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Community Energy Systems

Kids Fight Climate Change – What a glorious morning

This may be the beginning of the death of green house gas pollution in our atmosphere. To be clear it is not just carbon dioxide, but includes many other gases such as methane. It is the first generation, so dedicated, and it is magnificent to see. If I could

,,,,,,,,,//dance

in print

…………………..//I would.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/03/15/climate-change-strike-students-weir-dnt-newday-vpx.cnn

Kids protest as there’s no planet B

Kids protest as there’s no planet B

Mar—19—2019 03:26PM EST

Last Friday, students across 110 countries walked out of their classes in the massive Youth Climate Strike to bring attention to the effects of climate change. Hundreds of students filled New York’s City Hall Park, the air thrumming with excitement and anxiety. Some even hung from the lamp posts to get  a better view of the swarming crowd before police inevitably invited them to climb down. It was the first protest I’ve been to where children far outnumbered adults.

“I’m here because I don’t want to have to grow up in a world where I am terrified the people I love could lose their home,” Simone Rubin, a senior at NEST+M high school, told The Outline, referencing the potential affect sea level rise could have on New York City’s coast. “It’s unfair that we’re in this situation now because adults refuse to act and now we’re tasked with cleaning up an earth that we shouldn’t have had to do because we shouldn’t have put ourselves in this situation to begin with.”

The Youth Climate Strike was born out of the #FridaysforFuture demonstrations started by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. In August 2018, Thunberg started skipping school each Friday to protest outside of the Stockholm Parliament House, calling on leaders to prioritize environmental issues. Thunberg’s notoriety grew as she spoke at the U.N. climate talks last December, and the #FridaysforFuture hashtag received more and more attention. She’s since been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.

 

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Please go there and read most joyously. More next week.

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Lets Start A Wall of SHAME : I think it should be in Love Canal

Seriously, if Love Canal wouldn’t take it then there are Super Fund sites like Rocky Flats Weapons Factory that would. We could put up honorary members like the originators and manufacturers of Agent Orange, Whose ever idea leaded gasoline was, maybe the inventor and manufacturers of Mustard Gas. But the people who proposed and actually carried out atomic fracking must go near the top of the list.

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2018/02/nuclear_bomb_pennsylvania_proj.html

How about setting off a nuclear bomb to mine Pa.’s natural gas? It was considered

Fifty years ago Pennsylvania officials were presented a plan to detonate a nuclear device below north-central Pennsylvania. While the project never got past the planning stages it was part of a larger plan to use nuclear bombs in natural gas extraction. (Pennsylvania State Archives)

Editor’s note: This story has been update to fix broken art on this article.

HARRISBURG — In May 1966, Columbia Gas and the federal Atomic Energy Commission presented an audacious plan to a representative of the Governor’s Science Advisory Committee: A proposal to detonate a nuclear bomb more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima 3,500 feet below north-central Pennsylvania.

“At the present stage, this proposal involves a detonation of a ‘shot’ of perhaps 20,000 tons TNT equivalent at a location on the boundary between Centre and Clinton counties,” wrote Louis Roddis Jr., the governor’s representative in his report.

The goal was to use the nuclear blast to create a chamber that could then be filled with pressurized natural gas. Named Project Ketch, the proposal was an offshoot of another nuclear explosive-powered idea, Project Gasbuggy, which called on increasing natural gas production by detonating nuclear bombs underground to fracture rock deposits — nuclear fracking.

From the get-go, however, Roddis noted there would be challenges to the proposal. Safety considerations, he wrote, fell under three categories: seismic problems, immediate radioactivity problems, and long-term radioactivity problems.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Green New Deal Kicks Ass – Young Dems strike early and strike hard

I always try try to stay positive. This may have a chance. They will have to fight hard but it is their future. Not mine. I fought for 50 years. Now it is someone else’s turn. Good luck. God speed. Your only planet depends on it. We got no place else to go.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez

The Green New Deal, explained

An insurgent movement is pushing Democrats to back an ambitious climate change solution.

If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.

The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party claims to accept and understand it.

It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.

Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there’s been nothing to replace it.

Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution — renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.

Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) — a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past few months:

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Go there and READ. More next week.

