Hunger Coming To Korea

There has been an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in South Korea.

The severe foot and mouth epidemic that started in South Korea at the end of November could have even more serious repercussions for public health. Some 3m head of livestock have already been slaughtered but now the environment ministry is concerned about burial of the carcasses.

Under the pressure of events some cattle were buried alive and the authorities sometimes failed to take the necessary precautions: digging pits four or five metres deep and lining them with two layers of plastic sheeting. Farm animals were buried at more than 4,000 sites, often in easily accessible spots, for instance beside rivers.

As spring temperatures rise the corpses will start to rot. Rainfall leaching through the pits, above all during the June monsoon, could contaminate rivers and aquifers. This could be a hazard for drinking water with the risk of another outbreak of foot and mouth disease. To prevent "an unprecedented environmental disaster" the environment minister Lee Maanee last week called for "a full, detailed study of all the [burial] sites before spring".

According to a survey carried out in the eastern province of North Gyeongsang, where the epidemic started, more than one in 10 burial sites needs to be reinforced. New pits may be dug and lined with concrete.

The new problem comes on top of those posed by the epidemic itself, which has already cost South Korea 2,000bn won ($1.75bn) and pushed up food prices. The price of pork rose by nearly 12% in January alone. With about 5% of beef and dairy cattle having been destroyed the authorities are afraid there may be milk shortages, production having dropped by as much as one-fifth in some places.

Could it infect humans? Yes but it is rare.

Because FMD rarely infects humans, but spreads rapidly among animals, it is a much greater threat to the agriculture industry than to human health. Farmers around the world can lose huge amounts of money during a foot-and-mouth epizootic, when large numbers of animals are destroyed and revenues from milk and meat production go down.

And there are animal vaccines. It is looking bad for South Korea. But at least they have resources to buy their way out of the problem.

North Korea is in worse shape although the infection has not spread so far there.

SEOUL—A swiftly moving disease that has decimated South Korean livestock and damaged the country's food production now appears to be out of control in North Korea.

It is unclear where or when the latest outbreak of the airborne, easily transported illness known as foot-and-mouth disease began on the Korean peninsula. But in a sign of the pressure North Korea is facing over the issue, its state media on Tuesday reported that the outbreak originated in the South and that other countries, including Malaysia and Mongolia, have been hit with outbreaks in the past.

North Korea, which faces chronic food shortages and whose authoritarian government resists interaction with outsiders, hasn't taken any apparent steps to cull animals infected with the disease, as South Korea did.

Visitors to North Korea reported as far back as December they suspected the country was battling foot-and-mouth disease, but North Korea's state news agency didn't officially confirm the outbreak until Thursday when it said "more than 10,000 head of draft oxen, milk cows and pigs have been infected" and "thousands of them died."

In addition to reducing the North's already-constrained food supply, the disease's spread to oxen, widely used in place of tractors there, will limit the ability of North Korean farmers to carry out planting and other tasks.

And of course China, which borders North Korea is at risk. This is going to cause a spike in food prices world wide.

The rich countries will be stressed. Many of the poor countries of the world will be broken. Add in the recent freezes in in the US and Mexico and the world food supply is going to be strained severely. And yet the Delta Smelt has shut down a lot of food production in California (brilliant that) and we are using vast acreage to turn corn into alcohol. You have to wonder if the people running the show in America were born stupid or did they have to take classes?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Precautionary Principle

If we don’t know what is going to happen we must prevent it at all costs.

No Limit

Obama says Cap and Trade is dead.

Environmental groups and industry seem headed for another battle over regulation of greenhouse gases, as President Barack Obama said he will look for ways to control global warming pollution other than Congress placing a ceiling on it.

"Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way," Obama said at a news conference Wednesday, a day after Democrats lost control of the House. "I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem."

Legislation putting a limit on heat-trapping greenhouse gases and then allowing companies to buy and sell pollution permits under that ceiling narrowly passed the House in 2009 as a centerpiece of Obama's domestic agenda, but it stalled in the Senate.

Republicans dubbed the bill "cap-and-tax" because it would raise energy prices. They then used it as a club in the midterm elections against Democrats who voted for it. Thirty of the bill's supporters were among some 50 House Democrats whom voters turned out of office Tuesday.

"It's doubtful that you could get the votes to pass that through the House this year or next year or the year after," Obama said Wednesday.

If he starts in with EPA regulations or some such the Rs in Congress could gut the EPA budget. No money for you suckers.

And passage doubtful? More like impossible. Especially with coal state legislators in Congress violently opposed. If it couldn't get past the Senate when it was dominated by Democrats how much more unlikely is it to get passed with the new crop? Especially when you consider that some of the new Senators like Mark Kirk will be seated as soon as the election results are certified.

