The worldwide battle to get away from the coal and oil industries has been underway for some time. Countries are fighting to gain a share of the new green manufacturing industries with millions of jobs and trillions of dollars on the line. Country after country is executing plans to grab a share of this new industry. But not us. Oil-funded conservatives are trying to keep us from even fighting in that war.
Oil And Coal Are The Problem
Look around you, the climate is changing, the seas are rising, terrible storms are hitting, huge fires are burning, terrible droughts are causing crop failure, and plants, animals and insects are migrating to new areas. (In DC right now you might not be able to turn on a light because of that huge, freak storm you just had, so maybe wait and look around you after the sun comes up.) We have to stop burning oil and coal, and find a way to get that carbon back out of the air.
Aside from the terrible effects of climate change, our country has a trade deficit that is partly about buying oil, and those purchases send money to places that use that money against our country's interests.
Other countries get all of this. But our country is in the grip of an oil-and-coal-funded propaganda machine that tries to keep us from getting it.
Green Job Opportunities
We are in a worldwide economic competition to build the post-oil economy. This is a competition for millions of jobs and trillions of dollars. Every country wants a share of the design and manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal systems, biofuels, electric cars, high-speed rail, urban and suburban light rail, advanced batteries, smart-grid power transmission systems, and all of the rest. And there is also the fight for the construction, installation and maintenance contracts for all of these systems.
Many countries are fully engaged, and have national plans to capture a share of this new industry. They compete with us as countries, and see us as a country to compete with even if we do not. Because we refuse to act as a country, we send our companies out to compete with countries, and as big as our companies are they cannot compete with the resources of engaged countries. Conservatives Demand Surrender
Our top competitor is China. Shots have been fired; China is helping their companies compete, and this has cut solar prices. So a few American companies are going under. In response, America's oil-backed conservatives are demanding immediate surrender. In fact, they don't just demand surrender, they are giving aid and comfort, even actively helping the other side, running down America's efforts to fight for a share of the new green economy.
This huge effort by conservatives to keep our country out of the world competition for a share of the new green economy kind of makes you wonder about the secrecy surrounding all of the money that funds the conservative movement, its think tanks, media outlets, and now even funds political campaigns. We don't even know where the hundreds of millions funding these horrible, negative ads comes from! Does any of it come from our economic competitors? Shouldn't we at least be able to find out who (or where) is funding the conservative propaganda and political machine that is running down our own government and demanding we surrender the new green economy to China? Solyndra And Chevy Volt
Conservatives celebrated the fall of Solyndra, declaring that its demise meant that green energy in general is a "bad bet," or losing technology. They also have been trying to convince people not to purchase hybrids and new technologies like the Chevy Volt. The next time you hear someone of FOX running down our country's green energy efforts, knocking the Chevy Volt or denying climate change, think abougt this: Fox's second-largest shareholder is a billionaire Saudi oil prince. Fox might just have an agenda beyond backing conservatives here. Speaking of conservatives, though, keep in mind that the Koch brothers == oil. Abound Solar Goes Under
Last week solar panel manufacturer Abound Solar filed for bankruptcy. NY Times reports in "A 2nd U.S.-Supported Maker of Solar Panels Will Close,"
Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seized on Solyndra’s failure as evidence that the Obama administration was wasting taxpayer money by supporting clean energy companies.
... The company said it could have been profitable if it had had large-scale manufacturing under way, but “aggressive pricing actions from Chinese solar panel companies have made it very difficult for an early stage start-up company like Abound to scale in current market conditions.”
Abound Solar was unable to compete with low solar prices resulting from Chinese subsidies for their own solar manufacturers. (Add to that, China's currency manipulation which keeps the prices of everything made there up to 30% lower, even bore their subsidies, trade barriers, etc.) Federal officials froze their credit line last year, after the Solyndra failure, so Abound was unable to draw on credit to scale its manufacturing to a level that could compete with subsidized Chinese imports.
Conservatives immediately stepped up their drumbeat of demands that we surrender to China. Here are a few examples of conservatives blaming America first, calling America's efforts a failure, or generally running down efforts to fight for a share of the new green economy:
Hot Air: Yet another DOE-backed solar panel company bites the dust
Good grief. I feel like these ailing Department of Energy-backed loan guarantees are so laughably many that they’re barely even worth noting anymore, but you’re darn tootin’ I’ll continue to do so as long as President Obama keeps acting like it’s the federal government’s divine right to pick and choose winners in the energy market on the taxpayers’ dime.
... This article tries to spin the situation to suggest that the company’s failure is the result of too much unfair competition and global oversupply, and we should therefore direct our ire at China. No — just no. This is the fault of the Obama administration. Maybe if we had just left the decision to develop solar (or not!) up to the private sector, we would’ve quickly figured out that investing in solar energy was a bad idea.
Weekly Standard: Video: Obama Touted $400 Million Loan to Another Solar Company Now Declaring Bankruptcy
Washington Moon Times: Yet another government-backed solar company turns out the lights
News of the company’s demise prompted early criticism from Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and chairman of the House subcommittee on regulatory affairs, stimulus oversight and government spending.
In a statement, Mr. Jordan, among other Republicans, said Abound’s collapse shows that “our government is not good at picking winners and losers in the marketplace but has certainly proved it is good at wasting taxpayer dollars.”
National Legal and Policy Center: Yet Another DOE Green Failure as Abound Solar Goes Bankrupt
And now with failures like Solyndra and Abound Solar, in addition to several others, these crony redistributors leave the political fallout to others and just move on to their next “green” scheme. Unfortunately we won’t find out if the ultimate political price is paid until November, but in the meantime DOE continues with its renewable energy “investments,” which will undoubtedly lead to more pain for taxpayers.
Human Events: Your Obama “green energy” bankruptcy of the day: Abound Solar,
Abound had borrowed about $70 million against these loan guarantees. That would have bought a lot of health care for poor people, but the Obama Administration blew it on solar panel junk instead.
Heritage Foundation: Another Stimulus Backed 'Green Energy' Company Goes Bankrupt
Another stimulus-backed green energy company has filed for bankruptcy, further fueling criticism of Energy Department programs that backed highly-risky investments on the taxpayer dime.
Like Solyndra and a number of other green energy investments made under this administration, Abound Solar had a very poor credit rating, but enjoyed a wealth of political connections.
The Quelccaya ice cap, 12 kilometers across, is the largest icefield in South America. Google Maps image
by Andrew Alden Apr 04, 2013
When it comes to studying glacier ice for records of past climates, the poles are easy: Antarctica and Greenland have huge ice caps that we can drill cores in to our hearts' content. The real problem is in the rest of the world, where we all live. Scientists cannot model the global climate of the past with data from the poles alone. So a newly published ice-core record from the tropics is real news.
Tropical glaciers are few, scattered and endangered. South America and the Himalaya have most of them, and nearly all have been shrinking rapidly for several decades. Professor Lonnie Thompson [ http://www.geology.ohio-state.edu/faculty_bios.php?id=52 ] of Ohio State University has specialized in drilling ice cores from them for more than 30 years, and the very first one he cored, in 1983, is a remote ice cap south of the equator in Peru named Quelccaya whose top sits above 18,000 feet. There he pioneered the use of a lightweight, solar-powered drill rig and succeeded in collecting two complete cores through the ice, about 160 meters long. Unable to keep them frozen, he had to cut them into sections and let them melt, then brought the water home in bottles.
Twenty years later Thompson returned and brought two new cores, intact this time, to Ohio State's ice locker. In a paper published today in Science [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234210 ], Thompson's team shows that the 1983 and 2003 cores faithfully preserve a year-by-year record of tropical climate 18 centuries long, extending back to the year 683 with annual resolution and a little less perfectly back to almost 200. Thompson calls it "the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date."
The possibility of retrieving such precise records was what excited Thompson from the beginning. The ice consists of spectacular annual layers that represent dry winters and wet summers. The winter layers collect the lion's share of the year's dust and dissolved chemicals while the summer layers represent rainwater from the Atlantic Ocean, filtered through the tropical Amazon basin.
Annual layers in the Quelccaya ice cap are about 75 centimeters thick. Lonnie Thompson photo
The data from the Quelccaya cores shed light on many scientific problems related to climate. Most notably, the extent of summer snow from the east depends strongly on Pacific Ocean influences from the west, such as El Niño cycles—so strongly that the Atlantic snow record shows us the temperature of the Pacific as if in a mirror. And Pacific sea-surface temperature is one of the most important numbers in the planetary climate because it's the best gauge of how much water vapor enters the atmosphere.
Central Pacific sea-surface temperature (SST) during the last 1800 years reconstructed from the oxygen-isotope record of Quelccaya ice. Image from Science
The climate record in the Quelccaya cores gives us the nearest thing to real truth in the centuries before modern science. It helps sharpen the picture provided by other ice cores, especially those in the tropics. And that in turn makes global climate records, and the models built upon them, more robust as we peer into the past and future.
We have little time to waste. Thompson's latest expedition to Quelccaya documented hundreds of meters of shrinkage since his first visit. Newly exposed plant remains at the glacier's retreating edges were found to be 6000 years old. And the top layers of ice, deposited since Thompson's first visit, show signs of summer melting for the first time in the entire record.
In Sign of Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Andes Melted in 25 Years
[interactive image embedded] The Qori Kalis glacier in Peru, a tongue of ice extending down a valley from the mighty Quelccaya ice cap, has been melting rapidly. Pull the slider with your mouse to compare a picture taken in 1978, left, with one taken in 2011. Both images: Lonnie G. Thompson/Ohio State University
By JUSTIN GILLIS Published: April 4, 2013
Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.
Dating of those plants, using a radioactive form of carbon in the plant tissues that decays at a known rate, has given scientists an unusually precise method of determining the history of the ice sheet’s margins.
The paper includes a long-awaited analysis of chemical tracers in ice cylinders the team recovered by drilling deep into Quelccaya, a record that will aid scientists worldwide in reconstructing past climatic variations.
Such analyses will take time, but Dr. Thompson said preliminary evidence shows, for example, that the earth probably went through a period of anomalous weather at around the time of the French Revolution, which began in 1789. The weather presumably contributed to the food shortages that exacerbated that upheaval.
“When there’s a disruption of food, this is bad news for any government,” Dr. Thompson said in an interview.
Of greater immediate interest, Dr. Thompson and his team have expanded on previous research involving long-dead plants emerging from the melting ice at the edge of Quelccaya, a huge, flat ice cap sitting on a volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level.
Several years ago, the team reported on plants that had been exposed near a meltwater lake. Chemical analysis showed them to be about 4,700 years old, proving that the ice cap had reached its smallest extent in nearly five millenniums.
In the new research, a thousand feet of additional melting has exposed plants that laboratory analysis shows to be about 6,300 years old. The simplest interpretation, Dr. Thompson said, is that ice that accumulated over approximately 1,600 years melted back in no more than 25 years.
“If any time in the last 6,000 years these plants had been exposed for any five-year period, they would have decayed,” Dr. Thompson said. “That tells us the ice cap had to be there 6,000 years ago.”
Meredith A. Kelly, a glacial geomorphologist at Dartmouth College who trained under Dr. Thompson but was not involved in the new paper, said his interpretation of the plant remains was reasonable.
Her own research on Quelccaya suggests that the margins of the glacier have melted quite rapidly at times in the past. But the melting now under way appears to be at least as fast, if not faster, than anything in the geological record since the end of the last ice age, she said.
Global warming, which scientists say is being caused primarily by the human release of greenhouse gases, is having its largest effects at high latitudes and high altitudes. Sitting at high elevation in the tropics, the Quelccaya ice cap appears to be extremely sensitive to the temperature changes, several scientists said.
“It may not go very quickly because there’s so much ice, but we might have already locked into a situation where we are committed to losing that ice,” said Mathias Vuille, a climate scientist at the State University at Albany in New York.
Throughout the Andes, glaciers are now melting so rapidly that scientists have grown deeply concerned about water supplies for the people living there. Glacial meltwater is essential for helping Andean communities get through the dry season.
In the short run, the melting is producing an increase of water supplies and feeding population growth in major cities of the Andes, the experts said. But as the glaciers continue shrinking, trouble almost certainly looms.
Douglas R. Hardy, a University of Massachusetts researcher who works in the region, said, “How much time do we have before 50 percent of Lima’s or La Paz’s water resources are gone?”
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