3 Big Green 2010 Predictions That Didn’t Pan Out Posted on December 30th, 2009
Well, the last decade has seen a lot of predictions. Many of them optimistically claimed that the world would be a very different place by 2010 and green tech would dominate the landscape. We’d all be living in an environmentally-friendly utopia with everything but flying cars (those were a 1950s obsession).
Looking at those predictions for 2010 and where we are today, at the cusp of entering that new decade, it appears the predictions were off. Here’s my three favorite ones.
1 – Hydrogen and Hybrid Cars Will Be Everywhere
Well, that didn’t work out. Despite the Hydrogen Economy author, Jeremy Rifkin, prediction. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still a future tech with most not seeing them even entering the market for public consumption until 2015-20. Sure, every major car maker on the planet is working on some kind of H2-driven machine, but most of them make a Bentley look cheap with their current price points. So far, no major hydrogen fuel cell manufacturer has appeared to make FCs cheaply en masse. So.. it’ll still be a while.
As for hybrids being the “generational gap” between gasoline and electrics, high gas prices in the early part of this decade drove prognosticators to claim that nearly every car made would be a hybrid by 2010. Currently only one American auto maker has a hybrid that’s for sale, right now, today. Overall, there are only a handful on the market and they make up less than 2% of the total world-wide car sales market.
2 – Electric Car Tech Is About To Take Over
Back in 2005, the New York Times had an article by Robert Graham wherein he stated that “the technology is there, it just needs to be put on the street.” He was referring, of course, to electric cars (Graham heads the Electric Power Research Institute). Well.. Sorry, Mr. Graham, but the technology is still there and it still hasn’t hit the street. It turns out electric cars are a lot more expensive than people thought they would be by now. So far, batteries (specifically) haven’t caught up with expectations and are still very expensive per mile of range versus their gasoline counterparts.
3 – We’ll All Have Solar Panels On Our Houses By 2010
This one amazes me. The prediction came from a lot of sources in the early part of the 2000’s. So far, it hasn’t happened. Solar panels (photovoltaics) are still some of the most expensive power sources out there and on a small scale, like a home, they have way more costs than benefit. What’s more, most home owners are not willing to spend a large sum of money improving their home if the improvement doesn’t have a clear cost:benefit ratio. So if you can’t prove equivocally that the installation of something as expensive as solar PV ($9,000-$14,000 per home) will pay off before it’s expected lifespan is up (PV panels usually have a 5-7 year life), home owners won’t buy.
So, they aren’t everywhere and we don’t all enjoy sunlight as our home’s primary power source. Oh well.
Of course, next year starts a new decade. So I’m sure a lot of new predictions will be forthcoming. It should be interesting. Especially with 2012 coming up and the big “End of the Solstice” day on that year in which we enter the Age of Aquarius and leave behind Pisces. Ask the Mayans, their calendar runs out then too, coincidentally. Nostradamus had a few things to say about it as well. Should be fun!
The Sustainability Factor – What Sustainability Really Is Posted on October 13th, 2009
Lately, I have done a lot of research. That research is now culminating into a new white paper I’m penning titled The Sustainability Factor: What Sustainability Means and Why You Need to Know. The following is the introductory chapter of that paper. It lays out the gist of the piece and what it hopes to accomplish.
I’m including it here to show you this because this is the core issue behind this entire blog’s existence. When The Sustainability Factor is finished, I will be putting it up on the site for download, free of charge. You’ll note the addition of a “donate” button to the left. Please go to my About Me page to find out what that’s all about.
So, without further ado, here’s the introduction to my new paper. It should be complete and available here on the site in the next few days. The paper itself will have sources and a bibliography, of course.
What Sustainability Really Is
The term “sustainability” or “sustainable” is used a lot these days, almost always in relation to something that’s considered green (ecologically non-impacting, or at least more so than the alternative). It’s often used wrongly, especially when it’s used to tout products or services.
The problem with the word “sustainable” is that while it’s easily defined, it is hard to quantify with so many things in today’s consumerist world.
By definition, sustainable goods and practices are those that can be perpetuated almost indefinitely without lowering the future potential production of the good or practice. Until recently, the term was used most often to describe an agricultural method or technology. It is often used by economists to describe an economic trend or practice as well.
Using nearly any measurement, the sustainability of our current technologies and lifestyles is not feasible. While Al Gore and the other global warming hypsters go on about our pending doom with the planet’s atmosphere, they ignore something more fundamental and far more seriously threatening. They ignore peak production and extraction models.
This idea has been around, generally on the fringe, for a long time. We’ve heard about Peak Oil and Water Shortages, and all the rest. These are almost always laughed off by the main stream because they are, to put it bluntly, impossible to really quantify and come to grips with.
Those two issues are deservedly on the fringe. Peak Oil will not be an issue so long as we are willing to go to great lengths to get the crude. Including warfare and monetary disaster. Peak Water, similarly, will only be an issue in the foreseeable future in those areas that we don’t generally worry about (meaning: somewhere that’s not right here).
