Follow The Money To Solar And Wind Energy......NO MORE PLEASE

As was totally predictable, the Billions of taxpayer dollars spent on subsidies to the solar and wind energy industries has been a bust, a failure, a waste.  With America in such debt, isn't it time to pull the plug on these losers?  Will anyone be held accountable for such a criminal waste?  And voters elected the same Administration responsible for this outrage to four more years?  Amazing stupidity.
Peter

Is Colorado's "new energy economy" still viable in light of recent setbacks in the industry? No By William Yeatman The Denver Post Posted: DenverPost.com It's been a rough stretch for Colorado's "new energy economy." Over the last few months, the Centennial State's green energy industry, which the new energy economy was supposed to kick start, has been beset by a series of setbacks. Loveland-based Abound Solar went bankrupt; Vestas Wind Systems laid off almost 200 workers at its Windsor blade plant; and General Electric pulled the plug on a planned solar manufacturing plant in Aurora.   The troubles of renewable energy companies are not unique to Colorado; they extend nationwide. U.S. taxpayers ponied up $60 billion for green energy "investments" as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus bill. The results are only coming in only now, and they are not good. The list of "stimulosers" — of which Solyndra is only the most famous example — is long and growing. It includes Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Amonix, A123 Systems, Nevada Geothermal Power, and many others.   These green industries are in trouble for a simple reason. They are running out of subsidies. The 2009 stimulus has been spent and the wind production tax credit is set to expire in December. Without a steady influx of taxpayer help, renewable energy sources like wind and solar power cannot compete, due to their high capital costs and intermittent supply.   How dependent on government are these industries? The American Wind Energy Association estimates that almost half of the entire wind power workforce — almost 37,000 people — would lose their jobs if Congress were to allow a single tax subsidy to expire. Such sudden and severe contractions are symptomatic of industries whose business plan is predicated on political favoritism. When the political winds change and the subsidies on which these companies depend are cut, the bottom falls out from under them.   On the demand side, green energy entails higher rates for consumers. In 2011, for example, a New Energy Economy policy known as the Solar*Rewards program accounted for almost 4 percent of sales, despite generating a scant half a percent of Xcel Energy's system-wide power. That's a bad deal for Coloradans. Unfortunately, the burden on Xcel ratepayers will only increase with the expiration of federal subsidies, which have effectively discounted Colorado's policies.   Somewhat paradoxically, the new energy economy's biggest expense likely will pertain to fossil fuels. The 2010 Clean Air Clean Jobs Act mandated that Xcel Energy generate from natural gas almost 1,000 megawatts of base load supply that it now gets from coal. At current prices, natural gas is historically cheap, but it is still more than twice as expensive as coal, according to Xcel Energy's regulatory filings.   And let's not forget that the price of natural gas reached historical highs only four summers ago. In fact, the high cost and volatility of the natural gas market relative to coal was the primary reason that the Colorado utilities have relied on the latter to meet the preponderance of the state's energy needs. A spike in the price of gas after the current supply contracts expire would cost Xcel Energy ratepayers dearly.   The worst aspect of the new energy economy program is its regressive nature. Utility bills represent a larger portion of poor households' budgets, so the new energy economy's costs are shouldered disproportionately by those who can least afford them.   Before the new energy economy program came along, Colorado utilities' decisions on how to provide power to consumers were guided by considerations on how to do so most efficiently at the least cost. Now, many of those decisions are based on political considerations, such as the need to prop up renewable energy, imposed by politicians. As a result, Colorado ratepayers can expect to pay for unsustainable subsidies, endure lower power supply reliability, and suffer unexpected consequences — all in the name of green ideology.   William Yeatman is assistant director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C.

All "Environmentalists"....Read With Care

The following article accurately sums up the sad state of affairs surrounding the entire sordid man-caused global warming fiasco.  It has and is costing humanity dearly.  Let's hope we wake up in time to recover.  I have been preaching and pleading for people to listen to these truths for years.
Peter

The Greying of Green?

Posted By David Solway On May 16, 2012 @ 12:30 am In "Green" tech,economy,Elections 2012,Politics,Science & Technology,US News | 11 Comments

original here: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-greying-of-green/

It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject of “Global Warming” (or any of the other sobriquets by which it is known) that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, such as the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life in the industrialized nations will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts, and amenities to which they aspire.

Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, has vehemently denounced the attempt to impose energy restrictions on African nations in the name of fighting global warming. “These policies kill,” she writes. As for the combustible Al Gore, he “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.” Her conclusion: “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity—except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels—is immoral. It is a crime against humanity” (Townhall.com., July 29, 2009). Her article is a must read. Graced with common sense and logical reasoning, it is one of the best puncturings of the hot air balloon in the relevant literature.

H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, would clearly agree. He correctly argues that recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming—which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” Such consequences are already in evidence. Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to huge costs and minimal results (Climate Realists, March 11, 2009). Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada, whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies (National Post, March 31, 2009).

These are costs that may be suffered in other, frankly ludicrous, ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws”—which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest metropolitan traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.

The much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology is now proving to be a similarly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, bird-killing, neurosis-inducing, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially; Europe is gradually abandoning many of its green energy programs as cost-ineffective and injurious to both wildlife and human health; and, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value (FrontPage Magazine, March 31, 2009). Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission has rejected a deal to build an offshore wind farm that would have entailed “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs…” (The Providence Journal, March 31, 2010). New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia’s opposition party is vowing to follow suit.

The writing is on the wall in majuscule ^[1]. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has closed shop, putting an end to its estimated $10 trillion carbon trading scheme. In August 2011, President Obama’s pet green project, the California-based Solyndra solar plant, filed for bankruptcy, costing the U.S. $535 million in wasted stimulus funds and 1,100 jobs (NBC Bay Area, August 31, 2011). Other such futilities are impending. The Beacon Power Corp, recipient of a $43 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has filed for bankruptcy after being delisted by the NASDAQ (Moneynews, October 31, 2011). The solar cell company Spectrawatt, recipient of a federal stimulus boost, and Nevada Geothermal, which profited from Federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies, are on the brink of failure (FrontPage Magazine, January 26, 2012.) Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection (Bloomberg Businessweek, February 2, 2012). This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president’s car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales (Left Lane Online, March 2, 2012).

Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce (New York Post, March 10, 2012). And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama’s Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan’s former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up—another instance, to use Michelle Malkin’s term, of a smart grid, crony-inspired “enviro-boodle” (National Review Online, March 30, 2012).

The reason for many of these failures in green energy-production companies is simple. As noted environmental consultant and author Rich Trzupek explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have” (FrontPage Magazine, March 23, 2012). As happened in Spain, Europe’s bellwether country for climatophrenic ruination, Obama’s “solar alchemy,” which demonizes traditional forms of energy extraction and application, has become a recipe for an American economic debacle.

