Posts Tagged ‘energy’
Thursday Night
* Alison Bechdel gets a Guggenheim (along with a bunch of other people).
* Duke students are in the news, and it isn’t even for something horrible.
* The Atlantic profiles Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid.
* The evidence is in. Humans have failed. It’s time to give forests back to the robots.
* Upcoming energy collapse got you down? The Army is ready.
* Wisconsin’s Marathon Campaign Season Takes Toll.
* Inside the mind of the octopus.
* We are all legal realists now.
* And Republicans and Democrats finally agree! Gallup: Mitt Romney least popular Republican nominee in modern history within own party.
Some More Wednesday Links
* Science proves men are stupid around women.
* 10 “Occupy” Candidates Running for Congress. Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin is singled out for praise as the likely new senator from our upcoming new home.
* Personally, of course, I belong to the Optimism! party.
* Salon on “the new oil reality.”
* Apple Is Now Larger Than The Entire American Retail Sector.
* One in Seven Americans Thinks the Affordable Care Act Has Already Been Overturned. I mean really.
* “This desperation starts once you realize how much you’ve lost, and then you feel like you can’t stop because you’ve got to win it back,” she told me. “Sometimes I’d start feeling jumpy, like I couldn’t think straight, and I’d know that if I pretended I might take another trip soon, it would calm me down. Then they would call and I’d say yes because it was so easy to give in. I really believed I might win it back. I’d won before. If you couldn’t win, then gambling wouldn’t be legal, right?”
* Barack Obama is currently leading Mitt Romney in the polls by anything between 12 and -2. Can’t argue with facts.
* And from New York Magazine, dateline 1970: “Mugging as a Way of Life.”
Tomorrow Never Was
Nuclear power: the dream that failed. From the Economist.
They’re Paving Paradise
All the Oil’s Gone, Nowhere to Go
As ExxonMobil details in its report, more than 95 percent of today’s oil comes from fields discovered before 2000. About 75 percent comes from pre-1980 discoveries. While many massive, older fields can keep gushing for decades — Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, first tapped in 1951, still hums along at 5 million barrels per day — they seem to be dwindling overall. As Exxon’s chart shows, reserves discovered in the 1960s and before maxed out around 1980 (even as oil companies are trying to recover additional oil from older wells with better technology). What’s more, it seems to be getting tougher to squeeze oil out of newer finds.
Lots and Lots of Monday Night Links
* ThinkProgress reports solar is surging. We’re saved! Krugman has more, and so does Steve Benen.
* Via my dad: Soviet Bus Stops.
* Occupy my dad: Class war is intergenerational war.
* Rortybomb: Two Steps Toward Tackling Our Current Student Loan Problems. Robert Cruickshank: …any student loan reform proposal that does not include some form of principal writedowns is not likely to be very effective.
* Tor reviews Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I’m much more interested in his pitch for what sounds like a truly horrifying next novel: Occupy Bangor.
* A new AAUW study shows there’s an easy way for young women to avoid sexual harassment in schools: just avoid being either pretty or not pretty.
* Polling shows Americans have begun to realize Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy.
* Anti-vaccination fever just got a little more crazy. Via MeFi.
* Marriage equality increases property values. Is that a good enough reason?
* Also on the equality front: Dan Harmon kind-of, sort-of apologizes for the way Community treats gay and trans people.
* Everybody still hates Romney. Poor guy.
* And Bors memorializes one of the windows broken during the Occupy Oakland protests last week.
‘If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable’
So says James Hansen. Related: a new study shows coal is terrible for the economy.
In other words, instead of being “cheap” and “affordable,” coal is actually the costliest fuel for electricity.
“The findings show that, contrary to current political mythology, coal is underregulated,” Legal Planet’s Dan Farber comments. “On average, the harm produced by burning the coal is over twice as high as the market price of the electricity. In other words, some of the electricity production would flunk a cost-benefit analysis. This means that we’re either not using enough pollution controls or we’re just overusing coal as a fuel.”
