Chas Freeman on his hounding out from the NIC

... The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government. ...

Click the title of this post for the complete letter to Foreign Policy.

If you let big wind through the door, you can't stop anything else

Obama overrides Bush rule on Endangered Species Act, by Jim Tankersley. Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2009:

President Obama on Tuesday overrode the Bush administration on a key step in applying the Endangered Species Act, restoring a requirement that federal agencies consult with experts before launching construction projects that could affect the well-being of threatened species.

Environmentalists said reinstating the requirement blocks the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Forest Service and others from “nibbling away” at crucial wildlife habitat. Business and industry groups, on the other hand, warned that Obama’s action could hamper road-building and other projects that would help jump-start the economy.

Bush’s rule change, finalized in December, allowed federal agencies to determine on their own if projects would jeopardize endangered species, instead of consulting with expert biologists, as had been required for the last three decades. ... Obama made such consultation mandatory. ...

Industry lobbyists said Obama’s decision to mandate the consultations would add “red tape” to infrastructure projects funded by the economic stimulus bill. “This directive throws the brakes on projects,” said William L. Kovacs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

Even clean energy plans, such as wind farms, could be slowed down, said Michael D. Olsen, a former Bush Interior official who now lobbies for energy interests at Bracewell and Giuliani. “It’s not just projects that folks would term non-green,” he said. “It’s the green projects too.”

A few things should be noted. First, "red tape" in this case is what the civilized call "laws". Second, if a project threatens endangered species, it is not "green".

Third, it is not surprising that groups like the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) praise this return to the rule of law. At the same time, however, they join industry lobbyists such as Bracewell & Giuliani in promoting industrial wind energy development in rural and wild places. NRDC and EDF completely ignore adverse impacts in their praise for big wind. EDF even does PR work for individual companies. Only the Sierra Club recognizes that "wind projects tend to be large industrial developments with inevitable adverse impacts". Many of its local chapters actively oppose giant wind projects. Yet they also unquestionably accept the industry pitch that "Wind power is a reliable, clean, renewable resource that can help reduce our dependence on polluting fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and nuclear power for electricity". The wind is anything but reliable (for providing real-time power in response to the needs of the electric grid), you can hardly call 400+-ft-high generators clean -- along with their associated clearing, foundations, roads, substations, and transmission lines -- and, due to wind's high variability, intermittency, and unpredictability, it has not been shown to reduce the use of other sources.

Regarding industrial wind energy, environmental groups need to reassess what side they're on. As they welcome Obama's restoration of protection for endangered species, they should restore their own perspective: They should stop acting as agents for an industry whose green credentials have turned out to be a sham and return to fighting to protect the natural world. Industry has its defenders. Nature needs its defenders to get back on track.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights

Wind energy executive gets elected to state legislature, pushes laws to benefit wind energy

The Feb. 26 St. Paul (Minn.) Legal Ledger included a profile of freshman state representative Andrew Falk:

In 2005 he started his own wind-power company, Knight Energy, and has been a frequent presence at the Capitol in recent years lobbying for legislation supporting eco-friendly power sources. In part because of Falk’s advocacy work, his rural district has become something of an epicenter for the development of renewable energy sources, with wind farms and turbines dotting the west-central Minnesota prairie landscape. ... The freshman legislator from Murdock now expects to expand this work through his post as vice chair of the Energy Finance and Policy Division.

There was no mention in the piece that Falk divested his stake in Knight Energy before becoming a lawmaker. As far as I could determine, Falk is still invested in Knight Energy.

The usual ethics problem for legislators is their becoming lobbyists for industries soon after steering laws to their benefit. Here we have a lobbyist becoming a legislator and promising to work for laws benefiting his company. Sheesh!

wind power, wind energy, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Denmark: more per-capita carbon emissions than U.S.

According to Ralph Sylvestersen, Special Adviser for maritime regulation and international affairs at the Danish Maritime Authority and committees at the U.N.'s International Labor Organization and International Maritime Organization, and principal ship surveyor, Greenland, Denmark easily surpasses the United States in per-capita carbon emissions. Click the title of this post for his original piece.

