Bill Weihl - Google's Green Energy Czar
The “Green Paradigm” is beginning to lose its sheen as realism begins to creep back in. In 2009 Google appointed Bill Weihl as their “Green Energy Czar” and he made a big splash and boasted that within 3 years they would be producing renewable energy cheaper than coal.
He left Google earlier this month.
Reuters reports that Google are abandoning 7 projects including the “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” project.
I am not quite sure who put this together but its appearance within about 24 hours of the original data dump on a Russian server is pretty impressive.
Climategate 2 | FOIA 2011 Searchable Database
ReadMe:
This website is provided as a research resource for mining the recently leaked climate communications. Every effort has been made to redact personal contact information such as email addresses and telephone numbers. The redaction algorithms are currently tuned to be quite stringent, and they will inadvertantly obfuscate other details as well. We will continue to tune the software to improve the quality of the results.
This database was assembled in a very short space of time, and at present only provides the most rudimentary tools for exploring this vast trove of material. We will be improving the quality of the search tools and adding further metadata to the database over the course of the next few weeks.
The investigative capabilities of the on-line community when engaged is quite formidable (as I have remarked on earlier).
Data for 2010 is now available from the US Energy Information Administration. Solar and Wind power are still a long way from being commercial with just direct subsidies being equivalent to 7.8 and 5.6 cents/kWh respectively. Indirect subsidies and increased costs for alternate capacity are not included.
My view of subsidies in power generation is that they are usually counter productive and provide windfalls for developers and constructors but rarely lead to benefits for the consumers of electricity.
Factors Affecting Electricity Prices:
The average retail price of electricity in the United States in 2010 was 9.88 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). The average prices by type of utility customer were:
- Residential: 11.6¢ per kWh
- Transportation: 11.0¢ per kWh
- Commercial: 10.3¢ per kWh
- Industrial: 6.8¢ per kWh
On Tuesday, 22 November at 20:25 UT, ESA’s tracking station at Perth, Australia, established contact with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. This was the first signal received on Earth since the Mars mission was launched on 8 November. ESA teams are working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communications with the spacecraft.
The Carbon Trading scams around the world are coming undone (though Australia in it’s wisdom and its noble efforts to single-handedly save the world has just introduced a carbon tax). The Swiss Bank, UBS has produced a report for its investors with a devastating indictment about carbon trading “waste” in Europe and its bleak future.
SWISS banking giant UBS says the European Union’s emissions trading scheme has cost the continent’s consumers $287 billion for “almost zero impact” on cutting carbon emissions, and has warned that the EU’s carbon pricing market is on the verge of a crash next year.
Image via Wikipedia
I had posted earlier about the revelations that the BBC’s Roger Harrabin (with the help of his pal Joe Smith) had been acting as a mole within the BBC to lobby on behalf of the global warming orthodoxy in which he had a vested interest.
Well, it would seem that he gave up being an objective journalist and became a lobbyist some time ago. He has been lobbying hard since at least 1997. The CIES web page from August 18th, 2000:
Media & Environment Programme
Developed by Dr Joe Smith and Roger Harrabin (BBC Today Programme), the programme consists of a series of indepth seminars designed to broaden and deepen media thinking about global environmental change and sustainable development issues and to improve the academic and policy communities’ understanding of the setting and constraints of media reporting.
Programme co-directors:
Dr Joe Smith
Mr Roger HarrabinProgramme contact details:
Email: jhs125@cam.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)1223 740135Details of previous seminars:
The Changing Environmental Agenda – BBC Editors (1997)
Climate Change Meeting – senior editors (1997)
Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editors (1997)The Kyoto Outcome: Implications for UK Business (1997)
Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editor’s Seminar (1998)
Update 2100 CET: This has finally reached the Nature News Blog and the bits they quote are telling – especially in the light of the IPCC having to acknowledge that for the next few decades the global warming signal may be much smaller than the signals due to natural climate variation.
“I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present [climate] reconstructions,” one researcher is quoted as having allegedly remarked.
Another remark reads: “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.”
Indeed!
===================================
The Global Warming Climate Change scam.
When it reads like a scam, talks like a scam and sings like a scam — it is most definitely a scam!
From the Air Vent:
It happened again.I woke up to find a link from FOIA.org on a thread. Thousands of emails unlocked with 220,000 more hidden behind a password. Despite the smaller size of the Air Vent due to my lack of time, there were twenty five downloads before I saw it once. As before, there are some very nice quotes and clarifications from the consensus. Below is a guest post in the form of a readme file from the FOIA.org group. – Jeff
/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”
“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.
“Poverty is a death sentence.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…
OPERA is one set of experiments at CERN’s Italian partner labs at Gran Sasso and ICARUS is another.
image: http://www.redorbit.com
In September Opera reported the FTL neutrinos to widespread scepticism, wonder and some delight. Last Friday the OPERA scientists reported that new experiments supported the September results.
But on Saturday the ICARUS scientists reported – also on the same website- that they had analysed the September results and that they do not stand up!!!
An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.
I miss my incandescent light bulbs.
Low energy lamps have been touted as being environmentally friendly and Europe has virtually banned all incandescent light bulbs in favour of low energy lamps. But I do wonder who benefits most by this inane ban forced through by CFL manufacturers, politically correct bureaucrats and supine politicians.
But a new study in Sweden shows that the environmental benefits of compact fluorescent lamps are a myth and that mercury from some 200,000 CFL’s is being discharged directly into the surroundings every year.
Svenska Dagbladet reports (freely translated):
…. In 2009 Sweden introduced a total ban on mercury but compact fluorescent lamps (CFL’s) were excluded. Inhalation of mercury contained in lamps can, at worst, damage the brain and kidneys. Insomnia, irritability and personality changes are some examples of what can result after prolonged exposure. ....
“One must be terribly careful with mercury and certainly not inhale it under any circumstances”, says Jörn Nielsen, Chief of the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Lund University. The Division has studied companies that work with recycling of fluorescent lamps. Several of the employees surveyed were approaching levels of mercury “poisoning”.
Wind power has its place and, especially in small isolated circumstances, can even be a useful additional source of energy.
It is not a universal panacea and it is expensive. It is intermittent and when the wind will blow within the minimum and maximum limits for a wind turbine to operate is unpredicatable. Wind power capacity must be backed up by other capacity. In large electrical grid systems it is fundamentally flawed in meeting the requirements to have a continuous and instantaneous balance between electricity supply and demand. Electricity cannot be stored – except in some few cases in the form of pumped water into reservoirs to be later recovered as hydro-power.
The Duke of Edinburgh is known for often being politically incorrect and not always for his wisdom. But the mirage that is wind power owes much to political correctness. And this time he gets it right:
Clive Aslet writes in The Telegraph:
You have to hand it to the Duke of Edinburgh. At 90, he is still as incisive as ever. Once again, the Royal Family has articulated what ordinary people, without the ear of the media, have long felt. His son might have called the wind farms that are besmirching our mountains and waving their giant arms inanely out at sea “a monstrous carbuncle”. Prince Philip chose “disgrace”. So they are. The politicians who foisted them upon us should be put in the stocks.
The k2p blog 