“For the U.S. solar photovoltaic industry, December 17, 2007 was a historic day. That was the day the largest photovoltaic solar systems in the United States were activated. One was a 14-megawatt solar farm covering 140 acres opened at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas. The other was an 8.22-megawatt photovoltaic array covering 80 acres in Alamosa, Colorado, the largest solar PV plant in the United States supporting substation loads for a major public utility.”
Archive for December, 2007
Solar Crossing
Saturday, December 29th, 2007Earth Under Fire
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World is a comprehensive look at the world wide effects of climate change. In dramatic photographs, maps and quotes from world climate science leaders, this one-of-a-kind book shows how the earth is being changed right now.
The book illustrates on-going shifts from weather extremes and melting glaciers to disruptions of animal migration and plant growth — including the strong impact on human life, cities and cultures.
Earth Under Fire ends with a vision of how we can slow global warming and improve the lives of people everywhere.
A book you might want…
Arctic Sea Ice
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
“…the real story of 2007 isn’t that we simply set a new record low, but rather, it is the magnitude of the record low, which was well beyond our prediction…”
GW: Olive Trees
Monday, December 24th, 2007“It is December now, and my trees should be heavy with olives. But they’re not. Like last year, rains fell at the wrong time, too hard or too soft. When it mattered, there was no rain at all.
A warming trend with freak cold snaps confuses plant metabolism and emboldens killer pests. Last January, my trees budded, convinced it was spring. Then it froze. In June, the Dacus fly bore into the fruit, causing it to drop off the tree.
Many olive growers are somewhere between disbelief and denial. In an old Tuscan grove, the proprietor assured me her trees were fine. A quick look suggested otherwise; most of her olives were pierced by telltale holes.”
GW: Tropical Virus in Italy
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007“Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.
The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.
And if chikungunya can spread to Castiglione — “a place not special in any way,” Dr. Angelini said — there is no reason why it cannot go to other Italian villages. There is no reason why dengue, an even more debilitating tropical disease, cannot as well. ”
Global Warming: Score Cards
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007The California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV) has as a primary mission the education of voters in California to environmental issues. Yearly it publishes a scorecard of how the California Assembly, Senate and Governor have done on legislation for the environment. No surprise Democrats usually get high scores and Republicans get low. Somewhat of a surprise, Governor Schwarzenegger moved from 50% in 2006 to 63% in 2007.
Here’s the snapshot view. Scroll down a bit to see the historical Governors Scores. You’ll think a little more highly of Gray Davis.
The full report is here (PDF). You can go to page 28 for the detailed reckoning of the votes and vetoes. Descriptions of each of the bills precedes.
CLCV also has started a blog with a link to a Jerry Brown interview. As current Attorney General and rumored candidate for Governor, this will hold special interest.
CLCV has also done the work to provide a chart of the Presidential candidates’ positions on klimakatastrophe.
I’ve re-done it to allow comparison of Dems to Dems and Repubs to Repubs. [All work is CLCV's] You’ll be amazed and appalled at Mr. Security Giuliani’s row, and as interesting, Ron Paul’s row — since he has such high support from the geek-squad which certainly knows what is going on. On the Dem side, Bill Richardson looks like he gets it best. We are in an emergency! Of course, positions are merely sketches of what inevitably becomes a full piece of work, or work left aside. We can’t tell from this, and frankly I haven’t heard from anyone by Al Gore, the deep knowledge of what we are up against, and what it will take.
Greenland
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007“If one had to pick the region of the world most likely to influence the course of human history this century, the Middle East would be the obvious choice, due to its political volatility and rich oil resources. However, the Middle East may have a significant challenger next century from a seemingly unlikely place–Greenland. Why Greenland? Well, the Greenland ice sheet holds enough water to raise global sea level 7 meters (23 feet). There are worrisome signs that the ice sheet might be more vulnerable than we thought to significant melting near the end of the century, according to research results presented at last week’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.”
Jeff Masters Wunderblog
No Talking Climate Heads
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007It’s a sick crew running the media ship….
The League of Conservation Voters generated quite a bit of buzz on environmental blogs this week after it launched a new campaign pressing America’s most-watched political reporters to bring up global warming more often on all those influential Sunday talk shows. The group reviewed videotape of more than 120 interviews of presidential contenders by Chris Wallace, Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Wolf Blitzer and Bob Schieffer this year.
In the 2,275 questions posed, the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” were used three times, and a total of 24 questions indirectly touched on climate or related issues, the group said.
Here’s the League’s count of 2007 talk-show questions mentioning climate:
- Wolf Blitzer, CNN: 1 out of 311
- Tim Russert, NBC: 0 out of 664
- Bob Scheiffer, CBS: 0 out of 212
- George Stephanopoulos, ABC: 0 out of 661
- Chris Wallace, FOX: 2 out of 427
And they aren’t even counting Chris Matthews atrocious Hardball….
