Navy Research Lab Makes Carbon-Neutral Gasoline From Sea Water For Between $3 And $6 A Gallon

Sea water? Sea water! The US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has developed and patented (!) the process, and powered a model airplane with the result. How would it work on a larger scale? Well, first you build a nuclear-powered gasoline factory vessel...

Gasoline factory???

Actually, I have to temper my mockery with the possibility that a cleaner version of the process could be developed. But I am confident based on the Navy's experiments with powerful sound waves that kill whales and dolphins that the Navy will not bother with any damned environmental cleanup. I doubt the oil companies are quaking in their boots quite yet.

National Geographic: 'Climate Change Back On Political Radar After Sandy, Election'

Tim Profeta of Duke University, writing at National Geographic, reminds us of perhaps the most important issue you never heard mentioned by the presidential campaigns:

In his re-election victory speech, President Barack Obama finally touched on a seldom-mentioned issue of the campaign—climate change: “We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” ... New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the issue the centerpiece of his endorsement of Obama last week...

A number of environmental groups have expressed hope Obama will finally be at liberty to take steps to address the issue. “I do think there’s an opportunity, if the president chooses to take it, to show leadership and get attention on the cost that climate change is likely to cause,” said Kevin Kennedy of the U.S. Climate Initiative of the World Resources Institute. ...

But the future of U.S. climate policy is far from certain. With comprehensive climate legislation dead in Congress, many see the path forward in continued regulation of carbon emissions from power plants. Sen. Harry Reid said he hopes the Senate, where the Democrats have expanded their majority, can address climate change, but he didn’t offer any specifics. ...

...

The article is short and worth your time to read, but it is also discouraging. After the election, Mr. Obama is theoretically free, indeed arguably has a mandate, to act on this most significant of all issues. But he is surely still beholden to corporate interests which funded his campaign and which anticipate direct or indirect profits from older, dirtier methods of energy generation. Coal isn't going away on its own!

I don't even need to say that an Obama presidency opens the possibility of addressing climate change in a way that a Rmoney presidency would have shut off within five minutes of his election. But even with Obama, this will not be easy; it is incumbent (heh) on us to make sure the president is under as much pressure from environmentally concerned citizens as from big-money contributors. We have to sell our politicians on renewable sources of energy... sell them, and sell them again, until they are irrevocably sold on them.

Another approach, one at which Americans have proven themselves time and time again over more than a century, doesn't get mentioned often enough. That is building devices that use less energy. From computers to cars to industrial plants, we can provide incentives for technology companies to build energy conservation measures into their products from the moment they are designed. Are you, say, 50 years old or more? Chances are good the first computer you ever used filled a sizable room, required A/C in immense amounts, and drew power in quantities comparable to a small housing subdivision. Today, there's your iPad... even if your company has 50 employees each with an iPad or a small laptop, with a local network, all together they don't begin to touch the energy requirements of one old-fashioned room-sized computer. This can be done with other technologies. It can even be done with cars... the Tesla is just the beginning. Energy conservation... what a concept!

Police Brutalize, Arrest TransCanada Pipeline Protesters

Pipe this crud across US+Texas...
What could possibly go wrong?

Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake's The Dissenter and Current TV 's Films for Action (essentially crossposts) has details about Texas police (what level? not mentioned) using handcuffed stress positions while pepper spraying and tasering demonstrators who obstructed the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline being constructed by TransCanada, all while TransCanada officials stood by and made no attempt to halt the brutalization.

Here's a bit of background on tar sands by Edward Burtynsky at TreeHugger (love the site name!) for those unfamiliar (note: "oil sands" is just a sanitized name for "tar sands"):

• Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
• At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
• Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
• The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
• The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
• Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.

In other words, tar sands are an idea whose time is long past. Poisoning water much needed for other purposes to produce a fossil fuel whose burning pollutes our air might have been acceptable in the 19^th century, before far cleaner energy sources were available. It is not acceptable today.

As for suppressing protesters' peaceful demonstrations by brutalizing them... shades of the late 1960s and early 1970s! Does nothing ever change for the better?

Getting A Bigger Charge Out Of My Electricity Vendor

Un-Reddy Kilowatt?

I just spent a half hour in an online chat with a customer rep from Houston's largest (and my current) supplier of electricity. Our plan at Our House is up for renewal in a couple of months, and I needed answers to the following apparent conundrum:

• Our current plan is 100% wind power, as it has been since wind was first made available in Houston;
• 100% wind power seems to be available to new customers of this company;
• The company did not mention 100% wind power in its "plans for you" listed in my contract renewal.

The chat was very satisfactory; the rep was polite and helpful. But the result is that the company will not sell me 100% wind power. Period.

Meanwhile, in searching the web for other vendors (I've barely scratched the surface; I made no immediate progress), I ran across an article by Loren Steffy, a generally sane Houston Chronicle business columnist who also writes Fuel Fix, an energy industry blog. (Think: Houston's raison d'être is energy production. Of course there's a major blog for it; actually, several blogs.) Steffy's post, titled nonchalantly "Why the power company makes out like a bandit in Texas," begins like this:

Reddy-2-Kill-or-Watt?

NRG Energy has started making out its Christmas list a little early this year.

In a recent filing, the biggest Houston-area generator of electric power wrote a letter to the North Pole of Deregulation – Public Utilities Commission – to say what it wants: a doubling of the current caps on wholesale electricity prices and adopting what’s known as a capacity market.

Both possibilities have been considered separately to improve reliability for its troubled electric grid, but NRG’s filing is the first suggestion that the PUC do both.

Each option is likely to be expensive, and combined, it could result in higher prices and fewer companies for consumers to choose from in buying electricity.

“It’s outrageous,” said Paul Ring, an independent market analyst who writes the blog Energy Choice Matters. “It’s going to ruin the market.”

...

It's going to ruin our household budget, too. And not just ours. Houston summers are hotter, for longer, than most places in the country, and air conditioning is not optional: poor people whose electricity is cut off literally die here of dehydration and worse.

My best guess? Our electric vendor decided that there was too little profit in wind power, so they reduced the percentage in the mix in the few contracts remaining, to 20%. Most of our power, to quote GeeDubya, is nu‑ku‑lar.

So now I must shop for another vendor, not really expecting to find one. Welcome to Houston, Texas, energy capital of the nation, where suppliers give the customer exactly what they think s/he should want.

ADDED: how could I have forgotten to mention: the P.U.C. almost always gives the energy companies what they ask for.