Denmark boasts a high level of growth but steady energy consumption. Sylvestersen notes that while shipping is included in the gross domestic product, its energy consumption isn't included in national figures. Denmark owns 10% of the world's shipping fleet, including the high-speed container ships of the Maersk Line and others. In 2006, the shipping industry used more than twice as much energy as the entire country's domestic consumption.

Recalculating with figures from the Danish International Shipping Industry, Danish per-capita carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are 32.5 tons/year. That compares to 19.5 tons/year in the United States.

Outsmarting the Smart Grid

by William Tucker, February 18, 2009

The latest delusion about energy is the “smart grid.” This bright new technological miracle will once again help us overcome the realities of physics and allow us to live in a world run on wind and sunshine.

... Ever eager to show they are “green” and hip it is, General Electric is now running an ad that shows how “the smart grid” will help us forget the difficult choice of whether to power our economy with coal or nuclear.

... The first premise is that, by conveying real-time pricing the smart grid will encourage people to redistribute their consumption of electricity to off-peak hours of the day. This will “level loads” and solve the perennial problem of utilities in meeting demand that occurs a few hours of the day or a few days of the year.

The second premise is that the smart grid will help integrate wind and solar energy - the two balky “renewables” that have the disadvantage of not being dispatchable when we want them. With the smart grid, wind and solar generation will always be available somewhere and so can be conveyed to where it’s needed.

Notice these are different things. The true “smart grid” will be a digitalized distribution system that conveys real-time information. Incorporating remote wind and solar, on the other hand, will require an upgraded grid, something entirely different. Our present 345-kilovolt, AC transmission wires can’t do it without unacceptable line losses. We will need to rebuild to 765 kV DC system – something that could take decades and easily cost several trillion dollars.

One has very little to do with the other. However they are often described as the same thing. Thomas Friedman effortlessly conflates them in Hot, Flat and Crowded when he writes:

[The smart grid] has made large-scale renewable energy practical for the first time ever. Why? Because the flatter your utility’s load profile gets, the more it is able to go out and buy or generate renewable energy and sell it to you and your neighbors instead of energy powered by coal or gas.

This is not true. A flattened utility profile has nothing to do with incorporating wind and solar. In fact it is just the opposite. The one great virtue of solar energy is that it peaks exactly when it is needed – in mid-afternoon and on hot summer days. If we level loads, we will be taking away solar electricity’s greatest advantage.

Let’s go back and examine these issues one at a time. First, start with the premise that the smart grid will enable us to redistribute energy consumption throughout the day. It’s fitting that the girl [in the GE ad] is standing in front of a clothes dryer, because that and washing dishes are the only examples anyone has ever been able to come up with about how residential users are going to “redistribute” their energy consumption.

What else can they do? Are they going to wait until after midnight to watch prime-time television? Are they going to heat up dinner at 4 a.m.? Are they going to turn on lights at sunrise instead of sunset? And how about air conditioning, that most voracious consumer of electricity? One suggestion floated by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in “The Green Grid,” a study published last June, is that people might “pre-cool” their homes by running the air conditioning in the morning in anticipation of hot afternoons. This may indeed level peak loads. But it will also consume more energy, since some of the pre-cooling will obviously dissipate.

There’s one more thing about drying your clothes at 10 p.m. Have you ever noticed what happens if you leave wet clothes sitting in the washer too long? They start smelling a little moldy, don’t they? Maybe this thing about drying your clothes just after you've washed them isn't such a bad idea after all.

Getting people to redistribute their energy consumption sounds suspiciously like those perennial suggestions for relieving rush-hour traffic by staggering work hours. It may look good on paper, but most people still like to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, work 9-to-5, come home, have dinner, watch some TV and go to bed. And so rush hour traffic – and patterns of electrical consumption – will probably remain much the same.

