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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (895955)

10/23/2015 2:22:13 PM

From: Brumar89

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
FJB

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1575177

It's OK to Pollute, If It's In The Name of Green Energy

[ Haha, Democratic crony solar plant taxpayers (at a cost of billions) paid for has a carbon emission problem. ]

The Ivanpah solar project burns enough natural gas to be required to take
part in the state's Cap and Trade program to reduce emissions.

Just goes to show, if there are cronies to enrich, more Government control and a left wing agenda to forward, conservation and environmentalism mean very little, if anything. .

Press Enterprise
A solar power plant at the center of the Obama administration’s push to reduce America’s carbon footprint by using millions of taxpayer dollars to promote green energy has its own carbon pollution problem.The Ivanpah plant in the Mojave Desert uses natural gas as a supplementary fuel. Data from the California Energy Commission show that the plant burned enough natural gas in 2014 – its first year of operation – to emit more than 46,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.That’s nearly twice the pollution threshold for power plants or factories in California to be required to participate in the state’s cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions.

The same amount of natural gas burned at a conventional power plant would have produced enough electricity to meet the annual needs of 17,000 California homes – or roughly a quarter of the Ivanpah plant’s total electricity projection for 2014.The plant, which was developed by Oakland-based BrightSource Energy, was approved in 2010 amid questions about its cost to taxpayers and the facility’s effect on the desert environment.

The U.S. Department of Energy granted Ivanpah $1.6 billion in loan guarantees. As a green-energy project, it also qualified for more than $600 million in federal tax credits.

Just before the project broke ground, President Barack Obama praised it in his weekly radio address: "With projects like this one, and others across this country, we are staking our claim to continued leadership in the new global economy. And we’re putting Americans to work producing clean, home-grown American energy that will help lower our reliance on foreign oil and protect our planet for future generations."And former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar freed up large expanses of public land for the plant despite environmentalists’ concerns about wildlife habitat and the loss of open space.David Lamfrom, desert project manager of the National Parks Conservation Association, said information about the amount of natural gas used at Ivanpah shows that the plant is essentially a hybrid operation that requires both fossil fuel and sunshine to make electricity.He said he doubts the project would have gone forward if it had been billed a hybrid plant.“It feels like a bait and switch,” Lamfrom said. “This project was held up as a model of innovation. We didn’t sign up for greener energy. We signed up for green energy.”

[ True fact: Solar and wind on an industrial scale can't operate without fossil fuels. Liberals don't want to believe this but it's true.

I realize I forgot to include CO2 in my post about things fear-driven liberals are scared of. Guns, non-organic food, genetically modified food, crosses, Bibles, anything Christian, rising acid seas, weather, .... and carbon dioxide. ]

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (895955)	10/23/2015 2:31:13 PM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575177

Some Homeland Security Employees Have Been Paid to Stay Home for Over a Year Here's a story that'll make even a lazy VA employee green with envy. ] WAPO - A year after auditors documented tens of thousands of federal workers on paid leave for at least a month and longer stretches that exceed a year, close to 100 Department of Homeland Security employees still are being paid not to work for more than a year. The large number persists even after the Obama administration urged agencies in June to curtail their reliance on what is known as administrative leave, the government’s go-to strategy for dealing with employees facing allegations of misconduct. Now Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who provided the numbers he received from DHS, is demanding answers from agency officials. In a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson Wednesday, he called the officials’ previous explanation for extended leave cases “too broad and vague to assess whether other actions might have been more appropriate.” Grassley said the agency failed to explain how it was meeting federal guidelines to reserve paid leave for rare circumstances when an employee poses a physical threat in the workplace, or how sidelining employees for so long is consistent with numerous rulings by the comptroller general that federal workers should not be sidelined for long periods for any reason. “DHS also failed to explain why such extended amounts of time were needed to conduct investigations into security issues, misconduct, or fitness for duty,” Grassley wrote. DHS was one large agency cited by the Government Accountability Office in October 2014 in the first report on administrative leave. The audit, first made public by The Washington Post, found that 53,000 civilian employees were kept home for one to three months during the three fiscal years that ended in September 2013. About 4,000 of them were idled for three months to a year and several hundred for one to three years. The tab for these workers exceeded $775 million in salary alone, auditors found. While employees stay home, they not only collect paychecks but also build their pensions, vacation and sick days and move up the federal pay scale.