While the Montreal Protocol was a tremendous (and all too rare) successful instance of public policy actually following scientific consensus and addressing the emergency of ozone depletion, the dirty little secret of that success is that the materials which replaced ozone depleting CFC's (chlorofluorocarbons) are HFC's (hydrofluorocarbons) very potent and very persistent greenhouse gases in their own right.

Many of these gases leaking out of all those 2005 Prius's air conditioners - the Prius user who thinks he or she is saving the world representing in my mind a case something like an alcoholic announcing that he is now no longer an alcoholic because he has switched from drinking Scotch to drinking beer - will still be present in earth's atmosphere 50,000 years from now, something like 5 times the distance, in time, between the period before writing was invented and today.

In terms of persistence, CFC's are not quite as bad as HFC's, but of course, the mechanism for the decomposition of CFC's destroys stratospheric ozone, whereas HFC's generally do not. The solution was to make something that doesn't, effectively, decompose at all. (Actually HFC's do decompose under irradiation, but with hardly the same alacrity as HFC's; they have long half-lives. The decomposition product of HFC's is the very toxic compound HF gas - also decomposition product with CFC's - and various acid fluorides, including fluorophosgene. Happily the concentration in the atmosphere is never very high, because the slow rate of formation allows HF to be neutralized by glass and carbonates before it can cause much harm.)

The global warming potential of one widely used HFC 1,1,1,2, tetrafluorethane, R-134a, is about 1600 times as high as carbon dioxide. This is actually not quite as bad as R-12, which has a global warming potential of 6700, which is hopefully irrelevant owning to the Montreal Protocol banning it.

Any substance that has a half-life will, no matter how quickly it is formed, will come into equilibrium, at which time it will be destroyed at the same rate that it is created. The position of the equilibrium has to do with the rates of destruction and formation. Since R-134a has a low rate of decomposition, one can have higher concentrations of it in the atmosphere than one can have of R-12, which has a shorter half-life, if a more problematic decomposition route.

It would be nice therefore to have compounds with a short half life and a relatively benign mechanism of decomposition.

Actually it now understood that such compounds exist. They are the HFE's, hydrofluoroethers, which are pretty good refrigerants, are non-flammable, and decompose with a short half-life with a mechanism similar to that of HFC's, generating HF and fluorophosgene that can be neutralized by silica (glass) and carbonates before accumulating in toxic concentrations.

It might seem like a slam dunk, but, um, not so fast. Although HFE's are effective, they are not as efficient. To wit, it takes more energy to make them work than it takes with HFC's.

This is discussed in the ASAP section of the American Chemical Society Journal Environmental Science and Technology in a paper by Blowers and Landsbury out of the University of Arizona, where they should care about things like refrigerants.

Here is the abstract of the article, and a link for use of subscribers and people in good scientific libraries.

Here are some excerpts of the article from the text:



The bold is mine.

Note that the Joule-Thompson coefficient of all real gases, with the exception of hydrogen, helium and neon is positive, meaning that all real gases except these are potentially used as refrigerants. Indeed, liquid nitrogen is often made using the auto-refrigeration of compressed air being allowed to expand.

The problem is that using nitrogen to refrigerate itself involves an energy penalty. If energy is cheap, liquid nitrogen is cheap. If energy is expensive, liquid nitrogen is expensive.

These thermodynamic facts - like all thermodynamic facts - translate into environmental effects, since energy and the environment are inextricably connected, which is why energy storage always involves an environmental penalty.

To continue with excepting the paper, they consider - unlike an anti-nuke daydreaming about putative "someday" solar and wind systems with brazillions of battery packs - where energy comes from:



Note that coal use is likely to get worse not better although many attempts will be made to pretend otherwise, by building as a red herring one or two tiny coal gasification plants that could someday, possibly - if we really, really wanted to do it, even though we don't - be applied to sequestration, to distract attention from the huge new traditional coal plants. This is what I call the "Florida Power and Light Solution" which is marginally better than the German solution which is to announce that new coal plants don't count because they're, um, new. (It also helps to announce that you intend to use useless solar and wind power even as you build new coal and gas plants, another practice of the Germans who are in the process of replacing all of their nearly pollution free nuclear plants with "green" coal and gas plants.)

