How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
JEFF GOODELLPosted Jan 06, 2010 8:15 AM
Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming in Tim Dickinson’s “The Climate Killers.”
This was supposed to be the transformative moment on global warming, the tipping point when America proved to the world that capitalism has a conscience, that we take the fate of the planet seriously. According to the script, Congress would pass a landmark bill committing the U.S. to deep cuts in carbon emissions. President Obama would then arrive in Copenhagen for the international climate summit, armed with the moral and political capital he needed to challenge the rest of the world to do the same. After all, wasn’t this the kind of bold move the Norwegians were anticipating when they awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?
As we now know, it didn’t work out that way. Obama arrived in Copenhagen last month without any legislation committing the U.S. to reduce carbon pollution. Instead of reaching agreement on how to stop cooking the planet, the summit devolved into bickering over who bears the most blame for turning up the heat. The world once again missed an opportunity to avert disaster — and the delay is likely to have deadly consequences. In recent years, we have moved from talking about the possibility of climate change to watching it unfold before our eyes. The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world’s cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.
Our collective response to the emerging catastrophe verges on suicidal. World leaders have been talking about tackling climate change for nearly 20 years now — yet carbon emissions keep going up and up. “We are in a race against time,” says Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington who has fought for sharp reductions in planet-warming pollution. “Mother Nature isn’t sitting around waiting for us to get our political act together.” In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation. “It was the most aggressive and corrupt lobbying campaign I’ve ever seen,” says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic consultant.
Why are there four million fewer vehicles on the roads in 2009? Think gas prices, transit, tweeting teens and a car-to-driver ‘saturation point’
Martin Mittelstaedt
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Jan. 04, 2010 9:18PM ESTLast updated on Tuesday, Jan. 05, 2010 2:45AM EST
Americans’ infatuation with their cars has endured through booms and busts, but last year something rare happened in the United States: The number of automobiles actually fell.
The size of the U.S. car fleet dropped by a hefty four million vehicles to 246 million, the only large decline since the U.S. Department of Transportation began modern recordkeeping in 1960. Americans bought only 10 million cars – and sent 14 million to the scrapyard.
The decline in sales from previous years came despite 2009’s cash-for-clunkers program, in which the U.S. government gave Americans up to $4,500 (U.S.) to trade in their gas guzzlers for new, more fuel-efficient cars – a program that saw nearly 700,000 vehicles scrapped.
And the overall drop in car ownership has prompted speculation that the long American love affair with the car is fading. Analysts cite such diverse factors as high gas prices, the expansion of many municipal transit systems, and the popularity of networking websites among teenagers replacing cars as a way of socializing.
“We’ve reached a sort of saturation point in this country” when it comes to cars, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental think tank based in Washington.
The institute is issuing an analysis Wednesday that contends the drop in 2009 isn’t a one-time fluke caused by the recession, and that U.S. car ownership is likely to be entering a longer-term decline that will see the fleet drop by another 25 million by 2020.
Big Oil never wanted to be here, in 4,300 feet of water far out in the Gulf of Mexico, drilling through nearly five miles of rock.
It is an expensive way to look for oil. Chevron Corp. is paying nearly $500,000 a day to the owner of the Clear Leader, one of the world’s newest and most powerful drilling rigs. The new well off the coast of Louisiana will connect to a huge platform floating nearby, which cost Chevron $650 million to build. The first phase of this oil-exploration project took more than 10 years and cost $2.7 billion —
Things have gone pretty dismally in Copenhagen. The Developed Countries tried to bully the Developing Countries. The Newly Industrializing Countries sniffed at the DeIndustrializing Countries. The US yelled at China and China yelled back and jingled the coins in its pockets. After all that excitement I must say:
:}
Community Energy Systems is a nonprofit 501c3 organization chartered in Illinois in Sangamon County. As such we are dependent on public donations for our continued existence. We also use Adsense as a fundraiser. Please click on the ads that you see on this page, on our main page and on our Bulletin Board (Refrigerator Magnets) and you will be raising money for CES. We say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all who do.
Gruel is a food preparation consisting of some type of cereal— oat, wheat or rye flour, or also rice— boiled in water or milk. It is a thinner version of porridge that may be more often drunk than eaten and need not even be cooked. Historically, gruel, often made from millet or barley, or in hard times of chestnut flour and even the less tannic acorns of some oaks, has been the staple of the human diet, especially that of the peasantry. The importance of gruel as a form of sustenance is especially noted for invalids[1] and recently weaned children.