Finnish professor Jarl Ahlbeck, a former Greenpeace member and author of over 200 scientific publications, points out that “real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” Contrary to common belief, he continues, “there has been no or little global warming since 1995” (Facts and Arts, November 25, 2008). His findings have been supported by many other studies. To adduce just a few instances: geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his results on careful analyses from major weather-tracking agencies, reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously” (The Australian, April 23, 2008); geologist Don Easterbrook, associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Professor Emeritus at Western Washington University and former U.S. representative to UNESCO, is also convinced that recent solar changes suggest the advent of a new cooling cycle which could be “fairly severe” (GlobalResearch, November 2, 2008); and a new study conducted by three Norwegian scientists, Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum, indicates that the next solar cycle, which is imminent, will see a “significant temperature decrease” over and above the current decline (Climate Depot, March 7, 2012).

Moreover, as Robert Zubrin has decisively shown in his recent Merchants of Despair ^[2], there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that Earth’s climate is a stable system,   (I've been saying this for years now, Peter)  that CO₂ emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under cyclical conditions of global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life immensely improves.

In a brilliant article for the Financial Post (April 21, 2012) analyzing the eleven logical fallacies on which the argument for man-made climate change rests, Lord Christopher Monckton, known for tracking and exposing scientific hoaxes, has effectively proven that the anthropogenic thesis has absolutely no basis, neither in fact nor in theory. So-called climate skeptics need nerves of steel to oppose the reigning ideology. It takes no less courage and perhaps even more for a climate “Warmist” to buck the trend, as culture-hero James Lovelock has recently done. Lovelock, who in his 2006 The Revenge of Gaia ^[3] prophesied the charring of the planet, now admits he had been “extrapolating too far.” Despite predictably hedging his bets and deferring catastrophe into the indefinite future, he avers that “we don’t know what the climate is doing” and disparages his previous work, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth ^[4] and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers ^[5], as “alarmist” (MSNBC.com, April 30, 2012).

Nevertheless, the Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of the accumulating evidence, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. In my own country of Canada, “Warmist” foundations are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation. That such a move would impact national revenues and cost thousands of potential jobs is a matter of no concern.

But the problem does not extend only to adversarial institutions and fellow-traveling NGOs. In other respects, Canadian governing parties, on both the federal and provincial levels, have not yet caught on to the perilous, impractical and pixilated nature of the Green crusade. Unsightly, government approved wind farms, for example, are literally driving people crazy and adding steeply to electricity bills.

Despite being hyped by the left-leaning CBC News (May 22, 2008), solar energy installations and SpongeBob-looking photovoltaic panels disfiguring the landscape do not seem like a reasonable prop
osition in a country already burdened by a dark, six month winter, as the Ontario Power Authority will shortly discover. Government and industry supporters, to cite the enthusiastic CBC report, base their projections on the presumed success of the German model. But there is a slight hitch, namely, the German solar experiment is a possible “government boondoggle,” is “cost-inefficient,” ^[6] will soon be obsolete, and has become “debatable” (MIT Technology Review, July/August, 2010). Indeed, it is now being phased out (Slate, February 18, 2010).

And then we have the soon-to-be-mandated mercury-laden CFLs, an undoubted domestic hazard, that are replacing standard light bulbs. Like many of my fellow citizens, I am assiduously hoarding incandescents in my basement, enough to see me through at least five years of environmental madness. Perhaps by that time, Green may have greyed sufficiently to be put out to pasture. One can hope.

GOOD JOB OBAMA, MORE BILLIONS OF TAXPAYER'S DOLLARS LOST

Wake up America.  Obama's "green energy" policies are a complete failure!!!!

World's Largest Solar Plant, With Second Largest Ever Department of Energy Loan Guarantee, Files For Bankruptcy

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/02/2012 - 20:14 Citigroup Creditors Department Of Energy Deutsche Bank Germany Joe Biden LIBOR Obama Administration President Obama Reuters Term Sheet
Solyndra was just the appetizer. Earlier today, in what will come as a surprise only to members of the administration, the company which proudly held the rights to the world's largest solar power project, the hilariously named Solar Trust of America ("STA"), filed for bankruptcy.

And while one could say that the company's epic collapse is more a function of alternative energy politics in Germany, where its 70% parent Solar Millennium AG filed for bankruptcy last December, what is relevant is that last April STA was the proud recipient of a $2.1 billion conditional loan from the Department of Energy, incidentally the second largest loan ever handed out by the DOE's Stephen Chu. That amount was supposed to fund the expansion of the company's 1000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project in Riverside, California.

From the funding press release, "This project construction is expected to create over 1,000 direct jobs in Southern California, 7,500 indirect jobs in related industries throughout the United States, and more than 200 long-term operational jobs at the facility itself. It will play a key role in stimulating the American economy,” said Uwe T. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Solar Trust of America and Executive Chairman of project development subsidiary Solar Millennium, LLC."

Instead, what Solar Trust will do is create lots of billable hours for bankruptcy attorneys (at $1,000/hour), and a good old equity extraction for the $22 million DIP lender, which just happens to be NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, another "alternative energy" company which last year received a $935 million loan courtesy of the very same (and now $2.1 billion poorer) Department of Energy, which is also a subsidiary of public NextEra Energy (NEE), in the process ultimately resulting in yet another transfer of taxpayer cash to NEE's private shareholders.

The "Green Energy" Boondoggle

The facts elaborated on in the following article have been obvious, known, and discussed on this blog and elsewhere since its inception.  Maybe, finally, our current worldwide economic depression and enforced belt-tightening is bringing some common sense to our energy policies.  Let's hope so.  The public ought to be outraged at this waste; are you?

Let's hope this same common sense prevails this coming November and those pushing this "green energy boondoogle" find themselves out of office.
Peter 



Green Energy Is a Financial Parasite
source: Casey Research subscribers@caseyresearch.com


Any politician who talks of a green, utopian US - where wind and solar produce most of our energy, electric cars put power back into the grid, green fields of corn produce clean fuels, and millions of Americans work in green technology factories - is creating a fanciful vision so far detached from reality it should really be called a lie. Such tales are designed to encourage a public that is increasingly despondent about the future, but the policy moves that have been made in support of these fantasies have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Much of it is money that will not be repaid, because a whole whack of the companies and industries that accepted green grants, loan guarantees, and tax credits have turned out to be complete failures.  (e.g. Solyndra)

Two green subsidies expired with 2011, and not a moment too soon. In fact, we wish more of the US government's initiatives to support green energy had ended with the stroke of midnight, because the green energy industry has become completely dependent on a steady stream of government money. Protected by this "green gold," green technologies from corn ethanol to solar power have not had to compete against other power sectors based on their merits. If they had, many would have already failed.

Let's a take tour through some of the US's green subsidies and examine just how they have tipped the scales in favor of technologies that generally don't stand the test of economics, are often worse for the environment than conventional methods, and are costing taxpayers dearly.