Now for the results of the paper:



The bold is, again, mine.

Note that HFE's become a reasonable and workable replacement for HFC's if and only if electricity is freely available without the generation of greenhouse gases.

This is entirely feasible with known technology, but regrettably, ignorance and mysticism prevent full application of the technology.

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americ...

Since the population of Harrisburg, PA is roughly 50,000, or would have been had the city not had every man, woman, child, hermaphodite, cat, dog and gold fish wiped out by the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the automobile death toll is "only" roughly the equivalent of killing 60% of Harrisburg each year.

I, for one, am relieved, especially as so many anti-nukes here who worry incessantly about "dangerous nuclear power" are spending so much time talking about their theoretical solar powered and wind powered electrical cars which could work, although for as long as I've been here, 8 years, none of these optimistic predictions have panned out despite great enthusiasm and many thousands of energy consuming threads about them.

I'm sure that our saftey minded renewable car advocates can show readily that solar powered cars - should they exist someday - will be much safer than modern cars, which "only" killed 60% of a Harrisburg in 2008.

Driving a car of course is much safer than having a tritium atom decay every hour or so in some water in the Marianas trench.

The Impending Power Gap: Where Will Germany's Energy Come From ...


I thought wind and solar was going to supply 100% of Germany's energy, although I was sort of, kinda, in a way, after a fashion, maybe, remotely curious about why Gazprom was paying Gerhard Schroeder 300,000 euros per year to install gas lines to Russia, and why Nabucco was paying Joschka Fischer about the same amount to do the same thing.

I don't know who's going to cash in on the coal. Maybe Tritten can get on that one, by issuing a lot of platitudes about how Germany could build CGS plants by the 25th century or some other soothsaying.

This comes from the European Scientific Publication: Eur J Public Health JUEL et al. 10 (2): 93.

It's available on line for free: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/repri...

The title of the article is:

Mortality and life expectancy in Denmark and in other European countries. What is happening to middle-aged Danes?.

Fifteen nations were studied over that period. (One nation included is one that began using so called "deadly nuclear power" almost exclusively in that period to generate its electricity, which is, of course, my point.)

Of the fifteen nations reported, the largest increase in life expectancy were reported in decending order: Portugal, Spain, France, Austria, and (then) West Germany. Life expectancy in these nations increase about 5 years over the period. French men actually increased their life expectancy more than Spanish men, 5 years compared to 4 years resepctively.

The nations the smallest increases were, from highest increase to lowest: Sweden, Greece, Norway, Netherlands, and, dead last, Denmark. The increase in Danish life expectancy over this roughly 20 year period was just one year.

In this period, the nation with the lowest mortality from lung cancer was, um France, with a mortality rate of 20 per 100,000. France was also in the lower tier for breast cancer.

France, despite all of its "deadly" nuclear power plants, according to the Wikipedia reference, which claims to be based on United Nations statistics, as the tenth best life expectancy in the world, 80.7 years. Japan, the best in the world, has a life expectancy of 82.6 years. Denmark ranks #31, and has a lower life expectancy than the EU overall. Denmark actually beats out the United States, #34, but that's not saying much. In the United States if you have no money, you have no health care.

Apparently the evil, nasty, "deadly scourge" of nuclear power cannot overwhelm the excellent French health care system, and maybe - it actually could be - air pollution is bad for you.

Nevertheless, as we all know, everyone in France will die.

http://www.energy.eu /

French Electricity (Domestic): 0,1319 Euros/kwh.

German Electricity (Domestic): 0,2125 Euros/kwh.