Gruel consumption has traditionally been associated with poverty. Gruel is a colloquial expression of any slop that is of unknown character, e.g. pea soup; soup is derived from sop, the slice of bread which was soaked with broth or thin gruel.[2
Copenhagen climate change summit – final day live blog
World leaders are still trying to thrash out a last minute compromise climate deal. These are the final day’s main developments:
• In a disappointing speech Obama admitted that the talks are in the balance.
• Leaked documents showed a draft agreement is extremely weak.
• Obama held two crucial talks with the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
4.43pm:
Greenpeace has expressed its disgust at the draft Copenhagen accord currently doing the rounds.
Its climate campaigner Joss Garman said:
This latest draft is so weak as to be meaningless. It’s more like a G8 communique than the legally binding agreement we need. It doesn’t even include a timeline to give it legal standing or an explicit temperature target. It’s hard to imagine our leaders will try to present this document to the world and keep a straight face.
All this haggling is going to get us right where the top 500 POLLUTERS want us, sucking up their soot and poisons:
4.57pm:
A third draft of the climate is agreement being considered by world leaders, according to AP. But they are some way off the pace, according to our environment editor John Vidal – he’s looking at sixth version.
For what its worth the third version reinstates targets omitted from earlier ones. It says rich countries should reduce their greenhouse emissions by at least 80% by the year 2050.
It adds that developing countries’ emissions should be 15-30% below “business as usual”.
Stay tuned for more details on that later version.
5.28pm:
Tim Jones climate policy officer from World Development Movement, joins the chorus of disgust.
This summit has been in complete disarray from start to finish, and now appears to be culminating in a shameful and monumental failure that will condemn millions of people around the world to untold suffering. The leaders of rich countries have refused to lead and instead sought to bribe and bully developing nations to sign up to the equivalent of a death warrant. The best outcome now is no deal. Leaders of rich countries should go home and adopt new year resolutions to become low carbon economies and pay their climate debt. Then we may have a chance of a properly just and effective agreement in 2010.
WASHINGTON — The White House complex and the federal government are going green — and not just with Christmas trees and holly.
As President Obama meets with world leaders at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen today, the government he runs at home is quietly engaged in an unprecedented effort to reduce its carbon footprint, increase energy efficiency, conserve water, cut waste and more.
In the complex that includes the White House, that means more efficient heating and cooling systems as well as organic paint, low-flow toilets and lights that turn off by themselves. Even the 800 Christmas ornaments adorning the 18-foot tree in the White House Blue Room were recycled from previous administrations in a nod to the environment and the bad economy.
In many of the federal government’s other 500,000 buildings, the effort to go green includes cutting the amount of garbage produced in half and installing more efficient lights.
“This is a big leap forward for the federal government,” says Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of Obama’s White House Council on Environmental Quality. And the effort will be “sustainable itself beyond this president.”
Sutley says the federal government is the country’s single largest energy consumer, using 1.6% of all the power used nationwide, so reducing energy consumption will mean big savings.
The nation is the world’s second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, behind China, and the cuts could help there, as well, environmentalists say.
Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth says, “There are many economies of scale that President Obama can achieve by forcing the federal government to rethink its energy habits.Dot Dot Dot (as they say)
Environmental groups say Obama’s efforts go far beyond what’s been done before. “There’s real substance behind the rhetoric,” says Joel Makower, editor of GreenBiz.com, which reports on the greening of mainstream business.
Under a 15-page executive order Obama signed in October, government agencies must implement a host of changes, Sutley says. Among the requirements:
• Agencies must reduce waste by 50% by 2015.
• Agencies must show a 26% improvement in water efficiency by 2020.
• All new buildings and any major renovations to existing buildings must be eligible for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification given by the U.S. Green Building Council to environmentally responsible buildings. In and around Washington, the Pentagon and the ornate 121-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House are in the process of becoming LEED-certified.
• The government’s 600,000 vehicles must operate with 30% less petroleum by 2020.
Pentagon officials, Sutley says, are “thinking about how they can power their vehicles in different ways, so they don’t have to transport as much fuel,” a change that would save money and improve safety for servicemembers.
:}
So Copenhagen was pretty much a bust but it’s Christmas so let’s rock out!
