1. “American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant and affordable energy.”

Actually, it was not until the rural electrification efforts of the 1930s – which were financed largely by the government as part of the infrastructure make-work provisions of the New Deal – that electricity became available outside major cities. In many states of the west-southwest, the CCC and Army Corps of Engineers worked in tandem with the rural electrification programs building dams and hydroelectric power plants to supply energy to those rural grids. Most of these RECs were cooperatives, owned by the customers who purchased the power, and governed by boards drawn from those small communities.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: This is Socialism in action.

2. “There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!” + something about destroying the economy.

Actually, as so graphically demonstrated last summer when the price of gasoline was arbitrarily jacked up to nearly $5 a gallon so oil companies and traders could make a literal killing, a reasonably high cost of energy that reflects its serious environmental effects, the expensive wars we are fighting to secure it, etc. leads directly to conservation efforts instigated by the people themselves rather than imposed by the government. Consumption of gasoline suddenly got cut in half as people stopped driving two blocks to the bar or convenient store, car-pooled to work, learned how to walk again, etc. It’s good for people to pay the actual costs.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: The economy is already destroyed. Did you not notice? We did. These legs are made for walking. Or riding a bike. A truly reflective cost of gasoline – which other countries have been paying for decades – will spur investment in alternatives that will be more environmentally friendly, will bring much-needed crop price relief to farmers, and will generate jobs as more and more people are out of work with no chance of ever going back to the old ones.

3. “In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.”

Massive unemployment in the energy sector began just weeks after Saint Ronnie the Reagan took the oath of office. He ordered the wells in the booming oil and gas industry in Texas and Oklahoma (where I was at the time) immediately capped. Then he dramatically increased our dependence on imported Middle Eastern oil, no doubt to justify foreign policy adjustments that have led to current illegal oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s under those caps is now “reserve,” as we struggle to use up as much of the ME’s supplies as possible.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: The increased cost of doing things the old way will spur investment in new ways. Those acre-size factories dotting the landscape can install solar panels on their huge roofs to offset their costs. Wind and water storage systems can help provide night supply, but most such factories don’t run at night anyway. That’s jobs in the factories, jobs in support industries (like installation and maintenance), jobs in production, and electricity in the grid. This won’t be done so long as energy is artificially cheap. Real costs will lead to real changes.

4. “Of course, Alaska is not the sole source of American energy. Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source. Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.”

Again, America’s producing oil and gas fields expanded dramatically during Jimmy Carter’s “energy crisis” and ordered capped the moment Reagan got into office. They’ve been capped ever since. These are wells already drilled, were already producing. In order to increase our dependence on foreign supply so we could use it up and make vassals of those nations later on. Obviously, home-grown energy independence is NOT a Republican value or a “supply-side” tenet.

I live in Appalachia. I was in southeastern Kentucky last weekend and Mountaintop Removal is the absolute ultimate in environmental rape for fewer jobs and more poverty. I’m big into making a law through NC’s legislature that would forbid Duke and others from using coal mined in this way. In Tennessee there are once-beautiful communities still devastated by the massive fly ash spill, and increasing nasty health effects nobody’s attending to. There’s no such thing as “Clean Coal” – those scrubbers have been required by law since the 1970s and are STILL not installed because all coal plants get a waiver!

As for the most expensive and dangerous form of boiling water ever conceived, don’t get me started… I can go on for months. All those “secret” scram failures, failed fuel incidents and big ass dumps that have been going on since the early 1950s have killed and injured generations of Americans and are STILL not being adequately addressed. NO NUCLEAR, and I mean that most sincerely as a one-time health physicist who has seen it up close and ugly. We will NEVER be able to afford it, in any possible way.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: Name the forum, baby. I’ll bring my real cost-benefit analyses, my technical details, and some very sick survivors. You bring your ignorance, your propaganda and your lies. Then we’ll let the People decide, m’kay?

The way we do energy in this country must change. The change will indeed cause some trade-offs, that’s why the government is going to have to subsidize some things. Like offsets for the poor, low-cost financing to the low end of the middle class (that still own homes) to refit with supplemental power generation capacity and backwards meters, revamping the grid to recover some of the 30% of generation capacity we now lose to inefficiencies of transmission, etc., etc., etc.

Putting it off another decade or two won’t help, as more and more cities find themselves under water and massive population relocation kicks in due to increased global warming. Eventually it’s just time to pay the piper, and now is our time. Go back to Alaska and take care of your kids. They need you, we do not.

