Power Outage
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
Early yesterday, we had a couple of power outages — pretty rare up here — and the last one occurred while working on this blog, and no post.
First time during the weekdays for more than 18 months straight — hey, not bad.
And man — when one is so used to light 24/7 dark is really, really dark.
Outside was pitch black of the purest kind and way creepy.
(Illustration found here).
Although power came back on before I left for work, the little time spent in total darkness with just a flashlight bursting the gloom was not fun, and awkward to say the very least.
We are so used to flipping the switch on everything that when there’s no response, humanity nowadays can get really freaked.
And life is going to get more freaked as we move along.
The UK’s Guardian yesterday on a new environmental report from the Royal Society on the next few years:
“The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment.
We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption … or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future”, it says.
…
The authors acknowledge that it would take time and massive political commitment to shift consumption patterns in rich countries, but believe that providing contraception would cost comparatively little.
“To supply all the world’s unmet family planning needs would be $6-7bn a year.
It’s not much.
It’s an extremely good investment, extremely affordable.
To not provide family planning is an infringement of human rights”, said Sulston.
And it’s also the old inequality question:
“The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption.
Fairly redistributing the lion’s share of the earth’s resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates,” said an Oxfam spokeswoman.
The rub here, however, is the lack of fight.
President Obama seemed to appear in a Rolling Stone interview to put climate change into the vast dish of just another issue to be dealt with “…in a serious way.”
What!
Via a small snip at Daily Kos:
That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation — that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent.
That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.
The problem Mr. President is that we should have started yesterday — it’s bullshit if there’s any real seriousness involved here.
Right now there’s no other issue as serious as climate change and why worry about economics when they will be no nothing in a real short time — the shift in how climate slaps mankind in the face.
The reason?
Shit like this:
Humans might not be to blame for the latest piece of news that has caused new concerns about global warming.
A newly-discovered, naturally occuring methane leak over the Arctic Ocean could play a role in future climate change, according to a NASA scientist.
…
“We didn’t expect to see methane being emitted from the remote Arctic Ocean,” he wrote.
According to the researchers, the amount of methane coming from the Arctic Ocean is about as big as the pockets of the gas being released from an ice shelf in Siberia.
In 2010, the National Science Foundation said that the “release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the [Siberian] shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”
And then power outages coming way-abrupt, and staying out.
Meanwhile….
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FUNNY, FUNNY LADY
The most-wonderful Carol Burnett is 79 today.
In my humble opinion, the funniest person ever — a lot of people say Lucille Ball, but she didn’t carry the laughter Burnett can and didn’t have the humanity.
Burnett is hilarious just standing there without saying a word.
The closest nowadays is Kristen Wiig, who also can just stand there, do nothing and be so, so-funny.
Burnett covered more than half-century of funny — happy birthday, gal.
(Illustration found here).
Early Sunday Evening
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
A deeply-beautiful afternoon on California’s northern coast — finally after what’s seem like weeks and weeks of rain in various forms, so far, appears like we will get a full-day’s worth of sun, and, there’s not much wind, so it’s about as good as it gets up here.
A lawn mower bangs somewhere in the distance, somewhere close out my window.
And a kind of lazy day — been listening to last.fm — jumping from one artist radio to another, mostly stuff from the ’90s, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Better Than Ezra, etc., along with the notables, Bush and Pearl Jam.
Just finished You Tubing Blur Song #2 — such scratchy, pithy fun.
I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet
It wasn’t easy but nothing is
Despite what we think.
In my humble opinion, the early to mid-1990s was one of the best ever for real rock-n-roll — dude, that’s covering a shitload of ground, yeah, so what — and this when the best stuff was produced outside the mainstream, although some of those bands, like Third Eye Blind off its first album, became big names in pop music (Semi-Charmed Life opened 1997′s Contact, the Jodie Foster movie).
I also heard a most-interesting version of Van Halen’s Jump earlier — catch it at Balloon Juice.