Wednesday!
* The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has once again rejected Troy Davis’s appeal. Terrible.
* Occupy Wall Street, Day 5. Some more here.
* Apocalypse 2012: Just shy of a majority of registered voters, 49 percent, say they definitely plan to vote against Barack Obama in 2012, but just 36 percent say they definitely plan to vote for him, according to a newMcClatchy-Marist poll.
* House and Senate GOP leadership are taking fire from all sides for publicly pressuring Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke not to further loosen monetary policy, even if he thinks it will help the economy.
* Things Apple is worth more than.
* And some good news for a change: our energy problems are over forever. We’re saved!
“This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water,” said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering. “It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy.”
Saved!
Tuesday Night Links
* With Troy Davis denied clemency despite ample doubt about his guilt, it’s worth remembering that according to Antonin Scalia even “actual innocence” isn’t sufficient to keep the state from executing you.
* “Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project… where are the white heroes?’” he told the press during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film. Danny Glover is having trouble getting funding for a film on Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint-Louverture.
* If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna species worldwide could become extinct. Scientists … discovered that the proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80% of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms, according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Amazon.
* Peak Oil: 1979? Via Kevin Drum.
* Global Energy Use To Jump 53 Percent By 2035.
* UCSD’s Tom Murphy rediscovers Limits to Growth.
* And then there’s Germany: A mysterious “forest boy” presented himself at Berlin City Hall two weeks ago. The first words he spoke were English: “I’m alone in the world. I don’t know who I am. Please help me.” He believed to be 17, and to have spent the last five years sleeping on the ground in a forest. His identity is a mystery.
Monday Morning Links
* The line on Obama’s jobs plan from establishment bloggers is that Obama’s new mode is “no compromise.” We’ll see. At the very least we could get another wonderful debt ceiling clash out of all this, allowing my beloved debt ceiling alignment chart another chance to go truly viral.
* Two David Graeber interviews at Louisville’s Radical Lending Library and Democracy Now! (at ~23 minutes).
* The questions we don’t ask: Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields. Thanks for the link, Fiona…
* And the questions we do: A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday against a prominent Baltimore medical institute, accusing it of knowingly exposing black children as young as a year old to lead poisoning in the 1990s as part of a study exploring the hazards of lead paint. (via)
* And Netflix utterly determined to destroy itself. Unbelievable.
Recession Forever
As long as there’s spare oil-production capacity, increasing demand caused by economic growth produces only a steady, manageable increase in oil prices. But oil production is now close to its maximum and can’t be easily or quickly expanded. When the global economy grows enough that demand starts to bump up against this ceiling, oil prices don’t rise slowly and steadily; rather, they spike suddenly, causing a recession, which in turn reduces oil demand and drives down prices. When the economy recovers, the cycle starts all over. Because of this dynamic, the production ceiling for oil produces a corresponding ceiling for world economic growth.
Hydrofracked
This week’s episode of This American Life is a fascinating case study in regulatory and institutional capture, organized around the politics of natural gas mining in Pennsylvania. Both Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh come out looking hopelessly compromised by corporate influence, with state and local government not far behind. Give it a listen.
There Is No Ecology on the Moon
Against Sarah Laskow, I feel pretty okay with the idea of strip-mining the Moon for helium-3.
Friday Links
* Terrible news: Almost no new jobs this month, bringing unemployment to 9.2%. Benen: Wake up, Washington, jobs landscape is deteriorating. Drum: We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we’re just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that’s politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it’s politically risky to fight back.
* One important factor in the jobs disaster: CHART: Over 500,000 Government Jobs Lost Since Obama’s Inauguration.
* TSA agent caught stuffing traveler’s iPod down his pants. Apparently this guy stole $50,000 worth of consumer electronics before he was finally caught.
* Some good news at least: Governor Perdue has vetoed offshore drilling and executive-orders offshore wind instead.
* The last space shuttle has launched. China, your move.
* And your flowchart of the day: What Would Don Draper Do?