Danish Electricity (Domestic): 0,2671 Euros/kwh

French Electricity (Industrial): 00,0765 Euros/kwh.

German Electricity (Industrial): 0,1389 Euros/kwh.

Danish Electricity (Industrial): 0,1293 Euro/kwh.

Somebody call Joe Romm and ask him to explain the differences in these country's electricity rates.

I believe his claim is that "nuclear is too expensive," which belies the fact that France, the world's sixth largest economy, has as its 4th largest export, um, electricity.

Kerr and Stone, Science Vol 323, page 322, Jan 16, 2009.

The Zipingpu dam survived the earthquake, by the way. About half a million people live downstream from the dam. It is not clear that the dam would have survived Monsoon type levels in the reservoir, but the reservoir was only partially filled on the day of the quake. Engineers quickly drained the reservoir after the quake to repair damage to it.

The Zipingpu dam is upstream from the Three Gorges dam, which in turn is upstream from 40 million people.

A series of serial dam failures in 1975 in China, at Banqiao and other dams downstream from it represents the largest energy disaster of all time, killing more than 1/4 of a million people.

Of course everyone here knows all about that one, given the amount of time we all spend discussing it, which is almost continuously.

Just kidding...

A similar disaster was narrowly averted in the United States in 1983 - a matter that is somewhat obscure - but was averted when the Corp of Engineers went to a local hardware store to get plywood to avert the collapse of Lake Powell, upstream from the Hoover dam.

I covered this point on another website some time ago: A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.

Hydrological triggering of seismicity is being increasingly discussed in the literature. Another example is given in L. Bollinger et al. / Earth and Planetary Science Letters 290 (2010) 20–29

plants in France, or for that matter anywhere else.

Most nuclear plants worldwide run at close to or better than 90% of rated power, whereas there are zero solar plants that ever reach their rated power, and none that have reliability (capacity utilization of even 30%).

The same losers carry on endlessly about how wonderful wind and solar are, even though wind plants woud need to increase their pathetic reliability by a factor of more than 3 to run as reliably as nuclear plants, and wind by a factor of 9.

Today, January, 13th, 2010, the $700,000 "52 kw" solar toxic nightmare at MOCA in North Adams Massachusetts produced just 39 kWh of energy. Since the sun is now down and the piecd of consumer garbage isn't going to anything now, we may conclude that, since today, like every other day, contains 86,400 seconds, and 39 kWh is still 1.4 X 10⁸J, just like it has always been and always been, the output of the $700,000 system is just 1600 watts as average continuous power, not counting the waste that would have been involved in the imaginary batteries, if they existed, which they don't.

A lawnmower produces more power than that (since 1 horsepower still, as it always has, equals roughly 746 watts).

The capacity utilization of the "52 kW" solar plant today? 3%. Useless.

How do I know these details? Because the MOCA system posts its data "live," as I never tire of pointing out: http://www.sunviewer.net/portals/MoCA /

Have all the "renewables will save us" gas greenwashers in Massachusetts been living without electricity today just because the fucking solar toy isn't working reliably?

Of course not. They're right here on the internet hawking their selective attention like it fucking matters and posturing with denial.

Solar and wind fail miserably on the same criteria, reliability, that the "renewables will save us" gas greenwasher apply only to nuclear.

So called "renewable energy" will never be as clean, as safe, as reliable or as inexpensive as nuclear power.

A secret cabal of 150 unelected dirty birds, hiding behind "endangered species laws," funded by big wing interests is delaying the expansion into every valley, crook, mountain top, desert and dessicated dry lake bed in California marvelous "green" windmills filled with ton quantities of dangerous fossil fuel based lubricants that occasionally burst into flames.

This dastardly scheme against electric cars and the endless stream of asphalt and concrete connecting on which they upon which they depend as vital habitats, and the endangered desert tract housing cul-de-sac species that flower and depend on chaparral fires to reproduce, is funded by an elitist organization known as "Ventana Wild Life Society."

