energy
sheril | July 10, 2008McCain and Bush are recommending a plan for offshore drilling...
Having spent much of 2006 working hard to keep it far away from Florida's coast, I cannot overemphasize that this is a miserable idea. Craig McClain sums it up well over at Deep Sea News:
First, the current supply of drilling ships will put a seven year hiatus on any offshore oil making it to the market. Second, our offshore oil reserves are insufficient to meet our consumption for more than a handful of years. These are not my opinions, not a liberal or conservative view, but rather fact. X divided by Y equals Z. It's math…
sheril | July 10, 2008 Readers response to my post on biofuels yesterday was tremendously interesting with many new ideas, perspectives, and avenues to wander down in the future. The second installment at Next Generation Energy is already up this morning offering a different persepctive from Joseph Romm of Climate Progress:
Toyota, General Motors, and Volkswagen have already said they will introduce plug-in hybrid electric-gasoline vehicles to the U.S. market in 2010. These vehicles are likely to have a 20 to 40 mile range running on electricity before they revert to being a fuel-efficient gasoline hybrid. That…
sheril | July 9, 2008Today marks my inaugural post at a brand new Seed Scienceblog called Next Generation Energy: An evolving interactive forum on alternative energy. Each week my co-bloggers and I will dissect which ideas are real contenders and what will be practical (and affordable) at the start of the 21st century. We'll separate fact from hype and ponder how the heck to get ourselves out of this pesky energy crisis and back on our feet... errr, tires. I'm passionate about this subject from a conservation perspective and looking forward to participating in the dialog. Here's a peek:
Corn ethanol isn't…
j7uy5 | July 7, 2008There is an interesting and thought-provoking essay at The Oil Drum.
It was written by
href="http://www.uvm.edu/giee/?Page=about/students/Nathan_Hagens.html&SM=about/about_menu.html">Nathan
Hagens, a student at the Gund Institute, University of
Vermont.
He makes some errors in the science, and engages in some armchair
hypothesizing (see graph above), but the overall conclusions are not
affected.
He romps through evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and behavioral
neuroscience on his way to explaining why we have an addiction to oil.
It clearly is not intended to be a…
j7uy5 | June 20, 2008The old
riddle goes: you were granted three wishes, and you have one
wish left. What do you wish for? Everyone over the
age of 6 knows: more wishes.
When we figured out that there was oil under the ground, and figured
out how to use it, it is as though we had been granted three wishes.
Now the oil is running out. It is as though we have
one wish remaining. So what do we do with it?
What we have done in the meantime, is run around looking for more
Genies. Coal? No, too dirty. Nuclear?
No, can't figure out what to do with the waste.
Solar? Wind? Geothermal? Tidal?
Biofuels? No…
revere | June 16, 2008Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren't about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2008Wolfrum at Shakesville alerts us to The New Right's attempt to lay our failed energy policies every but at the feet of Republicans:
Take the post "How did the GOP get stuck "Defending Big Oil" again?"
Now, this post could have been just five words long: "Because that's what they do." But the post is more about how to change the oil debate to make the GOP look better rather than on how to do anything about oil prices:
First, I don't see any reason at all we need to keep getting stuck with the "defending tax breaks for big oil" charge over and over again. Subsidies are not a free market…
j7uy5 | June 4, 2008The Internet was abuzz for a bit today, when Engaget
href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/02/hitachi-maxell-claims-new-li-ion-battery-with-20x-the-power/">reported
that a lithium-ion battery was in development, that could store 20
times as much energy as existing batteries, with lower cost.
But then it was
href="http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/hitachi-maxell-lithium-ion-battery-manganese-subaru.php">clarified
that battereis could deliver 20 times more power.
Apparently, the original article is behind a pay wall, so bloggers are
still wondering what the real story is…
j7uy5 | May 25, 2008Despite a chorus among citizenry and punditry to end oil company
subsidies, it turns out that yet another has been foisted upon us.
What is worse, it was created under the guise of a populist
program:
Households will spend about $90 billion more this
year on gasoline if fuel prices remain at current levels, according to
a forecast by economists at Credit Suisse Holdings in New York. That
will consume about 80 percent of the more than $110 billion in rebate
checks the government is sending out.
So most of the rebate money will end up in the pockets of big oil.
It will not boost spending…
revere | May 21, 2008Stephen Johnson is a career professional, now the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is reported to be very religious and to hold prayer meetings with select staff at the start of the day. Apparently he also takes "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" seriously. Too bad he doesn't take the US law and his sworn responsibility to protect its citizens from environmental hazards as seriously. New revelations show he is a liar, morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest. I guess prayer has its limits as a motivator of probity:
Environmental Protection Agency chief…
j7uy5 | May 8, 2008One thing about hospitals, is that they
href="http://www.energybulletin.net/43514.html">use an awful
lot of
electricity. We already know about some of the
challenges
that will occur in health care in the post-peak-oil era; I wrote about
that in
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/10/peak_oil_and_health_care_chall.php">October
2007.