Don't Leave The Kids Hanging

H/T Ace Of Spades who goes off on a tangent and finishes with some details on the advert. Let me add that this seems to fit in well with the recently pulled 10:10 campaign (which other than to reference I refuse to post on or link to because it is so terminally vile. Watts Up With That has done it to death - yeah - a really bad pun in really bad taste).

Less Power More Control

The EPA under rules developed during a Republican administration has a plan that will shut down up to 20% of the coal fired electrical plants in the nation.

In March 2005 the federal EPA issued two new rulings that mandate significant reductions in air pollution and mercury pollution. These federal regulatory requirements will have significant impact on utilities in the US. The timeframe for these emission reductions will take place in two phases with the first phase occurring during the next five years and the second phase being completed within the next twelve years.

And the rules for the first phase will do what exactly?

Some plants could have a hard time meeting the proposed cap, which could push domestic cement production into countries with even less stringent environmental standards, said Andy O’Hare, vice president of regulatory affairs with the Portland Cement Association.

The proposal comes at a down time for the cement industry. Three plants in the Great Lakes region shuttered in December 2008 and January 2009, according to Portland Cement Association records. The Alpena plant announced in March a 45-day kiln shutdown.

Ah. So it is just another plan to ship jobs to China.

But wait. It is not just coal fired cement plants. It is also coal fired power plants.

[The rules] would force utilities to invest tens of millions of dollars on technologies to remove the substances. Many of those plants are about 50 years old and are already inefficient. "Those investments are just not going to be justifiable," said Dan Bakal, director of electric power programs at Ceres, a group of environmentalists and institutional investors.

Francois Broquin, a co-author of reports on coal by Bernstein Research, said the combined rules could push as much as 20 percent of U.S. coal-fired electric generation capacity to retire by 2015. "Obviously that will have an impact," he said.

So where are the shut downs going to be concentrated?

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed a new federal plan to reduce the pollution from electric power plants that wafts hundreds of miles across state lines.

The new rule would require pollution reductions in 31 states and the District of Columbia — most of the Eastern half of the U.S., from Texas and Minnesota to the coast.

To make the cuts, power plants would be required to install new equipment or use lower-sulfur fuels.

The plan is one of the most significant steps the EPA has taken toward cleaning the air for millions of Americans who live in areas where the quality of the air doesn't meet national standards.

It comes after many months of planning since a federal court ordered the EPA to revise its 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule . Coincidentally, it was announced in the middle of an Eastern heat wave, when smoggy air was at unhealthy levels from North Carolina to New York state.

So the East Coaster will have no choice. Cleaner air so important to a few (and very important for them) but no air conditioning in the summer for tens of millions. Who ever worked out the political calculations didn't do their homework. Let me add that the East Coast electrical grid infrastructure is not in the best of shape and if the shut downs are concentrated in that area the loss for the area could be much more than 20%. Let me add that with the current grid power does not ship well over distances longer than about 300 or so miles. And if the grid is already congested with power flows from inside the area? Dark energy will be a proven reality.

So how about nuclear power to replace the power that will be lost? Well enviros hate nuke plants. Especially East Coast nukes. They stopped the Shoreham nuke plant. And Vermont Yankee and Indian Point are being targeted.

I wonder what the marginal price of electricity will have to be to make supply and demand come into balance on a hot day on the East Coast? And how are the residents going to feel about it? You would think the California experience would be a cautionary tale for the political classes. You would be wrong.

And in case you hadn't guessed about the title: You get less power. They get more control. All this enviro wackiness is a bubble. And the bubble is going to burst. When it does things are going to get ugly. Attacks on power plants will not go over well.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Put The Navy In Charge

Let us get the bad news out of the way first. The Resident has put a part timer in charge of oil spill operations. And of course the Resident is defending that decision.

Can the man who President Obama has tapped to formulate a long-term Gulf Coast restoration plan work only part-time on such a monumental effort?

Some environmental groups say no way and are suggesting that Ray Mabus should give up his post of Navy secretary to focus on the Gulf full-time.

The criticism comes after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, will be splitting his time between the two jobs.

At least the guy has some contact with the Navy and knows the Gulf. Another big plus is that he is a Democrat.

Now for the real meat. Here is what a Louisiana politician had to say about the matter on 10 June.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told a Senate Homeland Security hearing today that the government and BP's command and control structure in responding to the Gulf oil spill disaster have been overly bureaucratic and slow to respond to the ongoing crisis.

"I still don't know who is in charge," Nungesser told the Subcommittee on State, Local and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration.

Nungesser said President Barack Obama should appoint someone with "the authority and guts to a make decisions." He said that currently it takes five days for questions to make their way up the chain of command to Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander, which Nungesser said was "much too slow."

The president and Allen have assigned Coast Guard officials to work with parish officials to cut through red tape, but Nungesser said it isn't working.