No one bothers to ask themselves, “how does a parellel anti-global warming conference get set up in Copenhagen”? We know how the pro-climate people got there. The world’s environmental organizations sent them. Some of them live there or are close enough to drive. The Government people got there on their countries dime as did the UN people. But how did the aptly named Lord Mockton get there? The answer is easy – The Carbon Industry sent them:
In 2006, according to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans saw “solid evidence” for global warming. By this fall, that figure had dropped to 57 percent—and just 36 percent said they believed that humans are to blame. That’s good news for climate change skeptics and deniers, who have spent years trying to perpetuate the illusion that the reality of climate change is up for debate. Never mind that the scientific consensus is firmly on the side of global warming—for anyone seeking an alternate view, there’s an entire parallel universe where junk science and bogus statistics ricochet through an echo chamber of kooky blogs, “nonpartisan” institutes, and fake “green” and “citizen” groups that are often acting on behalf of the oil and coal industry.
This is one of the most comprehensive articles I have seen and I urge everyone to read the whole thing. These pricks think they can BURN us off the planet. I hope they are wrong.
OK now that I have everybody’s attention. The people who do not accept Man Caused Global Atmospheric Destabilization (some people call it Global Warming I don’t) are insane or delusional. They just don’t want people to notice the obvious. They try to draw the arguement so far back into the clouds because if they admit MANKIND is contributing to the mess then the rest of their rhetorical walls begin to tumble. But to ignore this is pretty hard to do.
SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian authorities Friday issued a shipping alert over a gigantic iceberg that is gradually approaching the country’s southwest coast.
The Bureau of Meteorology said the once-in-a-century cliff of ice, which dislodged from Antarctica about a decade ago before drifting north, was being monitored using satellites.
“Mariners are advised that at 1200 GMT on December 9, an iceberg approximately 1,700 kilometres (1,054 miles) south-southwest of the West Australian coast was observed,” it said, giving the iceberg’s coordinates.
“The iceberg is 140 square kilometres in area — 19 kilometres long by eight kilometres wide.”
Experts believe the iceberg — known as B17B — is likely to break up as it enters warmer waters nearer Australia, creating hundreds of smaller icebergs in a hazard to passing ships.
“It’s still 1,700 kilometres away, so it’s quite a long way away, it’s not really on our doorstep yet but it’s been heading steadily towards us,” glaciologist Neal Young said Thursday.
This satellite image shows several icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf in 2000. The iceberg B17B on the left has been spotted 1,700 kilometres from Australia. (Australian Antarctic Division/Associated Press)
Scientists say that ice shelf calvings such as the one in 2000 happen about once every 30 years.
Wish they would make up there minds…is this a once every 30 years experience or once every 100 year event…but in a way it is so monumental that it is amazing that there is a Climate Summit going on and the deniers have everyone talking about stolen emails and NOT this. Cover your ears and go lalalalalalala.
Strewth! An iceberg passes under Sydney Harbour Bridge. Photograph: Dennis Degnan/Corbis
A crowd of suntanned Australians stand at Sydney harbour. As is traditional, they are having a barbecue. Someone has set up a cricket wicket in the middle of the road. The mood is a happy one. Then, all of a sudden, the light disappears from the sky. Men and women alike turn round to find a 50bn-tonne iceberg where the sun once was. This is B17B, the superberg, and it’s headed right for them, bringing with it a nightmare microclimate: cyclones filled with swirling tinnies, raining wombats and vicious blizzards (to enable the title).
The latest Guardian/film/films production – working title: The Blizzard of Oz – promises to take the disaster movie where it’s never been before. Australia. Inspired by latest events, we plan to tell a tale of ecological disaster that will keep you on the edge of your seat for pushing three hours and guarantees a flying CGI kangaroo every 15 minutes.
To clarify: the latest news seem to suggest that B17B, a 140 sq km block of ice that has broken free from the Antarctic ice shelf, looks set to miss Australia altogether. What’s more, it was heading for the west coast, not the east, so featuring Sydney would be a stretch, too. But this is the movies; rules get bent. Which is how we came to cast Stefan Dennis in the lead role.
Community Energy Systems is a nonprofit 501c3 organization chartered in Illinois in Sangamon County. As such we are dependent on public donations for our continued existence. We also use Adsense as a fundraiser. Please click on the ads that you see on this page, on our main page and on our Bulletin Board (Refrigerator Magnets) and you will be raising money for CES. We say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all who do.
