Category Archives: Current Events

Clean Energy for Conservatives – for Liberals – for Americans

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I ran across an interesting article on csmonitor.com about Clear Path, a conservative organization advocating for clean energy.

“Curbing the impacts of climate change isn’t the only positive of switching to lower-carbon energy. Innovating and deploying cleaner fuels helps create jobs while reducing US dependence on foreign oil. That’s a plus for the economy and national security, not just the climate… even if climate change weren’t a risk – which we think it is – these policies would still make sense…”

It’s not just conservatives looking at clean energy with a fresh perspective. There’s a shift in thinking on the left, too.

Clean Energy’s principles offer everyone something: Smaller government, innovation, energy security, lower air pollution risk, free market choices, all based on actual cost/benefit analyses.

In the 2008 election cycle, candidates on both sides of the aisle agreed climate change posed a risk and that cleaner energy sources offered a solution. Since then, partisan rancor has overwhelmed the debate.

It’s time to get off the Blue Team and the Red Team. Save your tribalism for your favorite sports team. Real life must depend on real data and realistic policies – if only because reality has a habit of winning over human wishes. To obstruct every idea because of distrust is deeply pessimistic and ultimately self-defeating. We’ll never all agree – after all, there’s 300 million of us Americans – but I like Clean Path’s belief that we can do this together.

Value Families or Family Values?

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way we really areAre collapsing family values the cause of America’s troubles?

  • Dire pronouncements on the future of American families.
  • Single moms worry their sons are doomed to lives of violence.
  • Pundits propose harsh penalties against people in “non-traditional” families.
  • Real wages are falling.

If this sounds like the latest news, consider The Way We Really Are  – published in 1998.

A family historian and faculty at Evergreen State College, Stephanie Coontz states her goal is to

“complicate an issue that the consensus proclaimers argue is so self-evident only a fool would disagree”.

Beaver Clever’s All-American “breadwinner family” where father works away from the home and mother raises the children is only 150 years old. In the breadwinner family, women’s access to economic and political roles is restricted, but historically productive work was part of mothers’ work. Breadwinner men’s nurturing is restricted, but historically fathers were part of daily parenting of children. Continue reading →

Rocky Flats Museum Still Searching for Home

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A recent article describes how members of a nonprofit have “…salvaged thousands of items during the decontamination and destruction of the Rocky Flats Plant.” They are searching for a permanent space for the artifacts after years of moving in and out of temporary spaces. There had been a federal grant of $492,000 obtained by former U.S. senator Wayne Allard in 2007 to find a space, but that money is gone.

The directors are paying about $600/month out of pocket for storage rental and other expenses. The items in storage include 400 boxes of photographs, maps and drawings along with thousands of items such as glove boxes and safety and monitoring equipment. Museum president Murph Widdowfield said, “Our goal is to find space for a small display so the Rocky Flats Plant can live on and continue educating people.” Museum historian Ron Heard said, “It’s one of those stories that’s not a happy story—the building of nuclear weapons—but it’s a part of Colorado history.” The vice president, Larry Wilson, “…said the items not only help tell the story of the country’s nuclear legacy, but also the story of Jefferson County.”

Scott Surovchak, Rocky Flats legacy site manager for the Department of Energy, added that “…more than 100,000 workers passed through the site in the course of its roughly 50-year history, allowing a middle-class buildout of Arvada, Broomfield, and Westminster.” He added that the board wants a place to take grandkids and great-grandkids to show them and the general public, “here’s what we did.”

I find it encouraging that Surovchak commented, “The current board is different than the original group, which included a bunch of the ‘anti crowd’.” That’s a welcome change from the time when I volunteered to help inventory what was in many of all those boxes and write papers about the history of the plant.

Savers and Interest Rates

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My father lived through the Great Depression and was forever nervous about whether he had saved enough to pay his bills after he quit working. He always saved all he could and put his savings into safe Certificates of Deposit (CDs). He had to move to assisted living and then began to fret that the interest he was earning wasn’t enough to keep him from beginning to use up the principal. I can’t imagine how upset he would be with the miniscule rate of return available to savers for the past few years. There must be millions of older Americans trying to figure out how to stretch their retirement savings to pay their bills while they earn less in interest than the rate of inflation.

The financial crisis resulted in the government intervening by “increasing the monetary supply” and reducing the interest on loans to near or at zero. It has struck me as beyond baffling that the result was a boom in the stock market while elderly savers suffered. I know I wasn’t the only investor who decided to take the additional risk of buying stocks with dividends that were higher than anything to be found in CDs. While politicians were railing against people who have money (the “investor class”), they supported policies that enriched those same “evil Capitalists” to the detriment of elderly savers.