Wild life my ass. They wouldn't know a good kegger party in the pack of my F150 pick up truck that could be fueled by electricity or wind powered hydrogen (except for the fact that I'm waiting for the super delicious model to hit showrooms in 2005) if I invited them to one, which I wouldn't, since they're obviously bird brains.

California Condors and the Potential for Wind Power in Monterey County.

Let's stop the bird shit now. It's damn hard to remove from my windshield, meaning I'm often delayed several minutes in my quest to get stuck in traffic in my swell F150 that could be electric some day.

From the Grid.

Um...um...um...

Lessons Learned From Case Studies of Six High Performance Buildings.






The bold is mine. Further on:



Great system.

I wonder if anyone here ever wrote a puff piece here about the "new" Oberlin College solar system.

I have no idea how Governor Hydrogen Hummer's brazillion solar roofs program is working out, but its a good thing they keep building all those gas plants in California. They'll be able to use them to keep those inverters humming all through the night.

One of the big jokes about the dumb fundie German nuclear phase out, engineered by the Russian gas company executives Gerhard Schroeder and Joschka Fischer, is that it was a "bait and switch" program extraordinaire.

There was all kinds of rhetoric from dumb fundie anti-nukes about how Germany didn't "need" nuclear power because the useless and failed so called "renewable energy" industry was so great.

Eight years later, Germany produced between January to July 2009 (YTD figures for July) 33,538 GWh of so called "renewable energy," wind, solar, geothermal and trash burning combined, 14,680 GWh of hydroelectric power, 73,573 GWh of "phasing out" nuclear power, and 205,056 GWh of dangerous fossil fuel power.

IEA data on German Electrical Production, page 14.

This makes nuclear energy, post Gas Executive "nuclear phase out" announcements aside (made when the gas company executives were nominally heading the German government and not Russian gas pipeline companies) the largest source of climate change gas free energy in Germany still in spite of massive German dumb fundie anti-nuclear ignorance.

Germany has no permanent repository for dangerous fossil fuel waste, has no plans to built one, no plans to site one, and no plans to design one. The waste dump for all of Germany's dangerous fossil fuel waste is earth's atmosphere.

This problem is obviously a failure not of technology but of language. Obviously the secret of improving the performance of the German renewables industry is to declare dangerous coal gas, "renewable."

German science has risen to the task.

Recently a very stupid dumb fundie anti-nuke posted a reference to a stupid paper on this website - he posts it over and over and over and over and over again as if it were the only paper in the scientific literature - claiming that um, renewable energy was going to save us all, and he could prove it by citing the same damn paper again and again and again and again. The reference reported by the very stupid dumb fundie anti-nuke was Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173. Of course, if one thinks critically, one realizes that not everything published in the literature is true.

I'll let people judge for themselves whether this paper from the scientific literature is accurate:

Organic GeochemistryVolume 35, Issues 11-12, November-December 2004, Pages 1537-1549.

The title of the article is "Coalbed methane in the Ruhr Basin, Germany: a renewable energy resource?"

Um...um...um...

Here's some excepts:



By the way, Germany has been doing what it can to help coal bed methane "fields" - abandoned coal mines - form around the world. The South African coal industry for instance, has big plans to fuel all of the new German coal plants.

Here's some happy talk from the Materials and Methods section of the paper:



Natural spring water. Can we bottle it in bis phenol A bottles?

And what's this stuff about active coal mines? In a "renewable" paradise? As Donald Fagen once sang in a slightly different context: "It just couldn't be and only a fool would say that..."

What follows is a tortured argument that really the source of the methane found in these mines is biogenic, derived from organisms living in the mines, maybe mine timbers.

So it's OK therefore. It's renewable. Problem solved and the apparent failure of the German renewable energy industry to match the "phased out" nuclear industry, the hydro industry or the dangerous fossil fuel industry is just an illusion.