George Bush lifted bans on offshore drilling, explaining that this will not only increase our domestic supplies, but will also remedy recent drastic increases in the price of imported oil. Now, oil companies already have more than 2,000 leases on offshore oil that they haven’t even begun to drill, and then there’s all the producing oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma that Ronald Reagan’s administration ordered capped (and labeled ‘reserve’) after taking office in 1981 (and which caused a rather drastic immediate recession in those states as well as contributing to the infamous S&L collapse. The very first bank to collapse – Penn Square Bank in 1982, was heavily invested in those producing wells when they were ordered shut down. That cost We the People $150 million. The current and ongoing bank failures will cost us a lot more.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports a Possible Industry Role in Energy Shortage, as Big Oil companies sought as long as five years ago to cut refinery output to increase profits. And cut back on new refineries is just what they’ve done.

But fear not! Bloomberg reports that Kuwait may build a refinery in Louisiana to help the US boost its capacity for refined petroleum products. As we fall further and further into deep recession/depression due to $5 a gallon diesel, $4 a gallon gasoline, and the fast-rising price of food, shelter and clothing based on that.

I probably don’t need to say it, but this is really bullshit. Bush/Cheney aren’t done robbing us blind yet? We’ve something MORE for them to steal before escaping to Paraguay? We’ve been set up for a fall, and now that we’re actually falling (with no sign of bottom yet), they expect us to clean up their mess with wealth we simply don’t have anymore? They looted our retirement funds. They screwed us on our mortgages. They blew everybody big time on WMDs in Iraq. And now… NOW we’re told…

…that the US oil industry is exporting a record 1.6 billion barrels a day of refined petroleum products, up a full 1/3 over last year.

Now, I realize that I’m not that smart about this sort of capitalistic crap-shoot, but it occurs to me that if the US had those 1.6 billion barrels a day of gasoline and diesel fuel we might not be falling off the economic cliff at an accelerating pace. And it occurs to me that we’re being told that the BushCo oil wars (now threatening to ignite the entire ME) are all about ’securing our supply’ – even though the truth is that our biggest foreign supplier is Canada, NOT Iraq, Iran, or even Saudi Arabia.

And with all this bruhaha about domestic supply – selling offshore and protected wilderness areas for drilling, capping producing wells, exporting a third of our domestic production – I’m wondering if the price of the oil they’re importing and charging us an arm and a leg for is LESS than what they receive on the world market for what they’re exporting.

I get the very strong feeling that they’ve screwed We the People yet again (that feeling just never goes away), seriously planning to turn us into just another Third World “Resource Region” for their total expoitation.

It’s their End Game. We have no choice but to play it.

Will the Candidates Show?

Government leaders, university presidents, leading scientists, engineering leaders, business executives, American innovators have been making the call loudly and with some help from NPR, MSNBC, the New York Times and Time Magazine as well as increasing numbers of other media outlets. Now that both the Democratic and Republican fields of potential Presidential candidates are down to two apiece, it’s time for Science Debate 2008 to happen.

The invitations to the candidates have been sent, the debate will be held at the Franklin Institute before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Thus far none of the candidates have responded that they will commit. While we all know that issues of science and technology are usually handled by advisors who have knowledge of the subjects, it would be nice to get a feel for whether the candidates for our country’s highest office have a basic grasp of those issues and a defensible position on policy. Or find out if all they’re good for is to mouth sound bites their handlers feed them.

If you’re interested in what you may be able to do to help convince them, visit the Science Debate 2008 website and sign on. And it wouldn’t hurt to write to the campaigns and request the candidates’ participation while you’re at it.

Link:
Science Debate 2008

[Cross-Posted to Science News Review]

I consider health care to be the #1 concern for the future viability of this nation, though oil wars/energy independence, revamped ag policies top to bottom and regulatory housecleaning across the board are all important issues as well.

Under the heading of energy policies, I’m going to have to weigh in on the whole renewed “nuclear option” horsehockey disguising itself as a cure for global warming and a means to energy independence in the 21st century. Nuclear power is a pig not even in its poke anymore – it’s fat and ugly, it’s voraciously greedy, it’s arrogant of its filth, and it can’t even fly. Hogzilla Unleashed.

We tried to leash it, honest. Succeeded for more than a quarter of a century, too. But they think we’re all dead now, or maybe just so old we’ve forgotten. We have not.

Way back in 1979, when TMI didn’t mean “Too Much Information” but “They Melted It.” Our field was health physics. Those are the folks who measure the releases and doses, make sure nothing’s leaking, monitor the reactor’s chemistry, and if something is leaking, they’re the ones who make sure workers have the right protection before they go in to clean it up.

HPs have never been very popular in the industry, though they are required to have HP staff on-site as part of oversight and safety. Apart from regular operational coverage at the plant, the HPs have a further task of ensuring that the public is NOT exposed to excess radiation, by promptly reporting over-limit leaks, accidents and any practices that break the rules. This is the power to “Stop the Job,” even order shut-down if it is warranted.