I wonder when the millions of elderly savers who are voters will rebel against the economic policies that have punished them. I acknowledge that the current stock market has begun to look risky for the “investor class” that has been willing to take risks for higher returns. My father would probably say something such as “Learn from this and stick with CDs.”

The Federal Reserve has actually introduced negative interest rates into their recent discussions of the economy. Perhaps the “saver’s revolt” will happen when the message is that you will receive less than what you put in your CD when it matures?

Future of Clean Energy?

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Pebble_bed_reactor_scheme_(English).svgI recently ran into an article reporting that a “nuclear startup called X-energy just scored a game-changing grant from the [US] government.” X-energy is run by a space contractor who is an Iranian-American – nice bit of irony there.

The article goes on to say the grant’s actually not that big or game-changing. But the technology could:

Commercialize a much needed energy source that doesn’t contribute to climate change and which could help revive a struggling nuclear industry.

Nuclear power
When you think about nuclear energy you probably think of huge plants that divert enormous amounts of water for cooling, thereby damaging aquatic life. Massive transmission lines marching across the countryside to move the power to its users. Difficult concrete pours and high-tech welding. Complex safety systems and expensive refueling cycles.

Okay, maybe some of this only occurs to those of you interested in reactor construction.

Everyone thinks of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

(BTW – it’s not like coal and gas fired power plants are risk free. See this old book– the numbers are out of date but the concepts still apply.)

But people need energy
and even some long-time opponents of nuclear energy are willing to look at better plant designs to stave off global warming. The threats of global warming over the course of the 21st century are extensive enough that listing them sounds hyperbolic. If you’re not familiar with the issue, check out wunderground.com.

X-energy is working on a design I read about some time ago – pebble bed reactors – which I find very exciting.

The pebbles are tennis-ball sized spheres of graphite and ceramic fuel (various radioactive elements can be used). Gas (helium is preferred though I like nitrogen – cheaper) is used to transfer heat from the core, rather than water that becomes radioactive and can lead to steam explosions. The reactor needn’t be shut down to refuel, and the spent fuel come out in the easily handled, shielded pebbles. You can learn more about the technology here.

This design makes the reactor inherently safer, and it gets even better:

A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed ‘idle’ temperature, and stays there.

I once read that small reactors might be built inside railroad cars and hauled into place all over the country. Imagine a grid where one outage doesn’t black-out huge areas. Imagine avoiding the power loss suffered by long transmission lines that eat up land and view-scapes.

Imagine your brother-in-law running one of these things. It’s okay! They’re simple and inherently safe.

I have a nagging concern that, if they’re so wonderful, why aren’t we already using pebble bed reactors? Wikipedia says there’s only one in operation – in China.

The balance between global warming fears and nuclear fears may allow us to look at pebble-beds with a fresh eye. I hope we can make rational decisions based on facts. It may not matter too much for me, but posterity could enjoy cheaper, safer, cleaner, and abundant energy.

Thanks to fortune.com for their article

Global Warming Saves the Planet

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I’ve been entertained by recent articles that the increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has prevented an ice age. Just guessing, but I predict most scientists and other citizens would vote for global warming if the choice was an ice age. Warming and increased carbon dioxide results in increased crop yields and more robust growth of trees while freezing results in poor or non-existent crop yields and people dying at higher rates from cold and starvation.

One explanation for why global warming has saved us is associated with something called the Milankovitch cycle. To avoid getting into tedious technical details, the cycle refers to how changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes, which also causes changes to the amount of sunlight received by the earth. (To state the obvious, the primary source of global warming is sunlight.) Citation needed (I admit that I copied the idea of using “citation needed” when an statement is made about an obvious fact from Randall Munroe’s excellent book “What If,” which I recently reviewed.)

To be “fair and balanced” there have been articles disputing the accuracy of claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been good. I was confused by articles that referred to sun spots causing aberrations instead of discussing the Milankovitch cycle, but then again, I’m not a trained climate expert.

I’ve noticed that there has been a scramble to explain why global temperatures didn’t continue to rise after 1998, even though 2014 might have broken that trend. One explanation is that the oceans are storing the excess heat. Now we have to consider something called Milankovitch cycles or sun spots.

I just checked the National Snow and Ice center’s report on Arctic sea ice, and the ice coverage for 2014 bounced around the average coverage for 2011-2012. It has recently just dipped slightly below that average line. Wasn’t the ice supposed to be gone by now?

For those new to this debate, I assure you I believe climate change is real as supported by the fact that the climate has always changed. Citation needed