Just like lightning and that shit is dangerous, yo. SAY NO TO SOLAR POWER!!
/This is a community announcement brought to you by your friendly neighborhood coal industry lobbyist.
Smithers: Well sir, you have certainly vanquished your enemies. An elementary school, the local tavern, the old age home. You must be very proud.
Mr. Burns: No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy, the sun.
Some news Republicans can get behind - Trump EPA hastening the Rapture:
(Reminder, Pruitt lied under oath.)
WASHINGTON â Days after the Senate confirmed him as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and was asked about addressing a group that probably wanted to eliminate his agency.
âI think itâs justified,â he responded, to cheers. âI think people across the country look at the E.P.A. the way they look at the I.R.S.â
In the days since, Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, has moved to stock the top offices of the agency with like-minded conservatives â many of them skeptics of climate change and all of them intent on rolling back environmental regulations that they see as overly intrusive and harmful to business.
Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of his friend and fellow Oklahoma Republican, Senator James Inhofe, long known as Congressâs most prominent skeptic of climate science. A former Inhofe chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, will be Mr. Pruittâs chief of staff. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jacksonâs deputy. Andrew Wheeler, a fossil fuel lobbyist and a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruittâs deputy, although he requires confirmation to the position by the Senate.
âHeâs the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator thatâs ever been,â said Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change. âHeâs not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.â
Mattis tells Congress climate change requires a âwhole-of-government responseâ. Unfortunately Trumpâs response is to tell the whole-of-government to ignore climate change.
Well, carbon is, like, from nature, dude, so it canât cause harm to nature, see?
Never ending:
This sort of stuff underlines the need for education, though sometimes one has to wonder whether that ship has sailed already. The ability of people to use buzzwords and slogans to rile up their supporters, while the actions those slogans reflect do nothing for their supporters, or even hurt them, is based solely on the ability to abuse the gullibility and ignorance of the desperate.
I donât even think itâs fixable at this point. Science is not a source of truth, and once that happens then what?
**
In other news, Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy. Not looking good for nuclear power ever gaining ground.
Costs for the projects have soared due to increased safety demands by U.S. regulators, and also due to significantly higher-than-anticipated costs for labor, equipment and components.
I would be interested to know what increased safety demands were made, whether they were reasonable or overly burdensome.
Ah⌠looks like they were based on trying to harden the reactors against potential terrorist attacks.
But delays were inevitable: the reactor company claims that safety regulations passed to prevent terrorist attacks against targets like nuclear reactors forced redesign and relicensing of the two power plants, which âcreated additional, unanticipated engineering challenges that resulted in increased costs and delays on the US AP1000 Projects.â
StupidâŚ
This was remarkable that it was done on Fox.
Michelle Thaller (NASA scientists, often appears on How The Universe Works and other Discovery network shows, or use to) on science denial with an anecdote about appearing on âFox and Friends.â
The NY Times canât get enough of âbalance.â
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/04/finally-reactionary-white-guy-catches-break
And here for some highlights from Bret Stephens (read the thread, it wonât hurt promise):
Via New Republic: A climate-denying congressman compared himself to Einstein. His constituents booed him
That irked Biggs. âItâs hard to get to the point because you want to shout me down,â he said. As the crowd continued its ruckus, Biggs compared his plight to Albert Einstein, whose theories were attacked vociferously before they were accepted and applauded. âOddly enough,â Biggs told the audience, âthe same attitude you take is the exact same attitude that Einstein faced over physics. Thatâs exactly what happened to him. They shouted him down until he was able to demonstrate.â
This prompted one audience member to yell: âYouâre not Einstein!â
The next thing that audience member said was, âOh my God.â
The article doesnât mention how the Chinese secretly buried heaters under the buildings.
[quote]
âIt scares me,â said Kumari Karunaratne, a permafrost expert who works for the Northwest Territories Geological Survey. âThis methane thatâs being released is being released over huge areas across the north. And itâs continually seeping out.â
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So, as climate change speeds up the permafrost melt, the permafrost melt will exacerbate climate change.
By exactly how much, itâs impossible to say. Karunaratne wonât even try to guess, because measuring it is difficult and imprecise. The area where itâs happening is vast and much of it remains uninhabited and unexplored.
But there are dramatic examples that show just how much methane is bubbling up from underground. Some lakes in the Arctic are so full of it, if you punch a hole in the ice you can light the escaping gas on fire.[/quote]
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/rick-perry-solar-and-wind-killing-coal-nuclear
The only diminishment at play currently is the closure of coal and nuclear plants before their expected retirement dates. Wind and solar barely register as a share of the national energy mix, but theyâve dominated new deployments, while coal and nuclear saw a net decrease. The explicit statements regarding âbaseload powerâ shed light on Perryâs perspective.
That term hearkens back to the second half of the 20th century, when the regulated utilities of the day, for reasons both cultural as well as economic, decided that the best way to produce power was with increasingly massive, centralized power plants. These mammoth facilities capitalized on efficiencies of scale, and the timelines and costs werenât a huge issue because the monopoly utilities didnât have to worry about competition.
We live in a very different world now.
âBase load powerâ isnât some old, outdated term.
Itâs the minimum amount of power required on the grid at any time. Base load stations are the suppliers capable of generating this much power at any time (generally nuclear and fossil fuels, just because their production is not limited by environmental situations).
That site talks about places like California closing nuclear sites, and how this is âan end to baseload power plantsâ, but sorry⌠itâs kind of full of shit. Because while California has done (in my opinion, foolish) things like shut down nuclear plants and not replace them with other base load plants⌠the reality is that it kind of doesnât work for them in California.
That is, greentechmedia is citing California as an example, without mentioning that the example is one of failure.
This failure is manifested in two forms:
- California has resorted to massive imports of electricity from OTHER states. So they havenât reduced their dependence upon baseload power plants, theyâve just moved that dependence to plants located elsewhere, like Washington state. (average import in California is around 200 million kWh, daily)
- Even with those imports, California still has absurdly frequent power shortages. People are told to conserve power during peak usage hours, to prevent blackouts. Theyâve instituted rolling blackouts to try and deal with the shortages.
I really do wish that nuclear power could get a better rep these days. Recent advances have reduced the waste produced significantly, and increased the efficiency greatly. There is just such a PR problem with nuclear power due to very isolated instances of failure due to errors that could be fixed with proper regulations and adherence to them.
Though, our government is not likely to spend any money on nuclear power research, or any money on setting up the regulatory safeguards needed to ensure the safety in future.
It is basically an amazing technology that needs a lot of money upfront to, in the longrun, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and carbon emissions. But, it is bad PR, so no politician will touch it.
Maybe the Trump, âI donât give a fuck what you thinkâ administration will get it kickstarted. Coal is over, no matter what they try to spin it as. Natural gas fracking has taken over completely, making coal too expensive to bother with.
And, it is not renewable energy policies closing these plants, it is shale oil fracking closing these plants.