Although GE carefully avoids saying it, the underlying presumption of the smart grid is that it will somehow help us conserve significant amounts of energy. In that light, the EPRI study – although full of the usual enthusiasm - is also a very sobering document.

First, the study examined all the possible smart-grid savings - from shaving residential voltage to 114 V from 120 V to not having to send meter readers out to homes every month. Even then, its most optimistic prediction was that by 2030 we could reduce electrical consumption by 7 to 11 percent below what is now being projected. That’s not an absolute reduction in consumption but only a slowing of its anticipated rise. Second, as the study concludes, “shift[ing] load from on-peak to off-peak periods may not necessarily save energy.” It will only save money. And when you make electricity cheaper, people may consume more of it. Nor will any of this necessarily reduce carbon emissions. In fact, it may just as likely increase them.

Utilities don’t like peak loads because they have to meet them by building generators that may be used only two or three weeks of the year. These are almost inevitably gas turbines – essentially jet engines bolted to the ground. Because they don’t boil water, turbines can be started up and adjusted almost instantly, enabling them to follow loads. Steam generators, on the other hand, may take the better part of an hour to get to full speed. But turbines run on natural gas, the most expensive fuel. In addition, they sit idle most of the year, a costly way to employ capital.

So if we shift more uses to off-peak hours, we may save the utilities lots of money. But we won’t be saving energy. At best, we’ll be using the same amount. If some kind of electrical storage is employed – another often mentioned component of the “smart grid” – then we will be consuming more energy, since power is always lost in the transitions. And if leveling loads means shifting consumption from relatively clean natural gas turbines to base-load coal plants, there will be an increase in carbon emissions. [emphasis added]

Finally, as we said before, the great virtue of large-scale solar installations will be that they coincide with hours of peak demand. If we ever get to that point, we won’t want to flatten loads. We will want to keep them the way they are.

Wind, of course, is an entirely different animal. Although completely unpredictable, the wind does tend to blow stronger at night and in the fall and spring, exactly when it’s not needed. A strong, steady wind in North Dakota might allow Illinois to cut some coal consumption but it won’t obviate the need for fossil fuels because the wind will always need backup. “The Green Grid” concludes that wind will work best in tandem with - wouldn't you know it - natural gas turbines. They can be adjusted instantly to compensate for the wind's vagaries.

So the prospect that a smart grid is somehow going to save huge amounts of energy and pave the way for a solar future is an illusion. At best it will make electricity a bit cheaper and perhaps shave 5 to 10 percent off the anticipated growth in consumption. But the smartest of smart grids can’t distribute power that isn’t already there. ...

The Dangers of ‘Cap and Trade’

By BEN STEIN

WHENEVER I pull up to my neighborhood service station in Rancho Mirage, Calif., or anywhere else lately, I have a strange feeling. Because gasoline is so incredibly cheaper than it was just eight months ago, I almost feel as if I am getting something free.

I keep wondering when someone in government will award some kind of stimulus prize to the oil companies for that. After all, by cutting the price of gasoline and other fuels by roughly half, the oil companies are giving consumers hundreds of billions of dollars in new purchasing power for other goods and services. Isn’t that worthy of praise?

What’s that, you say? It isn’t the oil companies? It’s just the free market correcting itself after a huge oil price bubble last year? Well, I agree. But I have a lot of angry e-mail burned into my brain from readers insisting that those high prices were an oil-company conspiracy.

So, are the lower prices now a conspiracy to help the consumer? If that’s silly — and it is — then let’s go back to the free-market explanation. It might actually work. The free market can make us crazy, but it can also explain a lot.

Still, when I go to my local gas station, I am amazed that there is any gasoline there at all. Yes, I can see how the big oil companies happily made gasoline when oil was $140 a barrel. But how can they do it when oil is in the $30s? That takes some fancy planning.

How do the oil companies manage to keep going when the price of their basic source product changes so much? Again, that takes fancy planning.

Such planning has allowed this country to get by without major supply disruptions since the shah of Iran was overthrown. But the situation is about to become much trickier, as we confront the need to reduce carbon emissions on the way to a cleaner environment. Indeed, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency now seems likely to act within months to begin restraints on carbon dioxide. This move had been resisted by the previous administration.

