Electric utilities in Vermont are worried about the high cost of home heating oil. They fear consumers will be inclined to use electric space heaters to heat their homes this winter.
Hey, I’ve been running the numbers on that. At over $4/gallon for oil, the 11 or 12 cent kilowatt-hour looks pretty good.
The utilities say their grid, particularly in Southern Vermont, cannot handle the added load if we all turn on a space heater.
And they want us to add plug-in electric cars to the mix?
Ye gods.
The End is nigh. The hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen have sounded. I am about to agree with Gary Trudeau. A couple-three years ago, his Doonesbury strip introduced Dr. Nathan Null, the Situational Science Adviser. Here’s an excerpt from that strip:
Young Republican College Kid: “Drat! These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!”
Situational Science Adviser: “Then Challenge them, Stewie!”
—–
SSA: “Situational Science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by the facts!”
—–
SSA: “That’s why I always teach the controversy like the Evolution Controversy or the Global Warming controversy …
—–
YRCC: “You’re right, Situational Scienceman–I’ll never trust science again! “It’s just too controversial!”
SSA: “Stewie gets it now, folks! Do you?”
Trudeau likes to pound the Bush administration (ya think) but there is a similar effort going on the Far Green camps to use science to forestall and obfuscate rather than simply to report.
Once upon a time I thought this wasn’t a wholesale attempt to discredit science, merely a concerted effort to ramp up tiny observations into generalized Truths to serve their agenda. After all, we are told the Far Right agenda tries to use common folk as cannon or environmental fodder so, situationally, the Far Green agenda must try to shut down one business segment after another.
That worries me, but not as much as what I now see as the wholesale drive to gain power over every facet of your life and mine. How? By discrediting science whenever it appears in public. It has been going on for years.
Big Tobacco tried mightily to discredit Dr. Koop as a poopyhead.
Natural Life Magazine tried mightily to discredit childhood vaccinations.
The Far Right tried mightily to discredit Evolution for 80 years.
Trudeau’s Situational Science Adviser pushed the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the Everglades controversy, the acid rain controversy, the mercury controversy, and more.
I know very little about mercury other than its toxicity and ubiquity. And its distance from the Sun. I did read that if you lose a single mercury filling in a ten-acre pond, the EPA would have to ban all fishing, swimming, bathing, and boating in that pond. Makes you wonder why we still have “silver” fillings–or why Al Gore pushes mercury-laden fluorescent light bulbs–innt.
Now, of course, everything from the unnaturally high snowfall in the winter of 2007-08 to the unnatural temperature rise of the Atlantic Ocean is caused by Global Warming, and all a result of Carbon Dioxide.
Heh.
Anybody want to guess the agenda here?
It’s almost the same as mine.
I want you to read this, decide I am brilliant, and do what I tell you is right.
The Far Green wants you decide they are brilliant and do what they tell you is right. But they want more. The Far Green wants to force you and you and you to do what they tell you is right And they are developing the tools to enforce their whims.
One of my correspondents related a story from the historical times after the Tet Offensive when gasoline cost 40 cents per gallon. His friend, a Quaker, had received Conscientious Objector status and was assigned to a group called “Environment!” After working there several months, he said “These guys don’t care a bit about the environment. This is all about power… We, the great and stupid unwashed, needed to be doing what the folks at “Environment!” said we should be doing.”
That was more than 35 years ago.
I think the group Environment! has joined the Extinct Species list but other Far Green groups are growing stronger.
Today their tools include taxes, criminal penalties, and news attacks on science.
Our Quaker friend said then that “if the environmental movement could define Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant, they would have total control.”
OK, everybody inhale … and hold.
Next up will be the ban on that other dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Your Carbon Footprint NASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the earth has entered a natural cooling phase that will last decades.
OTOH, Al and Tipper Gore’s Tennessee home uses about the same amount of electricity as a dozen or more average American homes or at least 156 Swahili villages. The Gore’s Nashville residence is just four times the size of those average American homes and the Gore’s consumption has jumped yet another 10% since their “energy-efficient” home renovations. Do as I say, not as I do, eh Al?
A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.
Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.
Got me to thinking, that did.
Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.
I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.
My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)
Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.