We worked for a technical support staff subcontractor rather than for utilities. This gives the HPs a measure of independence and a little job security if they happened to have to actually blow the whistle. It paid extremely well, but in the end the whole of the civilian industry was so filthy compared to the US Navy’s nuclear power program – where most reactor operators and HPs got their primary training and security clearances – that it just wasn’t worth it. So when told US military top level security clearances were no longer enough to justify our participation in the industry’s daily cover-up game, we told ‘em to take the job and shove it.

When TMI melted, we were called to meet in a Middletown motel room with the HP crew and handed a copy of 10CFR21 with the pertinent reporting sub-clause highlighted in dayglow yellow. We were given a copy of the GPU sequence of events for the accident’s 16-hour evolution, and got a thorough run-down on initial conditions – it was a horror story deluxe. We took the job measuring (and recording) releases, scans, isotopic analyses and doses beginning just four days after the accident and stayed for a month to monitor the recovery. Then we left to go back to being civilians.

We moved to a cabin in the mountains of New Mexico and wrote a book detailing the nature of the accident, its causes, and its serious effects which we’d hoped to publish while there was still time to mitigate some of the damage with intensive medical intervention and monitoring. We had help from a couple of other HPs we knew, one who had worked at TMI’s sister plant and then came to the meltdown (with the full tech schematics in tow), another who was at a different plant but checked our data per current NRC incoming. That one was my brother, HP site coordinator at the Hatch plant in Georgia before he was killed in one of those notorious one-car ‘accidents’ hours after arriving in NM to consult with us.

The book was finished by May of 1980, but was never published due to intervening murder, mayhem (and post-classification). The full investigation report – including data from and analysis of the Kemeny and Rogovin Technical Assessment and Health Physics Task Forces reports – was completed by June of 1981 and filed with the NRC, the chair of the Congressional Committee on Energy and Environment, and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee. In 1985 we testified before Congress and the NRC, then our house promptly burned down in a not-so mysterious “electrical wiring” fire taking what little we had left. Absolutely nothing whatsoever was done about the bad technology that led to TMI or to mitigate the harm to the public from its aftermath. The rest is history.

So we went on with our lives, did something else for a living. Now, like Zombies or some other ghostly specter of the Undead, They’re Baaaack…!!! Once again touting their golden goose as the Great Green Answer to all our energy woes – “Clean, Safe, Too Cheap To Meter!” Some things just never change, I guess.

All the top contenders for both the Republican and Democratic nominations support nuclear power as ‘Green Energy’ and a band-aid for global warming. Except John Edwards, who happens to be the candidate I support. Now, I do understand that professional politicians – particularly those nervy enough to vie for the top post – are not scientists. Nor do I expect them to be. They have probably never seen a nuclear plant, or toured one, and wouldn’t know a GELI from a TLD if it bit them on the ass. So when wannabe Theocrat (and current Republican front-runner) Mike Huckabee says…

“There’s been a real bias against nuclear energy in the United States, going all the way back to Three Mile Island in 1979, but I think most of it is unfounded,”

…I just have to roll my eyes. I was there. He was not. He doesn’t know shit.

When John Edwards was asked “Would you be in favor of developing more nuclear power here in the United States?” at a recent appearance in New Hampshire, he said very simply and unequivocably, “No.” That deserves all our applause, and certainly our votes. He may not be a scientist or a nuke, but he is a tort lawyer. If you’ve any doubts, Google “Price-Anderson.”

Now his campaign is running ads in New Hampshire touting his anti-nuclear stance, and I hope that resonates with the electorate. We can do better than nukes. All we have to do is put our national will into it, and we’ll surprise even ourselves! John Edwards believes it. I believe it too, and I’ve the experience in operational health physics (and TMI) to know what I’m talking about. No Nukes.

Links:

FOE Action: New TV and Radio Ads for Edwards in NH

WaPo: Video of Sleeping Guards Shakes Nuclear Industry

SFBG Politics: The candidates on nuclear power

LATimes: Nuclear power gets boost from candidates

USNuclear: Presidential Candidates’ positions on Nuclear

“Think about it,” Goodwin laughs. “…a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

Thus does Johnathan Goodwin, a 37-year old “who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair,” describe the 2005 H3 Hummer he’s recently hacked into being a tricked-out electric hybrid that runs on waste frying oils from fast food joints.

Fast Company Magazine calls him the “Motorhead Messiah” for taking the hugest gas-guzzlers in America and modifying them to get up to four times their rated gas mileage while burning low-emission biofuels grown on US soil – all the while doubling their horsepower. That’s what is becoming known as “Green and Mean.”

Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables – the nation’s largest producer of biodiesel fuels, says Goodwin is in a league of his own. “Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is.” Particularly no one in Detroit. The big American automakers have been whining for decades that what Goodwin does regularly just because he can is impossible.

Which, lobbyists for the Detroit contingent tell us, is why they’ve fought aggressively against raising fuel efficiency and emissions standards. It hasn’t worked, as labor unrest in the UAW has been brewing and Congress is threatening to raise the fuel efficiency standards for cars by 10 miles per gallon and a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Japan has flood the market with vehicles that get up to 40% better gas mileage than any American cars, and Mercedes’ new BlueTec diesel sedans not only deliver better mileage, they produce boosted horsepower as well. What’s wrong with American automakers?

Goodwin says they could do it as well as he can. 90% of the parts he uses in conversions are made by American auto parts manufacturers. He’s got an eighth grade education, didn’t even go to high school. Surely all those multi-degreed engineers and designers in Detroit could figure it out.

Yet to their continuing discredit, American automakers are very slow on the uptake. They pretend to know their market, what people want, and yet consistently ignore it year after year. As the competition beats them to the punch every time, and their bottom line triggers bottom-feeding frenzies.

It is clear that the US has to cure its addiction to the Middle East’s black gold. We cannot grow enough corn on all the farmland in the country to fuel our cars with ethanol. And if we tried that, we’d all starve long before we could save up enough cash to buy one of those cars. GM holds a joint patent with the EPA on a new passenger car diesel engine as efficient as the new Mercedes engine, but has refused for as long as the patent has been held to actually build it and put it in their production line.

While Canada has installed plug-in outlets in its parking lots and parking meters so Canadians can warm their engines enough to start in below-zero temperatures, Detroit complains that it can’t use hydrogen fuels because they have to be pre-heated. Like diesels have to be pre-heated. Heck, they won’t even give us the hybrids Japan could sell here just as fast as they can produce them, if Detroit’s automakers hadn’t lobbied for restrictions in the law that puts strict limits on how many hybrid cars can be produced and sold.

What’s wrong is more than just institutional inertia. If something doesn’t change soon, there will be no US automakers – they’ll all be out of business and smaller, more flexible companies will arise to fill the gaps. Companies more in tune with the customer’s desires for something actually worth the tens of thousands of dollars invested. Something that they can afford to drive from point A to point B, something they’re not ashamed to be seen driving.

Automobile and truck manufacturing is a huge chunk of America’s economic base. Transportation of people and goods dictates all peripheral industries and policies in our economy. It’s the reason we’re at war right now in the Middle East and Western Asia, thus the reason our children are dying on foreign battlefields. All so we can drive our Hummers around town with American flag stickers on the bumpers and yellow ribbons on the windows, without feeling guilty for being the greediest, meanest, most arrogant conspicuous consumers the world has ever seen.

It may be time to think up some new ideas. Goodwin’s way ahead on that.

Links:

Fast Company: Motorhead Messiah

Doing what Detroit says is impossible

Two years later the color of the federal government’s hurricane rebuilding efforts in Mississippi is decidedly black and white. Which, if you think about it, probably does more to explain the 6 Days’ Horror in New Orleans that we all got to watch on television as the government hemmed and hawed and dragged its collective feet, FEMA denied entry to relief organizations from Red Cross to Baptist Conferences, and the FoxNews androids made excuse after excuse, day after day, for the obviously racist response. Which cost lives.

The Congress was not so slow in allotting billions for federal grants to help low-income residents trying to recover from the storm in the Gulf states, yet Mississippi still has not spent half of its share. Many of the homes and buildings damaged have yet to see any repairs at all.

Meanwhile, reports The New York Times, $1.7 billion in federal money has been spent on programs that have benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. This money has gone to compensate middle to upper income homeowners, utility companies and to bail out the state’s insurance system.

Just 10% of the federal money has been spent on programs designed to help the poor, and most of that through small grants to lower-income homeowners. Highlighting the skewed demographics, 23% of the total federal allotment is planned to be spent on aid to the poor, while 37-40% of the actual residents living near Mississippi’s coast are poor.

How did such an obviously unfair situation come about in Mississippi, while Louisiana and Alabama’s recovery efforts have been much more equitable? Well, it turns out that George Bush’s administration – that’s the White House, not the Congress – arbitrarily waived the written-in rule that 50% of Community Development Block Grants must be spent on programs for low-income communities. The administration says that’s because the state (Gov. Haley Barbour & Co.) asked for the waiver.

Of course, Barbour & Co. claim they don’t discriminate by race or income when handing out aid to storm victims, but the figures don’t lie. Officials claim they want to help the poor with some of their unspent federal billions, but they’re having trouble thinking up projects to actually help the many whose homes and businesses haven’t seen a single repair since the storm.

That might be because the state decided to exclude homeowners who were too poor to have regular homeowner’s insurance, and anyone living in a rental house or apartment. Rather than federal help, the poor and black in Mississippi must look for help from churches and organizations like Habitat for Humanity to make their homes livable again. If ever.

Looks from the outside like Apartheid is still alive and well in Mississippi. That’s a shame.