News and Commentary on Space
It seems the Women in Black Silent Vigil For Peace (who I last observed observing something less than a moment of silence) have given up their first-Saturday protest outside Colorado Mills in Golden…
Did President Obama end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and neglect to tell anyone (except the Women in Black, apparently)?
(The local chapter appears to have folded.)
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.
Complete Colorado points to an article in the Daily Camera on Xcel’s efforts to install “smart grid” technology in (where else?) Boulder.
I definitely don’t like the idea of the power company (or envirokook do-gooders in the local government) having the authority to turn down my air conditioning or water heater whenever they find it “necessary”, but there are elements to the “smart grid” technology that I do find interesting, and possibly appealing.
Xcel has spent the last year installing more than 100 miles’ worth of fiber-optic cable in Boulder. That cable now carries vital information about the grid’s performance to Xcel. The company is also asking 10,000 volunteers to install “smart meters” in their homes that will allow them to get nearly real-time information about their electricity use.
The new grid technology could let customers give Xcel the authority to turn down the power to their air conditioners or other energy-hog appliances to help save power during peak-use periods. It could also let customers power-up their appliances when the data shows that more energy is being produced by alternative sources like solar and wind power…
Xcel will also soon be asking regulators for the right to charge consumers for electricity based on demand, rather than a flat price. If their efforts succeed, customers will be able to decide, for example, to turn on the dryer later at night, when electricity is cheaper. {emphasis mine}
That makes a lot of sense, in principle at least. (More info on the smart meters here.) If the new meters could actually provide realtime usage and pricing information via household display, it’s easy to see how one can save a few bucks simply by choosing to delay certain energy-hungry activities for a short while. And if the meters could show real-time price trends over several days or several weeks, consumers could establish new money-saving (and, yes, energy-conserving) habits based on this information.
Note that this sort of demand scheduling is not new – the company I worked for in college scheduled the startup of its heavy machinery for early in the morning, before the daily power demand picked up, in order to qualify for reduced rates from the power company. What’s new is the ability to plan such things on the fly, based on real-time information.
But of course, this being Boulder, someone has to drag class envy into it. Giving consumers more information on which to base voluntary money-saving choices isn’t good enough: poor consumers need to be given money to adopt the glamorous, expensive, and dubiously-effective green-preening luxuries energy technologies that the wascally wealthy can buy with their pocket change:
Boulder City Councilwoman Angelique Espinoza, one of those in the audience, said the energy-saving opportunities Floyd described sound exciting. But, she said, she wants to know what efforts will be made to help people without money buy their own solar panels, smart-meters, or plug-in hybrid vehicles.
“What it sounds like is that the person who has the most money to invest to control their consumption saves the most money,” she said. “But that’s not the person who needs to save the most money.”
Floyd said he doesn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. Much of the energy-saving technology is cheap, he said — and it makes sense to try to distribute it as widely as possibly.
“We want it to be equally beneficial, or even more beneficial, to people who are struggling to make ends meet,” he said.
That’s our Boulder.
Here’s a golden oldie, from back in the day when industry associations stood up for capitalism and the positive social by-products of productive enterprises, instead of apologizing for their existence and bending over backwards to appease environmentalist bullies, corrupt incumbents, and union thugs.
While it veers into the de rigeur hip-deep patriotic cheese near the end (around 9:50, when Gramps Robinson stands up), the rest of the film is surprisingly good and refreshingly accurate. As I’m in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged, I was struck by how the town in question is the mirror image of Starnesville: a place where the “motive power” of local industry was recognized, respected, and celebrated.
Another interesting element of this film is how toned-down the utilitarian justifications for capitalism are. Sure enough, capitalism is defended to some degree on the basis of its public benefits, but the public benefits are more overtly presented as the natural, emergent effects of the spontaneous organization sparked by Mr. Manson’s initial investment. Gramps Robinson even gets in a dig at the now all-too-familiar “Progressive” mindset which evades the real sources of prosperity, thinking it can tear down industry and still have the prosperity of which productive enterprise is the root.
Pretty sophisticated for an educational film aimed at young teenagers.
[cross-posted at People's Press Collective]
More here: “We needed Mr. Brown’s weenies! That’s the incentive that makes capitalism work!”
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.
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.