There's nothing good about corn ethanol fuel

On New Year's Eve the corn ethanol subsidy quietly expired, 30 years after it was implemented. In those three decades ethanol became the US's top recipient of alternative-fuel funding, with corn ethanol in particular becoming the darling of the biofuels craze. As a darling should be, the industry was showered with money: Over the last 30 years the federal government has spent $45 billion supporting corn-ethanol producers. In 2011 alone the feds spent $6 billion on corn ethanol subsidies, equating to 45¢ for every gallon of ethanol. Even with that support, US corn ethanol was not able to compete with Brazilian ethanol, which is made from sugar cane. To rectify that, lawmakers instituted a 54¢-per-gallon tariff against the Brazilian product. Together, the 45¢ subsidy and the 54¢ tariff meant American-made corn ethanol was supported to the tune of almost $1 per gallon.

That would be great were ethanol a good way to reduce greenhouse gases, lower energy costs, or increase US energy independence. Unfortunately, it fails on all of those fronts. A growing left-right coalition has been speaking out against ethanol as a fuel for some time now; the latest voice to join the chorus is none other than the National Academy of Sciences. In October, NAS researchers concluded that grain ethanol "could not compete with fossil fuels in the U.S. marketplace without mandates, subsidies, tax exemptions, and tariffs... This lack of competitiveness raises questions about the use of government resources to support biofuels." The report went on to discuss how biofuels actually increase net carbon emissions: pumping energy-intensive row crops into gas tanks leads to land use changes that increase greenhouse gases.

Continuing down the list of ethanol-as-a-fuel failures, it turns out ethanol is very tough on vehicles - a bill to allow gasoline to contain 15% ethanol (compared to the max 10% now allowed) was shot down after every major automaker said that much ethanol would cause significant engine corrosion. Then there's the fact that corn ethanol subsidies also generated a host of painful side effects. One is literally making us fatter: widespread use of high fructose corn syrup. Starting in the mid-1980s farmers realized that, even when sale prices for corn were low, the government's largess meant it was still worthwhile to grow the stuff. More and more corn was grown, beyond what could be consumed by people or livestock or made into fuel. What were producers to do with the rest of it? Make high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that is now in hundreds of thousands of products and that contributes thousands of empty calories to the average American diet every week.

So ethanol is uneconomic unless the government spends billions of taxpayer dollars supporting it, worse for the atmosphere than fossil fuels, and really hard on engines, while the support system to encourage corn-based ethanol production is contributing to the US obesity epidemic. Why, then, is ethanol even used in fuel? Because of all those government subsidies and mandates. After major lobbying efforts from the agricultural and biofuels industries, Congress mandated annual increases in use of renewable fuels, including ethanol, starting with 15 billion gallons in 2007 and growing to 36 billion gallons in 2022.

So fuel makers have to include ethanol in their mixtures. Too bad that rule did not also expire.

Electric vehicles: expensive toys that basically burn coal instead of oil

Another lesser-known tax break also expired with 2011: the credit that gave electric car owners up to $1,000 to defray the cost of installing a 220-volt charging device in their homes, or up to $30,000 to install one in a commercial location. A related subsidy that did not end still gives $7,500 in tax credits to purchasers of electric vehicles. For a variety of reasons, like the ethanol subsidy none of these incentives should have existed in the first place.

Electric vehicles have failed on one front after another. To start, they are inordinately expensive - the much-lauded Chevy Volt costs $40,000, while the Karma from Fisker costs a whopping $100,000. This means electric vehicles are only affordable for the wealthy; it's pretty hard to understand why American taxpayers should subsidize cars for the wealthiest members of society. The subsidies go beyond direct tax credits and rebates - government loans and grants in support of the Volt alone total $3 billion, which means each car produced to date has been subsidized to the tune of $250,000. (Volt supporters contest this number, saying subsidies only total $30,000 per vehicle... still not an insignificant amount.)

Then, for all that money, you still can only drive short distances. The Volt's official range is 30 miles, but reports show it can actually travel only 25 miles before needing to either recharge or switch to gasoline. There's also the issue that electric vehicles still need power, and the electricity that charges their batteries comes primarily from the US power grid, to which the largest contributor is coal-fired power plants. As such, a Volt essentially burns coal instead of gasoline, at least for the 25 miles it can drive before switching to gas.

At least coal is a domestic resource, compared to gasoline derived from imported crude oil, right? Well, let's see just how much electric vehicles will reduce US oil consumption. Assuming there are 6 million of them on American roads in ten years, out of 300 million passenger vehicles, and assuming that passenger vehicles continue to account for 40 to 45% of total US oil consumption, in ten years these tens of billions of dollars spent to support electric vehicles will have reduced US oil consumption by less than 1%. When you add in the fact that lithium-ion batteries are pretty toxic items, and that coal- or natural-gas-derived electricity demands will go up with each electric vehicle, the case for electric vehicles becomes pretty darn weak.  (weak?  pathetic!)

Solar and wind power: a financial sinkhole

Electric vehicles and corn ethanol fuel are not the only green industries that have been producing pitiful returns on government investment: Solar and wind power are just as guilty of eating up huge subsidies and still failing to break even economically.

Let's start with an example - one that was highlighted in a recent New York Times article. NRG Energy is building a 250-MW solar project in San Luis Obispo Country (northwest of Los Angeles), known as California Valley Solar Ranch. The ranch's one million solar panels will provide enough energy for 100,000 homes, but it will cost $1.6 billion to build. Most of those dollars are coming from government subsidies or low-interest loans.

All told, NGR and its partners secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects. The crazy thing is, the government is giving out these grants and loans despite information from its own researchers that solar power is uneconomic now and will remain so in the future. The US Energy Information Administration predicts that by 2016 the total cost of solar photovoltaic energy will be about $211 per megawatt-hour, compared to $63 for an advanced natural-gas combined-cycle power plant.

Just as with corn ethanol, it's the taxpayer who bears the brunt of this obsession with expensive solar power. The main federal subsidy currently covers 30% of the cost of a residential solar system. When other subsidies are added in, as much as 75% of the cost can be covered. Obama's administration has spent $9.6 billion on solar and wind power through the Section 1603 Treasury grant program over the last few years.

With that kind of support, it's no wonder America is in love with solar power. In 2011, solar installations skyrocketed, with 1,700 MW installed during the year, an 89% increase over 2010. Still, all of the panels now installed across the nation produce only about as much electricity as a single coal-fired plant. And even with demand growing rapidly, the industry is awash in debt and bankruptcy.

US solar manufacturers are being pushed out of the market by low-cost Chinese manufacturers, which get even more support from their government than Obama gives to American producers. In California, for example, Chinese producers held 29% of the market at the beginning of 2011; by the end of the third quarter they had grown their market share to 40%, while US manufacturers saw their share fall from 37% to 29%. And with the Chinese flooding the market with cheap solar panels, prices for solar panels fell by 40% in 2011.

