oldephartte(in training): Shills of the Energy Wars

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Shills of the Energy Wars

Global Warming (Photo credit: mirjoran)

Who Killed the Electric Car? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Prize together with Al Gore, at a conference in Vienna, 22 June 2009. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Surviving Climate Change

Is a Green Energy Revolution on the Global Agenda?
By Michael T. Klare
None of us can predict the future, but when it comes to a mass rebellion against the perpetrators of global destruction, we can see a glimmer of the coming upheaval in events of the present moment. Take a look and you will see that the assorted environmental protests that have long bedeviled politicians are gaining in strength and support. ...it is possible to imagine such a green energy revolution erupting in one part of the world and spreading like wildfire to others. A wave of serial eruptions of this sort would not be without precedent.
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I have not accepted the UN premise ( the IPCC is a UN bureaucracy ) that the sky is warming and we all must fry. ( Not that warming and increased CO2 is associated with other than prolific plant growth ).
The big problem with coal is actually the atmospheric scrubbers whose product has deposited radioactive toxic residue by waterways. I suggest the SourceWatch posts on Coal Ash; which is 'contained' ineffectively. Plus relaxed mining constraints protecting from the folly of strip mining add to water pollution.
The idea that CO2 will cause climate change was a premise of the formation of the IPCC and its models : which is dedicated to producing scientism bolstering alarm. Modeling is not data. Nor is peer review of proponents an acceptable substitute for scientific method.
Any alleged consensus ( peer review ) falls on the hard reality of stiff dissent from the proposition that we control climate and predict the future ( scientific method in operation ) . Too much simplification has occurred for modeling to be remotely feasible : short timelines, sparse data, unknown processes, chaotic conditions, uncalculable reactions and the reality that a water covered surface* (repetition omitted) heated from below by nuclear reactions ( with attendant CO2 release ) are not reassuring of the accuracy of projections : especially with methane release from the sea bottom and Arctic tundra plus CO2 coming out of solution in seawater all making a complete and utter hash of any potential for analysis. Not that such could be validated regardless.
Wind power doesn't work. Catastrophic gearbox failure is not fixable. Electric cars are hobbled by Chevron's patent lock up on NiMh automotive batteries. See Who Killed the Electric Car? ( EV-1 ) and the history of Toyota's electric RAV4 hybrid.
( I have been interested in the Fundy Power Project in the Minas Basin.)
There are really scary stories about Fukushima. Background analysis would suggest that it was part of systematic kludge dogging the nuclear generation industry. The NPT TRAP is only part of the story. GE engineers and building contractors alike resigned over their concerns about putting reactors with used fuel containers requiring constant cooling in an earthquake/tsunami zone.
But the green revolution didn't work for Germany nor Spain ( which went solar ).
Food for thought. http://www.iop.org/news/13/may/page_60200.html
less than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.( some of us think that meteorologists' scorn is richly deserved )
http://www.climategate.com/
RSS feeds promoting anything from antipathy to outright condemnation of 'warmism' alarm.
The source of 'consensus' http://www.webcitation.org/5nCXFD6mY
The emails http://michaelkelly.artofeurope.com/cru.htm
Delingpole journalizing http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100234054/if-you-still-believe-in-climate-change-read-this/
You must have faith ! ( but not in God ) http://www.interfaithpowerandlight.org/about/
My posts ( see Archives ) at my.opera.com/oldephartte/blog will be history Mar 1. Dec 1 and 4 2009 were my first notes on the climate contention,
Much more in sidebar notes and in the pages
http://oldephartte.blogspot.ca/p/oz-to-loose-ministry-of-truth-on-posted.html http://oldephartte.blogspot.ca/p/environmental-challenges-art-climate.html
Apologies for repetition in those 2 pages. Nor have many of the notes at Livejournal of various sidebar lists on Blogger made it to the summaries.

Posted by: opit | November 30, 2013 at 09:34 PM

Fossil Fuel Euphoria
Hallelujah, Oil and Gas Forever!
By Michael T. Klare

For years, energy analysts had been anticipating an imminent decline in global oil supplies. Suddenly, they’re singing a new song: Fossil fuels growing scarce? Don’t even think about it! The news couldn’t be better: fossil fuels will become ever more abundant. And all that talk about climate change? Don’t worry about it, they chant. Go out and enjoy the benefits of cheap and plentiful energy forever.

