KGO News Reports on Altamont Pass Wind Farm

This is another report on a history of birds being killed by wind turbines at the Altamont Pass. Isn't it time that the whole wind farm be shut down? If there was a person responsible for killing as many protected birds as this wind farm has, they would be put in prison for the rest of their life. So why does the wind farm get a pass on this transgression?

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Yet Another Online Poll Showing Overwhelming Support for Nuclear

Click image for updated results.

Professor Barry Brook from the Brave New Climate blog, posted an editorial today on the Australian news site Adelaide Now.  Barry makes a case why Australia should follow Britain's lead to develop new nuclear power plants.  Accompanying the post is an online survey with yet another impressive response in favor of nuclear energy with 79% of respondents backing the use of nuclear energy in Australia out of 1699 votes at the time of this writing.

This makes one question the common remark that nuclear energy is controversial.  If nuclear is so controversial, then why does it receive overwhelming support in almost every online poll I've seen?

Also noted in a side bar video caption is this: "A Nielsen poll shows 49 percent of Australian's think nuclear power is a good alternative to fossil..."  Though online polls are not scientific, we are still seeing impressive numbers of support for nuclear in controlled and non-controlled surveys.  Well, that debunks all those claims that people don't like or want nuclear power. 

Update: After about 24 hours the results of this poll have taken a dramatic turn to favor the 'no' side.  Perhaps I was prematurely rooting for nuclear energy on this one, but I'm sure we will continue to see increased support for nuclear in the future.

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The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009

This video is very fresh on youtube with less than 500 views and already I've read these attorneys, Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel, are being pressured by their employer, the EPA, to take it down even though they explicitly state nothing in the video is intended to represent the views of the EPA or the Obama Administration.

This video summarizes and explains in 10 minutes what has otherwise come across as a blur of confusion from many news sources. I myself was on the fence about the cap-and-trade scheme, but after watching this, I'm more convinced that Waxman-Markey (H.R. 2454) is the lie and rip-off described here. Though I was aware of the solution and problems they describe, I had yet to see a good pithy explanation such as this.

Since this couple is from the EPA, it was also a nice surprise to hear them mention nuclear power as a solution to climate change. The EPA has a bit of a reputation for not appearing friendly to nuclear energy. The escalating fee on carbon that is refunded to consumers is a concept that I've favored in the past but I kind of gave up on it for being too idealistic. It's good to see others with a great depth of experience back that idea up. Please share and distribute this video and visit carbonfees.org. Once it goes viral, Waxman-Markey will be a dead duck.

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CNN Online Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for Nuclear Energy

CNN ran a few stories about nuclear energy this past week paired with an online poll.  The articles could be described as sloppy journalism at best as noted by Kirk Sorenson on his Energy from Thorium blog. Readers know better than CNN and it shows in their commentary on the articles and in the poll with an impressive 76% voting in favor of nuclear energy with over 30,000 responses!  Even though online polls are not controlled, it's hard to imagine anyone would make any concerted effort to skew the results.  The results show that people's attitude about nuclear energy has changed dramatically. I think there is a good reason why this is and CNN as well as many mainstream media outlets just don't get it when it comes to nuclear energy - it's the bleed to lead idea.

With the emergence of the internet, blogs and feedback commentary, the face of news reporting has dramatically changed, or has it? Too often mainstream media reporters basically rehash the same "controversial" story about nuclear energy peppered with the same inaccuracies and all too often gaping holes of knowledge to give a "balanced" story.  Putting a little fear into a story rather than educating people seems to be a recurring theme for them.  But in the effort to report both sides of the story, they never bother to learn anything new for themselves and thus perpetuate their own ignorance to their reading audience. Would the  headline be very exciting if it read, "There are many solutions for spent nuclear fuel but which one is best?"

Based on the feedback from these stories, we can clearly see people have been doing better homework by checking different sources on the internet and deciding for themselves who is the more credible source.  I think Americans are also getting sick and tired of being told they cannot move forward with the most powerful clean energy source ever discovered simply because the government is too incompetent to deal with what amounts to a small warehouse of spent nuclear fuel.  I won't delve into all the solutions for what should or could be done with the spent fuel, but I invite you to read some other thoughtful posts on the subject at Atomic Insights and This Week In Nuclear.

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Barbara Ehrenreich: Did Positive Thinking Crash US Economy? Are We Playing the Same Delusional Game with Renewable Energy? You Bet We Are.

After watching this clip of Barbara Ehrenreich, my thoughts immediately turned to the nation's current infatuation with renewable energy. She is discussing the concept in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The idea that renewable energy and efficiency will solve our energy problems is delusional. Nuclear advocates are often accused of being "negative" or "not giving renewables a chance" when pointing out the folly of trying to run a civilization on extremely dilute sources of energy.

In the last week, a number of blog posts appeared criticizing renewable energy advocates. These are exactly the types of "positive thinking" spoilers that Barbara Ehrenreich refers to. These thinkers are giving the public the dose of reality it really needs and they won't be fired for telling it like it is.

David Bradish over at NEI exposed Amory Lovins habit of blatant cherry picking of data from reports to backup his lies.  Lovins recently argued against Stewart Brand's point that nuclear is less land intensive than wind power made in his new book. Lovins disagreed and backed up his points by a highly selective presentation of the data. Shame shame.

Barry Brook (Brave New Climate blog) absolutely destroyed the credibility of Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi's paper "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" along with the reputation of Scientific American for publishing this garbage with his critique. Their paper makes the outrageous claim that nuclear power emits more greenhouse gases than other energy sources on account for a probability of nuclear war and the emissions of such a war would be included in its CO2 profile.   When a "scientific" paper spins things this far, it ceases to be science and falls squarely into fantasy propaganda.

Charles Barton posted Texas Wind Rips Off Tax Payers and Rate payers, Money to flow to China at the Energy Collective.  Charles clobbered the West Texas wind farm sham by covering the problems with demand mismatch, production subsidies, and carbon offsets.  Adding insult to injury, wind proponent T. Boone Pickens is quoted as saying "I'm not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They're ugly. . . ."  from an interview with Fast Company magazine.

We have yet to see more mainstream media pick up on this positive thinking spin phenomena when it comes to renewable energy.  Let's stop kidding ourselves and get real. Barbara Ehrenreich's point should be a wake up call on this matter because we are positively creating a "green bubble" that will someday burst.

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Stewart Brand Lectures About His New Book "Whole Earth Discipline"

Stewart Brand, one of many environmentalists who have been converted from anti-nuke to pro-nuke gives a great overview of his new book "Whole Earth Discipline". Brand covers urbanization, genetic engineering, nuclear power, and geo-engineering. He's a very interesting thinker and mirrors my philosophy very much - we need to trust scientists and engineers not condemn them by harboring ideological thinking.

Run time is 1:30 minutes.

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Marvin Fertel on Clean Skies Network

Here is Marvin Fertel from the NEI Institute interviewed by Clean Skies Network. Marvin gives some interesting observations and insights but he does mention one thing that I disagree with him: that the current licensing process for nuclear is fine. It will not be fine if a strong goal of building 100 new nuclear power plants by 2030 is to be achieved. Unless the NRC has the ability to work on as many as 20 applications or so simultaneously, they would have to grant a new license every 2.4 months from 2010 to 2030 to keep on pace with that demand. So far the NRC has not shown that ability especially with the new licensing procedure.

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Per Peterson Lectures on Nuclear Energy

Per Peterson, professor at UC Berkeley, gives a lecture on nuclear energy.

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