Performed by a band I’ve never heard of — Aztec Camera, a Scottish group out of the 1980s, which apparently has since disbanded or something, can’t find anything new from them online anywhere.
In a distant relation, also read at CNN those SS agents caught partying-hardy in Columbia were part-n-parcel of a likely assessment: All the employees are accused of cavorting prostitutes ahead of last week’s visit by Obama. They’d arrived earlier that morning as a part of the “jump team” that flies in on military transport planes with vehicles in the president’s motorcade.
Yep, might as well go ahead and jump…
And those boys jumped fast, too — in country by daylight, banging whores by dark.
And I missed the big bang this morning (find out tomorrow if anyone locally heard it):
A loud boom sounded over much of Northern California early Sunday, the apparent result of an ongoing meteor shower.
A meteor was streaking across the sky when it apparently broke up above the Earth, sending the sound reverberating across the area, said Stefanie Henry, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento.
The National Weather Service received reports of the sound across Northern California, and even as far south as Orange County, she said.
Odd that shit.
And apparently along with the bang, the incident also carried some rocking and rolling, though, without any earthquake: Erin Girard-Hudson of Arnold, Calif., told The Union Democrat of Sonora, Calif., that the loud boom that occurred around 8 a.m. made her 2-year-old daughter, Elsie, cry. “It knocked me off my feet and was shaking the house,” she said. “It sounded like it was next door.”
And included a fireball that was “…extraordinarily bright in the daylight” that accompanied the phenomenon, but even more odd was this from Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno: “People are putting two and two together and saying it has something to do with the meteor shower,” he said. “But the fireball was probably coincidental and unrelated to the peak of the meteor shower.” Though the fireball was seen over such a wide area, Ruby said it was likely just “a little bigger than a washing machine.”
Ever tried to pick up a washing machine, Dan?
Heavy as shit, and have pieces of it falling on you can’t be delightful at all.
This too on Earth Day (via Raw Story):
The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.
…
The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some conservatives almost certain to object to international interference in US domestic matters.
Well, I bet — a lot of the screaming GOP-ers/Tea Party-ers won’t stand (or sit) for anything like genocide to crop up in this country’s history, but reality is not part of their constitutional make-up.
And also most appropriate this Earth Day, ‘The Snake,’ by Emily Dickinson:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,–
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The last verse most telling.
And tomorrow’s Monday.
Atomic-Powered Crazy
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘The Three Sphinxes of Bikini‘ found here).
Apparently, another subject placed on the news cycle back-burner, thus, out of the public eye.
Yesterday, from CNN on the NRC’s order putting southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant out of commission indefinitely until somebody figures out how radioactive gas is leaking from a steam generator:
The power plant has been shut down since this winter, when a small amount of radioactive gas escaped from a steam generator during a water leak.
At the time, federal regulators said there was no threat to public health, though they could not identify how much gas leaked or exactly why it had happened.
The water leak occurred in thousands of tubes that carry heated water from the reactor core through the plant’s steam generators.
…
“Tubes are vibrating and rubbing against adjacent tubes and against support structures inside the steam generators,” the agency noted.
…
In addition to driving the turbines to create electricity, the steam generators are “one of the barriers between the radioactive material in the reactor core and ultimately the external environment,” Jaczko noted.
This so-called ‘external environment‘ is home to literally millions and millions and millions of US peoples, all living not-all-that-far away from the San Onofre power plant near San Clemente — just 57.5 miles south of the very heart of Los Angles, and according to Google maps and in current driving conditions, one could get from downtown LA to the Dick Nixon library in about an hour and 10 minutes.
Oddly, I couldn’t find mention of the report on either the LA Times online front page, or the SF Chronicle.
According to the CNN story, the announcement came Friday from Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “We won’t make a decision (to approve the facility’s restart) unless we’re satisfied that public health and safety will be protected,” Jaczko told reporters. “They have to demonstrate to us that they understand the causes, and … that they have a plan to address them.”
Seemingly, that would cause some mention by California’s two biggest newspapers — and including this: Anti-nuclear activists gathered Friday, not far from where Jaczko, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, toured the power plant, to question the need for nuclear energy and raise alarms about a potential environmental catastrophe.
