Archive for the “Science” Category

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Dang skeeters – AWB

Senator Dick Lugar, 76 (that’s older than McCain) has made some major left turns here of late.

Now he’s teamed up with Barry Osama Obama.

U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) Friday said that they have introduced comprehensive legislation that will use alternative fuel technologies to greatly decrease America’s dependence on foreign oil.

“For all of our military might and economic dominance, the Achilles’ heel of the most powerful country on Earth is still the oil we cannot live without,” said Obama. “I could give you all plenty of reasons why it’s a good idea for this country to move away from an oil-based economy, but all we really need to know about the danger of our oil addiction comes directly from words spoken by Osama bin Laden: ‘Focus your operations on oil, especially in Iraq and the Gulf area, since this will cause them to die off [on their own].’”

Obama and Lugar’s bipartisan legislation, the American Fuels Act of 2006 (S. 2446), would take a four-step approach to reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. First, the legislation would spur investment in alternative fuels by increasing the production of cellulosic biomass ethanol (CBE) to 250 million gallons by 2012. It would also create an Alternative Diesel Standard that will require 2 billion gallons of alternatives diesels be mixed into the 40 billion gallon annual national diesel pool by 2015. This proposal is modeled of the Renewable Fuels Standard, which has proved successful in increasing ethanol production and use.

I’ll grant them that cellulosic biomass ethanol is a good thing because it’s made from straw and other plant waste instead of corn. However, that’s not fixing the fscking problem. Open up drilling in ANWR and in our coastal waters. E85 is NOT going to solve the oil crisis. More oil will.

Second, the legislation would help increase consumer demand for alternative fuels by providing a short-term, 35 cents per gallon tax credit for E85 fuel and by providing automakers with a $100 tax credit for every E85-capable Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV) produced.

Who gets the 35 cents?

Third, it would require the U.S. government to lead by example and increase access to alternative fuels by requiring the government to allow public access to alternative fueling stations located on federal government property and by requiring that only clean buses be eligible for federal cost sharing.

There goes Citilink federal subsidies.

Finally, the legislation would create a Director of Energy Security to oversee and keep America focused on its goal of energy independence. The Director of Energy Security would serve as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, the National Economic Council and the Homeland Security Council.

Yeah, I’m all for that. Let’s create yet another layer of government bureaucracy.

In other Lugar news, he’s the keynote speaker for a bunch of local tree hugging liberals that call themselves Grassroots Green.

Don’t Miss the Local Environmental Event of the Year!
Need to Go Green Conference
It’s all about progress, solutions, and forward movement. Join us to see what a greener northeast Indiana—and world—would look like and find ways to get involved.

And then there’s this: Senator Richard Lugar Drives A Prius - Might Be a TreeHugger

AWB

From NOAA’s National Climatic Information Center

UNITED STATES
Climate Summary
April 2008

The average temperature in April 2008 was 51.0 F. This was -1.0 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest April in 114 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

Global warming my ass. - AWB

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a “total crock of s—,” saying his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles.

Lutz, GM’s outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.

In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those “spewing virtual vitriol” at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were “missing the big picture.”

“What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is … hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support,” he said in a posting titled, “Talk About a Crock.”

From Lutz’s Blog

By Bob Lutz
GM Vice Chairman

It amazes me sometimes what kinds of things seem to “catch on” out there.

An offhand comment I made recently about the concept of global warming seems to have a lot of people heated, and it’s spreading through the Internet like ragweed. But I think that the people making a big deal out of it are missing the real point. My beliefs are mine and I have a right to them, just as you have a right to yours. But among my strongest beliefs is that my job is to do what makes the most business sense for GM.

AWB ™

A portion of Indiana lies within the Great Lakes basin including Fort Wayne. The only state entirely within the basin is Michigan, (see map below). There is a raging debate over who has the right to the water.

From the Escanaba Daily Press.
Water agreement a bad deal
MIDLAND — In 2001, the governors of states and premiers of Canadian provinces in the Great Lakes region reached an agreement on a charter for dealing with Great Lakes water issues. In order to be binding, it must be put into statute by each of the seven states and two provinces as well as the federal government. To date, only Minnesota, Illinois, Ontario and Quebec have done so.

[...]

Under the federal Water Resource Development Act of 1986 (WRDA), the governor of any Great Lakes state has the authority to veto proposed water diversions out of the Great Lakes basin by any other state. Michigan governors of both parties — including Gov. Jim Blanchard and Gov. John Engler — took advantage of this veto power to deny proposed diversion projects.

This has caused tension with other Great Lakes states, which unlike Michigan are not entirely within the basin. For example, while governors of Ohio or Indiana certainly would oppose diverting water to non-Great Lakes states, they may well support diversions to areas that are in their state but outside of the basin. These other states have claimed at times that Michigan is “hypocritical” in denying the use of water to out-of- basin communities in their states, while allowing access to water by communities, utilities and businesses anywhere in Michigan.

[...]

– Michigan would give up its sovereignty regarding water use decisions in the state. A majority of governors could halt particular water-using economic development projects in Michigan, even though this state lies entirely within the basin. Michigan would be turning over water use decisions to the governors of states with which we often compete for jobs.

From the Detroit Free Press.

Let us all in Michigan thank New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for bringing us together in defense of the Great Lakes. In a state that’s so politically fractured, it’s good to see so many leaders standing side by side on our shores, dukes up and determined.

