What pollutes almost as much as one and a half coal plants per permanent job? The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Does that sound like a good deal to you?
Talia Buford and Darren Goode wrote for Politico 1 March 2013, State Dept. Keystone report plays down climate fears, Continue reading
Fossil fuels get more than $70 billion dollars a year in
U.S. government subsidies (tax breaks and direct spending),
while solar and wind get only about $12 billion,
so fossil fuels got more than five times as much,
while
nuclear got ten times as much (especially
in Georgia).
Even corn ethanol, that sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time
boondoggle, gets more subsidies than solar and wind put together.
That’s without even going into the externalities such as healthcare costs due to polution, environmental destruction through mountaintop removal for coal, tar sands oil drilling, and fracking for natural gas, and wars for oil and uranium.
Continue readingRenewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RPS) are being proposed in Georgia and ALEC is trying to do away with them in North Carolina. If ALEC doesn’t like them, there must be something good about RPS. Let’s get on with real renewable energy in Georgia.
In Georgia,
HB 503,
sponsored by Karla Drenner, Carol Fullerton, Debbie Buckner, Scott
Holcomb, Spencer Frye, and Earnest Smith,
would create a Renewable Energy Credits Trading program as part of
renewable portfolio standards,
as Kyle wrote for Spencer Frye’s blog 10 March 2013,
Let the Sunshine In.
Unfortunately, HB 503 includes biomass as a renewable energy source.
Maybe they just mean landfill gas, which I consider a special case
since it’s being produced anyway, and since methane is worse as
a greenhouse gas than CO2, burning landfill gas makes some sense.
Nope, in
the actual bill, 46-3-71 (1):
‘Biomass material’ means organic matter, excluding fossil fuels and black liquor, including agricultural crops, plants, trees, wood, wood wastes and residues, sawmill waste, sawdust, wood chips, bark chips, and forest thinning, harvesting, or clearing residues; wood waste from pallets or other wood demolition debris; peanut shells; cotton plants; corn stalks; and plant matter, including aquatic plants, grasses, stalks, vegetation, and residues, including hulls, shells, or cellulose containing fibers
The barn door in there is “harvesting”, which can mean whole trees, but the rest isn’t much better. We don’t need to be burning things that increase atmospheric CO2 and end up stripping our forests. In North Carolina they staretd with just tops and limbs and then tried to escalate to whole trees. We already fought off the biomass boondoggle here in south Georgia; let’s not have it encouraged statewide. Especially when we have better solutions: solar and wind power. HB 503 isn’t going to get passed this year, since it didn’t make crossover day, so maybe its sponsors can clean up that biomass mess before they submit it again.
Speaking of North Carolina, Continue reading
Risks at
Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi?
Push those costs onto the public, of course!
Southern Company and its subsidiary Mississippi Power
got the MS Public Service Commissioners to approve super-CWIP
(Construction Work in Progress)
for Kemper Coal: automatic rate increases for MS Power customers for years.
Just like Southern Company and its biggest subsidiary Georgia Power
got the Georgia legislature to approve Super-CWIP for the new nukes
at Plant Vogtle back in 2009.
And both CWIP projects are already over budget.
How about we cancel those boondoggles and build solar and wind instead?
AP reported 13 December 2012, After spending $1.88 billion, Southern Co. still faces risks on plant in Kemper County,
Continue reading
Economist, author, and advisor to governments
Jeremy Rifkin
told an agent of the world's largest uranium field operator
at a conference of global investors that there's no business
future in nuclear power.
Jeremy Rifkin answered a question at the Wermuth Asset Management 5th Annual Investors Event 26 September 2012, Nuclear Power is Dead,
I don't spend much time on nuclear technology, unless somebody asks
me about it, because frankly from a business perspective, I think it's over….
Here's the video, followed by more transcript and discussion.
Continue readingNuclear power was pretty well dead in the water in the 1980s after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It had a comeback. The comeback was the industry said "we are part of the solution for climate change because we don't emit CO2 with nuclear; it's polluting, but there's no CO2".
Here's the issue though,
If China can tax CO2, so can the U.S.
Hou Qiang wrote for Xinhua 19 February 2013, China to introduce carbon tax: official
China will proactively introduce a set of new taxation policies
designed to preserve the environment, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, according to a senior official with the Ministry of Finance (MOF).