The Orninoco Bar, from Canaima
Friday, December 21st, 2007This is the opening chapter of Canaima, a Novel of Venezuela in the last 19th century,
by Rómulo Gallegos which I translated in 1996
Gateway
The Orinoco Bar! The starboard lookout heaves the lead and begins to cry the soundings.
“Nine feet! Hard bottom!”
The many mouths of the Orinoco River: doors just barely opened to a region where adventure and violence reign … A long brow of mangroves, black and floating, in the turbulent dawn. The waters of the river dragging silt to the sea and saturating the saline air with the odors of the earth.
“Eight feet! Soft bottom!”
Flights of sea birds appear from the south, rosary beads of the dawn in the distant stillness. The ocean resists the push of the river and a line of muddy waves runs along the bar.
“Eight feet! Hard bottom!”
The shimmerings of daybreak. Crimson clouds … And the black mangroves are green!
“Nine feet! Soft bottom!”
From the still sleeping land to the wide-awake sea, its lifting eye perched brilliantly on the horizon, the flights of birds still coming. The early risers are circling already over the glittering water: the gray, insatiable pelicans; the brown, endlessly choking cormorants; the voracious white seagulls with their hoarse screams; the black scissortails, their eyes sharp down the arrow of their beaks.
(more…)
Species Endangerment
Friday, December 21st, 2007There will be more accountability for the steroids pumped into the willing bodies of athletes than for the death by slow catastrophe of our world by those operating on the ideology of the greedy me.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson overruled the unanimous opinion of his legal and technical staff in blocking California’s effort to cut greenhouse gases from cars and trucks - a new revelation that California officials say shows his decision was based on politics, not the law.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, launched a probe Thursday into why Johnson made his decision even though EPA staffers reportedly warned him he would lose in court if he denied California’s request.
“Prior to making this decision, you assured the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as well as the state of California and many others, that you would make this decision on the merits,” Waxman wrote in a letter to Johnson. “It does not appear that you fulfilled that commitment.”
The revelation that Johnson ignored his staff’s advice was first reported by the Washington Post on Thursday. California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer said her office was able to confirm that the staff recommendations were rejected by the administrator.
Nitrogen Fed Corn for Ethanol Creates Dead Zone
Thursday, December 20th, 2007The recently passed energy bill in Congress, mandating more ethanol, principally from corn, was oblivious to this sort of news.
Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since World War II. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.
The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone” — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.
EPA Know Nothings at it Again
Thursday, December 20th, 2007The [dictatorial Bush Regime's] Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.
The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said California had failed to make a compelling case that it needed authority to write its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks to help curb global warming.
The decision immediately provoked a heated debate over its scientific basis and whether political pressure was applied by the automobile industry to help it escape the proposed California regulations. Officials from the states and numerous environmental groups vowed to sue to overturn the edict.”
“It’s a phony argument and ridiculous on its face,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
“I find this disgraceful,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who helped write the fuel-economy law. “The passage of the energy bill does not give the EPA a green light to shirk its responsibility to protect the health and safety of the American people from air pollution.”
It was the first time the EPA has flat-out denied a waiver request by California under the Clean Air Act. The law gives California special authority to set stronger standards because the state has a long history of smog and other air-quality problems.
But Johnson insisted the state’s request had not met the “extraordinary and compelling conditions” required under the act to grant a waiver.
California officials already had laid the groundwork to sue EPA, assuming weeks ago the agency would deny the request. State officials said they plan to file suit as soon as the ruling is published in the Federal Register in the next few weeks.”
The auto industry whining and crying and thumbsucking may have gotten the ear of the EPA but Europe is out to save itself from the obtuse self regard of the internal combustion crowd with promises of enormous fines as motivators.
European Union officials told leading automakers on Wednesday to make deep cuts in tailpipe emissions of the cars they produce or face fines that could reach billions of euros.
The European environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said the industry’s decade-old promises to meet emissions reduction targets voluntarily had not yielded the desired results, making the tougher action necessary.
The Last Empire: China’s Pollution Problem Goes Global
Monday, December 17th, 2007A friend of ours in Marin, Jacques Leslie, author of Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People and the Environment, has a piece in Mother Jones about China, the great dragon soon to out-eat the great eagle and then, with other globalvores, the nest we all call home….
In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world’s manufacturer. Among the planet’s 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world’s cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world’s buttons, half the world’s silk neckties, and half the world’s fireworks, respectively.
China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world’s steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world’s new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars’ performance on the city’s clotted roads.