:}
While the people who don’t want to admit that people are pooping on the planet so much that we are destabilizing the planet by citing bogus statistics or hacking emails that appear to challenge the L shaped curve for global warming over the last hundred years…the real destabilization continues. Which is the real point
An iceberg at Bauer Bay on the west coast of Macquarie Island has drifted from Antarctica. Credit: Brett Quinton / Australian Antarctic Division
At least a hundred icebergs have trekked from Antarctica toward New Zealand, arriving at islands off New Zealand in recent weeks after being set adrift perhaps 9 years ago.”The larger icebergs seen from Macquarie Island are tabular in shape, which indicates they have calved relatively recently, probably from one of the massive icebergs which originally calved from the Ross Ice Shelf nearly 9 years ago,” said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young in a statement released earlier this month.
“Everyone on station has their eyes glued to the horizon trying to spot new icebergs,” said Cyril Munro, acting station leader on Macquarie Island. “The scientists working on the southern tip of the island were astounded to see an iceberg of about 2 kilometers [1.2 miles] in length,” he said.
:}
Here are several maps if you would like to see the icebergs:
The alert comes three years after cold weather and favorable ocean currents saw dozens of icebergs float close to New Zealand’s southern shores for the first time in 75 years.
New Zealand maritime officials have issued navigation warnings for the area south of the country.
“It’s an alert to shipping to be aware these potential hazards are around and to be on the lookout for them,” Maritime New Zealand spokeswoman Sophie Hazelhurst said.
dot dot dot
Large numbers of icebergs last floated close to New Zealand in 2006, when some were visible from the coastline in the first such sighting since 1931.
It is rare for whole icebergs to drift so far north before melting, but a cold snap around southern New Zealand and favorable ocean currents have again combined to push the towering visitors to the region intact.
dot dot dot
Young said that having the icebergs end up near New Zealand is not necessarily linked to global warming, but said that the rate of icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf in recent years may have increased due to dramatically rising temperatures on the continent over the past 60 years.
Community Energy Systems is a nonprofit 501c3 organization chartered in Illinois in Sangamon County. As such we are dependent on public donations for our continued existence. We also use Adsense as a fundraiser. Please click on the ads that you see on this page, on our main page and on our Bulletin Board (Refrigerator Magnets) and you will be raising money for CES. We say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all who do.
:}
Here is a web site that suffered from lack of support, has 4 no 3 no 2 days left, and a point to make:
Energy independence is the new creationism; nuclear power its deity. As the head glow for nuclear’s new dawn, you can’t do better than Aris Candris. He’s president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric, the company aiming to build 14 of 25 new nuclear reactors planned in the United States. Candris also sums up everything that’s wrong with the nuclear power industry’s orchestrated revival — the deceptions, the manipulated numbers, the false promises and the sheer swindle of taxpayer dollars for a technology with a lethal past and an unproven future. Candris’ Nov. 9 tribute to nuclear in The Wall Street Journal tells the tall tale.
He pretty much says the same thing no matter where he speaks – More Nukes..More Nukes
Nukes Good – Renewables Bad
:}
Aris says: Only nukes can supply the huge electrical demand. My source is bigger than your source.
Pierre says:
Actually, that’s more true of nuclear, far less so of renewable. Not a single nuclear power plant has been approved and built in the United States since the 1970s. The newest one, Watts Bar in Tennessee, began construction in 1973 and went online in 1996 — a 23-year span that multiplied its initial costs, to $7 billion. Candris gives the impression that a slew of plants are about to be built. Not so. A slew of plants applied for licenses, but only because the federal government is offering up to $1 billion in tax credits per new nuclear plant (once electricity production begins), as long as the application was in by the end of 2008.
:}
Aris says: Nukes planned will come in starting in 2016. My source is faster than your source.
Pierre says:
Look for pigs flying around Turkey Point, too, because Westinghouse’s claims are identical to those of Areva, a French company building what was supposed to be a next-generation nuclear plant in Finland — quick, safe, cheap. The plant, Europe’s first in 30 years, was supposed to open last summer. Finns will be lucky if it’s open by 2012. It was to cost $3.5 billion. The cost is now creeping close to $7 billion and counting.
:}
Aris says: Renewables, conservation, efficiency weak. Look at France.
