It has become necessary for all scientists commenting on the exponentially increasing GHG climate disaster to explain the nature of this phenomenon. They need to climb down from their lofty theoretical world and go back to basics. To science and math that they learned in grade school. Here's a news flash: Politicians and the general public and even some of your colleagues do not understand the basic concept of positive feedback and exponential change. Do not take this understanding for granted. People like Obama and his top advisors who are well educated enough to have heard of this concept still don't apply it to climate change.   more »

That might be what CIA officials could admit were they not stuck with the usual "No comment" on reports that they are successfully winning over Afghan warlords by dispensing Viagra. A side note: How will the "chattel" of these local dictators be effected? More rapes at first, but then more heart attack deaths for tyrants too. As in the HBO series about polygamy though, the monsters of war will find Viagra addicting.   more »

Could you maybe get together with middle eastern leaders, and european leaders, and try to get them to collaborate with our solar and wind industries? Aramco, the Saudi oil giant wants to go solar, maybe ME leaders would like to see the Fertile Crescent become fertile again with wind, wave, and solar powered cloud formation and desalinization technologies. They have the money, we gave them in return for oil, we have the technology.   more »

Is this the first attempt to patent human weather control? This inventor is seeking a patent for seawater spray geo-engineering. "He proposes installing 1,000 or more devices that spray water 20 to 200 feet into the air, depending on conditions, from barren stretches of the West African coast, bluffs on deserted Atlantic Ocean isles, deserts adjoining the African, South American and Mediterranean coasts and other arid or windy sites." Could the Sahara be a new green expanse? Or the ME deserts, could the Fertile Crescent be fertile again? It's feasible. Mass production of the floating energy machines from molded fiber concrete in shipyards everwhere, starting on the US west coast could maybe do it. There's a green job wave.    more »

Are the twin positive feedback effects of methane release and ice melt/solar absorption already making the climate tipping point inevitable? Add in corporatism that fights any manufacturing trend towards GHG mitigation with political corruption, and how could the tipping point not be inevitable? There's another feedback mechanism too. Firestorm related to drought. Geo-engineering may seem megamaniacal, but it maybe the only alternative now. Cloud creating wave/wind powered floating platforms that send a fine mist of seawater up into the astmosphere to increase cloud reflectivity and rain/snowfall seems to be possible and less drastic than other schemes.   more »

Ponzi scheming is in the news again: About 90% of the currency circulating the globe in electronic accounts, seems to be imaginary. So, yes (as Steven Earl Salmony says here) I think... "the global manmade economic colossus {a veritable and proverbial, modern Tower of Babel in all its glory} could crash before the overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide collapse the frangible biological systems and finite physical resources of the planet...". If we had a real currency that was based not on imaginary economic theories, or gold and silver as it once was, but on the commodities we depend on day after day, just maybe the labor of honest people could be turned into financial security without global scammers taking a 150% cut.   more »

This is troubling: "Worried about radioactivity? Coal's still your bogeyman. Dr. Chu says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant, given the flyash emissions of radioactive particles." Here chu repeats a tired old nuclear industry talking point, and glaring false dilemna fallacy. The choice is not between nuclear contamination and coal radiation, it is between distributed smart grid renewable energy and fossil/nuclear central power grid corporate monopoly.   more »

But really Chrysler, if you are serious please go Fiber Forge carbon fiber body/frame technology too. That might put you in position to buy out GM in a few years. The key to plugin hybrid, is lightweight. Carbon fiber does it while actually increasing crash protection strength and safety. A 1200 pound economy plugin hybrid would beat the world to the punch. make it a Chrysler.   more »

I was at first comically dismayed at the inane response to the first real smart grid thread on Gristmill all about Austin's smart grid project (they own their own grid!). Why complain though, it's another opportunity to repeat myself, yet again, in another fashion. Maybe someone will comprehend something from my techo-bloggerel this time? Hehey. Consider distributed computing, remember Napster anyone? Instead of a central server with computers connected to it, it was made up of computers acting as servers. A smart grid uses distributed generation and storage controlled by distributed computing to adjust demand to match supply.   more »

An excellent Gristmill article on the state of the auto companies' remaining denial. How do their points of view on bail out compare? Ford really gets it. GM has problems with focus, but has the vastly overpowered overpriced Volt. Ford is further behind on plugin but shows promise for 2012. These companies can be saved! How? Force them to upgrade to hypercar, Fiber Forge stamped carbon fiber body/fraime design, or they get no bail out. Mileage would double or triple in every model. Sales would soar.   more »

Descent into the Maelstrom. Deflation is rearing its depressionary head. The tipping point between recession into depression is approaching. A maelstrom of falling prices and profits and layoffs powers itself, one by one industries enter the event horizon and plunge into bankruptcy, the memory of the corporate entity lingers after chapter 11. Individual fortunes are gone for good, thanks to tighter individual bankruptcy laws, lobbied in by credit card companies disguised as banks, too big to fail.   more »