C02 + Sunlight = CO + Gas?
Sunday, December 16th, 2007“Could concentrated solar energy be used to reverse combustion and convert carbon dioxide back into gasoline? That’s what scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, aim to find out by building a novel reactor that can chemically “reenergize” carbon dioxide.
The device uses a two-stage thermochemical reaction to break down carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide, says Nathan Siegel, a senior member of technical staffat Sandia’s Solar Technologies Department and one of the researchers developing the technology. “Carbon dioxide is a combustion product, so what we’re doing is reversing combustion,” he says. The carbon monoxide can then readily be employed to produce a range of different fuels, including hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline, using conventional technologies. ”
Water
Sunday, December 16th, 2007From East and West of the US come these ominous water stories.
In Florida:
South Florida’s Strictest Water Rationing Ever
For the first time in the agency’s history, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) declared last week an extreme District-wide water shortage and ordered the strictest rationing ever across South Florida.
”We’re not in any old drought. We’re in what I like to call the biblical drought. This is an enormous state of emergency.”
-Shannon Estenoz, a member of the South Florida Water Management District’s governing board
”We are facing Armageddon. I think we are going to see massive crop losses we have never seen before.”
-Malcolm ”Bubba” Wade, a board member and vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp., one of the region’s largest growers.
In California:
L.A. must dump water from two reservoirs
In the midst of a drought, Los Angeles officials announced Friday that 600 million gallons of water must be dumped from two reservoirs that supply a swath of the city because an unexpected chemical reaction rendered it undrinkable.
Klimakatastrophe
Saturday, December 15th, 2007‘Klimakatastrophe’ picked as Germany’s word of year
December 7th, 2007, filed by Erik Kirschbaum
The Society of the German Language (GfdS) has picked “Klimakatastrophe” (climate disaster) as its “word of the year”, an annual honour awarded to the term the prestigious Wiesbaden-based group feels has captured the spirit or dominated the headlines and public discussion of the year.
“‘Climate disaster’ points to the direction that climate change is headed,” said GdfS expert Gerhard Mueller. He said in a German radio interview that ‘climate change’ had been considered, but the society didn’t feel it was dramatic enough. The topic of climate change played a major role in the public discussion in Germany in 2007, he said.
Yep. That says it a lot better than Global Warming…
Climate Crimes Against Humanity
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007We will need a category corresponding to War Crimes to explain, indict, try and extract retribution for what the Bush Administration is doing to us.
Over the weekend, officials from the United Nations, backed by the European Union and many developing countries, offered a draft plan for talks over the next two years, including a statement that dangerous warming can be avoided only if industrialized countries cut emissions by 2020 to levels 25 to 40 percent below those of 1990.
But on Tuesday the United States remained firmly opposed to such language.
Global Wilding
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
This is one of many pictures of the ice storms that have hit the southwest and midwest. I haven’t found much in the way of meta analyis, how these storms add to or change our notions of the effects of the C02 choker.
The Devil Knows
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007We wound up at “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Sidney Lumet’s new film, last night because we couldn’t get into “I’m Not There,” the multi-actor Bob Dylan film. We hadn’t done our usual homework on “Dead” so we didn’t have a clue what we were in for, except the class A list of actors: Phillip Seymour Hoffman (most memorably of “Capote”,) Ethan Hawke, Maria Tomei and Albert Finney. Looks like a go, we said.
Imagine our surprise when, without previews, without titles, without warning we were watching an overweight, naked white male plowing — at length, from the rear — what seemed to be a beautiful woman, or at least a woman with lots of beautiful hair. I have to say, it was a long scene. In part because I was trying to figure out how this well lit porn shot fit the movie I thought we’d paid to see. It ended in sweet hilarity, somewhat redeeming the man who, keep in mind we know nothing about yet, reserved half his amorous attention for the figures in the mirror. Somewhat. Their conversation lets us know that this loving, and the following sweetness is unusual in their lives. It throws them back to the “old days,” the days they met. And it clues us to the financial pressures –so central to the rest of the film– that are squeezing “Andy” as he tries to live a life larger than even his sumptuous salary can maintain. The woman’s sudden withdrawal from happy coitus tell of her unhappiness at his day to day absence, emotional and physical.
After a dippy little subtitle –”The Day of the Robbery”– almost indicating we are watching a comedy, we are zipped into a little shopping corner as banal as can be found. The L of stores around mostly deserted asphalt, a UPS truck, an elderly man dropping his elderly wife off, a white sedan with two guys sitting in it, waiting for stores to open. The woman unlocks a door and goes into a store, takes off her coat, begins to settle herself. It’s a jewelry store. And suddenly the filmic dip from high sexual fever into banality explodes into threat and violence. One of the men in the car comes into the store, a mask pulled over his face and a big gun waving at the elderly woman. Lots of shouted orders. Frail responses. The tension is unbearable. And then hell breaks loose.