Pierre says:
But French electricity consumption is 7,200 kilowatts per person per year, 44 percent less than the American consumption of 12,900 kilowatts per person. France is a model — of conservation. (Candris is wrong about France’s independence: it imports all of its oil and natural gas.)In the United States between 1995 and 2008, electricity consumption increased by 22 percent, more than the projected increase over the next 21 years. The country coped without gobs of nuclear power — and can cope again as renewables like wind and solar increase their share of electricity generation, from 5 percent today (compared with nuclear’s 20 percent) faster and safer. Imagine if renewables had the kind of obscene tax subsidies the nuclear industry is receiving.
:}
Aris says: ALL those wimpy girlie technologies are expensive and US manly Nukes are cheap.
Pierre says:
In fact, nuclear energy is more expensive than solar or wind energy. Take Florida Power & Light’s plan to build two new nuclear reactors sometime over the next 12 years (it’s not clear when, though the company is already socking it to customers by making them pay for construction today. No other state but Georgia allows that con). The projected cost of the two reactors is $18 billion. It’ll certainly go up well beyond that by the time they’re done, but go with the $18 billion figure. The two reactors will produce 2,234 megawatts of electricity. That comes out to $8 million per megawatt at the opening bell. FPL just started operating a 25-megawatt solar-power plant in DeSoto County. Cost: $152 million, or $6 million per megawatt — $2 million cheaper than the projected cost of the nuclear reactors. With wind, it’s even cheaper. A Chinese-American consortium on Oct. 29 announced plans for a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas. Cost: $1.5 billion, or $2.5 million per megawatt. Cheap nuclear power? Demonstrably not.
Keep in mind that wind and solar farms require zero raw materials to operate, and minimal security. Terrorists aren’t about to crash planes into wind turbines or solar panels. Operating a nuclear plant is said to be cheaper than operating gas- or coal-fired plants — but not when security, liability and potential catastrophes are figured into the equation. And for all the safety advances of the past 30 years, the current fleet of about 100 reactors has a projected Chernobyl- or Three Mile Island-like severe accident rate of one every 100 years. Would you like to live near those odds?
The nuclear power industry can’t even persuade its own investors to bet on it, so it’s going after tax dollars and captive customers to pay for its dreamed-up expansion. Simple solution: If nuclear power can make it on its own, fine. But it’s far too dangerous, too uncertain, too costly and too tempting to terrorists to be subsidized by taxpayers and unwilling customers. So far, the nuclear power industry is betting equally and exclusively on public dollars and gullibility. Don’t let it get away with it.
:}
Pierre is right and Aris is wrong. Please support him.
Just for kicks I typed Energy Efficiency into the Google Search engine and guess what turned up? You would think it would be pages devoted to helping you out. What you get instead are major corporations that…well are a big part of the problem.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) envisions a modernized, more energy-efficient America. Through targeted investments, the ARRA seeks to update and renovate our infrastructure, making us more energy-efficient and self-sustaining far into the future.
At Eaton, we have been living this vision and are ready to do whatever it takes to help the country get back to work.
Eaton has the power management solutions you need to make your products and business more productive, efficient and sustainable. From electrical power quality and distribution systems to innovative solutions in power control systems for performance, fuel economy and safety, Eaton has the solutions that power businesses across nearly any application.
Case Studies
Read about how GreenOrder clients have cut costs and increased revenue through environmental innovation.
Business Strategy & Change Management
Sustainability can be a source of innovation and value, but companies must make it their own — figuring out how green can enhance their unique business situation.
A major shift is underway in how large companies are thinking about energy and the environment. Once seen simply as costs associated with regulatory compliance and risk reduction, now some of the world’s smartest corporate leaders are using sustainability to win – making it a source of innovation that creates better products, stronger profits, and greater enterprise value.
“If you just create a green ghetto in your company, you miss it. You have to figure out how to integrate green into the DNA of your whole business.”
–GreenOrder’s Andrew Shapiro, quoted in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times magazine cover story, “The Power of Green” (2007)
There are many reasons for this, including the need for energy security, concerns about climate change, increased transparency, and changing consumer preferences.
What’s clear is this: Companies today need a robust sustainability strategy and implementation plan – just as, a decade earlier, they had to reinvent themselves in response to globalization and the digital revolution.The historical comparisons are instructive. The most successful companies in the 1990s realized that the Internet could not be relegated to the IT department, but rather required a strategic response across the company. Sustainability is a similarly transformative trend that affects company functions ranging from research and product development to human resources and sales.GreenOrder has the hands-on experience and diverse expertise to deal with this complex challenge and craft game-changing green initiatives in response.