The problem with reaching peaks in any resource is that the individual resource is often not likely to reach a peak. Oil, for instance, can be infinitely available for as far into the future as we wish to project, provided the other resources that make it possible to get the oil are still easy to extract. Conversely, so long as we have cheap energy (oil), we can raise the amount of our reserves for any other resource because it becomes possible to extract it indefinitely.
Eventually, however, we’re going to hit a synergy where we won’t have one or the other to rely on for supplying our usage. We’ll eventually reach a point where oil is too hard to get because we just can’t afford the cost in oil to extract the metals required to make the machinery for extracting the oil. Or the phosphorous for fertilizing our fields to make the food to supply the workers to get the oil.
All of our resources are not in a chain, but a web. Just like the synergy between foods, markets, economics, and so forth the resources of our planet are also tied into a web. Each affects the other either directly or through a chain of connections.
Currently, we are seeing two major changes in that web that are affecting everything else: economic upheavals are changing the landscape of oil’s availability as the largest purchaser on the market is replaced by another, who stands on slightly firmer economic ground. This upheaval is causing big changes in other market sectors as food production, which requires a large influx of oil to power its machinery, shifts towards using food as a fuel. This shift causes the food itself to become a hotter commodity on the market, making it more expensive to get. In turn, other markets are being affected as the economics all bump into one another vying for their new position in the web.
It’s my belief that long before the claims of doom and destruction from Al Gore and the global warming parade come to pass, we’re going to face something much more sinister and much more telling. We’re going to see the collapse of our industrial agriculture and thus will be facing starvation on a planetary scale.
I know that sounds extreme, but the evidence is all there if we just look for it. We’re reaching a “tipping point,” to steal one of the favorite climate change phrases, wherein we will not only reach Peak Oil, we’ll reach Peak Everything.
In this discussion, we’ll look at the various aspects of the resource web and how they’re changing and beginning to play against each other. Rather than supporting each other in a balanced web of usefulness, they are now pulling against one another and will eventually collapse—likely nearly all at once.
We will like at peak water, minerals, fertilizers, petroleum, etc. Then we’ll talk about what needs to change and how it can be done. That change won’t come from where you likely believe it would.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s first look at how these various resources are beginning to waver.
Aaron’s EnvironMental Corner Twitter Account Posted on August 24th, 2009
I’ve been using my personal Twitter account, up to this point, as the unofficial tweet base for this site. I’m changing that, since I’m sure many of you aren’t interested in my other ramblings and would prefer to just get tweets related to this site.
So I’ve created a new Twitter account just for Aaron’s EnvironMental: AaronsEnviro
From there, all site updates (starting with this one) will be tweeted, including new posts, environmentally-oriented information, etc. I expect it will be at around 3-5 tweets per day at maximum. The avatar for that account is at right.
You can also contact me through the new account, of course, though you’ll likely have better luck with my main MacAaron account. Direct Messages (DM), of course, will come directly to me quickly in either account.
I’m doing this party for marketing reasons and partly because many people have told me that they don’t follow me on Twitter because they see how many tweets per day I generate–many of which are not related to this site.
I can understand that, since I filter who I follow on the same kinds of criteria, so hopefully this new account will address that issue.
As usual, you can also comment on any of these blog posts or send me an email directly (I purposefully don’t publish it since I get a lot of spam already).
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story Posted on August 10th, 2009
by Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press
Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack Obama.
“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.
Read the rest of this tawdry tale here.
Government Monopsony Distorts Climate Science says SPPI Posted on July 26th, 2009
Government monopsony distorts climate science, says SPPI The climate industry is costing taxpayers $79 billion and counting The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism.
Key findings:
The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.
Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highlyorganized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.
Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks, which profit most, are calling for more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 – $10 trillion in the near future. Hot air will soon be the largest single commodity traded on global exchanges. Meanwhile, in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying just $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government spends on alarmists, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in 2008 alone.
The large expenditure designed to prove the non-existent connection between carbon and climate has created a powerful alliance of self-serving vested interests. By pouring so much money into pushing a single, scientifically-baseless agenda, the Government has created not an unbiased investigation but a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sound science cannot easily survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance. Says Nova, “For the first time, the numbers from government documents have been compiled in one place. It’s time to start talking of “Monopolistic Science”. It’s time to expose the lie that those who claim “to save the planet” are the underdogs. And it’s time to get serious about auditing science, especially when it comes to pronouncements that are used to justify giant government programs andmassivemovements of money.”
Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, says: “This study counts the cost of years of wasted Federal spending on the ‘global warming’ non-problem. Government bodies, big businesses and environmental NGOs have behaved like big tobacco: recruiting, controlling and rewarding their own “group-think” scientists who bend climatemodeling to justify the State’s near-maniacal quest for power, control, wealth and forced population reduction.
“Joanne Nova, who wrote our study, speaks for thousands of scientists in questioning whether a clique of taxpayer-funded climate modelers are getting the data right, or just getting the “right” data. Are politicians paying out billions of our dollars for evidence-driven policy-making, or policy-driven evidence-making? The truth is more crucial than ever, because American lives, property and constitutional liberties are at risk.”
Read the full report here (PDF)