Falling prices for solar panels and dwindling market shares forced three US solar companies into bankruptcy in 2011 and recently necessitated staff cutbacks at another two companies. This is all happening despite billions in loan guarantees to these companies. First Solar, for example, took $3 billion in loan guarantees from the federal government to develop three solar farms in Arizona and California. Now the company is cutting half of its staff, including 60 jobs in California where it received $3 million in state sales tax credits.

Of course, the most notable solar bankruptcy of 2011 was Solyndra, the California-based company that went bankrupt months after receiving a loan guarantee of $535 million from the US government and despite increased demand for solar panels in the country following implementation of state mandates for solar energy.

And things are about to get a lot tougher for struggling solar panel producers in the US, because the 1603 program expired on January 1. When you add up grants, subsidies, loans, and tax credits that have been helping the solar and wind industries along, then add in mandates that require utilities to buy renewable power at set prices from the alternative energy producers for decades, you are left with an industry that is wholly dependent on taxpayers, not on its own technology's capabilities. Forced to go it alone in the power industry, solar and wind producers are not going to survive.

Leveling the playing field

In chasing the green power dream, the US is not alone. In fact, it trails several European countries in the effort. Germany and Denmark have the largest installed bases of alternative energy in Europe and are often held aloft as examples of how to encourage wind and solar power. Proponents usually stay mum on the fact that retail customers in Germany and Denmark pay the highest electricity rates in the European Union.

It is true that progress is never easy and is often expensive. From that pulpit, advocates argue that continued investment in green technologies will drive prices down in the long run. However, this reasoning ignores the other side of the problem: solar and wind can never produce baseload energy. The average wind plant in the United States runs at about one-third of its rated capacity, while solar plants runs at about 25% of their nameplate capacity. Since there is no way to store large amounts of electricity, the variable outputs from solar and wind facilities will only ever be able to replace a modest amount of conventional baseload power.

When you look at green subsidies on an energy production basis, the disparity becomes pretty stunning. Wind's 5.6 cents per kilowatt hour is more than 85 times that of oil and gas. Solar power costs 13 times more than wind, making solar more than a thousand times more expensive than conventional fuels.

Wind and solar power, corn ethanol, and electric vehicles are not infant industries in need of support. They are perennially inferior industries that only still exist in their current forms because of a constant stream of "green gold."

That stream is slowly drying up, thankfully. The only way to achieve the very admirable goal of transforming society into an energy-efficient space is to eliminate all of the subsidies that are currently directed at green energy and clean technology while increasing taxes on the things we are trying to minimize, such as gasoline consumption and plastic bags. That would force everyone to innovate, compete, and win or lose according to merit.

The Cold Hard Truth About Solar Energy

The cold hard truth about solar energy is that it is not economically viable, except in specialized, limited and usually subsidized applications.  This is despite having Billions of tax-payer dollars fed into the bottomless pit of corrupt science (man-caused global warming) incompetent governments and crony capitalism (Solyndra).  So now British Petroleum (BP) has seen the light, figuratively speaking and they're pulling the plug on their solar energy efforts.  I could say I told you so.
Peter

BP shutting solar unit as industry struggles


3:13 pm ET 12/21/2011 - MarketWatch Databased News

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- After prominently featuring solar panels in its brand advertisements and at some of its gas stations, BP PLC is planning to shutter its BP Solar operation, according to reports on Wednesday.



BP PLC said global economic challenges have impacted the solar industry, making it difficult to sustain long term returns, according to an internal BP email cited by press reports. The move will affect 100 jobs.



BP, which has been in the solar business for decades, had featured solar panels prominently in its Beyond Petroleum advertising campaign.





BP said the solar business, which has been flooded by excess supply from China, has become commoditized.



A phone call and email to BP by MarketWatch was not immediately returned. BP will hold on to other alternative energy businesses, including wind.



BP inked a supply contract with JA Solar in 2010 as it started scaling back its own solar panel factories and trimming jobs.



Sam Wilkinson, senior market analyst of IMS Research said BP's decision comes as global photovoltaic module manufacturing capacity reaches 50 gigawatts, while demand is expected to total only 24 gigawatts this year. Average prices are now 44% lower than they were one year ago.



"Rapid manufacturing expansions have coincided with a slowdown in the growth of global demand," Wilkinson said in a statement emailed to MarketWatch. "The result has been intense competition and a fierce price war, and not enough demand to support all of the industry's hundreds of suppliers."



The move comes just days after First Solar, the only pure-play solar panel maker in the S&P 500 , issued a profit warning for 2012 and said it'll refocus its business toward large-scale utility projects, rather than residential solar panels. See: First Solar falls to lowest level since 2007.

Blowin' In The Wind.......The Slow Death Of Wind Energy

There is an old saying, "Money talks and bullshit walks". Few ideas deserve this criticism more than the concept that wind power or wind turbines can generate electricity as an economic alternative to oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy. About the only thing more stupid is the whole idea that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming, or should I say "climate change". This grand hoax is coming to a pitiful end, investors are taking their money elsewhere, as documented in the following article. The "smart money" is fed up with the ridiculous alarmist lies of the environmentalists promoting wind energy as a solution to the world's energy needs. Al Gore ought to be hung in effigy from every windmill in the world by the millions of people who lost money and jobs because of his lies and deception. An inconveniet truth indeed!

Peter

Climate-change funds shift focus from wind, solar

12:01 am ET 12/10/2010- MarketWatch Databased News

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The poor performance of some sectors aiming to slow climate change is pushing money managers to cast further afield for investments that both carry green credentials and are likely to post better returns.

Some renewable-energy stocks, such as those in solar and wind industries, have fallen spectacularly in recent years, belying hopes that they were poised to break out.

Money managers say this poor performance is in part due to a lack of hoped-for policies to help these industries grow. As a result, say the managers, they are looking at other areas of the market that are part of the climate-change story, such as recycling and energy efficiency. Even eBay Inc , as a promoter of reusing goods, fits the bill.

"Nobody's questioning the long-term prospects, market share or gains of [renewable energy] sectors, but over the medium it's not been that good," said Vipin Ahuja, manager of Allianz RCM EcoTrends Fund . "So people are looking elsewhere for sustainable stories for the next couple of years."

Ahuja's fund, which he joined about one year ago, is down 19% a year in the past three years, according to data from Morningstar Inc.

The deteriorating prospect for new policies to combat climate change has been palpable at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancun, where delegates from nearly 200 countries met to hash out a possible extension of the Kyoto Protocol and other policies.

The more sober atmosphere this year, particularly compared to the gathering's predecessor in Copenhagen, reflected toned- down hopes the world's largest polluters would reach agreement on policies to combat global warming and promote renewable energy. Read MarketWatch's coverage of the Cancun climate talks.

