Change for the better, Politicizing for the worse

With the US government taking climate change as a serious threat politicians and lobbyists now step in to ruin a good intention. The deffinition of "renewable" is now being lobbied. Lobbyists for energy companies that ruin our environment are trying to get federal money for doing what they have always been doing like burning spent coal or capturing methane and re-using it or for burning food waste. The point of subsidizing renewable energy is to help wind and solar and wave to gain a footing in the energy market. Certainly we want companies to do things like capture their waste and re-use it but a federal subsidy is not needed to encourage this. We will see how watered down this vital effort gets.

The world business summit on climate change will occur next weekend and companies like shell are using the rhetoric of change while changing little. Shell's big plan is to just wait for carbon capture technology to develop in the next 10-20years and then use it when it is cheap enough for them to want to use it. Climate Change has a time line and waiting that long to reduce emissions is ineffective in mitigating Climate Change. This summit should be amusing as businesses come together to explain why we should do something about Climate Change while they do very little.

Steven Chu is the US Energy Secretary and he is making some contentious decisions. First, Chu is favoring the building of new coal fired power plants. This is unacceptable because every coal plant built today will burn coal until at least 2050. The understanding of environmentalists was that Chu would not allow another to be built under his watch, Chu is not gung-ho about coal plants, but is giving the nod to build more. Chu is also trying to get some reactors going that turn spent nuclear waste into a form that has a drastically smaller radioactive half-life. By doing this Chu would be making the spent nuclear fuel storage facility planned for mountains in Nevada unneeded. Finally, Chu is reducing the government funding of the hydrogen car, many are mad about this but hydrogen is a nowhere technology that was loved by GM and Bush because they could talk about it all day without the risk of having to make a single hydrogen car because there are too many obstacles for this technology. Also, to get fuel for these cars is so energy intensive it makes the car not the environmental thing that people want it to be.

Restructuring our infrastructure to be more "environmental" creates a lot of jobs!

Pollution damages our bodies we all know, but a study that is highlighted by National Geographic explains some of the newest research on the subject.

Canada is pulling oil out of a thing called the Alberta Tar Sands. It is drastically more energy intensive to get oil from sand fields then from tar deposits. The Alberta Tar Sands have 350 years of extraction left but it is expensive to extract and very costly to the environment as these sands lay below a forest and multiple meters of soil. In the Pacific NW of the US 10% of all oil comes from these sands, this topic is very important and you should research it more.

12/24/08: Environmental Economic stuff

The economist gives a good article on alternative engines and focuses on steam. It is a bit satirical but the solution to environmental degradation (in the popular media it is a.k.a. "Climate Change") needs to be as broad as possible.

The price of oil needs to be high to create large investments in alternative energies and a "sustainable" economy. But, the price of oil is low. This article shows what happens to investment in a sustainable economy when the USA goes into a depression and the price of oil is low.

The economist supplies another great article on computers and how green this whole technology thing is . The article gives some good information on how sustainable the carbon emissions of the computer world are. Currently, Computing and Telecommunications produce 2% of global emissions which is comparable to the amount that aviation emits (plane travel). The article did not specify what was being emitted by technology use, but apparently it is 2% of global emissions of all things. Pollution is not a single thing, some pollution is preferable to other pollution. So, 2% of global emissions does not mean much. But, the article is worth reading, and so is most of the economist.