See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.
But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.
Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.
Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.
The Miami Herald thinks solar power is a white elephant.
The old saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I guess there wasn’t enough blood in South Florida yesterday.
Florida Power and Light, the principle utility here, has “scaled back grand plans for solar energy in Florida. Sunshine may be free, but generating energy from it is still a costly proposition,” according to a report by John Dorschner in the Miami Herald.
It surprised me to discover that “Florida gets much less direct sunlight than some other places.” The Herald continued that “What’s more, solar can be considerably more expensive than other forms of energy, experts say.”
For the record, FPL Group has desert solar plants and wind facilities throughout the western states. It is the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar power. FPL serves more than 4.4 million customer accounts across Florida.
“I haven’t seen anything yet that shows solar is right for Florida,” Jay Apt, executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, concluded in the Herald.
Now for the real story.
“Backers of solar power insist that costs would drop quickly over time if solar gets support from utilities and politicians. But those who study energy economics are skeptical.”
I want to know where they found these experts. Consider this:
1959: “Only Jules Verne can get a man to the Moon”
1969: “That’s one small step for man …”1975: “The American automobile industry can’t possibly double the gas mileage on cars. Double? Are you crazy?”
1985: The Corporate Average Fuel Economy for cars reached 27.5 mpg.1992: “The sweet spot for desktop computers is $3,000” (I paid $3,085 1992 dollars for an 80486-based Gateway 2000 in May of that year).
2002: Gateway sold Pentium 4-based desktops with Windows XP for under a grand (and some for half of that now).2006: Google founder Larry Page and Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla lit a public fire under solar power with a California ballot issue.
Computer chips and solar cells are, at the engineering level, pretty much the same thing.
“A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” Paul Saffo, an associate engineering professor at Stanford University and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley said in the International Herald Trib earlier this year.
That tells us we can link Moore’s Law and solar technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so; its corollary is that prices plummet at around the same rate.
In 2006, Solaicx was one of dozens of Silicon Valley firms driving the then-$11 billion worldwide solar energy market. Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of chip-making equipment, began selling machinery that manufactures solar wafers that same year.
In 2006, SunPower founder Richard Swanson told CNN the solar industry was like the chip industry 30 years before. “It was an extremely fun and dynamic industry,” he said. “But unless you were in it, it was practically invisible until the IBM PC came out in 1981.”
That was a couple of years ago, long enough for the news to reach Florida by now.
So. Mr. Dorschner thinks solar power is a white elephant. I think the Herald and Mr. Dorschner should maybe do a little more research. And maybe, just maybe, they should report what the solar industry is doing that will change the numbers instead of looking to spill enough blood to kill it.
I know it doesn’t seem true, but data is everything. Oh, sure, we see plenty of examples of apparent professionals who punch the fire alarm on a hunch, but advertisers want to measure everything. If you don’t know how many people see your ad, if you don’t know when they see your ad, if you don’t know who sees your ad, you aren’t selling. I’m talking names and addresses, people.
Billboards seem unlikely data gatherers, eh?
But wait! Imagine a billboard with a camera that can “look back” at passers-by and gather details about gender, age, expression, and time-span of the contact. “We’re not storing actual images of the peeps we see,” saith the billboard owners, “so privacy is not a problem.”
Horse puckey.
Facial recognition programs already use surveillance cameras in public places to store, sort, and process actual images of the passers-by and to compare those images to the stored images of known bad guys.
That’s pretty cool from a Homeland Security standpoint.
But wait.
Those who would give up an essential liberty for
temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.
–Benjamin Franklin
Huh.
A billboard camera that photographs passers-by and a facial recognition program that can tap the databases of every state DMV. Driver’s licenses have photos now; the issuing states require you to update your photo periodically so they can actually identify you. The technology exists now. All it takes is a few lines of code to mix and match.
“Oh, that would never happen,” you say. “We have too many safeguards.” Betcha you think the FBI needs a warrant to rummage around in your phone, email, financial, and library stuff, too.
Can you spell G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l meets D-a-v-i-d O-g-i-l-v-y?
So. How long will it be before both the Feds and Proctor & Gamble have not only your Social Security number but also your last year’s income tax return?