"If they have the authority they aren't using it," he said.

Ah. It isn't working. It seems nothing the Resident does is working. Except for paying off supporters and cronies.

Not to worry. The Idiot in Chief says he is going to give the Gulf spill every thing he has got.

Seeking to reassure Americans that his administration can handle the growing Gulf Coast oil crisis, President Obama promised Tuesday in his first address from the Oval Office to hold BP accountable for all costs and to "use everything we've got" in the federal response to the calamity.

Hours earlier, the scale of the problem widened dramatically when federal officials said in new estimates that the spill is at least 50% greater than previously known.

Evidently everything he has got is a part time director of operations.

Bill Quick is calling out (wanna fight?) the idiots who put President Present in office. Like the ass lickers in the media.

Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?

Actually, never mind. Since Obama’s election will turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the leftist project in America in the past hundred years, and will free a generation from the chains of leftist quackery at just the time such freedom is most sorely needed, I actually thank our lucky stars for useful idiots like you two. Without such, we might have been saddled with John McCain, and that would truly have been a disaster for conservatism, liberty, and America.

Sorry to say this. But I think he is right.

Let me add that the Brits are none too happy with President Absent.

If further proof were needed that the Obama administration’s relentless bashing of BP is seriously damaging America’s standing in Britain, a new YouGov poll shows that just 54 percent of Britons now have a favourable view of the United States, down from 64 percent before the Gulf oil spill. The poll, which surveyed 1,500 people on both sides of the Atlantic, also revealed that a significant majority of Britons believe that Barack Obama has harmed the Special Relationship. As The Sunday Times reports, “by 64% to 2% in Britain and by 47% to 5% in America, people believe the president’s handling of the crisis has damaged relations.” In addition, 22 percent of those surveyed in both the US and UK believe that President Obama is anti-British, a strikingly high figure among Americans.

Well a lot of those Brits depend on BP share prices to fund their retirement. So maybe that is understandable.

Wasn't Obama going to restore our special relationship with Europe that Bush had destroyed?

When Obama was campaigning for president (as did John Kerry before him), he harped on endlessly about “restoring” America’s standing in the world in the wake of the War on Terror and the Anglo-American led war in Iraq, as though world leadership were some sort of glib PR exercise. He excoriated the Bush administration for supposedly alienating US allies (no doubt he had the likes of France and Germany in mind), and imperiously lectured about the need to make America respected abroad.

But what has the Obama administration actually succeeded in doing? Seriously damaging relations with its closest ally, Great Britain, throwing loyal allies like Poland and the Czech Republic to the Russian bear, and sparking a major diplomatic spat with America’s closest friend in the Middle East, Israel. I don’t recall President Bush ever knifing US partners in the back, and siding for example with Washington’s enemies in Latin America by calling for negotiations over the sovereignty of British territory. Bush understood the meaning of alliances, and he also cherished the partnership with Great Britain. No one could ever accuse him of being anti-British.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

But what about the French? Here is a report from April of this year. A very long time ago it seems.

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today authored by France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) and recently “obtained” by the FSB shockingly quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy as stating that President Barack Obama is “a dangerous[ly] aliéné”, which translates into his, Obama, being a “mad lunatic”, or in the American vernacular, “insane”.

According to this report, Sarkozy was “appalled” at Obama’s “vision” of what the World should be under his “guidance” and “amazed” at the American Presidents unwillingness to listen to either “reason” or “logic”. Sarkozy’s meeting where these impressions of Obama were formed took place nearly a fortnight ago at the White House in Washington D.C., and upon his leaving he “scolded” Obama and the US for not listening closely enough to what the rest of the World has to say.

I don't see how you can get closer to your friends without at least considering their opinions. As to "insane"? Only the people who voted for him. Well. I tried to warn you. But you wouldn't listen. You insane fools.


Not near soon enough.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Lobby

JLawson is responding to a comment by Diogenes at Talk Polywell.

Diogenes wrote:

This doesn't look good.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967

You can read more about the link at: The Gulf - It Is Worse Than We Thought.

The reply by JLawson:

No, it doesn't. In fact - that's about as far from 'good' as I could imagine.

Ironic, isn't it, that the environmental lobby, pushing hard as they can to get oil drilling as far offshore as possible, seems to have caused the disaster that they were so anxious to avoid.

Of course, it all depends on how accurate the info and analysis is... but it rings true, unfortunately.

What can you expect from people making technology policy who have no deep understanding of technology?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sustainability

So I'm looking at a bunch of links about sustainability and I come across this link to a Huffington Post article. As usual I have some points to make:

The Sun is going to burn out in a billion years or three. Nothing is sustainable.

There are 746,712,500,000 metric tons of Earth for each inhabitant. (assuming 8 billion) do you think that will be enough?