Obviously, oil and gasoline are a big part of the emissions problem, and something needs to be done. I seem to have trouble breathing on too many days. Part of the solution involves more efficient cars and furnaces, and better technology at all levels. But what about a direct financial restraint on burning hydrocarbons? Might that not reduce hydrocarbon emissions, too? It is hard to believe that it wouldn’t.

Two main ways to address the issue are under discussion. One would involve a nationwide system of credits for carbon burning, with a total cap. The credits would be traded in national and maybe world markets. Entities that emit more carbon gases would have to pay more to buy these credits, and those who saved carbon would pay less and be able to sell credits to heavier users.

The other idea is a direct tax on carbon emissions of a stable amount. The proceeds might be refunded in whole or in part to energy producers to help with other goals, such as producing cleaner fuels.

Both ideas have merit, but there is a tricky little history to “cap and trade,” which seems to be President Obama’s favored approach. Because the credits would be traded on an exchange, or somewhere else, their prices would fluctuate. They could even fluctuate wildly, as prices of traded items often do. (See the stock, bond and commodity markets if you’re looking for examples.)

The European system of cap and trade has seen large fluctuations. Right now, because of the recession in European manufacturing, the cost of these carbon credits has fallen fantastically, rendering the cost of carbon emissions low. That doesn’t do much for reducing emissions.

[Also see: "Climate change paradox: Wind turbines in Europe do nothing for emissions-reduction goals", Der Spiegel, Feb. 10, 2009, which describes the failure of German emissions trading.]

Why add another element of uncertainty to energy production, especially if the goal of suppressing carbon-based fuel burning can be accomplished by another means? Energy companies have enough problems as it is — including reduced supplies, political risks and wildly changing prices for raw materials.

Of course, the new system would be a great benefit to the people who traded the credits. But how about the rest of us? Haven’t we just had a big lesson in what happens when we put traders ahead of producers and consumers? Have we forgotten that lesson already?

Why not do what governments usually do to reduce consumption — namely, impose a tax that punishes the production of carbon emissions? That would also be much less sensitive to manipulation by speculators — and the types of extremes that have led to our country’s recent undoing.

It seems a more direct and simpler way to go, and would help ensure that gasoline will always be there when we need it.

environment, environmentalism

Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

To the President of the State of Israel and the Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial: Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Following the example of Jean-Moise Braitberg, we ask that our grandmother's name be removed from the wall at Yad Vashem. Her name is Gertrud Neumann. Your records state that she was born in Kattowitz on June 6, 1875, and died in Theresienstadt.

M. Braitberg delivers his request with excellent reasons and eloquent personal testimony. His words are inspiring, but they give you – and those who stand with you - too much credit. I will instead be brief. Please take this as an expression of my disgust and contempt for your state and all it represents.

Our grandmother was a victim of that very ideal of ethnic sovereignty in whose cause Israel has shed so much blood for so long. ... I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this. ...

Michael Neumann

I join my brother, Michael Neumann, in asking that any reference to our grandmother be removed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. ...

Israel has twisted the Holocaust into an excuse for perpetrating more holocausts. It has spent the treasure of the world's sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust on a fruitless effort to shield itself from all criticism as it massacres and tortures Palestinians and suffocates them under a brutal occupation. I do not wish to have the memory of my grandmother enlisted in this misbegotten project.

I grew up believing that Jews were that ethnic group whose historical mission was to transcend ethnicity in a united front against Fascism. To be Jewish was to be anti-Fascist. Israel long ago woke me from my dogmatic slumber about the immutable relationship of Jews to Fascists. It has engineered a merger between the image of Jewish torturers and war criminals and that of emaciated concentration camp victims. I find this merger obscene. I want no part of it. You have forfeited the right to be the custodian of my grandmother’s memory. I do not wish Yad Vashem to be her memorial.

Osha Neumann

human rights