Lumet is no stranger to hell breaking loose. He’s a master at screwing up the tension between the bad and the good. In doing so he can usually be counted to be on the side of the good. Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Prince of the City, even Dog Day Afternoon –which he has described as showing that even the freaks in our lives are more like us than we can ever know. But something different is going on here. The “Devil” is a fast plunge into hell, with not too much redemption going on. The story is told in overlapping segments. We are moved back in time before the robbery as subtitles tell us “Two Days before the Robbery;” “One Week Before the Robbery.” We see new parts of the larger story connect to parts we’ve already seen, the same sequence of lines and actions repeated, now set into new contexts. Always we see the family — of men, the mother is dead and the sister is barely present — collapsing in on each other, wildly trying to leap over the previous mistake that had brought them to the present precarious position.
Hoffman is the older brother, the one we have seen in the opening scene, successful, aggressive, sure of himself but in trouble. His success is falling short of his needs. The falling short is driving him to drugs, impotence and financial chicanery. Hawke is the younger brother, the baby, the unambitious, the loser as he is called by his angry ex-wife and his disappointed daughter. Both brothers need money and they need it bad. When Hoffman — Andy — proposes a simple robbery to jump start their lives, Hawke — Hank — at first is incredulous, then resistant, then crazed by his need for money, acquiescent. Andy details the plan. Knock over their own parents’ jewelry store. They don’t work on Saturday and the old woman who does can be hustled into the back room. The jewels are covered by insurance. They stolen ones can be fenced. The old man, it turns out later, is no warm and nurturing dad. No harm, no foul. Everybody’s happy.
Hoffman is a genius at becoming the nasty, seductive older brother. Hawke a little less successful at being a chump but pretty damn good. Trouble is, he decides he can’t possibly pull the robbery off himself so he enlists the help of a real thug. A real thug with a real gun juiced by heavy metal music and pumped testosterone leads to certain mayhem. Perhaps he’s the only bad guy from the old Lumet world, to get what’s coming to him. All the rest live in a gray zone, some charm, some evil; men in the modern world caught up in their greed and bad decisions, the women not too helpful either. Maria Tomei, Andy’s thick haired wife we met in the opening scene, acts out her despair at Andy’s lack of emotional/sexual accomplishment –when not on vacation– by meeting Hank once a week for a good long nooner. It’s all a fuckin’ mess, as they say. So far from the sweet Irish toast from which the title comes ” May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead” that one imagines it was deliberately done. Meaning the opposite of what is intended.
So watching it, as I always do, I ask myself: why is this film being made? What is on the director’s mind? The writer’s? What is the story they want to tell and why do they think it important enough to spend several years in its making? Why this film and not another? For some, the only reason to make a film is because it looks like a cash machine. Story, purpose, not important except to draw ticket buyers. Lumet isn’t one of these guys. In most of his earlier films the question of “why this film?” is easy to answer. He is dealing with significant questions in life. He has stories to show us people and how they deal with the messiness and uncertainties of the world. He has hope. Without being simplistic he writes the good over the bad. The “Devil”?
The story spirals into a murderous tiny point –warning, Plot Spoiler — (more…)
South Korean Oil Spill
Monday, December 10th, 2007Big oil spill on the coast of South Korea
Sea farms and fishing areas on the country’s western coast have been turned into a “sea of oil” following the Friday leakage of oil from a tanker in seas off Taean, South Chungcheong Province, which is believed one of the world’s most devastating sea pollution cases involving oil.
Maritime officials say about 5 percent of the oil has been collected, and about 9,000 soldiers, police, officials and volunteers were struggling to clean up the polluted area, Monday, the fourth day of operations.
The amount of oil spilled _ 10,500 tons _ is more than double the 5,000 tons that leaked from the Sea Prince into seas off Yeosu, South Jeolla Province, Korea’s worst previous oil spill in 1995.
It is also about 28 percent of the 37,000 tons leaked from the Exxon Valdez into Alsaka’s Prince William Sound in 1989, one of the world’s worst sea pollutions by oil. [the recent spill in San Francisco Bay was about 190 tons -- 1/55 of Korean spill.]
South Korea—Chung Hwan-hyang surveyed the damage from South Korea’s worst oil spill, saddened by the knowledge that the oyster farm she and her husband ran for 30 years was lost.
more stories like this“My oysters are all dead,” the 70-year-old woman said Sunday as she and thousands of others cleaned foul-smelling oil from Shinduri Beach. “I cried and cried last night. I don’t know what to do.”