This interview is really great! Tom says: '...it's about national power -- not power so we can stomp all over the rest of the world, but power so we can actually be where we need to be as a country, to lead the world they way we need to lead the world and also to pass on what we need to pass on for the next generation."' My advice, use the force Tom!   more »

A long discussion all about cars finally turns to reality. 40,000 deaths per year and how many serious injuries? Why not bike at 20 mph instead? It really puts the whole car issue in another light, any alien observor would definitely spot the insanity. The Walmart stampede killed one person and it was on the news constantly. The Hadj stampedes in Mecca regularly kill hundreds. 40,000 per year and maybe 200,000 serious injuries? And we go on driving like maniacs? Yow. Collective insanity rules the roads.   more »

A great story on local agriculture from NBC nightly news. "The government began a subsidy program for small-scale farmers, providing them with fertilizers and high-tech seeds at roughly 15 percent of the market cost – the fertilizers and seeds were required for a more productive and resilient crop. The scheme cost the Malawian government $60 million, a huge amount for one of the poorest countries in the world where the average annual income is only $250." "Malawi’s major donors, including the World Bank, European Union and the United States balked and warned Malawi to reconsider. They claimed that such large-scale subsidies would cripple the economy. But the government went ahead."   more »

Another NBC nightly news ag story. It seems that with modern agribizz equipment, fertilizer, and seed, abandoned Russian collective farms are yielding bumper crops.   more »

How to reduce oil demand incrementally year after year in order to stabilize the global economy? What is needed is an OPEC for consumer nations. The oil importing countries getting together to "drill, baby, drill" efficiency and renewable energy for oil demand reduction. OPEC puts a billion into a new oil field, we put 10 billion into mass production of solar, wind, plugin hybrids, ground source heating systems, and smart grid technology.   more »

This sounds serious: "Big American utilities are slashing their investments in alternative energy. Florida Power & Light has cut its planned investment in wind power next year by 400 megawatts. Duke Energy of North Carolina has lopped $50m off its budget for solar power. And on October 31st VeraSun Energy, one of America’s biggest ethanol producers, caught out by gyrations in the prices of corn and petrol (gasoline), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the European Union the price of carbon permits has fallen from a high of almost €30 in July to around €20, making clean-tech investments less attractive." But as the failure of VeraSun shows, the drop in oil prices is killing agribizz ethanol. Which is a good thing. Will this also delay the roll out of plugin hybrids? Will it give the auto makers an excuse to put off mass production of oil substituting electric vehicles?   more »

Check this out! Larry Summers, the proposed director of Obama's National Economic Council? David Corn really sounds a warning on Mother Jones blog. This creep, along with Gramm, Greenspan, and Rubin was in on the crucial moment that regulation was prevented. Now we know where the blame really should be placed for "derivatives" and "credit default swaps", whatever they really are, these creeps obviously never understood them, and don't to this day.   more »

A very good presentation, direct to Obama, the latest from climate action pioneer Dr. James Hansen. But he makes a rash statement. That 4th generation, waste eating nuclear reactors can be ready for mass deployment in the 2015 to 2020 time window. Hansen is picking technology, and doing something he says he is against, asking government to pick technology. He uses the old false dilemna fallacy, in a soft way. Stating that we, america and europe, maybe able to rely on renewable/conservation energy technology to replace fossil fuel, but China and India won't. Leaving the reader to conclude that nuclear and CCS will be necessary.   more »

World trade problems have the global economy in a tailspin again. Could we maybe look back into ancient history for a key to local farming versus global commodity agri-business conflict? Maybe Adult Swim could bring back Sherman and Peabody? I think Jay Ward did an episode on the Incan corn based empire? The Incan system worked like a federal reserve, with store houses of corn, rather than storehouses of electronic/imaginary currency.   more »

The GHG climate change tipping point is a well worn scientific theory. The recessionary tipping point is looming just beyond the collective conceptual horizon. To understand when and how a recssion takes on its own momentum and becomes a global depression, a comparison with climate change is most helpfull. The tipping point for climate change will occur when positive feedback mechanisms kick in and take over the climate.   more »

Main stream media, Brian Williams on NBC nightly news, called clean coal an "oxymoron" just last evening. Then proceeded to show a clean coal pure oxygen CCS plant in Germany where the liquid CO2 is trucked to a cap rock sequestration well. "It could raise the cost of coal electricity 50%", was the tagline. Better that government chooses technology to support with subsidies and mass production orders than let industry pursue full scale boondoggles like this. Separating oxygen for combustion, extracting pollutants, then compressing CO2 into a liquid state, trucking it in a tanker truck and pumping it underground, only increasing the cost by 50%?   more »

Peaksters! Give up the "Mad Max" screaming about the end of cheap oil. Admit that if demand drops in conjunction with supply, our oily GHG economic war on terror problems would evaporate into thin air. Climb on the GHG tipping point scream wagon and talk up demand reduction as the only way out. Electric transportation can drop oil demand steadily year after year, and GHG along with it. Look out for the resultant economic boom.   more »

