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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 10:55:28 AM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Respond to of 86352

Yep.. like that post..

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 11:00:45 AM
From: Eric	Respond to of 86352

Spot on Mindmeld. Tom hit the ball out of the park with this one.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 11:20:04 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 86352

and here's his house

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 11:35:35 AM
From: Eric	Respond to of 86352

First Solar Reaches 4 Gigawatt Manufacturing Milestone First Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) today announced that it has manufactured 4 gigawatts (GW) of thin-film photovoltaic solar modules since beginning commercial production in 2002. A 4GW generation capacity is enough solar electricity to power around two million households, displacing more than 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions a year--the equivalent of taking 500,000 cars off the road. The company also announced that its second factory at Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, has begun producing solar modules one month ahead of schedule. The four new production lines are still expected to ramp to full production during the third quarter of 2011, bringing annual capacity at the two Frankfurt factories to more than 500 megawatts. First Solar, which is one of the world's leading producers of photovoltaic solar modules, also has manufacturing sites in Perrysburg, Ohio and Kulim, Malaysia, as well as new plants under construction in Mesa, Arizona and Vietnam. It recently completed the production ramp of its two newest plants in Malaysia.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 12:02:04 PM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86352

Making my first clean kilowatt grist.org

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/8/2011 3:02:58 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86352

EXTREME HEAT THE NEW NORM Analysis by Tim Wall Wed Jun 8, 2011 01:03 PM ET The hottest summer day you remember from childhood could be the norm in a few decades, in fact it looks like the heat has already been cranked up. "When scientists talk about global warming causing more heat waves, people often ask if that means that the hottest temperatures will become 'the new normal,'" said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford in a press release. "That got us thinking – at what point can we expect the coolest seasonal temperatures to always be hotter than the historically highest temperatures for that season?" wondered Diffenbaugh. Diffenbaugh is lead author of a study to be published later this month in the journal Climate Change. Stanford research assistant Martin Scherer co-authored the study. "According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years," said Diffenbaugh. Within the next 20 to 60 years, if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise summer temperatures are likely to rise irreversibly around the globe, with the tropics feeling the heat first, and parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas suffering unprecedented summer heat within the next two decades, according to Diffenbaugh's study. The middle latitudes, including Europe, China, and the United States, will feel the heat within 60 years, they report. But evidence suggests that these summer heat extremes are already happening. "We also analyzed historical data from weather stations around the world to see if the projected emergence of unprecedented heat had already begun," Diffenbaugh said. "It turns out that when we look back in time using temperature records, we find that this extreme heat emergence is occurring now, and that climate models represent the historical patterns remarkably well." The authors point to the tropics as the poster child for increased summer heat. "We find that the most immediate increase in extreme seasonal heat occurs in the tropics, with up to 70 percent of seasons in the early 21st century (2010-2039) exceeding the late-20th century maximum," the authors wrote. "The fact that we're already seeing these changes in historical weather observations, and that they match climate model simulations so closely, increases our confidence that our projections of permanent escalations in seasonal temperatures within the next few decades are well founded," Diffenbaugh said. Diffenbaugh and Scherer based their predictions on more than 50 climate model experiments. By looking at models that represented the behavior of the worlds' temperatures over the last half century, as well as models for how temperatures will change in the future, the researchers forecast that much of the world will experience a permanent increase in seasonal temperatures within 60 years. The models were based on relatively moderate forecasts of greenhouse gas emissions for the 21st century.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (26535)	6/9/2011 2:34:05 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86352

Friedman’s Slide into Population Bomb Territory By Jonah Goldberg June 8, 2011, 11:11 am As I already mentioned over at the Corner, Tom Friedman lets his inner Malthus out for a drive today: You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? “The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.” Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding. This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity. Full disclosure: Friedman gets under my skin like few others. But this is dangerous stuff and Friedman’s slide into Population Bomb territory is significant. But first a few easy shots. One of the standard complaints against Friedman is that he leaps from anecdotes and conversations—often with CEOs or press flacks for evil regimes—to sweeping conclusions about the state of the Universe. For instance, the whole idea behind his book The World Is Flat stems from Friedman’s complete misunderstanding of a point made by Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, about level playing fields. In today’s New York Times column, Friedman says that he saw a tanker truck delivering water in Sana. And this is supposedly a rich reportorial nugget suggesting that Sana may run out of water. Well it might. I confess to not knowing much about Sana. But I do have some experience seeing water trucks. I’ve seen them in lots and lots of places, from Mexico to Alaska. I’m pretty sure that if I jumped to the conclusion that Fairbanks, Alaska was running out of water because I saw a water truck, few reasonable people would find that persuasive. I saw a taco truck setting up in downtown DC on my way into work today. Does that mean DC has reached “peak taco”? And then there’s the whole “sustainability” thing. We apparently all must now live within our means. Okay. For the record, this is Tom Friedman’s house, which he defends by arguing that it is a “green space” for wildlife. Oh and here, my friend Jim Geraghty recaps some back-of-the envelope calculations about Tom Friedman’s carbon footprint. Anyway, one need not rehearse the tale of Julian Simon’s wager (I got to know Simon a little bit when I was a lowly—yet noble!—researcher here at AEI 20 years ago and he would come visit). But when Friedman cites these calculations that depend on “prevailing technology” he’s committing the classic blunder of making a straight line projection from the present to the future. Think of all the technologies we didn’t have ten years ago and you realize how stupid it is to think we’ll be stuck with the same technologies ten years from now. We have more trees in the United States than we had over a century ago. Why? Because new technologies rendered trees obsolete as a fuel and less vital as a construction tool. So now there’s vastly more forest on the East Coast than there was at the end of the 19th century. Also, Friedman misses an important point. Much of the scarcity of resources we have in the United States isn’t the result of actual physical scarcity. It’s the result of man-made scarcity. Fossil fuels aren’t really so scarce in absolute terms, but in legal terms. That may not be the case in some parts of the developing world. But his column is aimed at people in America who irresponsibly want to live as lavishly as Tom Friedman. blog.american.com Also see Sustainability: Empty Rhetoric or a Bad Idea? daviddfriedman.blogspot.com