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Germany Ditches Coal – Is it a model for the rest of the world

It is one thing for Germans in power to say they are giving up using coal. It is another thing to do it. It is another thing to get people to go along with it. I saw nothing about massive retraining programs or massive building projects but still I have always said “Green is Good for the economy”. We shall see if that is true. I say HURRAY.

https://www.apnews.com/1e6872051a0649409e97d6ee6e1d71dd

AP Explains: How Germany hopes to quit using coal

January 25, 2019

BERLIN (AP) — Germany wants to stop using coal, a major source of the carbon emissions that drive climate change. But finding the least disruptive way to get there has been a challenge.

A big question is not only when the last mines and power plants will close down, but how quitting coal can be done without generating drawn-out protests or harming the German economy.

A government-appointed panel of experts is poised to offer recommendations. Despite months of deliberations, the panel remained undecided on key issues ahead of a key meeting on Friday .  A short guide to the stakes at play and some proposed solutions:

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Go Germany. Go there and read. More next week.

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Japan Forsakes Nukes – I thought it would never happen

Many people have commented on the irony of the only ever to be nuked to be so heavily depemdent on nuclear power. It is difficult to be a well developed or advanced economy without many energy resources. While this is a baby step it does bode well for the future.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/orsted-signs-agreement-to-work-on-offshore-wind-projects-in-japan-.html?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cstory%7C&par=yahoo&yptr=yahoo

Danish firm Orsted signs agreement to work on offshore wind projects in Japan

  • Orsted is a world leader in wind energy and built the world’s first offshore wind facility in 1991.
  • Friday’s news represents the firm’s first involvement with the Japanese offshore wind energy sector.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Danish energy business Orsted to work together on offshore wind projects.

In an announcement Friday, TEPCO said that it had been “exploring offshore wind business opportunities” in both Japan and overseas. Orsted is a world leader in wind energy and built the world’s first offshore wind facility in 1991.

TEPCO said that the two companies would work on the Choshi offshore wind project. In November 2018, TEPCO announced that it had been carrying out a seabed survey to assess the feasibility of the project. They will also work towards what was described as a “strategic partnership for broader collaboration.”

 

 

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Continuing With the 2018 Wrap UP – Top 10 positive environmental stories for 2018

I want to say this up front. Donald Trump is an environmental and an alternative energy nightmare. The current attempt to roll back restrictions on Mercury emissions is just the latest killing of Americans. It is important to celebrate the good news as well as the bad.

Top 10 happy environmental stories of 2018

  • Throughout 2018, efforts to protect habitats and conserve threatened species were driven by governments, scientists, NGOs and indigenous communities.
  • The world pledged more conservation funding to protect the oceans, while protections for coastal ecosystems were also boosted.
  • Conservation initiatives steered by indigenous communities continue to garner attention and praise, not least because they tend to be more sustainable and effective than top-down programs.
  • These were among the upbeat, happy environmental and conservation stories we reported on in 2018.

“I like to envision the whole world as a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces of puzzle scattered all over the place. If you look at the whole picture it is overwhelming and terrifying, but if you work on your little part of the jigsaw and know that people all over the world are working on their little bits of it, that’s what will give you hope,” Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist and conservationist and Mongabay adviser, says in a post on her Facebook page.

Hope for global conservation is what we wish to evoke in our readers with some of the more upbeat environmental stories from the past year that we have pieced together from around the world in this list. These include some of your favorite happy stories, from the expansion of protected areas for wildlife, cancelled reclamation projects that posed coastal ecosystem threats, to the impactful role of indigenous communities in conservation.

1. More protection for wildlife corridors

 

On a housekeeping note, websites contact me all the time to say, you cite this source: this one is better or more up-to-date or broken and here we fixed it. they want inserted in the actual Blog post that relates directly to their “improvement”. I AM ONE guy. I can neither verify what they say is true OR get in edit mode and go back in time for years. So, I am going to post them here as addenda. Click on them and see what surprise you get.

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I saw you mentioned the Wikipedia guide to led lights on your page:

https://censys.org/date/2015/01

That’s a great resource. In fact, it inspired me to create my own guide here:

Everything You Need to Know About LED Lighting in 2019

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Go there and read. It is a really long article. More next week.