Those downgraded expectations have left their mark on solar-panel stocks, once Wall Street darlings.

In mid-2008 First Solar Inc.'s stock trading at close to $300. Today, it's at about $132.

It's a similar story with many of First Solar's peers, including SunPower Corp. , whose stock has fallen from close to $100 to about $12 in the past 30 months. The MAC Solar Energy Index is down an annualized 27% in the past three years.

Others in the renewable energy space have also suffered, such as wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems , which has seen its stock price fall from more than $140 in 2008 to less than $30 a share this week.

One example of how politics has hurt the renewable sector is the failure to pass a federal renewable portfolio standards policy. The rule would have forced utility companies across the U.S. to supply a certain amount of their energy from renewable sources.

"That discouraged many utilities from signing, for example, agreements for wind [farm] installations," said Colm O'Connor, a portfolio manager at Kleinwort Benson Investors who is part of the management team on Calvert Global Alternative Energy Fund, which is down an annualized 26% over the past three years, according to Morningstar.

Looking elsewhere

"In the past year we've avoided wind and solar investments," said Richard Mercado, manager of London-based F&C Global Climate Opportunities Fund.

Merchado said the fund has been looking more at the natural gas sector, and -- in a theme several money managers repeated -- also at so-called mainstream companies with a climate-change slant. For example, eBay is one of the fund's investments as it "promotes re-using products and not throwing them out," said Merchado.

Merchado said the most represented sector in the fund is energy efficiency. This focus chimed with that of other managers, several of whom pointed to developments in LED technology as an example of the trend. As the costs come down, use of LEDs in anything from televisions to traffic lights increases, and lighting for commercial spaces becomes possible.

Another example of looking at efficient, rather than renewable, energy is demand-response technology. These services let utilities manage consumer demand more efficiently by relaying energy usage data back to providers.

O'Connor said he plays demand response by investing in meter makers such as EnerNOC Inc. and Comverge Inc. .

Ben Allen, director of research at Parnassus Investments, said that since 2007 his firm has invested in Waste Management Inc. , which he said has been focusing on energy efficiency by turning waste into electricity. Another company Parnassus likes is Cooper Industries PLC, in part because of the company's growing LED business.

Allianz RCM's Ahuja said his fund's holdings in LED-related companies went from zero to about 15% in the past year.

Sticking with it

But though solar and wind have suffered recently, that's not the whole tale. For example, while there's no federal renewable portfolio standard, O'Connor said that 29 states have their own standards. And the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- the stimulus bill -- created two programs of credits to promote renewable power projects.

What's more, Ahuja noted that global demand for solar energy grew 100% in 2009. And, he said, some solar companies have seen their share prices grow, or at least hold up better than others, in recent years, such as China's Trina Solar Ltd. and Yingli Green Energy Holdings .

Some sectors in the climate change theme, such as renewables, are subject to policy volatility, said Bruce Kahn, senior investment analyst at DB Climate Change Advisors, a unit of Deutsche Bank .

"I agree that the area is struggling in the short term, but we're investing in the long-term trend and trading around the volatility," he said. "It tells me that you can't pick sectors when dealing with this kind of volatility -- it's a stock-pickers universe."

"Environmentalism Used As A Tool For Political Purposes

Here is just one example of how environmentalism and its often pseudo-science is used for political purposes. These people playing on people's emotions don't care about the real environment; all they care about is power and control. This is especially true when it involves the myth of man-caused global warming which is held up as the reason for nearly every problem in the universe. It is becoming a standing joke.
Peter

A Move to Put the Union Label on Solar Power Plants

By TODD WOODY

SACRAMENTO — When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk.

By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible.

One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors.

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

“This does stress the limits of credibility to some extent,” a California energy commissioner, Jeffrey Byron, said at one contentious hearing, “when an attorney representing a labor union is so focused on the potential impact of a solar power plant on birds.”

Union leaders acknowledge that they make aggressive use of the environmental laws, but say they do it out of genuine concern for the sustainability of California’s power industry, not just as a negotiating tactic. And they contend they do not abandon valid environmental objections to a project just because a company signs a labor agreement.

“We’ve been tarred and feathered more than once on this issue,” said Marc Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy. “We don’t walk away from environmental issues.”

At proposed fossil-fuel power plants, the union group has long been accused of exploiting environmental laws to force companies into signing labor agreements. The tactic is a subject of perennial discussion in the California legislature, which has considered, but never passed, bills to strip labor of its right to participate in environmental assessments.

What is new is that California Unions for Reliable Energy, a coalition of construction unions, appears to be applying this approach to new-age renewable energy projects, especially solar power plants, which are being fast-tracked to help meet the state’s green power target.

Lawyers for the union both negotiate labor agreements with solar developers and participate in the environmental review of the projects.

California Unions for Reliable Energy insists it is pursuing the long-term interests of its members. If energy projects are held to high environmental standards, the group says, more of them will ultimately get built, and that will mean more union jobs.

Nationwide, as billions of dollars in public and private investment flow to renewable energy projects, the environmental and labor battles being fought in California could prove to be the opening skirmishes of a larger fight over the emerging green economy.

Should Rust Belt factories converted to making solar components and wind turbines be union shops, gateways to the middle-class for a new generation of workers in the green economy? Or will the green economy look more like the service economy, with low-paid employees installing rooftop solar panels and retrofitting buildings?

For the labor movement, green jobs represent an opportunity to regain relevance after years of declining membership.

“Unions are trying to get a foothold in solar, wind and other new green occupations,” said Philip Mattera, research director for Good Jobs First, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.

“We’re at a turning point that will have an impact on the future of the whole economy, and a lot of unions are gearing up.”

But skeptics fear that union control of renewable energy projects will saddle the nascent industry with high costs and undermine its competitiveness.

“These environmental challenges are the unions’ major tactic to maintain their share of industrial construction — we call it greenmail,” said Kevin Dayton, state government affairs director for the Associated Builders and Contractors of California. “The future of solar energy is jeopardized by these unions holding up construction.”

In California, project labor agreements can raise costs on a project by about 20 percent, Mr. Dayton estimated.

The fights of the moment center on solar farms proposed for tens of thousands of acres of desert and agricultural land.

When the utility giant the FPL Group ignored entreaties from California Unions for Reliable Energy to use union labor on a planned 250-megawatt solar farm, it was hit with 144 data requests, demanding details on things like “the engine brand, model, and horsepower rating” of a water pump engine, “the number of man-hours devoted to focused tortoise surveys, by location” and “the role of each individual that participated.”

In filings with the California Energy Commission, Ausra has accused the union group of abusing environmental laws in a bid to extract a labor agreement. FPL’s lawyers accused the group of trying to stall the company’s solar project.

Bob Balgenorth, chairman of the labor group, makes no apologies for pushing hard for union jobs from solar developers while scrutinizing the environmental impact of the projects. “You only have so much land that can accept solar power plants,” said Mr. Balgenorth, who has cultivated strong ties with conservation groups.

“So the question is, should that land be used for low-paid jobs or should that land be used for high-paid jobs?”

Some solar developers say that signing a labor agreement is simply an unavoidable cost of doing business.

“Let’s just say that it is clear to us from experience that if we do not enter into a project labor agreement, the costs and schedule of the project is interminable,” said Douglas Wert, chief executive of Spinnaker Energy, a San Diego company hired to build two solar farms for Portuguese developer Martifer.

After Stirling Energy Systems filed plans with California regulators to install 30,000 solar dishes on 10 square miles of desert land, its executives got a call from Mr. Joseph, the union lawyer. Sean Gallagher, a vice president for Tessera Solar, the development arm for Stirling, said the company declined Mr. Joseph’s request to commit to using union labor.

California Unions for Reliable Energy subsequently filed 143 data requests with the company on the final day such requests could be made, and later intervened in a second, 850-megawatt Stirling solar project.

It was a different story after BrightSource Energy pledged to hire union-friendly contractors to build its Mojave Desert solar power plant complex. Despite questions raised by environmental groups about the project’s impact on wildlife, the union group took no action, according to commission documents.

Mr. Joseph said that the labor group wants to mediate between environmentalists and BrightSource, which is based in Oakland, Calif.

“We’re actually hoping that we can help resolve these issues in a way that allows that project to go forward and gives maximum protection to the desert tortoise,” he said.

He said he sees “absolutely no conflict of interest” in seeking labor agreements from solar developers while challenging the environmental effect of the projects. “It is in the interest of construction workers to have good middle class jobs — and to have conventional and renewable power plants that are sustainable,” Mr. Joseph said.

The union group’s strategy drew plaudits from environmentalists when the group was winning agreements from developers to cut pollution from fossil fuel power plants. But as some conservation groups ally themselves with business interests to push for a rapid rollout of renewable energy, strains are showing in the so-called blue-green alliance.

Some environmental groups are worried that the labor tactics will delay green energy projects and cause a backlash, but they are reluctant to go public with criticisms of the labor movement.

Others, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, are trying to steer clear of the controversy.

The council “hasn’t taken a position on whether union labor should or shouldn’t be used in these projects,” said Sheryl Carter, the group’s co-director of energy programs.

And still others defend the labor group’s role.

Carl Zichella, the Sierra Club’s director of western renewable programs, said California Unions for Reliable Energy had been effective at extracting concessions that aid the environment.

“It’s not a warm fuzzy thing they are doing; it’s a very self-interested thing they’re doing,” he said. “But it has a large ancillary public benefit.”

FACTS That Irrefutably Prove Climate Change Is Driven By Solar Activity

This is hard, measurable, factual data and observations showing variations of solar energy received by the Earth to be the over-ridingly dominant factor controlling changes in global warming and climate change. Computer climate models used to generate the myth of man-caused global warming are merely guesses based on (faulty) assumptions. Facts must outweigh guesses, always.
Peter


By: Dr. Gerhard Lobert, Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics
As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.

1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behavior. In two-thirds of these 10,000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!

2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behavior in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.

3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere.
Read more here.
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It's The Sun That Causes Climate Change...

I've taken this from the following blog, (link highlighted below). Are variances in the energy received from the sun are responsible for climate change? It sure looks like it.
Peter


It’s the Sun, stupid

source: http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/category/politics/page/2/

The The United Nations’s IPCC Report comes out today so I thought I’d make a report too.

James Carville used to remind Clinton during the ‘92 campaign that “its the economy, stupid”.

I (and many others far smarter than I am) say that on the subject of Global Warming: “its the SUN, stupid”

Our earth is warmed by a gigantic nuclear fireball, millions of times the mass of earth and a mere 8.5 light-minutes away. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun’s disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths.

By the way, the sun has a total luminosity output of 386 YottaWatts thats 386,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts, but we only get a tiny portion of that.

You can’t just ignore that kind of power. Though it seems some prefer to, since it muddles the results they seek.

The total luminous energy output received by earth from the sun is 174 PETAWATTS (174,000,000,000,000,000) watts. Now lets just say the sun increases its output by 0.1% as its been measured to do. (And its gotten way more active this century.) That dumps an extra 174,000,000,000,000 watts into our atmosphere (174 trillion watts) 24/7.

Data source for graph: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt

Note: In the graph above, the low flatline from 1645-1715 is the Maunder Minimum, a period of virtually no sunspots, where the historical reports from the northern hemisphere tell a story of dramatic climate change: harsh winters, cools summers, crop failures, famine and disease.

From the abstract referenced above: “Estimated increases since 1675 are 0.7%, 0.2% and 0.07% in broad ultraviolet, visible/near infrared and infrared spectral bands, with a total irradiance increase of 0.2%. “

So its not just 0.1 %, it is 0.2% which translates to a 348 TeraWatts global irradiance increase.

Now lets put 348 trillion watts into perspective:

Hurricanes: the heat energy released by a hurricanes category 1-5 equals about 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.

Katrina, released about 200 trillion watts over its life cycle.

Now imagine double that amount of extra energy being added to earth’s atmosphere every second by small increases in the suns output that have been documented to exist. Thats what the increase in solar irradiance is doing. Since 1675, after the depths of the Maunder Minimum, we’ve seen an increase in solar irradiance of about 2.5 watts per square meter.

Climate modelers say that the extra CO2 equates to a forcing of about 2 watts per square meter, which totals about 1.12 Petawatt (1,120,000,000,000,000 watts). The problem is, they can’t always recreate that reliably between all of the different models out there, with the positive and negative feedback mechanisms, and other variables involved. There’s disagreement on the total contribution. A lot of it. Nonetheless they seem all to agree that CO2 makes some contribution, and thats likely true. But compared to the sun, I beleive it’s minimal.

Now lets look at us: 13.5 TeraWatts is the average total power consumption of the human world in 2001.

Do you think we could change the planets atmospheric energy balance with that if we squeezed all the power we made that year together and shot it into our atmosphere ?

Whats very clear though, when you look at history, and the graph above, is that our earths atmosphere and resulting climate is extremely sensitive to variations in solar output. The sweet center point seems to be about 1365 watts per square meter of irradiance…what we consider as “normal” climate. Take 1.5 watts/sq. meter away, and we get significant cooling, harsh winters, cool summers, and increases in ice and glaciers. Add 1.5 watts,/sq. meter and we get hotter summers, mild winters, and melting of ice and glaciers.

Now irradiance aside, as it’s only one component, there’s also the suns dynamic magnetic field and solar wind, which modulates earths magnetic field, which modulates the number of cosmic rays that enter our atmosphere, which modulates the number of clouds that form, hence changing the net surface irradiance. Plots of changes in the suns magnetic field line up very well with climate change.

There’s growing sentiment that CO2 theory may very well be a red herring.

Yeah, its the sun, stupid.

Ethanol Fuel Not The Answer?

This is a discussion about some alternatives to gasoline for powering vehicles. It presents some useful facts to consider.
Peter


Shuck the ethanol and let solar shine
Solar power and compressed natural gas offer more-efficient energy technologies than planting, fertilizing, harvesting and refining fields of corn into fuel. Investors, take note. Congress, listen.

By Jon Markman
New research by a University of California petroleum engineering professor suggests that worldwide crude oil supplies will start to run so low over the next nine years that resource-blessed countries like Saudi Arabia will begin to hoard them for domestic use instead of exporting -- and states with large reservoirs of natural gas, like Montana, will seek ways to avoid sharing with less-advantaged neighbors like Oregon.

Attempts to forestall the political and economic damage by turning aggressively to agriculture for "renewable" transportation fuel in the form of ethanol will prove futile, according to professor Tad W. Patzek, as new calculations show that the entire surface of the Earth cannot create enough additional biomass to replace more than 10% of current fossil fuel use.

The process of sowing, fertilizing, reaping, distributing and refining corn and grasses for ethanol feedstock uses up nearly as much carbon energy as fuel farmers claim to save, and it generates so much soil degradation and toxic byproducts that widespread use will leave the Earth denuded and hostile to human life within decades, according to the professor's data.

Apocalypse now, again Patzek, in a controversial paper presented last month to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, says military battles over fast-depleting fossil fuels will combine with insufficient replacement strategies and escalating population growth soon to imperil the human race unless coordinated global efforts to curb energy demand are taken quickly. "Change will be made for us unless we make changes," he said in an interview from his UC Berkeley office this week.

Of course, we are accustomed to apocalyptic statements about the environment these days, after recent campaigns to raise awareness of ecological disasters ranging from global warming to the destruction of the rain forest. But we can't really do too much about those beyond changing a few light bulbs and recycling cereal boxes.

Yet a provably insane public policy focused on ethanol production is something we can urge politicians to halt. We can also demand that tax dollars and product development funds be spent on more long-lasting transportation fuel solutions based on solar energy and compressed natural gas. And as investors we can take positions in companies that are likely to benefit from improvements.

Let me explain the problem in the simplest terms. The main thing you need to keep in mind is that all energy on our planet comes from the sun. Through the magic of photosynthesis, shrubs and trees hundreds of millions of years ago grew plentifully worldwide in swamps. They died, were covered by layers of sediment amid tectonic change, and were then baked via geological processes into oil, gas and coal.

Fast-forward to the early 1900s, and petroleum engineers figured out how to discover, exploit and transport this buried treasure on a mass scale. Then followed the greatest explosion of industry, freedom and wealth the Earth had ever known. For 100 years, as long as supplies were abundant and cheap, all was well. Enter the sport-utility vehicle, air conditioning, two-hour commutes to work, $200 cross-country flights and skyscraper cityscapes lit up all night.
The big drain Is this sustainable? At the risk of sounding like an environmentalist crackpot, maybe not.

It's now becoming clear to scientists that half a billion years' worth of natural energy production has been drained in a century. As production has slowed amid intensified demand from emerging nations, prices have risen eightfold to allocate diminishing resource to those with the greatest ability to pay. Now scientists like Patzek say depletion has reached the phase when it will accelerate exponentially with rising needs.

Figure there's maximum another 100 years left, but after only another eight years the difficulty of acquiring it will be felt so dramatically that governments of exporters will feel compelled to stockpile instead of trade.

As importers foresee an impasse -- and observe the painful ineffectiveness of simply grabbing resources, as the United States is accused of doing in Iraq -- new sources are needed or our way of life must plainly end. The solution? That's where it gets interesting.

Sun block The U.S. agriculture lobby is incredibly powerful, and it has somehow managed to convince Congress that our next 100 years of energy should also come from the sun. Not in its most efficient route, directly transformed by the magic of electronics from solar rays into electricity via large and small grids of photovoltaic cells. But in the most inefficient way possible: From the growing of corn and then its refinement into fuel.

How inefficient is the ethanol solution? When you break the "agrofuels" system down scientifically, you can see that 99.9% of the energy in sunlight is lost in the process, with the greatest waste coming in the creation of ammonia-based fertilizer from natural gas, and in the refinery. That is, for every unit of energy that is put into creating agriculture-based fuel, almost three-quarters of it is dissipated before it actually does any work. The greatest amount of energy lost is not in the creation of ammonia-based fertilizer, as many believe, but in the refinery.
Of course, an even bigger problem is that the 6.6 billion people on Earth need all the food they can get, so every acre taken out of wheat, rice and soybean production to feed our 1 billion cars is an acre that won't feed starving kids. As Patzek notes pungently in his paper, after a lot of math to prove the point, "Our planet has zero excess biomass at her disposal."

One better solution is solar energy created at the municipal level by massive photovoltaic cell facilities, at the street level by home-based grids and at the transportation level at lots where electric vehicles' batteries can be charged. Photovoltaic cells lose only about 80% of the sun's energy to dissipation, making them at least 100 times more efficient than ethanol after the fuel cost of growing and refining the biomass feedstack is accounted for.

The sun doesn't have its own lobby or a voting bloc in the presidential primaries, so research and funding has lagged. U.S. and European industrial giants General Electric (GE, news, msgs) and Siemens (SMAWF, news, msgs) are working hard at this solution, as are many intriguing U.S. and Chinese small and midsize companies such as Suntech Power (STP, news, msgs), First Solar (FSLR, news, msgs), Trina Solar (TSL, news, msgs) and MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR, news, msgs).

For transportation, most energy experts agree that compressed natural gas, or CNG, is an ideal long-term choice. It is not only much more plentiful in North America than oil -- negating the need to depend on unstable regimes in Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia -- but also many times more efficient. CNG only loses 5% of its power in the transportation and refinement process, and has two other benefits: Its emissions are much less toxic than gasoline or diesel, and when a CNG tank is hit in a crash it is much less likely to explode than a gasoline tank.

As I wrote back in August, many countries are depending on CNG trucks for their large truck, taxi and bus fleets, so this is not some pie-in-the-sky idea. What's lacking in the United States is a distribution network and convenient filling stations -- though you can actually install equipment at home to fill a CNG car or truck from your current heating gas line.
A pilot project in California, moreover, may pave the way for thousands of heavy-duty trucks to be retrofitted with fuel injectors made by a Canadian company called Westport Innovations (CA:WPT, news, msgs) in conjunction with engine maker Cummins (CMI, news, msgs). The conversion kit allows Peterbilts and Kenworths to run clean-burning CNG instead of filthy diesel.

Stall on ethanolIt's been a hot year for ethanol, but has it been too hot? Two industry executives discuss the problem.
In short, there is nothing we can do about the depletion of the sun's bounty from the bowels of the Earth. But we can stop the politically cynical ethanol scam in its tracks, and try to move the debate and our own consumption toward solar and CNG. Of course, the best solution of all is to cut down on wasteful uses of energy such as long-distance commuting, and shipping off-season fruits and vegetables up from the southern hemisphere, and to encourage cities to step up mass-transit development efforts.

It's easy to just ignore the problem with our usual American bluster, but 30 years from now our grandkids are really going to wonder what the heck we were thinking.
Fine Print To learn more about Patzek, visit his Cal Berkeley Web site. Here is the paper he presented at OECD, titled "How Can We Outlive Our Way Of Life?" (.pdf). It's quite readable every for lay people and explains a lot -- so take some time to go through it. To learn more about Clean Energy Fuels, click here. To learn about Westport Innovations, read here. . . . Learn more about GE solar projects here. . . . To read more about Suntech, click here. . . . Learn about MEMC Electronic Materials here. . . . To learn about First Solar, check its Web site here. . . .
When it's available next year, I'm thinking about trading in my trusty Ducati Monster , which I use for my two-mile commute, for the Enertia electric motorcycle. There's also a hydrogen-powered motorcycle in the works called the ENV. . . . There's a sweet Mercedes-Benz, the 200 NGT, available only in Europe, that runs on CNG. Check it out here. To gas it up at home, check out the Phill by FuelMaker. . . . For more background on the ethanol craze, check out my April 5 column on the corn boom.

Carbon Dioxide or Solar Forcing?

This is an excellent article and warrants saving and reading.
Peter

from: http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar

Home
Carbon Dioxide or Solar Forcing?
PersonalResearch -->
By: Nir J. Shaviv
Natural or Anthropogenic? Which mechanism is responsible for global warming over the 20th century? According to the common perception, the temperature over the 20th century has been warming, and it is mostly anthropogenic in origin, with greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver. Others, usually called "skeptics", challenge this view and instead claim that the temperature variations are all part of natural variability.

As I try to demonstrate below, the truth is probably somewhere in between, with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. Following empirical evidence I describe below, about 2/3's (give or take a third or so) of the warming should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.

Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye.

The Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500 Year Climate Cycle---The Ice Cores

Here is one line of evidence demonstrating the Earth's historic cyclical climate changes. This is observable, quantifiable, reproducible data, not merely a computer model. Again, these observations, from multiple, highly reputable sources, are difficult to deny. The sun appears to be the overwhelming control of the Earth's continual climate changes. The amount of carbon dioxide mankind adds to the atmosphere is obviously not a factor.
Peter

from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st279/st279b.html

The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
The Ice Cores
In the 1980s scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing, moderate natural climate cycle.The 1,500-year climate cycle emerged almost full-blown from Greenland in 1983.
Denmark’s Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland’s Hans Oeschger were among the first people in the world to see two mile-long ice cores that brought up 250,000 years of the Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. Over the previous dozen years, the two researchers had pioneered ways to pry information from the ice cores. They had learned, among other things, that the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to oxygen-16 isotopes in ice could reveal the air temperature at the time when the snowflakes that made the ice fell to earth. The correspondence of the change in the isotope ratios to the recent Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) is shown in Figure II.3

Dansgaard and Oeschger expected to see the big 90,000-year Ice Ages in the cores, and they did. But they were startled to find, superimposed on the big Ice Age swings, a smaller, moderate and more persistent temperature cycle. They estimated the average cycle length at 2,550 years. They dismissed volcanoes as a causal factor because there’s no such cycle in volcanic activity. The timing of the cycles seemed to match closely with the known history of recent glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.

The report that Dansgaard and Oeschger wrote in 1984, “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” was, in retrospect, almost eerie in its accuracy, its completeness and its logical linking of the climate cycles to the sun.4 The only major correction imposed by subsequent research is that the cycles were more frequent than they thought. The average length of the cycles has now been shortened by almost half — from their original estimate of 2,550 years to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).
"Ice cores from Antarctica show the same climate cycle."

Dansgaard and Oeschger were correct when they told us that the climate shifts were moderate, rising and falling over a range of about 4° C in northern Greenland, with very little temperature change at the equator — and only half a degree when averaged over the northern hemisphere.
The cycles were confirmed by 1) their appearance in two different ice cores drilled more than 1,000 miles apart; 2) their correlation with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe; and 3) independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.5

They noted that the cycle shifts were abrupt, sometimes gaining half of their eventual temperature change in a decade or so. That suggested an external forcing, perhaps amplified and transmitted globally by the ocean currents and winds. (In the mid-19th century, the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming went from Little Ice Age to Modern Warming in about 10 years.6 That implies a climate driver from outside our planet, almost certainly involving the sun.)
However, Dansgaard and Oeschger noted, “Since the solar radiation is the only important input of energy to the climatic system, it is most obvious to seek an explanation in solar processes. Unfortunately we know much less about the solar radiation output than about the emission of solar particulate matter in the past.”

The two scientists did know, however, that both carbon-14 and beryllium-10 isotopes vary inversely with the strength of the solar activator. The isotopes of both elements in their Greenland ice cores showed historic temperature lows during what solar scientists term the Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715) — the absolute coldest point of the Little Ice Age and a period when sunspots virtually disappeared.
"Climate cycles coincide with sunspots and variations in solar energy output."

Today, we can measure variations in the sun’s irradiance from satellites out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of our own planet. The solar constant isn’t — constant, that is. We also know that when the sun is less active, its solar wind weakens and provides less shielding for the Earth from the cosmic rays that bounce around space. With a weaker sun, more of the cosmic rays hit the Earth, creating more charged particles in the atmosphere, which then become low, wet clouds reflecting more heat back into space. A less active sun thus means a cooler Earth.7
The importance of the 1,500-year cycles found in the Greenland ice cores increased dramatically four years later when they were also found at the other end of the world — in an ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier. The Vostok ice core went back 400,000 years, and showed the 1,500-year cycle through its whole length.8

The scientific world had known about the sunspot connection to Earth’s climate for some 400 years. British astronomer William Herschel claimed in 1801 that he could forecast wheat prices by sunspot numbers, because wheat crops were often poor when sunspots (and thus solar activity) were low. Not only did the Maunder minimum (1645-1715) coincide with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer minimum (1450–1543) aligned with the second-coldest phase of that period.

In 1991, Eigel Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen noted that the correlation between solar activity and Earth temperatures is even stronger if we use the length of the solar cycle to represent the sun’s variations instead of the number of sunspots.9 (The solar cycles average about 11 years in length, but actually vary between eight and 14 years.) Their paper in Science concluded that the solar connection explained 75 to 85 percent of recent climate variation.
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