Richardson, a Democratic candidate for president who will never carry Michigan now, had the nerve to suggest recently that the country needs a “national water policy,” given how parched things are in some states, like his, while “states like Wisconsin are awash in water.”

Since “states like Wisconsin” would include Michigan, battle lines have been drawn to safeguard our most precious natural resource against the nightmare scenario in which the sucking end of a pipeline is dipped into Lake Michigan under some new federal law that says water can be pumped to wherever people need it, even if they choose to live in a desert.

Not long after Richardson’s splash, the state Legislature took up way overdue bills to join a regional compact to keep Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes region. Then Gov. Jennifer Granholm joined the other Great Lakes governors in a message to all presidential candidates demanding to know what plans they have for protecting and restoring the Great Lakes. And in Washington, two members of the Michigan congressional delegation testified on a bill to create a “21st Century Water Commission” for the nation, warning that any commission that tries to tap the Great Lakes invites regional warfare.

“If anyone would try to divert water, I would suspect we’d call up the militia and take up arms,” said the usually reserved Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids. “We feel that serious about it.”

So Michigan’s ready to bring out their militia to protect their water. It’s not really “their” water, in my opinion anyway. Surrounding states within the basin have a right to the water as well. Reselling it has a commodity to states outside the basin should not be allowed to happen.

Calling the legislation a “subversive attempt” to tap the Great Lakes, Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, said people cannot just keep moving to places without the natural resources to sustain them.

“My constituents are not going to support diverting Great Lakes water, particularly to areas of the United States that have lured jobs and people from Michigan,” she said.

Two very valid points. Maybe those living in Phoenix should shut the sprinklers off on their golf courses.

So - who’s water is it?

DT

Mike Sylvester brought it up mandatory recycling on this post. For those like Charlotte that have the time and inclination to do so, more power to you. For AWB, I think mandatory recycling is a pile of rubbish.

Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Montana, could handle all of America’s trash for the next century—with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.

The EPA itself acknowledges that the risks to humans (and presumably plants and animals) from modern land-fills are virtually nonexistent. The agency has concluded that landfills constructed according to EPA regulations can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years—one every 50 years (EPA 1990, 1991; Goodstein 1995). To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States,and celery, pears, and lettuce are all considerably more dangerous to humans than are modern landfills (Ames, Magaw, and Gold 1987;Gold, Ames, and Slone 2002).

The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests exceeds by a factor of twenty the amount of wood and paper that is consumed by the world each year (Lomborg 2001,115).

Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice as much output per unit of energy as we did 50 years ago, and five times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as much metal as in 1970, and optical fiber carries the same number of calls as 625 copper wires did 20 years ago.

Bridges are built with less steel, because steel is stronger and improved engineering permits the use of even less. Automobile and truck engines consume less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce fewer emissions. Packaging has been made both stronger and lighter, yielding less breakage and consuming fewer resources. The list goes on and on, and any analysis that forgets or ignores innovation will always produce incorrect conclusions.

Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environmental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment(1989, 191) says that it is “usually not clear whether secondary manufacturing [such as recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing processes.” In-deed, the Office of Technology Assessment goes on to explain why: Recycling changes the nature of pollution, sometimes increasing it and sometimes decreasing it.

For example, the EPA examined both virgin paper processing and recycled paper processing for toxic substances. Five toxic substances were found only in virgin processes, eight only in recycling processes, and twelve in both processes. Among these twelve, all but one were present in higher levels in the recycling processes.

Today’s pepenedores of Mexico work the nation’s dumps from Mexico City to the U.S. border, hoping to find anything that has been missed by the men who push the garbage carts on the city streets, or those who drive the trucks transporting the trash to the dump. Full-time work can yield $25 to $40 per week (Cearley 2002;Medina 1998a, 1998b). The zabaleen of Cairo specialize in particular products, with all members of the family assigned specific roles.They manage to recycle some 80 percent of what they pick up, including the filaments in light bulbs (Mursi 2000; Voluntary ServiceOverseas 1998). America’s transmigrantes are perhaps higher on the economic scale, buying pickup trucks from junk yards, loading them with appliances and furniture scavenged from the side of the street and transporting the load 2,000 miles to the neighborhoods of Guatemala or Costa Rica, where these treasures—truck and all—find a ready market (Yardley 2002).

So there you have it, let’s put all 12 million illegals to work scavenging the dumps.

Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. In sharp contrast, however, mandatory recycling programs, in which people are directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off. Such programs force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard. On balance, mandatory recycling programs lower our wealth.

The complete article, the “Eight Great Myths of Recycling” can be found here (.PDF file)

My recycling bin.

AWB

Bruce Henderson, The Charlotte ObserverBob Teixeira decided it was time to take a stand against U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

So last fall the Charlotte musician and guitar instructor spent $1,200 to convert his 1981 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil. He bought soybean oil in 5-gallon jugs at Costco, spending about 30 percent more than diesel would cost.

His reward, from a state that heavily promotes alternative fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He has been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal government.

To legally use veggie oil, state officials told him, he would have to first post a $2,500 bond.

What a crock of butter shit.

[..] Speedway sting

Teixeira’s story began near Lowe’s Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.

The investigators spotted Teixeira’s passing bumper sticker: “Powered by 100% vegetable oil.”

“It was like some twist of fate that put me there,” he said. “It was like I was asking for them to stop me.”

Wow. Read the whole crock here.

AWB