Sigh...

As is well known to people who have taken a science course in their lives, the vast majority of the reduction of carbon dioxide by living systems is dominated by the use of chlorophyll, which is structurally a porphyrin complex of magnesium.

Here is a picture of the chlorophyll porphyrin:



The source of energy for the reduction of carbon dioxide by chlorophyll is of course, solar energy, and, from a thermodynamic perspective, the energy efficiency is extremely low, less than 10%, sort of like the capacity utilization of solar PV toxicological nightmares, which seldom ever reaches 15%, which is why the fraudulent solar industry always advertises it's systems not in terms of energy but rather by peak power which solar PV systems never actually reach.

Live, From the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art: The Solar System.

One Holy Grail in energy science is to achieve the efficient electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to energy carriers, which are chemically reduced compounds.

I found a relatively recent report in the scientific literature interesting in this regard since it involves porphyrin biomimetic chemistry to accomplish the reduction of carbon dioxide using electricity as a source of energy.

Here is the abstract of the paper to which I will refer:

Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical 229 (2005) 249–257

The title of the article as one can see by clicking on the link above is: "Electrochemical reduction of CO2 mediated by poly-M-aminophthalocyanines (M = Co, Ni, Fe): poly-Co-tetraaminophthalocyanine, a selective catalyst."

Here are some excerpts from the paper:



The porphyrin complexes used in this chemistry are not co-ordination complexes of magnesium, as chlorophyll is, but rather complexes of the metals cobalt, nickel and iron, which happen to be the most paramagnetic elements among the transition "d" elements. (Lanthanide paramagnetic elements such as samarium are also known.)

The South American scientists who have written this paper report the products of this reaction:



In table one the only other product is hydrogen.

Formaldehyde and formic acid need to be further reduced to methanol or DME to be useful as fuels. This would best be accomplished by hydrogenation, but obtaining the hydrogen further reduces efficiency.

The efficiency for the reduction complex was highest for nickel pthalocyanine complexes, about 40%.



The more I think about energy, by the way, the more I recognize the element nickel as being one of the most important elements in the periodic table for technological development. This metal has tremendous use both as a catalyst, where it is important in oxidation reduction chemistry, but also in the preparation of high temperature superalloys like Hastelloy and Inconel. It's a great metal.

I hope this report doesn't generate any "we and our stupid cars are saved" thinking, but it is interesting because of the electrochemical organic moieties.

Despite briefly, for 10 minutes periods that end up consuming lots of electricity as internet mavens admire it, producing large amounts of power from wind, Spain's reliance on renewable illusions has a predictable result: A huge increase in the output of carbon dioxide.

Predictably the change is dominated by the use of dangerous natural gas. There are no permanent disposal facilities in Spain to contain dangerous natural gas waste for eternity, none are designed, sited, or planned. The primary dump for Spanish dangerous natural gas waste is earth's atmosphere, which Spain continues to use in ever increasing amounts.

Dangerous Fossil Fuel Waste Dumping Around the World.


The Spanish dangerous natural gas dumping program is Amory Lovins' wet dream, an official anti-nuke program of the type that enriches dangerous natural gas companies who then get to pay Lovins "consulting fees."


Although so called "nuclear waste" in Spain has killed zero people, and zero people have been injured by Spanish nuclear facilities, the Spanish, now experiencing desertification of their peninsula have announced a policy of producing wastes that do kill people.

Of the 45 million tons of increased dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping, 35 million tons derive from dangerous natural gas burning. Dangerous natural gas is dumped in Spain when the wind plants there briefly produce zero percent of Spain's electricity.

Dangerous Natural Gas Waste Dumping Policies Around the World.