WTF.
Going nuclear — going atomic — is one of mankind’s all-time great worse mistakes.
There’s a humongous shit list of intentional/unintentional errors humanity has brought upon themselves, the environment, many, many other living things, but cranking out nuclear energy without really thinking about the whole, big picture might be a real biggie.
And when something happens at these nuclear plants ought to flash red to everybody, especially when a major US facility is put offline indefinitely.
Along with this from the Orange County Register in a article last week previewing RNC Chairman Jaczko’s visit, a twist in the tale:
And with nearly 20,000 tubes per reactor, the plugging of worn tubes is routine during the life of steam generators; the many tubes ensures that plugging some will not affect the generator’s performance.
But San Onofre’s steam generators — two for each reactor — are only two years old.
Such wear on the tubes so early in their life is considered “unusual,” an Edison spokeswoman said.
Operators shut down the plant Jan. 31 after a leak was discovered in those tubes, which resulted in a small release of radioactive gas: …and Edison says neither the public nor plant workers were placed at risk.
Pay no attention to that guy behind the curtain — or even the NRC, as spokesman Victor Dricks concluded two days after the San Onofre incident that radioactive gas “could have” escaped the San Onofre facility after it was shut down but added, “It would have been a very, very small, low level, which would not pose a danger to anyone.”
The Southern California Edison Webpage on San Onofre is ludicrous, creepy PR, and would make one laugh out-loud if the subject wasn’t so scary.
Meanwhile, and also announced on Friday, Japan’s government scrapped a rule requiring cattle farmers still living within 20 kilometers of the Fukushima nuclear power plant to slaughter their livestock, but they are still not allowed to sell, transport or breed the animals.
And from the SF Chronicle today: Kelp off California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s coastline, according to a new scientific study.
Fukushima just keeps on giving.
Nuclear is just nuts — and let’s not get started on the huge highly-radioactive piles of horror these plants produce — nuclear waste — a byproduct that is/will be around for a long, long time stored right near millions and millions of people, as the rant-filled discourse could take forever.
Some background on Salvador Dali’s ‘The Three Sphinxes of Bikini‘ pictured above.
The surrealist’s subject was the tragedy of the Bikini Atoll — from UNESCO:
In the wake of World War II, in a move closely related to the beginnings of the Cold War, the United States of America decided to resume nuclear testing.
They choose Bikini Atoll in the Marshall archipelago in the Pacific Ocean.
After the displacement of the local inhabitants, 23 nuclear tests were carried out from 1946 to 1958,. The cumulative force of the tests in all of the Marshall Islands was equivalent to 7,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
…
The emergence of the atolls forming the Marshall archipelago is relatively recent.
The arrival and settlement of the Micronesian populations in the islands goes back to the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE.
Their lifestyle, which remained largely traditional over a long period, was based on fishing, and the gathering of fruit, coconut in particular.
The traditional Micronesian way of life was little affected by the visits in the 16th-18th centuries of the first European explorers such as Captain Marshall, after whom the islands were named.
The same was true of the first colonial episode, as a German protectorate at the end of the 19th century. Coconut plantations were developed.
After World War I the islands were made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations.
The bombs changed it all.
The inhabitants of Bikini Atoll, who numbered just over one thousand, were evacuated in March 1946 to the neighbouring atoll of Rongelap.
…
The Bikini inhabitants were relocated several times from one atoll to another.
Those on Rongelap were authorized to return to their island in 1957, but the return proved a failure as the high degree of cesium-137 pollution made food grown on the islet hazardous.
…
From 1967 onwards the US authorities considered the possibility of the Bikini people returning to their atoll, and this led to work to clean up radioisotope contamination
This was carried out from 1970 onwards, backed up by an agricultural production programme.
Medical follow-up of inhabitants showed, however, high levels of human contamination as a result of consuming food produced on the atoll and water from its wells.
The atoll had therefore to be evacuated once again in 1978.
