“Tell me, JJ, what’s this capital request all about?”
“Boss, this is for a heat exchanger that will use our cooling-tower water for meeting our air conditioning needs when it’s cold outside. I figure it will save 5% of the power we now use for operating our chiller. The project should come in at around $10,000 and have a payback of less than a year.”
“Saves energy, does it? We can use this project to get greenie points towards obtaining Polar Bear level on our Politically Correct Building certification.”
“Maybe, but getting that certification takes a lot of paperwork and costs about $50,000.”
“Include a bicycle rack in this project, which gets points also. And does this thing use electricity?”
“A little bit, for controls and automatic valves.”
“Good. Include a solar panel to power it and put it over the entrance to the building so it can be seen. …
Continue ReadingA passion of mine is defending my profession (Science) from assault. Such is approaching a full-time job, as those promoting political or economic agendas are painfully aware that real Science is a major threat to their aspirations — so they are aggressively attacking it on multiple fronts. (See ScienceUnderAssault.info, which was my talk to Congress sponsored by the House Science and Technology Committee.)
We now have yet another distressing example, where a leading scientist has lost his job — apparently for the crime of being a conscientious, competent academic, focused on quality research (instead of chasing grant money).
Dr. Henrik Møller is an world-renown expert on infra-sound, and has published several high-quality studies on low-frequency acoustics (like here, here, here, and here). More recently, some of these have dealt with industrial wind energy noise (e.g. …
Continue Reading“What, in short, if there is government failure in the quest to address what is seen as market failure? James Hansen should consider supporting his [fee and dividend] scheme inside the ivory tower, not outside in the real world. The two are not the same.”
As California labors under its cap-and-trade law for stationary sources, and as Tom Steyer pushes the state to include the transportation market for allowances as well, words of warning come from climate scientist/activist James Hansen. Such updates his biting analysis back in 2012 against California’s initial program.
Hansen’s latest concerns Australia, which ditched their carbon tax. In a July 29th post, Facing Facebook: Australia’s Cap-and-Tax, Hansen states:
… Continue ReadingThe two main points that I made in discussions in Australia re their cap-and-trade were (1) it would be ineffectual in reducing emissions, and (2) it would be recognized as a tax, and thus it would not survive and grow at the rate needed to phase out emissions.