When people start talking about Lebensraum ugly things start to happen. Not all at once but over time. The sustainable people start doing nasty things to the unsustainable people. Just to hurry things along. Or to slow things down. Depending.

A Hole In The Data

Here is a story I missed. The data used to ban CFCs that were supposedly making a big ozone hole in the atmosphere were wrong. Why? Bad methodology.

The following is an excerpt from article in Nature Magazine hidden behind a pay wall.

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

“Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.”

Let me look and see if I can find out some more.

I thought this bit from 1997 was interesting.

by C.J. Carnacchio

When I told a friend that I was writing a column attacking the environmental movement, she immediately replied, "How can you be against the environment?" I am not against the environment. I am against the environmental movement: a movement rooted in a Chicken Little ideology of scare tactics, lies, pseudoscience, and a flagrant disregard for individual liberties and private property rights. Let's debunk some of theis movement's myths and examine the true roots of the Greens' ideology and agenda.

and now on to ozone.

The Hole in the Ozone Layer: Contrary to the environmentalists' claims, there is no permanent hole in the ozone layer and no ozone shortage. Ozone is constantly created and destroyed. The interaction of ultraviolet radiation with oxygen molecules is what produces ozone. In the stratosphere, 10 to 40 kilometers above the earth's surface, several tons of ozone are produced every second.

The amount of ozone present at any one time is influenced by many factors. For example, the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching the stratosphere (and ultimately producing ozone) depends upon latitude, solar cycle, and season. Concentrations of ozone may differ drastically from one day to the next, sometimes by as much as 50 percent, depending on the weather. Ozone holes are natural reactions to these ultraviolet light variations. Ozone levels can also be affected by the amount of volcanic matter in the stratosphere. Each volcanic eruption emits roughly a thousand times the amount of ozone depleting chemicals than all the CFCs man has ever produced.

The ozone hole that appeared over Antarctica and caused all the panic is a natural and annual phenomena. The annual ozone hole was first measured in 1956-57, long before the ozone destroying CFCs were in common use. The hole appears at the end of the dark, cold Antarctic winter, lasts about three to five weeks, and then disappears. There is no overall or permanent depletion of the ozone layer.

That is interesting. A natural phenomenon is measured. It gets "worse" for a few years (possibly caused by natural variation) and the "worse" is ascribed totally to man.

CFCs were banned in 1987 by the Montreal Protocol. You will never guess what happened. We had the biggest ozone hole ever in 2006.

“From September 21 to 30, [2006], the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles,” said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Newman was joined by other scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in reporting that the ozone hole over the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere broke records for both area and depth in 2006. A little over a week after the ozone hole sustained its new record high for average area, satellites and balloon-based instruments recorded the lowest concentrations of ozone ever observed over Antarctica, making the ozone hole the deepest it had ever been.

Well obviously banning CFCs was not enough. HCFCs will have to go too. Making refrigerators a little less efficient (or smaller in cooled volume) thus leading to more food spoilage and more CO2 production in the manufacture of the refrigerators and possibly in food production as well.

And CO2 is a pollutant for climate but a fertilizer for plants. What to do? It is my opinion that raising taxes is the all purpose answer.

It Would Damage What We Hold Dear

That I think is one of the most eloquent points ever made against the alternative energy craze as it is currently being manifested. We know what the world looks like now. How will it look if we have to get 100% of our energy from natural sources with technology that is available now? Or even technology that will reasonably be available in the next ten years?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Evaporation Is The Cause

Americans are not guilty. And that worries some people. Greatly.

According to a new survey commissioned by the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation, a non-profit group formed by the rechargeable battery industry to promote battery recycling, just 12 percent of Americans now feel guilty that they’re not doing everything they can for the environment. That’s down from 22 percent in last year’s survey.

And the person who wrote the article seems to know why Americans are not guilty.

...evidence suggests a different reason for the overall decline in “green guilt”: When the economy is bad, concern for the environment evaporates.

A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that, for the first time in 25 years, a majority of Americans think economic growth should be given priority over protecting the environment.

Another poll, from the Pew Research Center, found that for Americans surveyed, the environment ranked 16th among a group of 20 national priorities, and global warming ranked dead last.

The economy, meanwhile, was No. 1.

High energy prices (especially oil) had a role in tanking the US economy. And who are the big guns in "do not drill for oil in America"? Environmentalists. So in effect they put a gun to their own heads pulled the trigger and found that there was a bullet in the chamber.

I kept telling them that pushing alternative energy before it made economic sense was a bad policy. Well they wouldn't listen to me. Now look at where they are. Next time they should pay attention. What are the odds of that?

Banning Mercury

The Obama Administration is working on a treaty to cut mercury pollution.

