The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.
That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.
New research has found that from 20,000 to 7,000 years ago Great Britain was surrounded by a vast area of dry land that reached as far as Denmark.
The research suggests that the populations of these drowned lands could have been tens of thousands, living in an area that stretched from Northern Scotland across to Denmark and down the English Channel as far as the Channel Islands.
As the ice age ended and sea levels rose, this land was slowly swamped and engulfed by the North Sea.
While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.
The article’s headline falsely suggests that the scientists oppose all nuclear power plants, which is not the case. If anything, the overall manner in which the Fukushima power plant withstood the biggest earthquake in history demonstrated that most of Japan’s nuclear power plants are probably safe from future earthquakes. For scientists to have concerns about one particular plant seems reasonable, however, and is not the same thing as opposing all nuclear power.
A skeptic takes an educated look at alternative energy.
The matter of affordable costs is the hardest promise to assess, given the many assorted subsidies and the creative accounting techniques that have for years propped up alternative and renewable generation technologies. Both the European Wind Energy Association and the American Wind Energy Association claim that wind turbines already produce cheaper electricity than coal-fired power plants do, while the solar enthusiasts love to take the history of impressively declining prices for photovoltaic cells and project them forward to imply that we’ll soon see installed costs that are amazingly low.
But other analyses refute the claims of cheap wind electricity, and still others take into account the fact that photovoltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000. At that time the national mean was close to 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, while the latest Solarbuzz data for 2012 show 28.91 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 63.60 cents per kilowatt-hour in cloudy ones. That’s still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost between 11 and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet.
Then consider the question of scale. Wind power is more advanced commercially than solar power, but with about 47 gigawatts in the United States at the end of 2011 it still accounted for less than 4 percent of the net installed summer generating capacity in that country. And because the capacity factors of U.S. wind turbines are so low, wind supplied less than 3 percent of all the electricity generated there in 2011.
Read the whole article. It is detailed, thoughtful, and blunt.
Forbidden by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment, a shovel brigade of 60 people last weekend made temporary repairs to Tombstone’s water line.
“It took 60 people two days to complete a work project that could have been done in two hours with the appropriate equipment,” Barnes said. “We have a lot more work that needs to be done up there, but we don’t have the permits from the forest service to go back.”
For reasons that only bureaucrats understand, the Forest Service decided that the use of heavy equipment like a bulldozer is more harmful to nature than 60 people with shovels, even though in the end the work done is exactly the same, and that this same work was done repeatedly in the past by heavy equipment.
The IPCC has decided that it is too difficult to purge non-peer-reviewed envionmental activist press releases from its next report. Instead,
In addition, the IPCC has decided “to impose gender and geographical quotas on IPCC membership,” rather than simple pick the best scientists.
And climate scientists wonder why the public no longer believes anything they say.
New data from Antarctica suggests that the south pole icecap is not melting, as predicted by climate models.
It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass. The model results were in contrast to the available data from satellite observations, which are supported by the new measurements.
The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted, which means that the Fimbul Ice Shelf is melting at a slower rate. Perhaps indicating that the shelf is neither losing nor gaining mass at the moment because ice buildup from snowfall has kept up with the rate of mass loss, Hattermann said.
In other words, the climate models were wrong. When actual data was obtained, first by satellites and now from the water under the ice shelf itself, the new data found that the ice shelf is stable, not melting as predicted.
Your tax dollars at work: The Obama administration spent $10 billion dollars to create 355 renewable energy jobs, according to testimony to Congress on Tuesday.
Thank you Obama. That’s $28.17 million spent per job created.
Global warming: Second thoughts by an environmentalist.
For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.
He then very clearly outlines what we do and do not know about the Earth’s climate, and pinpoints the important uncertainties that presently exist.
On June 4 NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. Now that I am back from Nevada, I’ve had a chance to take a look at it, and have posted the new graph for April below the fold.
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This should help the economy: The EPA will propose today stricter standards for the release of soot by factories and power plants.