How does a business make green part of its unique “genetic” identity?StrategyIt starts with the right strategy. GreenOrder has helped to create some of the most successful green initiatives in business history, including GE’s award-winning ecomagination initiative. We know how to align sustainability with a company’s business goals.
LRN has a singular mission: to help inspire principled performance in business. We believe that a corporate culture that governs according to shared values is the ultimate driver of productivity, profit and long-term value. Companies with a reputation for responsible conduct attract and retain the best employees, customers, partners and investors – yielding long-term, sustainable competitive advantage.We provide everyone in an enterprise with the knowledge, tools and solutions they need to make better decisions, take better actions and work according to higher standards of business conduct. Our offerings mitigate the risk of costly ethical lapses and compliance failures, while building trust and earning the company a reputation for lawful and ethical conduct.Experience and expertise
Our dedicated team of nearly 300 business professionals brings a wealth of diverse experience and expertise – ranging from law and philosophy to education and multimedia, as well as software and technology – to develop innovative solutions that address critical business needs.We also maintain extensive relationships with subject-matter experts from business, government and academia who focus on governance, ethics, compliance and culture management issues. We also draw upon our proprietary expert legal network.Like-minded community
We are proud to be at the center of a community of like-minded organizations that have a common vision for acting lawfully and ethically, according to higher standards of business conduct. Our community includes companies of all sizes and industries as well as affiliations with professional associations and trade organizations with the shared purpose of promoting responsible conduct among employees, clients, suppliers and shareholders.
Our long-term partnerships with more than 350 client companies, including some of the most respected and successful businesses in the world, have enabled us to create an active and growing community with a common interest. Together we acquire and disseminate proven strategic and tactical insights and develop solutions based on real-world experiences. Over our history, we have provided millions of people in more than 100 different countries with the knowledge they need to foster a better understanding of the legal, ethical and cultural considerations that impact their culture and their business.
Notice they say the “carbon plume may eventually drift (DRIFT) under Ohio”. Notice the guy says everything will be fine until SOMETHING goes wrong. Notice one of the commentators says that depending on the amount of ammonia used the site could be considered a hazmat accident waiting to happen?
This article is from a very nifty issue of Scientific America:
CARBON CAPTURE: A relatively small unit in the shadow of the smokestack at the Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virginia has begun capturing carbon dioxide from the plant’s flue gas and injecting it underground for permanent storage.
NEW HAVEN, W.Va.—A 100-story smokestack belches a roiling, white cloud of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other leftover gases after burning daily as much as 12,000 tons of coal at the Mountaineer Power Plant—a total of 3.5 million tons a year. The facility just outside the town of New Haven boasts a single 65-meter-high boiler capable of generating enough steam to pump out 1,300 megawatts of electricity—enough to power nearly one million average American homes a month—continuously. And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO2 billowing from its stack is being captured in an industrial unit rising from the concrete in its shadow and then pumped underground for storage. In case you were wondering, this last phase is called “clean coal”.
“Mountaineer is the turning point,” says Philippe Joubert, president of Alstom Power, a subsidiary of France-based Alstom, SA. “We believe coal is a must, but we believe coal must be clean.”
The small stream of flue gas travels to the carbon-capture unit through plastic pipes reinforced with fiberglass and is cooled to between –1 and 21 degrees Celsius from the 55-degree C temperature at which it emerges from the other environmental technology add-ons that strip out the fly ash, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The carbon-capture machine’s loud hum comes primarily from the whirring of fans to further cool the flue gas, along with the steady jostling of the agitator that keeps solids from settling out in the tall tank where the CO2 is captured. There is also the continuous chug of the compressors pressurizing that captured CO2 into a liquid at 98 kilograms per square centimeter. An incessant rumble also emanates from the regenerator stacks, as well, where steam heat and pressure combine to turn ammonium bicarbonate (part of the CO2-stripping process) back into baker’s ammonia (ammonium carbonate), siphoning off the captured CO2 in the operation. A little bit of ammonium sulfate—a fertilizer—is also produced; it is shipped to a farmer’s cooperative just across the river in Ohio.