And check out a most-modern nuclear horror story at Aljazeera English on the town of Muslyumovo, not far from Russia’s southern border with Kazakhstan.
One nightmare place.
Understandably, that’s all off war products, but busting the atom is still busting the atom, and people are still flesh and blood.
Pump Dreams
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment, Weather | Leave a Comment
Weather tends to pop its now-ugly head into modern life on a much-more frequent schedule than just a few short years ago — yesterday afternoon tornadoes cleared a chaotic path through the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with video showing tractor-trailers being tossed around like toys.
CNN meteorologist Sean Morris estimated the tornadoes were EF1 or EF2 twisters, at their strongest.
“This is fairly weak in terms of tornadoes, but we saw the awesome power of the twisters as they lifted the trailers several hundred feet in the air,” he said.
And these kinds of scenarios will only get worse — why?
Fossil fuels — Duh!
(Illustration found here).
Via Climate Progress from the Planet Under Pressure conference last week in London:
As consumption accelerates everywhere and world population rises, it is no longer sufficient to work towards a distant ideal of sustainable development.
Global sustainability must become a foundation of society.
It can and must be part of the bedrock of nation states and the fabric of societies.
And ‘consumption‘ of what?
Fossil fuels — Duh!
Even beyond the bubbling crude, coal is the real kicker — creating a third of all carbon dioxide emissions, producing nearly 40 percent of the world’s power.
According to WSJ’s Market Watch last week:
“China and India are leading the global buildout of coal-fueled generation.
Over the next five years, we see generation growing 370 gigawatts (GW)… and that requires more than 1.2 billion tonnes of additional coal.
To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to one new 500 megawatt power plant every three days… through 2016.”
And from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Waste created by a typical 500-megawatt coal plant includes more than 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber each year. Nationally, more than 75% of this waste is disposed of in unlined, unmonitored onsite landfills and surface impoundments.
However, as much as we love coal, oil greases all of modern civilization.
Global consumption is about 87 million barrels a day (bbl/day) with the US and Europe sucking up about a third of that and in 2010, the globe was producing about 85 million bbl/day — what math?
From Spiegel Online and a ‘World without Oil:
But in most countries of the world, especially the emerging countries, economic growth and energy consumption still go hand in hand.
A global change of course is overdue, according to the German Advisory Council on Global Change.
“The carbon-based world economic model,” say the scientists on the council, constitutes “a normatively unsustainable situation” and is as morally reprehensible as slavery or child labor.
The Spiegel post was about peak oil, not climate change, but those two factors are hand-holding sweethearts.
And we all are locked into that love affair — yesterday, I put another $20 worth of fuel in the old Jeep with the cost still at $4.49 a gallon for regular.
Price hasn’t changed since the last time.
Via Reuters: Brent crude futures fell by 40 cents to $124.46 a barrel by 0940 GMT, after earlier touching a low of $124.23. U.S. crude futures lost 79 cents to $103.22, after falling by more than $1 in the previous session.
And at the pump, US gas notched a nationwide average of $3.90 per gallon on Monday, which by Memorial Day reportedly could be higher than the record $4.11 set in July 2008.
In California, although we’ve cut back on driving, the state average was $4.32 on Monday, down from $4.36 the previous Monday and from $4.38 two weeks ago.
Humanity is caught between the old rock and a hard place.
If we don’t get our collective heads out of our collective asses, this oil dream will soon be a nightmare where the weather has the last say, tossing every freakin’ thing around like toys.
Pump Creative
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Politics | Leave a Comment
Iran not unplugged:
Oil prices on Friday briefly spiked to the highest level in three weeks following a report that Iranian oil exports dropped significantly this month.
…
Benchmark U.S. crude rose by $1.52 to finish at $106.87 per barrel in New York.
Earlier, prices jumped by $2.95 per barrel in 13 minutes to $108.25, the highest price for benchmark crude since March 2.
Brent crude, which is used to price oil imported by U.S. refineries, rose by $1.99 to end at $125.13 in London.