More recent figures on the failure of the weeny renewable energy industry to make a difference in OCED practice of dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere can be seen in the simple pie graphs produced by the IEA for 2009, showing that despite 50 years of dumb fundie chanting cheering, so called "renewable energy," excepting the hydroelectricty that has already destroyed most of the world's major river systems, accounts for just 3% of OCED electricity.

Wanna bet that little dumb fundies can't interpret a simple pie chart? Don't bet on them being able to do it: You'll lose money, since their game is denial.

In the period between January and July of 2009, nuclear power produced more energy than wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass combustion combined, producing, in the process far fewer deaths, zero, than these other forms of energy. In terms of something called "numbers" - to which anti-nuke fundies object vociferously, nuclear power produced 1,252.0 TWh whereas hydro produced 805.8 TWh and the combined solar, wind, geothermal and biomass industry produced 152.6 TWh. Unless you are a dumb fundie anti-nuke, you can add 805.8 and 152.6 and determine that the sum is less than 1,252.0.

In fact, without hydro, the entire renewable portfolio, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass remains in the OCED a trivial form of energy, so trivial that it could disappear without anyone noticing.

Interestingly, proponents of the failed so called "renewables" industry, like all dumb fundies who rail against stuff they can't understand, oppose the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy. They couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels, without which their toys would collapse.

but I'll leave that special feature to my work at Kos, of which I am still very proud in spite of what the wardens have done to the place. There were times at Kos that I have felt I actually wrote things that I could not have written better, and that's been a rare experience for me for most of my life.

Getting the polls... Writing the polls over there was often, almost always in fact, the most difficult part of the work, the one that required the most art. I certainly don't miss the responsibility of doing it. It was hard. It was very difficult to repeat the same thing over and over and over - a literary device about with a certain meaning conveyed not by the words themselves but by the style - still be amusing and still refer not only to the topic of the diaries themselves, but also the absurdity of the fact that some of these things even needed to be discussed at all. The polls worked, but a lot of times that I went to write one, I'd get a knot in my stomach. (Sometimes I'd get a knot feeling that "I shoulda said..." about a poll.) I always felt great when someone would comment in the diary - and there were more than one such occasions - remarking, "Best. Poll. Ever."

That was second only to someone telling me that they read my diaries and changed their minds about nuclear energy because of my writings. If that happened just once, it would have made it worth it, but it happened many times.

For the record, Tim certainly isn't the worst of the dumb fundie anti-nukes, but he is one who, rightly or wrongly, has been awarded nonetheless a certain level of autocratic power and is handling it badly. On some level that's not surprising if you come to understand certain features of his life.

There are some things he did in the past that I thought quite noble. Most fundamentalist anti-nukes are consumerist simpletons who are notably devoid of an ability to look beyond their own provincial realities. Tim was not that kind of guy in his better days.

He and I corresponded off line briefly and he was often gracious, even as I am almost never gracious. He is one of those guys who almost makes one want to weep, someone who definitely struggles to do good, but gets so swept by his illusions that he ends up, wholly unintentionally, being a force for doing the great wrongs without ever even being able to realize the depth and tragedy and nature of the illusions themselves.

Anyone who can't relate to that most human of predicaments is probably suffering from a short supply of self-cognition.

That said, ignorance is ignorance, of course, as I used to say over there, "Ignorance kills." Ignorance is not neutral. Ignorance is not acceptable. Ignorance must be confronted.

Although I am angry at Tim for giving reign to his ignorance, it's not like it's active ignorance, the kind of ignorance that insists on its right to assert itself as glory. I think on some level he is able to question himself. Better than 95% of the anti-nukes around, from the stupid and evil Amory Lovins to some of the more prosaic dunderheads here, revel in ignorance of the latter type. They positively glory in not knowing what they're talking about. They are actually proud of displaying with force how little they know. Again, Tim was generally not that kind of guy.

But these concerns are pedestrian. The real problem is our country and our planet and what we must do about them with the fuse burning ever closer to the bomb. We get so swept away that we forget that there is not much time left.