10/15/2013

How to Reverse a Slow-Motion Apocalypse
Why the Divestment Movement Against Big Energy Matters
By Todd Gitlin
The institutions of our ruling world have a powerful stake in the mad momentum of climate change -- the energy system that’s producing it and the political stasis that sustains and guarantees it -- so powerful as to seem unbreakable. Don’t count on them to avert the coming crisis. They can’t. In some sense, they are the crisis.
Corporations and governments promote the burning of fossil fuels, which means the dumping of its waste product, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere where, in record amounts, it heats the planet. This is not an oversight; it is a business model.
Governments collude with global warming, in part by bankrolling the giant fossil fuel companies (FFCs). As a recent report written by Shelagh Whitley for the Overseas Development Institute puts it,

"Producers of oil, gas, and coal received more than $500 billion in government subsidies around the world in 2011... If their aim is to avoid dangerous climate change, governments are shooting themselves in both feet. They are subsidizing the very activities that are pushing the world towards dangerous climate change, and creating barriers to investment in low-carbon development and subsidy incentives that encourage investment in carbon-intensive energy.”

Of course a half-trillion dollars in subsidies doesn’t just happen. It cannot be said too often: the FFCs thrive by conniving with governments. They finance politicians to do their bidding. Seven of the ten largest companies in the world are FFCs, as are four of the ten most profitable (just outnumbering three Chinese banks, which presumably have their own major FFC connections). These behemoths have phenomenal clout when they lobby for fossil-fuel-friendly development and against remedial policies like a carbon tax. And if this were not enough, they flood the world with fraudulent claims that climate change is not happening, or is not dangerous, or that its dimensions and human causes are controversial among scientists whose profession it is to study the climate.
At Harvard, my alma mater, a fierce campaign by courageous and strategic-minded students has spun off a parallel campaign by alumni. They are being asked to withhold contributions to the university and to donate to an escrow fund until Harvard divests from its direct holdings in FFCs and undertakes to divest from its indirect holdings as well.

WebCite ( possibly to close at year end due to funding shortfall. Marigold and Furl have been down that path. Ezra Klein lost a lot of material that way. )
An increasing number of editors and publishers ask that authors, when they cite a webpage, make a local copy of the cited webpage/webmaterial, and archive the cited URL in a system like WebCite^®, to enable readers permanent access to the cited material.
( Marigold and Furl have been down that path )

Veterans Day, 95 Years On
The Enduring Folly of the Battle of the Somme
By Adam Hochschild
Illustrations by Joe Sacco

In a country that uses every possible occasion to celebrate its “warriors,” many have forgotten that today’s holiday originally marked a peace agreement. Veterans Day in the United States originally was called Armistice Day and commemorated the ceasefire which, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, ended the First World War.

11/11/2013

Creeping China

( Consider the source - all the way from use of the propaganda staple 'emboldening' to India's ongoing hostility to China. Envy might also colour analysis. )

YaLibnan

THE SHADOW COMMANDER

Qassem Suleimani, one of the most dangerous people in the world is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East… from orchestrating the killing of Lebanon’s Hariri to putting Maliki in charge of Iraq . Now he’s directing Assad’s war in Syria.

Questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask

Here are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. This is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.

Identity of the Side that Deployed Chemical Weapons is Crucial.

by Ghassan Karam No one will be able to forget anytime soon the grotesque images of the over 1300 bloodless dead Syrians in the suburbs of Damascus any time soon. I know that these images, especially those of one row after another of the innocent young children will literally speaking stay with me for the [...]

Opinion: Syria, shattered

By David Ignatius, The world still talks about Syria as if it’s a single country, but some members of the Syrian opposition are beginning to discuss the reality that Syria today is effectively partitioned

In Muslim lands the dream of democracy has died

By: YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN, The Arab Spring was real and authentic, a surge to claim human rights and remake ossified nations that were ruled by dictators. What happened next?

Syria: Without water Revolution

By Thomas L. Friedman, The Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when drought, a fast-growing population, a repressive and corrupt government, and sectarian and religious passions combine.

Photo Voltaic:One Way to Meet the Electricity Shortage in Lebanon..

by Ghassan Karam Let me stress from the start that one of the main outcomes of an electric PV initiative is a substantial decrease in the carbon footprint of the consumers. I will not expand on this issue in the current post because of the space limitations but let me stress that each KWH produced [...]

How the Muslim Brotherhood lost Egypt: Special report

When Egyptians poured onto the streets in their millions to demand the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, few thought they would return two years later demonstrating for the overthrow of the man they elected to replace him.

The Syrian Chess Board: Behind the Game Played by Russia, Israel, the U.S. and Other Powers

Diplomacy is running full bore in the Syrian conflict, and even as horrors multiply on the battlefield, a good portion of the war is also being carried out in words