Monthly Archives: February 2009

TWITTER: John McCain tweets his top ten “porkiest projects”

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UPDATE (4 March 09): How To Manage A Beaver

In an attempt to embrace technology and bring the Republican Party into the 21st century, Senator John McCain twitters his “TOP TEN PORKIEST PROJECTS in theOmnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass.” Earlier Senator McCain tweeted, “$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi – how does one manage a beaver? [emphasis added].” He subsequently changed that tweet.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator McCain attacked government spending on research type projects, and he continues that theme in his top ten porkiest projects. I wonder what type of programs besides defense spending would Republicans support. Besides cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, restricting civil rights, and deregulating—do Republicans actually make policy?

john-mccainjohn-mccain2

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ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT: Bill reverses last minute Bush rule changes to ESA

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Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act “directs all Federal agencies to use their existing authorities to conserve threatened and endangered species and, in consultation with the Service, to ensure that their actions do not jeopardize listed species or destroy or adversely modify critical habitat, [and] Section 7 applies to management of Federal lands as well as other Federal actions that may affect listed species, such as Federal approval of private activities through the issuance of Federal permits, licenses, or other actions.”

Obviously, Section 7 as a substantive rule carries a lot of weight, so without the mandatory Section 7 consultation requirement or independent review, the ESA would be much weaker. Before leaving office, former President George W. Bush attempted to weaken this provision. From TPMDC:

The bill also authorizes a reversal of last year’s controversial Bush end run around the Endangered Species Act, which would allow oil rigs and highways to be built anywhere in the U.S. without independent reviews of their potential impact on the surrounding wildlife populations. As Bloomberg reports:

The provision authorizes President Barack Obama to reverse a Bush administration rule that said energy projects outside the habitat of polar bears couldn’t be blocked solely because emissions might add to global warming and destruction of the arctic species.
…

The provision could also expand the consultations required before changes are made to endangered-species listings. A rule issued under President George W. Bush limited the number of agencies that had to weigh in on decisions about endangered animals.

In other endangered species news:

  1. american-pikaThe “furry little American pika has chalked up a significant victory in Sacramento federal court, [because] the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has finally agreed to consider listing it as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act.”
  2. The republicans are not happy about polar bear protection in bill: “Language in the omnibus spending bill that would allow the Obama administration to reverse a controversial regulation on the polar bear is raising the ire of some prominent Republicans, who claim the rider could open the door for the Interior Department to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”
  3. A Georgia man was charged for possessing various wildlife contraband: “United States Attorney David E. Nahmias said, ‘This defendant was a collector and had acquired a number of illegal skulls of birds and the carcass of a snow leopard, all of which are endangered and therefore protected by federal wildlife law.’”
  4. Mixed salmon forecast: “Things are looking up for commercial and sports fishing off the northern Oregon and Washington Coasts. But the forecast remains grim farther south.”
  5. sea-lion-eating-salmonsea-lion-eating-sturgeonProtected sea lions eating endangered salmon and sturgeon will be trapped and killed. From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

    A federal appeals court has refused to block plans to start trapping and killing sea lions that eat endangered salmon at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.

    The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Thursday it would not issue a stay sought by the Humane Society of the United States, because their arguments are unlikely to prevail as the case moves forward.

    California sea lions are normally protected by federal law. But since some have discovered that salmon – including threatened and endangered species – are easy pickings at the dam, NOAA Fisheries Service has given authority to the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho to kill up to 85 a year.

The American pika image was found here, and the sea lion images were found here and here.

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REEL BIG FISH: 770-pound freshwater stingray landed on rod and reel

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freshwater-stingrayfreshwater-stingrayA very large pregnant freshwater stingray was recently pulled from the Mae Klong River. According to the Telegraph.co.uk, the angler—Ian Welch—with 13 men took “90 minutes” to land the giant freshwater ray (Himantura chaophraya), which “measured 7ft long and 7ft wide.” After the ray was brought to shore and photographed, it was released.

According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the giant freshwater stingray is considered a vulnerable species, since the “species has been and will continue to be adversely affected in much of its range by a complex of factors including directed and bycatch fisheries and habitat alteration or destruction, [so] the possibility of extinction in the wild for some subpopulations is considered extremely high.” FishBase indicates that the giant freshwater stingray has a “very low, minimum population doubling time [of] more than 14 years,” and the giant rays are occasionally caught for “meat and possibly its cartilage” in the “demersal gillnet and longline fisheries operating in riverine and estuarine areas.”

Worldwide, giant freshwater fish are threatened with extinction, so the Megafishes Project is working to raise awareness, educate, gather data, and protect freshwater giants.

Images © BNPS.co.uk were found here.

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CLEAN COAL: In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal

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On clean coal:

[M]ore PR than reality.

The Reality Campaign has two good ads attacking the myth of clean coal:

Two good reasons why coal isn’t clean:

  1. Mountaintop removal

    2. Coal companies lazily use mountaintop mining to blast away mountaintops to bring the consumer cheap coal, while valleys are filled in—destroying sensitive aquatic ecosystems, impacting property values, increasing erosion, and threatening communities with coal sludge or slurry ponds that store accumulated waste—basically corporations making a profit at the expense of the environment and local communities. So how is coal clean?

  2. Toxic fly ash: From TIME

    3. The “clean coal” campaign was always more PR than reality — currently there’s no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be.

    .       .       .