Over all these bitter years, I worried myself knowing that it is far more difficult to act than to criticize actions, and I've often cited Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech at the Sorbonne, the one about "being marred with sweat and dust", - which Roosevelt made in a typically triumphant manner by the way - as evidence of that difficulty and its risks. My goal in seeing the Democrats elected was not to triumph over the Republicans as an end in itself, but to hope that we would govern wisely, to give humanity its best hope at overcoming the vast challenge of a collapsing planet, something of which the Republicans were clearly temperamentally incapable.

If anyone seems equal to avoiding those risks of being swept away by power itself, the current President would seem to be the best we can hope for, because he has a thick skin, grace, intellect and most importantly a sense of humor. In this way the President may manage to achieve what the great Presidents achieve, a sense of limits that, at their most beautiful and evocative present themselves not as failure but as the success accomplishing the maximum for what those limits allow. Of all the qualities that a President must have, a sense of humor is the most important requirement for achieving those goals.

The great Presidents were all good at being self deprecating.

Compared to the challenges in Washington, DailyKos, and all other blogs are, in fact, provinces of small import, however big they think themselves, however humorless they are becoming. I am grateful however for many things I learned at Kos that I didn't know before. I certainly got to know about the President there - he was certainly not initially my ideal candidate but what I learned at Kos changed my mind - and knowing about the President has given me - still - something that doesn't come easy to me: Some hope. This is the first time in a very long time that I have wanted to hear what a President has to say on a subject, any subject. That's something and let me show some gratitude: Daily Kos was a beacon - as this place was - in some very dark times when I used to dread having to listen to what was advertised as "Our President."

But with the incredible load of work before us and the needs so crucial, who really cares about Kos and Democratic Underground and whether small obnoxious insulting bloggers who write silly polls are happy with them? Does it matter?

No.

All that said, the management at Kos is a little starstruck with itself and is probably not avoiding what Fox News was unable to avoid at the peak of its (dubious) credibility. Kos himself seems to think he's a cross between Madonna and Rupert Murdoch. I never paid much heed to him and actually have no real sense of his ideas but from what little I do know, I think he's laying the seeds of his own demise. (He certainly has a corps of anti-science types around on his front page appealing, um, to "science," and hypocrisy has a way of eroding one's credibility.) I could be wrong about the future of DailyKos, but, again, who cares?

Still Tim... Tim... Tim...there was a part of me that really liked him as dumb as his anti-nuke ideas were because I really felt he wanted to learn something and he really wanted to be a Mensch, a man. Still, somewhat more tragically than is the case with Kos himself, Tim has always been limited by being the opposite of what our much strained President is: Tim has too thin a skin, is not much of an original thinker and he sorely lacks both creativity and a sense of humor.

That's too bad. He would have been better off without any kind of authority, and he wouldn't have ended up looking like that kid you knew in elementary school whose personality was destroyed by being appointed hall monitor by the Vice Principal. Tim could have been more, because, maybe unlike me, I really suspect that he sorely needs to feel that he is a good man. In the right place and time that need alone can lead one to do great things.

But this little post ended up something like an old NNadir diary, and I'm rambling insufferably. Thanks for coming by and, oh yeah, even if we don't use our polls much, we have smileys here in case you ever find yourself too lazy to use words:

As a kind of shorthand, I like to say that I favor the banning of dangerous fossil fuels on the grounds that there is no solution to the problem of dangerous fossil fuel waste which is rapidly in geological terms doing extreme damage to the existing biosphere.

Specifically, I don't buy into the Amory Lovins/Gerhard Schroeder/Joschka Fisher meme that any of dangerous fossil fuels can be regarded acceptable, including the ones that pay their salaries, specifically, dangerous natural gas. It is pure bull shit - and not bull shit from a giant factory farm feedlot poop to methane scheme either - to claim that dangerous natural gas is a "clean" fuel. It is only slightly, very slightly, more ridiculous than appealing to so called "clean coal."

