Fossil Fuels and Green?

Nod to Angry Alex

How Fossil Fuels are "Greening" the Planet

Interesting talk (20 mins) by Matt Ridley

http://youtu.be/S-nsU_DaIZE
(Nod to Art Carden)

Green Energy Chronicles

This would be funny, if it weren't so not at all funny.

In particular:

 A website of the U.S. Department of Energy, Wind Powering America, describes how schools can receive taxpayer funding for wind projects.  The site provides links to wind-friendly educational materials from Canada, California, Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana, and Arizona.

Wind companies and their trade groups are also involved. In Ontario, my province, teachers are asked how they feel about corporate logos in schools in exchange for such “benefits” as free computers. The response is often negative, but industrial-wind propaganda abounds in textbooks, learning materials, and kid-friendly websites.

It's true.  The jerks who were opening mortgage origination shops in strip malls in 2006 are all now "working" in the the green energy industry.  And wind power may be the biggest rip-off of all.  Solar power is just expensive and inefficient, but at least it produces some small amount of power.  Wind power is actually a complete fraud.

Corn to Ethanol Fiasco

As the WaPo noted, the US has a wide variety of idiotic "go green!" energy policies. It makes a little more sense once you realize that sacrifice and wasted resources are actually the goal, as in any religious exercise.

But the very worst is likely the requirement that companies find a way to use more bio-fuels.  And in THIS special place of stupidity, the focus on corn-based ethanal is the worst, of the worst, of the worst.

Given the amount of petroleum based fertilizer we use to raise corn, the environmental return on converting from oil to ethanol fuel is about 0.8.  That is, all things considered, the net impact of ethanol bio-fuel is actually harmful to the environment, given the distortion in land use and the expanded conversion of forested land into cornfields.  That's bad.

The world price of corn has gone up, and people all over the world are finding ways to grow more corn.  That is partly bad, and partly good.

But, we are NOT using the corn for food!  And that is really hurting poor people who depended on corn as a high calorie source, and protein source.  That, dear ones, is the worst, of the worst, of the worst, of the dumbest darned thing I can think of.  We waste petroleum to pay politically connected corporations to build useless ethanol stills so poor people can starve.  Really?  

Caption Contest!

A KPC caption contest.  Saw this at UNC-Charlotte, where I was visiting DoL Co-blogger Craig Depken.

The box has dirt in it.  And a bunch of text about how great plants are, and how this "Green Screen" will help save the environment.  I had to take a picture.  It captures pretty much everything I know about the "green" movement... Solyndra in a flower box!

click for an even more unwatered and pointless image