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Vail Hails Gales

Vail Resorts to be second-biggest corporate wind-power buyer in U.S. Colorado-based ski-resort company (and one-time eco-vandal target) Vail Resorts announced this week that it will buy enough wind power to offset all of the electricity it uses at its five ski areas, as well as in its corporate offices and stores. The company’s promise to […]

Dalai Drama

China plans massive diversion of Tibetan river water The Chinese never met a problem they couldn’t solve with a few billion dollars and a massive engineering project out of scale with anything ever attempted before by humanity. The latest is a $37 billion undertaking which would divert water from rivers in the high reaches of […]

Ports punting pollution

Recognizing they can't grow unless they clean up, the huge ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will soon unveil a $2 billion effort to address the incredible air pollution they produce every day. According to today's Washington Post, the two ports that account for 40% of the nation's container trade will launch a plan next month to "reduce particulate matter by 81 percent and nitrogen oxides by 62 percent in five years."

And it sounds like it is needed; incomprehensibly, the L.A. port alone emits daily the equivalent particulate matter and nitrogen oxide produced by a half million cars, a typical refinery, and a typical power plant combined.

But looking at the numbers, it starts to make sense.

Geothermal energy

In yesterday's MIT Technology Review there's an interview with Jefferson Tester, who claims that geothermal power is a potential game-changer in the energy world.

Technology Review: How much geothermal energy could be harvested?

Jefferson Tester: The figure for the whole world is on the order of 100 million exojoules or quads [a quad is one quadrillion BTUs]. This is the part that would be useable. We now use worldwide just over 400 exojoules per year. So you do the math, and you know you've got a very big source of energy.

How much of that massive resource base could we usefully extract? Imagine that only a fraction of a percent comes out. It's still big. A tenth of a percent is 100,000 quads. You have access to a tremendous amount of stored energy. And assessment studies have shown that this is thousands of times in excess of the amount of energy we consume per-year in the country. The trick is to get it out of the ground economically and efficiently and to do it in an environmentally sustainable manner. That's what a lot of the field efforts have focused on.

The idea is to break up super-hot rock way down in the earth, flood it with water that absorbs the heat, and bring the water back up, in effect mining the heat. Tester says the technology's been successfully demonstrated and we could have commercial-scale plants up and running within 10 to 15 years.

The advantage over other renewables is that geothermal provides steady baseload power:

Could global warming kill the internet?

Apparently so.

California failin’

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy and quite depressing story about California's long and futile attempt to reduce oil use in its transportation sector. I say skip it. Life's too short to be depressed!

Initiatives on the ballot in six states could cripple government

A bang-up reporting job by Ray Ring in the most recent issue of High Country News on a menacing set of property-rights initiatives that will be on the ballot in six states this November: Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Washington. If you thought Oregon's Measure 37 was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

How to protect — and restore — lost fishing grounds

"Something in our oceans has gone greviously wrong," report Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling in a remarkable week-long multimedia series called "Altered Oceans."

On the web, the series turns out to be a collection of impressively-arranged videos, charts, and photographs, focusing not just on the usual complaints -- overfishing and mismanagement -- but also on the threat of plastics to birds, "slime" to divers, and toxic algae to sea lions. The special -- the web version plays almost like a documentary -- has been lavishly praised by visitors to the L.A. Times message board.

But of course, if there were any doubt about the threat to our oceans, one could also pay attention to National Geographic on "dirty fishing," Nature [$] on acid level rise, the Monterey Herald on the collapse of salmon fisheries in California this year, Mother Jones on our blindness to the fate of the seas, and no doubt many other thoughtful, well-researched articles and documentaries.

But for a ray of light amidst the gloom, consider this fact: Lobsters are thriving in the waters off Maine, despite an ever-growing and highly profitable commercial fishery.

Why?

Talking point: Global warming and economic growth

Many people in positions of power -- and not just global warming skeptics -- believe the following two things:

1. Economic growth is an engine driven by fossil fuels. Remove all restrictions on fossil fuel use, growth surges. Restrict fossil fuel use, growth slows.
2. "Doing something about global warming" means restricting or capping carbon dioxide emissions, which means restricting fossil fuel use.

The inevitable conclusion is that the only way to fight global warming is to slow down and possibly cripple the economy. Thus you get calls for "certainty" about exactly how much damage global warming will do, so it can be weighed against the damage of mitigating global warming.

This picture of the situation is grossly distorted. Here's why, in a nutshell:

Power recycling

John draws my attention to this piece in the Toronto Star about power recycling (combined heat and power, or CHP). In turn, that reminded me of the long post I wrote about power recycling a while back. It's a good one, if I do say so myself, and nobody else did, so I have to.