The government will collect the environmental protection tax instead of pollutant discharge fees, as well as levy a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, Jia Chen, head of the ministry’s tax policy division, wrote in an article published on the MOF’s website.
-jsq
LTE in the VDT today. I’ve added a few links. -jsq
Continue reading
Fox News recently claimed that “solar won’t work in America because it’s not as sunny as Germany”. Such statements are common for a network that has long lost its credibility. Unfortunately too many take such gibberish at face value. Thus columns like “environmentalism or obstructionism?” are not surprising, but in the end it’s the facts that matter:
- Global warming is real. For years we have been experiencing record heat waves, droughts, wild fires, etc., and while seawater levels are rising, storms like hurricane Sandy become major threats to low lying areas along coast lines.
- The main culprit for global warming are greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal and oil.
- While China overall emits more than we do, the US leads in per capita emissions. The average US citizen produces three times more carbon dioxide than the average Chinese citizen.
As
anticipated,
Georgia Power released
that
20-year energy plan Thursday,
because they have file one every three years with the PSC.
It includes far less solar power than tiny little far-north-of-here
Denmark is busily deploying.
The good news:
Georgia Power is closing a bunch of coal plants.
And this plan makes a nod towards
"demand response programs, energy efficiency programs, pricing
tariffs and other activities".
The bad news: they're replacing those coal plants with natural gas, and of course "two new state-of-the-art nuclear facilities at Plant Vogtle"; you know, the two Georgia Power has been charging customers for since 2009 while they deliver no electricity. Georgia Power can't even seem to deliver the reactor containment vessels.
But what about renewable energy? Continue reading
What will Georgia Power announce for a 20 year energy plan Thursday? Will they (1) just double down on their rate-hike boondoggles for nuclear and gas, or (2) they could flip like Austin Energy in 2003 and Cobb EMC in 2012 and suddenly go solar? The wording here looks like it’s going to be the former. That they even feel compelled to announce some sort of formal plan instead of just shovelling disinformation out another 50 years indicates they’re feeling the pressure to change direction to real sustainable energy: wind and solar power.
Matt Shedd wrote for WUGATV today, Georgia Power To Release Energy Plan,
Georgia Power is set to release a 20-year energy plan on Thursday
which will outline a way for the company and the state to be less reliant on coal power. The AJC reports that just 5 years ago, the company’s reliance on coal was at 70 percent.
That number has now dropped to 47 percent. These changes are coming in the wake of Georgia Power’s parent, the Southern Co., being pushed by environmental rules to rely less on coal. Georgia Power won approval to buy electricity produced by natural gas from its sister company Southern Power, which may be part of the company’s future plans.
Thomas A. Fanning, CEO of Georgia Power’s parent The Southern Company (SO), has been touting 70% to 35% reduction in coal since at least May 2012 at the SO shareholder meeting. Fanning continues to emphasize nuclear, gas, and “clean coal” instead of real sustainable energy, namely wind and solar power. He also continues to assert electricity demand will increase, while ignoring conservation and efficiency, which for Georgia could remove all need for new energy, enabling solar and wind to shut down more coal and gas plants, as well as nukes.
So, get out the popcorn and take your bets. Will it be (1) or will it be (2)? I’m betting this time it will be (1), but sooner or later it will be (2), and even Georgia Power, and yes, even Southern Company, will stop digging in their heels and get on the solar train to profits, jobs, energy independence, and oh, by the way, clean air and plenty of clean water.
-jsq
Valdosta resident Forrest H. Williams replied in the VDT today to
my op-ed of 6 January.
His information seems a bit out of date.
For example, he cites
Progress Energy’s Crystal River nuke
as a good example, when it’s been
down since 2009
and is still
producing zero percent power,
both according to the NRC.
Readers of this blog know that
the blog version of my op-ed
already links to sources for everything I said.
I may respond more later, but no doubt there are other people
who want to get involved in this discussion.
And I do thank Forrest H. Williams for airing the sort of disinformation
that is out there, so others can dispel it.
Oh, and saying water that is evaporated is not lost is like saying trees that are burned are not lost. Evaporated water is not available for agricultural or wildlife or drinking water use, and thus is indeed lost.
Continue reading