...Petroleum scarcity will affect the health system
in at least 4 ways:
through effects on medical supplies and equipment, transportation,
energy generation, and food production...
One way this will affect medical care is that it will…
esiegel | May 5, 2008Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter:
The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early universe during the Big Bang when Dark Matter was first created. If the LHC does indeed create such particles then it will be the first time that the amount of Dark Matter in the universe has increased since the Big Bang - the LHC will effectively be a Dark Matter 'factory'.
Well, Hector basically…
esiegel | April 24, 2008Warning: Crazy talk ahead. Some of you may remember that I wrote about inflation and why its alternatives fail awhile back. Apparently, Louise Riofrio didn't get the memo. When there's misinformation about cosmology out there, it's up to me to set the record straight. (And I am not alone.) Let me first remind you about one of the alternatives to inflation I debunked last month:
Add defects and vary the Speed of Light. This one’s out. Why? Because we would see defects in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and we don’t. The constancy of the speed of light is highly supported by experiments, but…
revere | April 22, 2008It's kind of strange when suddenly there are a lot of articles on growing meat in a vat (it's probably because there was a recent conference in Norway on the topic). Even we posted on it last week and today the New York Times tells us that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - scientists excepted), the militant and sometimes violent animal rights group, is offering a $1 million prize for the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012":
Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins…
esiegel | April 14, 2008Yesterday, my good friend (and SWAB reader) Brian wrote a great comment about the practical reasons to explore space, where he talked about the overall economic impact that Space Exploration has had on the economy, as well as the impact it has had on our knowledge and understanding of the Earth, its environment, and how to manage/mitigate the threats to it. And that's wonderful for exploring our Solar System and others.
But what do I do in the meantime? After all, this isn't what I study or explore. So I asked this:
The practical arguments as to why exploration of space is worthwhile…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2008I've never understood why so many liberals and progressives think the Democratic field is strong. Yes, the candidates aren't insane, but neither of them are particularly good on economic issues. There is nothing in either Clinton's or Obama's records or speeches that suggests that they will do anything significant to reduce income inequality, other than perhaps letting the Bush tax cuts expire (and Obama has even been waffling on that).
And keep in mind, that income inequality isn't just a matter of economically integrating more people into society. That's not some gushy, "it's not fair"…
esiegel | April 11, 2008So, what's the deal with this one? startswithabang.com reader Scott Stuart asks the following question:
I was reading "The First Three Minutes" last night and came across an
interesting section about blackbody radiation and energy density. The
author states that as the universe expands, the number of photons
running around (in the CMB, for example) is unchanged, but their
wavelengths get stretched. The energy in a photon is, of course,
inversely proportional to its wavelength, so the energy content of a
photon decreases as its wavelength increases. That seems to mean that
the total energy…
esiegel | April 10, 2008In a comment on my last post, What is Dark Energy, Kendall asks the following, which is such a good one I think it deserves its own post:
I thought the expansion was accelerating? Aren’t you saying that it is on its way down to 85% of its current rate? Sounds like expansion is slowing, but still leaves us with an open universe…
People do say the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. But that doesn't mean that the expansion rate is accelerating. It means that if you take a look at any one galaxy that isn't gravitationally bound to us in the Local Group (that is, any big galaxy that isn't…
esiegel | April 9, 2008You've all heard these words before. Dark Energy. But what is it, and why are we stuck with it? Let me start by telling you a story.
Imagine, for a minute, that you have a candle. You know everything about this candle, including how bright it is and how far away it is from you. Like so:
Now if I move this candle twice as far away, I know it's going to be one-fourth as luminous. If I move it three times as far away, I know it's going to appear one-ninth as luminous. And if I move it a thousand times farther away, I know what I see is going to be one-millionth as luminous as the original…
esiegel | March 13, 2008Aaah, the Virgo cluster. A huge cluster of hundreds of galaxies, and our closest large neighbor in the Universe. People have known for a long time that although Virgo is still redshifting away from us, it isn't quite as fast as we would expect from the Hubble expansion rate of the Universe. Does this mean that we're gravitationally bound to it, and some day, we'll move into this dee-luxe apartment in the sky?
Nope. Dark energy is here to push it away from us, and we'll unfortunately see this bright neighbor recede farther and farther from us, until it disappears from our sight. So say your…