This is a perfect example of an Oil and Gas shill. Actually at this point I guess I should call him a Carbon front man. Ever notice how it’s always a man? He ignores the subsidies paid to the Oil and Gas business right now, which are huge. He ignores the impact of the pollution (externalities you know). He ignores the fact that, as predicted, we are starting to use oil shale and oil sands which are marginal materials because we are running out of resources. Not because of “magical” new technologies. He ignores the simple fact that if everyone in the world heated their water using geothermal or solar we could cut consumption in half….
I loved the true story of the Nigerian energy worker who, having received a pay check for $900, amended the figure to read $9,000. As the reporter wittily put it, “The check fraud proved entirely successful … right up to the point where he attempted to cash it.” That’s kind of how I feel about the renewable energy revolution. It will prove entirely successful in the eyes of the public and media — right up to the point where the lights start going out. And those lights will soon start going out, according to a new report.
I fully understand the romantic attraction of the clean energy revolution and the rush to replace ‘dirty’ fossil fuels. In the light of the war on carbon it’s a no brainer, right? Which is precisely why, just as diminishing EU and UK subsidies are prompting an industry exodus westward, the British renewables industry may be about to be given an unexpected investment shot in the arm from some of the world’s biggest multinational companies in one of the biggest analogs to the adage “I gave at the church,” in this case the environmentalism church. Companies, it seems, in their rush to appear politically correct are oblivious to how that renewable revolution is ushering in a new dark age in Britain.
Why the multinationals?
Speaking at a UK Confederation of British Industries (CBI) conference in October, the Bank of America’s head of power and utilities, John Lynch, named companies like Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and IKEA (the Swedish home goods company) as being potential new investors for Britain’s offshore wind industry. “This is the technology that the UK is leading in, and these companies are looking at ways to get involved,” Lynch told his CBI audience, “because it meets their own corporate social responsibility objectives.” Enthusing over the prospect of a massive new injection of funds for British industry, Lynch noted how the Crown Estate (which owns the UK seabed) had launched the offshore program specifically to enable Britain to meet its target of 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 compared with 1990 levels. Clearly nobody had told Lynch that in recent weeks the leaders of Britain’s biggest energy companies privately warned the government that its climate targets, contingent upon renewable sources replacing hydrocarbon fuels, are “illusory” and “delusional.
as we say in the editing business … or dot dot dot
Put bluntly, Tucker shows that industrial scale renewable energy is, realistically and mathematically, an economic non-starter.
Ironically, just as UK and European subsidy opportunities are dwindling and the revolution faltering, the retail multinationals may be about to reinvigorate the flagging UK program. And as the economic cost of renewables is being counted across Europe, Britain’s energy-climate policy is likely to be touted increasingly as the blueprint for others to follow. A rash of UK studies continue to sound alarm bells over the government’s current energy direction and, one of these, just published, should do the same well beyond UK shores.
Does it really take an Einstein?
In October, the UK energy regulator, Ofgem (The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets), warned that Britain was facing 1970s style power blackouts within just four years – a much shorter timescale than previously thought. Project Discovery cited the British government’s failure to renovate its “crumbling power infrastructure” due to compliance with new EU rules that will force the closure of a quarter of the country’s power stations by 2015. In a typically British understatement, Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem’s chief executive warned, “There could be a potential shortfall in the period 2013-18 … Life might be pretty cold.” Buchanan’s assessment is that only an “involuntary curtailment of demand” – power cuts – can conserve household supplies, unless the government acts urgently to upgrade its nuclear plants. Jeremy Nicholson, of the Energy Intensive Users Group, representing some of Britain’s biggest manufacturers, said that power cuts that hit UK business first would present a “material threat to heavy industry.” Nicholson also warned that once the crisis hit the 60 percent hike in British energy bills currently being acknowledged by the government will, more realistically, hit the 120 percent mark.
Bottom line? If Einstein’s E=mc2 as it applies to renewable energy doesn’t cut the intellectual ice for prospective investors and foreign governments alike, perhaps another will. Try this:
UK energy-climate policy, circa 2009 = a blueprint for black-outs.
See what I mean about a fraudulent check being entirely successful right up to the point
:}
But here is where his analysis shows his paradigm. He says industrial users have to have “so in so” amount of power. I say great. Let the industries that need it generate it in such a way that they generate no pollution. Thank you very much and usins in the residential market, well we will keep our alternative energies. Come on you ARE the smartest guys in the world right? oh..OR maybe not?
Browse Products by Category
ABOUT LRN 