The Obama administration has reversed years of U.S. policy by calling for a treaty to cut mercury pollution, which it described as the world's gravest chemical problem.

Some 6,000 tons of mercury enter the environment each year, about a third generated by power stations and coal fires. Much settles into the oceans where it enters the food chain and is concentrated in predatory fish like tuna.

Children and fetuses are particularly vulnerable to poisoning by the toxic metal, which can cause birth defects, brain damage and peeling skin.

Daniel Reifsnyder, the deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and sustainable development, told a global gathering of environmental ministers in Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday that the United States wants negotiations on limiting mercury to begin this year and conclude within three.

Ah. Another attack on coal fired electrical generation. And no plans to ramp up a replacement for their base load generating capacity.

Mercury is also widely used in chemical production and small-scale mining.

And an attack on the chemical industry to boot. Although I must say that keeping it from small scale miners might be a good idea.

While substitutes exist for almost all industrial processes that require mercury, more than 50 percent of mercury emissions come from coal-fueled power plants, complicating efforts to regulate it in countries that rely on coal for power.

A U.S.-drafted proposal obtained by The Associated Press would form a negotiating committee in conjunction with the U.N. environment program to help countries reduce their mercury use, clean up contaminated sites and find environmentally sound ways to store mercury. The European Union has already banned mercury exports starting in 2011. The U.S. has a similar ban that will be effective 2013, legislation that was sponsored by Obama when he was a U.S. senator.

If mercury exports are baned where will we get the mercury needed for CFL light bulbs? How will we be able to import those bulbs? If we want to produce those bulbs in the US where will the mercury come from?

And what does the Obama administration intend to do about volcanoes?

Natural sources such as volcanoes are responsible for approximately half of atmospheric mercury emissions.

And that is not even the best of it. Integrated circuits are dependent on gold wires to connect the chips to the package they are housed in. And mercury is critical to the extraction of gold from the ore.

The three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the U.S. are the three largest gold mines.

You know it appears that Mr. Obama and his cohorts are flying blind. Instead of doing research on replacements for mercury in various industrial processes they are just going to ban it and hope for the best.

I particularly like this view of the situation by Marcus Aurelius: "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Green Speculation

Commenter RAH at the Belmont Club (5:26 pm) speculates on how the Green Movement and CO2 hysteria have played into the hands of the Russians.

Russian President Medeyev was Gazprom President. In his new position he is buying contracts from other countries. Venezuela sells oil to Russia; Libya just signed a contract with Medeyev and Gazprom. I believe that they got the contracts from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Saudi Arabia provides oil to the US as well as Kuwait and they are our client countries.

They have been trying to secure outside sources for oil and gas. They recently this spring went to the artic to lay claim to the sources that may be there. Both Sweden and Finland are contesting those areas. Canada also has interest in the artic. The sea ice in the artic actually has changed and the melt has been prominent in the Russian area. The Canadian ice has been getting thicker. The Russia took advantage of the open sea to explore and lay claim. Russia has been the primary interest in the PARS field in Iran that the French company just pulled out.

So Gazprom has known about the need to get more sources since this is Medeyev’s obsession. The clash for oil sources will be the 21st century issue for some time to come. The fools who decry no oil for blood are clueless about how seriously nations will get to secure their energy. Energy is really the life and blood of a nations economy.

After the Soviet fall the Communist and Marxists groups and agitators went into the Green Movement. The Green Movement and the global warming scare have been targeted at Europe. Now it is curious that Russia has been from the 1990’s trying to become Europe’s energy supplier as the Green movement has insisted that power generation be only from natural gas and not coal that Germany has in abundance. Also they forced Germany under Schroeder to phase out the nuclear power generators. Later Schroeder went and worked for Medeyev’s Gazprom.

There is a true collusion from the promoters of Global Warming and the Green Movement that has been strangling Europe to work against its own national interests.
The vociferous attack against those that speak out about global warming as a product of human produced CO2 has been very strong and picked up by the liberal left and almost accepted doctrine in the West. Now we are just starting to show the cracks in that movement and science with bad methodology and sensors and cook algorithms.
Now what would be a good idea is to look at the funding of these groups and see if they have been funded or a disinformation campaign by Russia. The timing is right and the interests do coincide.

Russia never stopped working against the US and since we are their competitor on the world stage it is not surprising. Russia has fomented terrorism in Libya from the 1970’s and then in Syria and Iraq and Iran. They are also working in South America with Venezuela and Bolivia. So Russia has never stopped the Cold War it just went in different direction and form

Speculation of course. But it rings true. The parts fit. So who is funding AL Gore? And isn't it time McCain dropped his carbon tax ideas?

In any case it also fits with the idea of the Uber Enviros being like Watermelons: Green on the outside Red on the inside. They should be ashamed of themselves. Starting resource wars and all especially in the midst of plenty (at current prices).