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Nothing Struck Me This Week – So I am taking this week off

It’s the holidays for goodness sakes. So I may take next week off too. I have never done that before. It has been a slow energy week. If it don’t interest me, I don’t print it.

Want To Save The Planet – Block the sun

It is a short article. So I will be brief. This is a film that reduces solar absorption by 10%. Combine that with a white roof and you got some major savings. Plus you dampen green house gases at the same time. HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/12/heat-rejecting-film-reduce-air-conditioning/

Heat-rejecting film could reduce air conditioning costs

It blocks 70 percent of incoming solar heat.

Climate change can be a vicious cycle when folks crank up the air conditioning during heat waves and add even more CO2 to the atmosphere. Scientists from MIT and the University of Hong Kong have developed a new type of window coating that could curb that trend. It remains highly transparent up to 89 degrees F (32 degrees Celsius), but beyond that, it becomes translucent like frosted glass. As a result, it reflects back up to 70 percent of the sun’s incoming heat, reducing interior temperatures and the load on your air conditioner.

To maximize heat blocking, the researchers inserted tiny water-filled spheres into a standard poly material. At temperatures starting around 85 degree F, the spheres start to shrink, squeezing out the liquid and forcing the poly fibers closer together. That gives the glass a frosted appearance, blocking 70 percent of the incoming heat while still letting a lot of visible light through.

Such films have been tried before but didn’t block heat that well. The MIT and Hong Kong teams realized that the water filled spheres needed to match the wavelength of infrared light responsible for most solar heating. After expanding the bubble size to 500 nanometers, the film became a much more effective heat-blocker.

MIT heat-rejecting film

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Google this if you want extra. Go there and reat the uplinks. More next week.

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How Many Times Can I Write, Coal Is Dead – I will let you know when I get tired

This was is the way it always going to happen. The market shifts after a slow pivot.Then it was going to bust loose suddenly. Clean Energy was going to chase coal all across the globe as it fought a rear guard action. Then it would become a novelty – OH LOOK they still use that stupid stuff. Then people will marvel at all the damage it had done and it would go away.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2018/11/02/indiana-utility-says-renewables-save-customers-4-billion-over-coal/1837469002/?fbclid=IwAR1N_p2XCFjH-OlFdVwiFlr3-lpQufzWCNqvsJuKrEvccVWfIkz6lX20VFY

This Indiana utility may have just put the final nail in coal’s coffin

The embers of the coal industry have been slowly fading in recent years, despite efforts by the Trump administration to reignite the flames.

But an announcement this week from a northern Indiana utility — in the heart of a state that ranks in the top 10 for both coal production and consumption — suggests the end may be nearer than some expect.

After having already announced plans to speed up the retirement of its coal power plants, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company said this week that it will switch to renewable energy to make its electricity instead.

Why? Because it’s cheaper. A lot cheaper, they said, to the tune of more than $4 billion over a few decades. Still, those long-term savings might come with a short-term price. The utility is asking for a raise in its rates to upgrade infrastructure.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The Economic Civil War In America – Rich white guys face off

It turns out that it is rich white progressives verses rich white recessivesthat is politically rivening this country. This leaves all of us in the middle angry and confused. I disagree with Buffet on this one, but I see why he is fighting the fight.

https://www.afr.com/news/world/north-america/warren-buffett-and-casino-boss-sheldon-adelson-clash-in-nevada-over-electricity-20181030-h17bc5

Warren Buffett and casino boss Sheldon Adelson clash in Nevada over electricity

by Trevor Hunnicutt

New York | Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and investor Warren Buffett are set for a desert showdown over electricity next week as the two billionaires’ interests collide on election ballots in Nevada.

At issue in the November 6 election is the cost and control of power from the neon lights shining on the Las Vegas Strip to the state’s gold mines.

A measure supported by Republican donor Adelson, who is also Las Vegas Sands Corp’s chairman, would force state legislators to break up control over much of the state’s electricity in effect held by a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, NV Energy. It would allow customers to choose their own power provider by 2023.

Buffett has supported liberal causes and backed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Unlike previous western duels, both sides in Nevada are showing up with cash. The energy tussle is shaping up as one of the more costly of an election season in which Democrats are trying to wrest control of at least one chamber of US Congress from Republicans.

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Go there and decide for yourself. More next week.:

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