    As we grapple with global warming, coal can be cheap or it can be (somewhat) clean. But the sea of ash in Tennessee shows it can’t both, and that’s a reality we need to face as we plot America’s energy future

mountaintop-removal

Image by Southwings.

Get involved here and with the organization iLoveMountains.org.

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SMART GRID news

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The image below is © Better_Place on Flickr

better-place-denmark2

Here are some interesting news stories that highlight the potentials of smart grid technology and how smart grid technology works:

Denmark outlines plans for wind-car smart grid: IBM to join project to make one in 10 Danish cars electric:

The Danish government has this week stepped up plans to build a genuinely zero carbon electric car network that draws on the country’s wind energy to power car batteries, inking an alliance that will see IBM roll out the smart grid technologies required to manage the charging infrastructure.

.       .       .

The government is keen to develop the network quickly as the batteries in electric cars will provide storage capacity for the power the country already derives from wind turbines. It is hoped that the infrastructure will simultaneously help Denmark manage peaks and troughs in power supply, while allowing cars to run using genuinely zero carbon energy.

How Better Place plans to revive the electric car:

Last year we reported on Better Place’s deals with various national and state governments, such as Israel, Denmark, Hawaii, and California, to roll out infrastructure to assist in the adoption of electric vehicles (EV) from about 2011 onwards. This infrastructure will primarily consist of battery exchange stations, where drivers of Better Place compatible EVs can have their nearly depleted battery pack swapped out for a fully charged set, and EV charging points, located in homes as well as public places.

.       .       .

Through the network-control center we will be liaising back into the grid and our suppliers. This means we won’t fill a battery or, say, a million batteries at 3 p.m. on a 40-degree day when the grid is already at peak load. We’ll actually help the grid out by taking some of the charge out of those batteries and helping load balance the grid, and put the charge back in at 3 a.m. the following morning when the wind farms are spinning and there’s no one taking the electricity.

By having an intelligent network, we can control how much charge goes in, when it goes in, if it comes out, which makes us a very beneficial partner for our utility partners and makes us a certain customer for our renewable energy suppliers.

Four big reasons to get behind the smart grid:

Just one of the benefits of the smart grid — reducing power outages — arguably helps justify the federal government’s desired investment of $17 billion in federal funds into transmission and smart-grid investments. According to Electric Power Research Institute estimates, power outages cost U.S. business at least $50 billion a year.

But reducing power outages is but one of the potential benefits of connecting utilities and consumers through an intelligent network. With smart meters installed at homes and businesses to monitor energy consumption and transmit information between energy providers and consumers, the smart grid promises to be substantially more efficient than today’s system. I’ll dig more deeply into the capabilities and features of the smart grid as I share what I view as some of the top benefits it holds for business.

Leading Smart Grid Provider Testifies on Capitol Hill: CURRENT CEO Says Smart Grid Will Boost Energy Efficiency, Slash Carbon Emissions, Create Jobs:

CURRENT Group, LLC Chief Executive Officer Tom Casey told the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming today that a Smart Grid would have a substantial and immediate impact on the nation’s electricity system and deliver immense environmental benefits by reducing carbon emissions in the United States.

Smart Grid is the application of readily available technology to the wires that distribute electricity to customers. That technology is comprised of sensors that are attached to those wires to determine whether the electricity is flowing as it should, high speed communications to transmit that information, and software that can analyze it and determine whether there are problems, and if so, what to do about it. Finally, a Smart Grid would also act on this analysis by correcting the problems. Ultimately, allowing a utility to manage its distribution grid more efficiently, require less power to be generated, create fewer emissions, and reduce the frequency and duration of outages.

Siemens to explore innovative options for connection of electric vehicles to public power supply grid:

“Denmark currently meets 20 percent of its power demand with electricity generated using wind power. To make even better use of this fluctuating renewable energy in the future Denmark started the EDISON project for connecting electric vehicles to the power grid. EDISON stands for “Electric vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated market using Sustainable energy and Open Networks”. The project not only focuses on feeding electric current from the public power grid into the batteries of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. In addition to a conventional combustion engine plug-in hybrid vehicles also feature an electric drive, whose battery can also be charged from the power grid. This project will also investigate whether, in times of high grid load, electric vehicles can return energy from their fully charged batteries to the power grid when they are not in use. Preliminary investigations have shown that over 90% of the millions of automobiles in industrialized countries are not in motion for comparatively long periods every day. If these were electric vehicles equipped with high-performance batteries, they could, given an appropriate infrastructure, be used as interim energy stores,” Siemens reports

GE & Google say: Get Smart:

Google’s working on a software, called the Google PowerMeter, to show consumers their consumption in real time. As Ed Lu, a Google executive (and former space shuttle astronaut for NASA), put it: “All of our work in this area is based on the premise that consumers ought to be able to see how much energy they are using.”

Because a smart grid is essentially the application of information technology to the electricity business, Google (an IT company) and GE (an energy company) have joined together to push for better federal and state policy to enable the grid. This was their first outreach event in DC. Here are a few things I learned:

Information is power. Power over power, in this case. A smart grid will tell consumers how much their electricity costs at any given time of day, how much each appliance draws down from the grid, how their usage compares with their neighbor’s, perhaps even whether they are using clean or “dirty” power. So, for example, if consumers know that it’s cheaper to run the dishwasher or washing machine at night, many will do so. Can you think of a better way to promote energy efficiency in homes?

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