“The market’s a powder keg with a very short fuse,” independent oil analyst and trader Stephen Schork said.
(Illustration found here).
However, the real culprit are those sanctions against Iran, “a real Catch-22 for the global community,” and no amount of drilling and opening pipelines will alter the consequence, unless one is a delusional Republican.
Iranian oil exports have reportedly dropped to 1.9 million barrels a day in March, way down from the 2.6 million a day just last November — the sanctions are to make Iran take stock of its nuclear program, but there’s doubts that will happen, but the reality of those actions is adding a $20 or $30 premium to oil prices.
Although the Iranians have claimed their nuclear program is and always-has been for peaceful purposes — Israel with the US say bullshit — those sanctions are not only making fuel prices climb, but apparently are also pissing off the Iranian leadership.
From Reuters:
“The sanctions are having an effect — it’s just not the effect they were supposed to have,” says Dina Esfandiary, a research analyst and specialist on Iran at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Sanctions are not exerting the desired influence on the regime.
If anything, they may be making them more committed.”
And maybe even richer; this can’t be good, and the whole thing appears to go beyond one of those frightful wait-and-see situations, despite the US pump prices.
This morning, Juan Cole posted a translated article from Javan, an organ of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and thus might explain further the warmongering bombast from the West might be counter-productive.
Cole warns, though: The article should be taken with a grain of salt, but it makes some good points.
Or at least some semblance of a possibility.
One such:
Nuclear Iran writes that an informed source said: “In Stockholm, teams from the CIA (America), Mossad (Israel), MI6 (England), BND (Germany) and DGSE (France) are now discussing one of the main areas of focus in these reports, which is that instead of reducing Iran’s revenue, in the last three months the oil sanctions have increased Iran’s revenues by more than $3 billion.”
One wonders at the whole f*cked-up scenario.
And the backlash: Those prices at the gas pump.
Yesterday, after a visit to the laundromat, I put another $20 worth of gas in my old, now-refurbished, sounding-much-much-better Jeep Comanche at the local Union 76 station (which was robbed at gunpoint early Thursday morning — crook was just wearing a sweatshirt, no hoodie).
Despite it all, the price at $4.49-a-gallon was the same as the last time.
Up here in the north, we’re always higher than anybody else — and gas costs more, too.
Statewide, the California average last week was $4.375 a gallon, a downward-dump of 0.1 of a cent, but yet still nearly 41 cents above the calender record, set just last year — now there’s six states with pump prices at $4-bucks-a-gallon, or more: Illinois, New York and Connecticut last week joined California, Alaska and Hawaii (really not a fun honor).
What’s weird: U.S. refineries continue to export record amounts of fuel, primarily diesel, according to Energy Department statistics. Refiners are exporting at a rate of 3.156 million barrels a day, up 36% from a year ago and double the amount exported five years ago.
All this before the arrival of summer gasoline — accordingly, pump prices most-likely won’t peak until near May, when the more expensive hot-weather fuel hits the market.
And on top of that, US drivers have been using less fuel — in the last year, gasoline consumption dropped by 4.2 billion gallons, or 3 about percent.
And even more weird is no one seems to know what the shit is happening — conspiracy theories with rising pump prices debunked yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle, based on the story, apparently all bullshit, one “…might as well be looking at burnt embers” so summed up at the end; last Wednesday, CNN ran an opinion piece that the spike in gas prices could be blamed on speculators in commodity markets, however, two days later, CNN ran another opinion piece claiming with an expert-like vocabulary, speculators were not to blame; and politics just adds fuel to a huge bullshit fire that more oil on hand will decrease gas prices, bluster and anti-bluster the rule of thumbs: Obama mocked Gingrich’s promise, saying, “They start acting like they’ve got a magic wand and will give you cheap gas forever if you elect us.”
A frightful oddity is even with all this chaos at the gas pump, the concern for what that actual most-desired product does is kind of astounding and seems to create a vicious circle.
Just foolishness, so says Sheriff Taggart: “Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shit-load of dimes!”