“… the total is 0.00476°C (0.0086°F) of global warming avoided by the California cap-and-trade program for reducing greenhouse gas emissions out to the year 2050. Such numbers strain the limits of detectability within our current observing systems, not to mention environmental significance.”
With the California Air Resource Board’s (CARB) recent announcement that they have finalized their greenhouse gas cap and trade regulations, California becomes the first state to have, according to the CARB’s chairperson Mary Nichols, “done something important” on the issue of climate change.
Ms. Nichols couldn’t be further from the truth. While CARB may have done “something important” for many things in California (not all of which may prove positive), climate change isn’t one of them.
If the emissions targets under the CARB cap and trade program as it is scheduled to the year 2020 are met, the total amount of global temperature rise that would be avoided amounts to 0.00015°C (or for those who prefer English units, 0.00027°F).…
Continue ReadingFor two researchers at Cornell University, it’s turning out to be a very tough year.
Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea released a study this past Spring that found emissions from natural gas produced from shale are worse than coal, based on the global warming potential (GWP) of methane. Since it was released, numerous institutions have weighed in and come to a fairly uniform conclusion: The Howarth/Ingraffea paper simply has too many errors to be credible.
New University of Maryland Study
Nonetheless, ideological opponents of shale gas have continued to wield the Cornell paper as a major weapon against this game changing source of energy. But a new study released by the University of Maryland, The Greenhouse Impact of Unconventional Gas for Electricity Production, suggests that Cornell’s paper has been intellectually superceded.…
Continue Reading” The Solyndra technology was far from innovative, much less game-changing. The DOE … failed to quantify the elasticity of production costs in a highly competitive market where solar panels are a commodity.”
“Given the many other companies with shaky financials that have received loan guarantees, I expect we’ll see more and larger epic fails like Solyndra in the coming years.”
– Robert Peltier, “Epic Fail, POWER, October 2011, p. 6.
The seasoned warnings against politically correct, market incorrect technologies for electric generation by POWER magazine editor-in-chief Robert Peltier are now being vindicated. Peltier did not anticipate the unseemly crony capitalism involved in such cases as Solyndra, but he knew that there was trouble ahead because of the technological problems of converting very dilute, intermittent energy into affordable, dispatchable power flows.…
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