(The more that I think about it, the more I think that the anti-nuke fundamentalism of the aforementioned men is a deliberate function of their overt corruption by dangerous fossil fuel interests.)

I personally regard the phase out - the fast phase out - of dangerous fossil fuels as something that should be one of humanity's highest priorities, higher than health care, higher than the wars, higher than a host of other problems. This is because however great our problems with these issues may be, they will inevitably be made wildly uncontrollable by an unstable climate, particularly the risk of war as the number of refugees grows larger.

I am sometimes criticized for my rhetoric and although I generally couldn't care less, there is a technical problem with my rhetoric, inasmuch as I rail against methane as a dangerous fossil fuel, whereas the fossil part is assumed. There is a theory - to which I personally give little credence - involving abiotic methane, methane that has remained in rocks and subterranean formations from the time of the accretion of the earth. Advocates of this theory - including some who have drilled very deep holes at great expense to attempt, thus far with no success to "prove" it - point to the existence of huge quantities of methane that are known to be in interstellar clouds and, for that matter, in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets and some of their moons, like the moon of Saturn, Titan, that was recently visited by a European space probe as part of the Cassini mission. There is a form of methane however that is not strictly either abiotic nor fossil: This form is the famous methane hydrates in the deep ocean that have been viewed alternately as a source of both optimism and terror.

Personally I come down on the terror side, since I regard this methane not as a hopeful source of energy with which to keep Viking Stoves fired up in stupid car CULTure suburban McMansions, but as a (potentially) unstable sink for holding a dangerous risk to the atmosphere in place for as long as is possible. I am concerned that warming oceans will cause some of this gas to be released, contributing a huge positive feedback loop.

Earlier this year in connection with another subject in which I am interested, I collected a paper on the origins of these hydrate formations.

Here is the abstract of the paper to which I refer:

Journal of Geochemical Exploration 95 (2007) 88–100

The title of the article is: "Terrestrial organic matter controlling gas hydrate formation in the
Nankai Trough accretionary prism, offshore Shikoku, Japan"

If the first paragraph of the article doesn't scare the pants off of you, it should:



Imagine someone trying to dump twice as much dangerous fossil fuel waste as is already known...

There I go again, saying "fossil." What I should say, at least strictly, if this paper is correct is that I favor banning the burning of deposited methane, since it is not clear that the origin of methane hydrates involves ancient formations. To wit, some other excerpts of the paper:




In other words, the stuff may have formed relatively recently from biological action. Some may accrete into the crust by being dragged along by subduction plates.

The authors do extensive analysis in their paper - wonderful analytical chemistry - and find lots of interesting and exciting things, like unusually long chained alkanes and primary alkanols, some with chain lengths up to 32.

The authors discuss at some length the difference between biogenic methane formed by decarboxylation of acetate and that formed by the biogenic reduction of carbon dioxide either from carbonate rocks or carbon dioxide formations, many of which are known and some of which - as amazing at it might seem in these times - are mined.

If one is interested, one may refer to the original paper at a subscribing institution's library.

A little from the conclusion:



I really don't trust human beings to discover huge reserves of methane, since I expect that they will do something stupid and dangerous with them, embracing short term and possibly suicidal thinking when they approach it. The idea of enormous reserves makes me shiver to think what may happen in that still shivering cold water.

First Lady blames Saitoti for oil spill deaths



Imagine, just for a minute - if you have a sense of humor - that these 118 dead had been European and for another minute, that the cause of their death was a radioactive spill.

There would have been an international fetish lasting for decades.

As it is, this is the first lady of Kenya, the land of our President's father, and the spill involved oil and so the world couldn't care less about these people. The decision to not care less about any dangerous fossil fuel deaths, including the millions who die each year from air pollution, is an arbitrary decision, one made in a moral vacuum that in an ethical world would be reprehensible.