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Electricity Up Platinum Down

There appears to be a Platinum shortage going on. Naturally prices have been rising over the past few years.

Platinum prices have dropped by almost 20% in daily trading over the past three weeks (to $1,565/troy ounce on Tuesday). But, for the year, the price of platinum, which is used in catalytic converters for motor vehicles, they will average $1,970, or 51% more than it did in 2007, according to the latest forecast by Natixis Commodity Markets of London. The outlook for 2009 is an even higher $2,250/oz.

Some other analysts have suggested that platinum this year and next could fall closer to the $1,303 average price of 2007 because of the sharp fall in motor vehicle sales in North America and Western Europe. The Natixis analysis isn’t so bearish because its analysts expect supply shortages from the biggest platinum producers due to the South African national power crisis. “We do not believe that the power-related production problems in South Africa have been resolved,” says the report. If that’s true, then production problems will continue to plague Angloplat and Impala Platinum, the second-largest producer.

In fact, Bloomberg today is reporting that tens of thousands of workers went on a national strike over rising energy bills. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, or Cosatu, called the one-day walkout after the electricity regulator allowed state-owned Eskom Holdings to increase power prices 27.5% to fund a badly needed $44 billion expansion.

Well we have seen a dip in prices in the middle of a secular rise. And who is the blame for this mess? The usual suspects. The geniuses in the South African government. Funny thing is they admit it.

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 8 -- President Thabo Mbeki apologized Friday for his government's failure to prevent crippling power outages across South Africa and warned that restoring a reliable supply of electricity would require new projects and major cuts in usage.

"We face an emergency, but we can overcome the problems in a relatively short period," Mbeki said in his televised state of the nation address, delivered in Cape Town at the annual opening session of Parliament. "This situation has precipitated the inevitable realization that the era of very cheap and abundant electricity has come to an end."

We had better get the NIMBYs and the Just Say No enviros out of the way or the USA could be facing similar problems. Electrical shortages take a long time to develop and a long time to resolve.

What will happen if we don't get a move on? The same thing that has happened in South Africa. A shortages and sharp increases in prices. Which is not only bad for consumers. It is bad for business.

Fresh Kills

Green is not selling the way it used to. This is old news and it is the Onion. But it marks the start of a trend.

STATEN ISLAND, NY–An estimated 450,000 unsold copies of Time's special April 22 Earth Day issue were trucked Monday from the magazine's New Jersey distribution center to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.

The discarded copies of the issue–which features articles about conservation, biodiversity, and recycling, as well as guest editorials by President Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio–are expected to decompose slowly over the next 175 years.

"Unfortunately, 'Earth Day 2000' wasn't as successful as we had hoped," Time managing editor Walter Isaacson said. "After selling out of such special issues as 'The Future Of Medicine,' 'Baseball At 100,' 'The Kennedys: An American Dynasty,' and 'Celebrating The American Automobile,' we thought we had another winner with this one. But of a press run of 485,000, only 35,000 sold. I guess we overestimated the demand for a full-color, 98-page Earth Day issue printed on glossy, high-pulp paper."

How about some more recent evidence from a more reputable source?

Green issues don't sell say a number of publishers.

As global warming was first becoming a cause célèbre a few years ago, many serious environmentalists worried that green was in danger of becoming a fad -- something that would inevitably recede from consciousness after overtaxing our limited pop-cultural attention span.

Sad to say, that prediction shows signs of coming true. Last week, The New York Times noted that the advertising industry is pulling back from green-themed marketing, having "grasped the public's growing skepticism over ads with environmental messages.

And advertisers' concerns are buttressed by the recent sales figures for magazines that have published a "Green Issue" this year. Time's Earth Day issue was the newsweekly's third-lowest-selling issue of 2008 so far, according to ABC Rapid Report. A typical issue of Time sells 93,000 or so copies on the newsstand; the April 28 installment, which substituted green for red in the magazine's trademarked cover design, sold only 72,000.

Enviro hysteria does not sell the way it once did.

The New York Times says ad agencies are starting to get it.

At an annual gathering of the advertising industry a year ago in Cannes, the environment was the topic du jour. “Be seen, be green,” one agency urged on the invitation to its party at a hillside villa.

Al Gore, invited by another agency, delivered a message linked to “An Inconvenient Truth,” his book and film about climate change: That the ad industry could play an influential role in encouraging businesses and consumers to change their ways and slow global warming.

The sun was still beating down on the Côte d’Azur last month as advertising executives from around the world returned for this year’s festival. But Mr. Gore was nowhere to be found, and the party buzz was about the American presidential election, the Euro 2008 soccer tournament and even the business of advertising itself. Green marketing, while booming, had lost some of its cachet.