This is excellent, Ashton Kutcher on "Real Time" with Bill Maher: Make the very successful, profitable oil companies bail out the auto industry. Since they killed their business model trying to sell gas guzzlers...to benefit their oil company board room mates and fellow investors. Is this just to simple a plan for politicians to understand? No stolen bailout cash. No cap n' trade, no auctioned GHG permits, no carbon taxes even. Yow, what's a lobbyist to do? Fight it like their very mcmansion and mistress and kids' harvard education depends upon it? Yep. hehey.   more »

Live streaming Puppycam!   more »

This is more than getting to 60 in the senate, although that is vital as well, this is about discipline. Turning the US from a blue/red state mess into a coalition is not just campaign propaganda. Obama's principle is to become the change you want to see in the world, in this case, the world of politics. It's easy to mend fences with green republicans who opposed the war. If we can work with Lieberman, the man who repeated nearly every slur against Obama promulgated during the sleazy McCain campaign, we can work with nearly anyone? Cancel the bickering until the economy is fixed, oil wars are obsolete, and GHG is under control. It's all about oil...again. About replacing it as an energy source over the next 10 to 20 years.    more »

Pretty amazing news! It looks like some of the people running the world economy are considering re-evolutionary notions only discussed on blogs?   more »

Romm is right, think tanks need flushing. Most political/environmental prescriptions still have that underlying "free" market Reagan revolution flaw at their heart. Cap and trade, offsets, auctioned GHG permits, they all have that illusionary market efficiency, let-big-business-do-it attitude. The false premise behind these schemes is obvious, that unregulated markets are onmiscient saviours of the human species. Kind of like Jesus, but with money? Government directed WW 2 war production, competition survived and capitalism thrived, so what is the problem with a million car per year government contract with the automakers?   more »

Auto companies want a bailout? They better accept new people along with the taxpayer cash. Consider the lack of judgement of the failures now in charge. For instance, what about the current GM answer to our oil problems? The Volt a long promised, but never mass produced plugin hybrid. A redesigned, higher hp EV-1, with less battery range and a backup generator.   more »

Long term, safe returns do not lie in oil exploration and development. Or in nuclear power investment. Or in "clean" coal. The new energy economy is a better, safer investment. As renewable/conservation smart grid technology lowers oil demand and electricity demand itself, and plentiful renewable supply takes over energy markets, money is safe in the leading suppliers of these new energy devices. Money in the old energy economy companies will evaporate and condense in the hands of investors in the new paradigm. And so it goes.   more »

This is great news! One would think we could hit the ground running, finally having a chance to push a green job wave that will revive the economy and stop climate change. That doesn't seem to be happening. It's hard to tell why. Is it collective shock?   more »

Can the same old anti-government regulation talking points of the last 30 years of GOP corporate shilling win the war(s) we find ourselves in now? Removing subsidies for the old energy economy wouldn't be enough to win this time around. Subsidies need to be diverted to the new energy economy. The "free" market could choose which path to follow if those paths actually existed. But to open those paths, like plugin hybrids, government needs to set standards and order millions of units of these vehicles in order to spur mass production.   more »

Composters unite! Digest your hot waste first. Generate clean backup power for a renewable grid in the process. You'll still have plenty of compost, fed with the biodigestor fertilizer. This also eliminates the pathogen problem. That first germ killing biodigestion process. These latest pandemics originate in interspecies manure/food stream intake and the development of resistant mutated strains of pathogens that migrate from species to species. Bird flu to humans for instance.   more »

This makes all the days trail running to get ready even better. A little bit of every trail infuses through the psyche into every other trail. Pretty soon the trail becomes your real life, and your "real" life a detour from the trail.    more »

Barack notices Pollan's NYT article on food and ag policy, that's great. But the connections between food, ag, and energy must be better transmitted up the political food chain.   more »

I awoke to her first policy speech, on special needs children like her 13 year old nephew and her infant son Trig. It's shocking to see this much dumb, even with the experience of 8 years of the gibberisher in chief.   more »

This job creation out on the west coast shows the way to economic recovery. California solar companies are short of installers. Jobs are being created faster than they can be filled. Obama can make that green job wave wash over the whole nation. The template is there, it is working in California. Ground source heating/cooling, solar cogeneration panels for roof installation, wind farms on farms, offshore floating wave/wind and desalinization systems, biogas systems on farms hooked to distributed solid oxide fuel cell/turbine power plants, and plugin hybrids.   more »

On a clip featured in the latest "Daily Show" (link to follow when it's up on the net) we find out that we are still "real" americans, according to the McCain campaign! Oh lucky us, we here in northern Wisconsin, along with the Minnesota Iron Range residents, and those in a few other regions, have been labeled "real" americans, because McCain still has a marginal chance to win here. We are still "pro-america america". I guess if/when Obama wins, that will make all of america anti-american. Yep.   more »

Yes, Sarah takes the stage from Tina. A fitting media tribute to Palin, the skit is written to make her look great. Just like the applause for McCain at the Al Smith dinner, to put it in palinese, "Thi(a)nks, but no thi(a)nks (sic)."   more »