Jim's Comments

While I agree with much of what Mr. Wolfe says, the gulf spill was NOT caused by global warming and will not be fixed by global warming legislation.
The gulf spill was caused by the same problem that plagued the east Texas oil field a century ago. That is the technology did not keep up with the new environments that oil exploration had entered. It was a failure to recognize and appreciate pressures within the earth then, it has failure to recognize and appreciate pressures within the earth now.
The gulf spill had pressures of upwards of 40,000 pounds per square inch. That blew out the concrete plugs and probably damaged the casings. Similar things were happening in the Anadarko field in the 1980's, when wells at over 9,000 psi came in on fire and burned down $3 million worth of oil rig before breakfast. One casing in the Texas panhandle failed at a couple hundred feet below the surface and was excavated out and fixed.
The gulf spill will be fixed by technology that can contain the oil while the pressure drops to workable levels, then through continued improvements in technology other oil wells will be successfully drilled.
What the industry and the US do not need is a top-heavy regulatory system that actually limits oil production while providing very little alternative to oil.
The DOE which was established to help us move away from oil will gobble up $28 billion this year, and yet the best hybrid cars are coming from Japan and our light bulbs are coming from China.
One wonders what they are doing over at DOE.
Meanwhile, the global warming bills before congress tend toward two goals: raising taxes and raising the cost of living, with side benefits to the commodities traders and a few others, but very little toward the citizens of the US.

You know I had an email a few months ago from one of those online job match outfits. They claimed that they had found an opening for me leading the choir of some church.

Tell Paula that those of us who have been around a while, remember the Oil Depletion Allowance, the Iacoca Chrysler bailout, the recent bank bailout, and the General Motors bailout. Incentives have helped American industry for a long time, and are actually getting worse.

I have had some time to ponder this article since it came out in December.
I have read where some coal power plants consume over 200 tons per hour.
That is about 3 tons per minute. A farmer delivering a fair load of switchgrass to a biomass plant would not be out the gate before his load was consumed.
We have a problem with biomass. First, we do not have systems big enough to gather and transport biomass that will compete with coal. We have some of the machines but not the systems.
Second, just as it takes us only a few minutes to fill up our gas tanks to drive for several hours, the handling systems will have to operate at
10 to 40 times the rate that the power plants are consuming the biomass.
Third, when we do develop the systems, it will lead to significant change of our forests.

We have a long way to go.

A few notes:
Erich, thank you for writing about CHAR

From blogs.chron.com/sciguy concerning a "carbon-constrained economy "
one of the commenters wrote:

In 1925, Herbert Hoover was Sec. of Commerce.
Tires were made of natural rubber back then. When the price of rubber became high and unstable, Hoover and some of the leaders of the tire industry, as a patriotic kind of thing, decided to make tires out of recycled materials.
They put up a huge advertising campaign. Buying recycled tires was patriotic.

The result was a tire that was less dependable and wore our quicker.

Tire manufacturers' profits often went down. The consumer got a poor quality tire, and the commodity speculators made money.

There are a lot of similarities with that program and what is happening today in energy.
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Texas A&M built a gas powered plant in the early '90's that generated power and heat for the campus.
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Texas has a lot of brush. The brush is native to Texas, but before the introduction of European man, horses, and cattle, it was often confined to creeks or was retarded by fire. South Texas is especially brushy.

Texas Tech built a small brush harvester on a MF tractor in the 1970's.
I have yet to see R&D for commercial harvesting and processing of the heavier biomass sources.
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As the forests grade west into Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas they produce trees that are often inadequate for lumber production, but the rainfall and soils are still good for biomass production.
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Merry Christmas, y'all

While I have been in favor of a replacement for coal since the 1970's,
I do not expect much from Copenhagen. The cap and trade Entrepreneurs
seem to be well on their way to making money on carbon at the very moment that Climategate has brought the whole basis of the AGW movement into question. I am also concerned with the advertising product and religious dogma that it seems to have become.

Today Reuters had a story stating that our present unemployment had actually pushed our CO2 levels half way to a goal set by . . .I failed to discover who, but the obvious answer to going all the way would be to
put a total of 50 million people in the US on unemployment.

While I have supported renewables for a long time, this unemployment problem is far more important in the short run, and needs to be addressed before the cap and traders make their first millions.

Yes, Hannah,
Arnold Leitner's company SkyFuel should be in this group.

And thank you for this update. It is amazing how many name changes
CSP is going through right now.

What a pleasant surprise. Not another article with a lot of hot air about Renewable Energy, but an article about real people that actually went out and did something to make Renewable Energy work.

This may be covered in later sections.
Hawaii sits on the edge of a good sea current that flows on both sides
of the islands:
http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=3732
Jacques Cousteau was talking about windmills in the sea for places
like that over 30 years ago.

And eventually we will have to start havesting the plastic and seaweed
that grows in the center of these areas.

It is an unfortunate reality that for solar to succeed in the short run, it
does not have to benefit the environment or the people, it has to benefit government.

Re: we need to reduce carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade program.

This program will eventually take the pricing for our cheapest forms of energy out of the hands of the producer and into the hands of the free-range speculator, the strong-arm payoff man, the confidence racket, the Ponzi schemer, and the petty nickel-and-dime grifter.

Society does not need to support these people. They produce nothing. We owe them nothing.

The big auto companies are like big utilities.
Do you want your utilities cut off, just because
fewer people are paying for them?
If we are going to kill it, kill it slowly.

What we need is a tactical and strategic plan to
make the car we want 5 years down the road,
and to make the transportation system we want 15 to 25 years down
the road.

If we look at the autoworker we have today,
he probably only has about 2 chances in 5 of being
with us in 15 years. We need to look at training that may
change drastically every 5 years.

If we are going to push renewable energy goals
onto these old car management behemoths, I think we are
making a mistake. We need to start with people like
Dell who are young enough to build a product
that people want and can afford,
rather than supporting the crumbling Detroit model.

We also have to look at regulation. We are regulating
our manufacturing here right out of the country. GM
for all its symbolism of being a US car maker
is producing a lot of cars and parts in Canada and Mexico.

Re: 80% of rail shipping in the U.S. is for transporting fuel.

I drove parts of the old Oregon Trail last year. I was surprised
that I only saw coal trains on that railroad.

Re: building ugly towers

I am sure Mr. Blakeslee's father did not come home from work smelling like creosote poles as mine did. Those poles carried electricity to west Texas oil fields. Being a kid, I did not recognize the greatness of the work performed by thousands of men from Texas to California in the 1950's.

Having helped build 3 power plants that are connected to urban centers by
"ugly towers" I invited him to attempt to take them down. The corporations that own them would have him before a judge pretty quick.

Re: following existing road and rail rights of way
We cannot have a truly long vision and assume that road and rail right-of-ways will remain static. Rail miles decreased as our interstate highway system increased. We cannot assume that underground HV electric lines will be any safer than underground gas lines where a backhoe operator
is injured every year. None of the gas lines that I helped build were free. The expense whether they went cross country or beside an existing highway
was monumental.

Safety: I cannot imagine an economical HV electrical line within 10 miles of a large population center that would be safe. There is too much construction, too much human activity, and too high a risk of vandalism to
really consider this proposition safe.

A pipeline company had a plane fly their lines regularly in Oklahoma over 20 years ago. One flight discovered a trailer house perched right on top of a 30 inch gas line. Can you imagine how many people would have died if that had been an HV electric line and the home owner had decided to drop in a septic tank? A short count would have been the whole family.

While I admire Stefan's writing, I have to take issue with the UN's gushings on climate change. Climate change, once referred to as global warming, is not.
It is not caused by man. And it cannot be economically controlled by man.

Every solution the climate change alarmists propose will actually make the common man poorer, because he eventually has to pay for it, and makes the climate change alarmists and their puppet masters richer.

One clear example of this is the proposal to levy a tax on cows in the US.
The reason this is considered necessary by the climate change alarmists
is that cows produce CO2. That tax is huge, often over 14% of the gross return on that cow per year. Besides driving the milk and meat cow business into bankruptcy, it ignores the facts that the cow replaced the American bison and when the cows are gone, termites and other detritus feeders will be making CO2 in the same spot.

It also ignores the fact that as our human population zooms from 6 to 9 billion that the economic and ecological systems that support us will collapse long before global warming does us in. For example, more people will die of the complications of water supply in the next 20 years than will die of climate change.

We need to tie renewable energy to clean water supply, fellows.

I am wondering about laminar flow and this author's hint that a certain
amount of living plant material might be acceptable for a wind farm.
Commercial Windfarm Horticulture anyone?

The power companies have, since their inception, fought vegetation from periodic tree trimming all the way to total soil sterilization. This is just another logical step in a long battle.

Eventually, someone may realize that a wind-biomass electrical power plant may have advantages over the quick build and sell wind farm.

I cannot visualize even one major parameter of this project that is feasible.
Materials requirements for the machines, power requirements, hole material removal, and time requirements are are far too great for this planet.

At those depths steel is soft. Copper is in puddles. Your control valves and gauges are on the floor sloshing around with the copper. Your electronics
have already let out their magic smoke. The atmosphere is toxic and there is an extra 12 miles of it over your head. Everything, everything has to be different and no pizza.