So let me give you an anecdote of my own. Instapundit linked to a piece I did on the decline of carbon hysteria, The Globe Reverberates With Laughter, and the comment section just went nuts. As one commenter noted: politicians ought to be careful. Elections get lost big time when public opinion changes and politicians don't. Take the question of drilling for more oil in the USA. I made a bumper sticker about it that is rather cute: Without Lubrication, which looks at the change in attitudes about drilling for oil in America and off its shores. A nominally green issue. About 60% of the American public thinks more oil is of greater importance than reducing the risk of oil spills to zero. The reason? Green is fine as long as the pocket book effects are small or well hidden. That is no longer the case.

Democrats may be in for a rougher time this year than they expect. I have some advice for them: "It's the price of gasoline, stupid."

H/T Counting Cats in Zanzibar

What Is The Rush?

Commenter Pastorius commenting on my article on Moore's Law suggested I have a look at this article by Ray Kurzweil on the accelerating rate of the rate of change.

...a serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential. In exponential growth, we find that a key measurement such as computational power is multiplied by a constant factor for each unit of time (e.g., doubling every year) rather than just being added to incrementally. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example.

One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but "double" exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. These observations do not rely merely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore's law (i.e., the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit), but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes. What it clearly shows is that technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology, indeed since the advent of evolution on Earth.

Yep. Change is happening much faster than when I was a kid (50s). We have so much more capable technology than we had then and so many more capable technologies.

What does this mean in terms of solving humanity's technical problems? Say energy for instance. It says we should put off implementing a solution for as long as possible because better solutions are just around the corner. Al Gore's idea that we need to rush to fix our reliance on fossil fuels chop, chop, double quick, is flat out wrong. It would be much better for us to rely on current technologies for as long as possible (at least until the alternatives become economically competitive) because the solutions we will have available in five or ten years will be so much better than the ones available today. The important thing is to avoid, through any kind of government program, getting locked in or promoting any given technology.

In the home computer market that is pretty much what we do. If we assume a doubling of capability every two years replacing your home computer every four to six years makes a lot of sense. In four years your "old" machine will have 25% of the power of what is currently on the market. In six years the "old" machine will have 12.5% of the capacity of the latest and greatest. Its economic value at that time (six years after purchase) will be around zero. Which is why if you go out on garbage day looking for a computer you will generally find machines about five to eight years old. Business is a little different. They can't afford to get too far behind in technology. Which is why they get new computers on a three year schedule. They can't afford to give up more than a factor of three to their competition.

Here is another example (based on hypotheticals). Suppose we do a big push on solar and then some kind of nuclear fusion "magic" comes along reducing the price of electricity by a factor of 10X? Under those circumstances the less we spend on alternative energy at today's prices the better off we will be. Given the accelerating rate of change we are bound to come up with some new kind of "magic" of one sort or the other.

It all depends on the learning curve of a particular technology. I'm not sure what the learning curve for solar is but I can guarantee that what we can do in five years will be much better and more cost effective than what we can do today. Kurzweil estimates that the rate of technological change in 2100 will be around 20,000 times the rate of today. That is pretty damn fast. How fast? Changes that we would see in five years at todays accelerating rate will happen in a day around 2100. (I haven't done the math so that number is just an estimated representation to give a feel for what is happening).

What does this tell us in general? Forcing change is wasteful. Real environmentalists (who inherently are conservative) will resist change until the market provides economic solutions, because forcing change increases waste. We saw this in the solar boom in the Carter era. It didn't work out. Because of government subsidies there was a huge amount of waste. Or as that most wise of sages once said:

Patience grasshopper.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

File A Complaint

Under the Endangered Species Act the polar bear is now listed as a threatened species.

After 18 years of a law practice devoted to counseling landowners, home builders and commercial interests affected by the long arm and severe penalties of the Endangered Species Act, I am used to incredulous looks and outraged oaths from clients coming to grips with the Act's incredible burdens on impacted private citizens.

"Are you telling me I can't build my Burger King because a Delhi Sands flower-loving fly that has never been seen and is above ground only a few days a year might be near-by?"

"I can't build a connector road because the noise from construction might damage the hearing of the Stephens' kangaroo rat thus impairing its reproduction?"

"All construction in San Diego involving impacts to road ruts which might contain Vernal Pool Fairy Shrimp is enjoined? All construction?"

Yes, yes, and yes. The list of situations in which the ESA has stopped otherwise legal and fully permitted projects from proceeding is extraordinarily long and getting longer. With Wednesday's decision to list the polar bear as "threatened" the burden on the American economy brought about by the ESA grew exponentially.

How about that. It looks like the socialists and luddites have won the day.

