such arguments against direct exploration and settlement would center on the risk of biological cross-contamination - concern over some Martian microbe hitchhiking back to Earth and improbably devastating the “defenseless” life on this planet, or that by taking terrestrial biology with us (via microbes on nearly-but-not-perfectly sterilized landers or quite literally by sending human explorers to the surface) we would destroy any scientific value the discovery of life on an untampered-with Mars might yield.1
Further in this vein, there is the possibility that a Mars inhabited by even primitive life would trigger a trekkish “Prime Directive” response, whereby concerned citizens would seek a prohibition on exploration and settlement of the planet based on the ’self-determination rights’ of microbes to evolve on their own, without outside interference.
It’s impossible to predict exactly what the response would be, of course, since it will depend on the circumstances and the prevailing attitudes at the time of discovery. One hopes rationality will prevail, but one never knows.
1 For an example of keeping an uninhabited place pristine for scientific purity, examine the case of Surtsey: “The scientists have strict rules against not carrying any seeds to Surtsey – the idea behind no human interference is to witness colonization and secession as naturally as possible.” While the quarantine of Surtsey is a nearly-unique and highly valuable scientific experiment on Earth with negligible effects on anyone else, closing off an entire planet to human activity based on the presence of the most primitive forms of life would be excessive.