I have written here and here on the polar bear controversy. Those columns delineated how the advocates of the polar bear listing planned on using the bear to impose vast new controls on the emissions of greenhouse gases across the United States. When Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced the listing, he also made a bold statement that the new status of the polar bear would not lead to such consequences.

To which the environmental activists replied immediately: "Says who?" The law is the law, they correctly noted, and it cannot be cabined by "guidance" issued by the executive branch.

I'm assuming that Bush is no dummy. So what can be done?

Because the polar bear has been listed as threatened due to alleged deterioration of its ice habitat, and because the alleged loss of the ice habitat has occurred because of global warming caused at least in part by the emission of greenhouse gases, environmental activists will argue that all emissions of greenhouse gases that flow as a consequence of the grant of a federal permit of any sort are now subject to review under the ESA and, crucially, that those permits cannot be issued unless and until the United States Fish & Wildlife Service reviews and approves of the requested permit under Section 7 of the ESA, a process which takes at a minimum months and which can cost millions of dollars even if it is successful.

Because of the generous "citizen standing" provisions of the ESA, expect dozens of "60-day" letters to begin to arrive in the offices of Secretary Kempthorne very soon, announcing that unless the Department and the Service act to invoke Section 7 vis-a-vis this or that federal permit, a lawsuit will be filed to force compliance. Expect most of those suits to be filed in the Ninth Circuit, where the appeals court has been very expansive in applying the ESA.

Well it is obvious what is to be done. Start filing those 60 day letters. As the article points out:

Swarming the courts has long been a tactic of the left, but private sector firms and sectors threatened by the threatened polar bears need to do more than sit back and wait for bills to come do and projects to be canceled.

Start a cottage industry with standard forms and get those letters out to the United States Fish & Wildlife Service. Don't like City Hall in your town? File a letter. Hate the Saudis? File a letter. Down on Cezar Chavez? File a letter. Don't like Chinese imports? File a letter. Don't like Al Gore's mansion? File a letter. In fact file letters even for industries you like. Bury this decision under a blizzard of paper.

Once this gets going if some one will direct me to the requirements for letter filing and standard forms or groups that will help I'll post them. The way to put an end to bad law is to get it strictly enforced. The stricter the better.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Why Are They Still Talking - Why Don't They Do Something?

I find it strange that there are still people around talking about overpopulation.

If they were really serious we would no longer be hearing from them.

There is one simple way to bring about the results they desire: More Communist States in the world. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Population will be reduced.

Inspired by Fred's Footprint: Green fascism"

H/T LarryD by e-mail.

The Forest Fire Plot

Is it possible that Al Queda has been setting at least some of the wild fires in Southern California? The FBI seems to think so.

PHOENIX (AP) — The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.

The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic. Davis declined to share a copy of the memo and an FBI spokeswoman in Denver didn't immediately return a telephone call.

What do you know? Could be. The people detained were planning to set fires in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. They can't be the only cell in America.

How about forest fires in Lebanon?

BEIRUT: Fires raged across forests in northern and southern Lebanon late Tuesday and Wednesday for the second time in a month, prompting government officials to question whether the devastating blazes were the result of arson. Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa said on Wednesday during a news conference at the Grand Serail in Beirut that the conditions under which "these fires have appeared have raised huge questions."

However, Sabaa refused to identify any possible suspects, saying that he would not comment on the matter until police reports are finalized.

Curiouser and curiouser.

From Beirut to the Beltway says:

Lebanon Files quoted civil defense director Darwish Hobeika as saying the cause of the fires is arson.

So how about environmentalists in America? According to this story excerpted at Michelle Malkin's they seem to like throwing wood on the fire.

The GAO examined 762 U.S. Forest Service (USFS) proposals to thin forests and prevent fires during the past two years. According to the study, slightly more than half the proposals were not subject to third-party appeal. Of those proposals subject to appeal, third parties challenged 59 percent.

Appeals were filed most often by anti-logging groups, including the Sierra Club, Alliance for Wild Rockies, and Forest Conservation Council. According to the GAO, 84 interest groups filed more than 400 appeals of Forest Service proposals. The appeals delayed efforts to treat 900,000 acres of forests and cost the federal government millions of dollars to address.

Forest Service officials estimate they spend nearly half their time, and $250 million each year, preparing for the appeals and procedural challenges launched by activists.

“The report demonstrates that the appeals needlessly delay federal efforts to prevent wildfires, and if the process is not streamlined, millions of acres will be lost this summer,” said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico).

“The American people will no longer tolerate management by wildfire,” Domenici added.

I'm not so sure of that. That bit came out in 2003. It appears not much has been accomplished since then.

Environmentalists and jihadis in cahoots? Only objectively. Only objectively.

H/T Americanphile

House #2

Who does House #2 belong to?

House #2 Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet ( 4 bedrooms ) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F. ) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.

Answer here.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers