Cooking Grease: The Latest Target for Organized Grime

    The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has highlighted a recent Reuters article on what has been characterized as a "major crime" on the rise in California.  Stealing used cooking grease.  The state is apparently so saturated with fat crooks (that's fat crooks, not fat crooks) that a state assemblyman has introduced legislation to help trap these slippery thieves.
    The law would allow the CA highway patrol to pull over the typically unmarked pumper trucks often used to transport the illicit lipids to check paperwork for proof of ownership for any Inedible Kitchen Grease (IKG - yes, it's a real acronym) found on board.  Not only could the undocumented oil be confiscated, but the transport trucks as well.
    So what is behind this allure of lard, these grease-grabbing gangsters?  Turns out it all comes back to the environment.  The castoff cooking contraband is a prime raw material for biofuels.  One man's grease is another man's gas.  According to the CDFA's website, this has been a problem since the early 1990s, but the recent increased interest in biofuels has solidified IKG theft as a major crime in the state:

Like copper, the state says, the grease has value as a commodity, and is often sold by restaurateurs to make extra money. Legitimate haulers also try to turn a profit by agreeing to remove the waste from restaurant sites and sell it to rendering companies, which turn it into usable fuel such as bio-diesel.

    The real mystery is why this story has not captured more attention.  It has crime, politics (CA state assembly), environmentalism (biofuels), nutrition (if restaurants sold healthier food, they wouldn't have all that grease), even civil liberties (pulling over vehicles without probable cause to "check paperwork"? in America?!) I am hoping to draw attention to this story and help grease the skids to bring it the national prominence it deserves.
    I know... fat chance.

Energy Dept. Seeks Company to Turn Sunshine Into Gasoline

    Although CO2 has a bad reputation as a "greenhouse gas" that contributes to climate change, if the Energy Department (DOE) finds partners to capitalize on the research of one of its laboratories, someday cars might run on sunshine.  Technically, cars would run on the product of sunlight, CO2 and water using a "two-step solar thermochemical cycle" developed by the Albuquerque, New Mexico government lab.  The DOE posted the special notice seeking interested companies on the Federal Business Opportunities website on Tuesday:

Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) is conducting ongoing research and development into solar fuels, the conversion of sunlight, CO2, and H2O into high energy density, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel pre-cursors...

Sandia is seeking a company or companies interested in this unique opportunity which will lead to the demonstration and deployment of this technology. 

    Researchers have been working on this idea for some time according to a 2007 press release from the Sandia lab.  At that time, one of the researchers speculated that although a prototype of a device to carry out the chemical process was already under development, it was "a good 15 to 20 years away from being on the market."  The special notice released this week did not contain a timetable, but did note that companies interested in the project "must have a significant interest in developing this technology to the demonstration and deployment stage."


Note: A version of this article first appeared at The Weekly Standard.

Bee Kind

    In Duryea, PA, one community is setting an example in 21st century thinking: No Bee Left Bee Hive Behind.  The Associated Press reports:

They say home is where the hive is. Or something like that.
A colony of troublesome honeybees will settle into new digs in northeastern Pennsylvania after being removed Friday from a back alley in Duryea, where the queen and thousands of her loyal subjects had taken up residence in an old tree several years ago.
They were such a nuisance that neighbors say they couldn't stand to be outside in the summertime. The bees got into garbage and recycling bins, disrupted barbecues and buzzed anyone who got too close.
"It was a big safety issue for us," said Joe Roscioli, 32, who is allergic to bees and whose house is only a few feet from the tree.

    Humans and bees have long had a love-hate relationship, but one that benefits... us.  They pollinate many of our plants, we take their honey, and in return, we don't kill them all.  Duryea, PA has taken this non-killing a step further.

Years ago, an annoyed human might've eliminated the problem with a can of insecticide.
But with a mysterious affliction called colony collapse disorder decimating hives around the nation, Duryea's streets supervisor got a bee in his bonnet to save the colony and its 10,000 to 20,000 occupants. So on Friday, PPL Electric Utilities, a tree-trimming crew and several bee experts converged on the alley for a rescue operation.

    But is there a hidden victim in this story?

With a small crowd looking on, licensed apiarist Bill Fisher and other experts drilled several holes in the tree, then inserted probes to establish the lower and upper limits of the hive.
"It's a lot like a colonoscopy for bees," Fisher joked.
Once the 60-foot northern catalpa tree was cut down to size, a crane lifted a 15-foot section of trunk onto a trailer destined for the Hershey area, where Fisher has a small farm. When it gets warmer, Fisher will try to extract the queen, slice out the comb, and transfer the colony to a bee box. Its ultimate destination, if all goes well, is a community garden in Drums, about 30 miles southwest of Duryea.

    Where is the tree-sitter?! Where is the Friends of Catalpa Trees on this issue?  Oh, the drendonity! Could they not spare a protester to protect what someday might be an endangered specie? Just because the tree was described as "old" should it be casually drilled, cut down, and loaded onto a trailer like so much cordwood?  The article just glosses over this aspect of the story.

Such rescues are becoming more common. The state Department of Agriculture said it's seen an increase in calls from exterminators, residents and business owners who want to avoid destroying inconvenient hives and are seeking help.
"Colony collapse disorder has really increased awareness of the importance of honeybees," said Karen Roccasecca, Pennsylvania's state apiarist.
Gino Marriggi, the Duryea streets supervisor who launched Friday's rescue mission, said he couldn't be happier with the outcome.
"The neighbors are happy the bees are going to be gone, and I'm happy nobody's going to destroy them," he said. "It's a win-win." 

    In this case, perhaps a "win-win" is not good enough.  In the future, a backhoe and a tree-baller could ensure that the next so-called "rescue" is a win-win-win. On the other hand, I wonder what kind of grass was growing there?

Sting, the Lorax

    The approximately 4,967,000,000,000 trees in the world can rest easy knowing that 182 of their compatriots are safe.  Sting, the musician cum environmentalist ("Green Hornet" perhaps?), recently announced a change of venue for a planned concert in the Philippines. The AP reports:

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Sting has moved the location of his "Back to Bass Tour" concert in the Philippines following a petition by environmentalists who said the original venue is owned by a conglomerate that plans to uproot 182 trees for a parking lot and mall expansion in a northern mountain city.
The SM Mall of Asia Arena said on Saturday that changing the site of the Dec. 9 concert was "the decision of the artist himself."
"Understandably, the known environment advocate artist was left with no choice in spite of the SM representatives' appeal," it said in a statement....
Karlo Marko Altomonte, who initiated the petition, wrote Sting's foundation saying that removing the trees would significantly increase air pollution and the risk of landslides and flooding in an area near schools.

    The article goes on to note Sting's green cred:

Sting and his wife Trudie Styler established The Rainforest Foundation in 1989 to protect tropical rainforests and the people who live there. 

    However, that was not enough to spare Sting the sting of this charge:

Environmentalists said in their petition that as a champion of the environment, "Sting can't be saving rainforests and enabling SM [the Mall of Asia Arena owners] to rape the environment at the same time!"

    I will be carefully monitoring feminist websites for the outraged reactions to this frivolous use of the word "rape" in connection with 182 trees.  Senator Claire McCaskill could not be reached for comment.

Green Jobs: The REAL Solution to Unemployment

    On his show Thursday, Rush Limbaugh called attention to a story that by all rights should have been shouted from the top of every windmill and solar panel in the country, and perhaps would have been were it not for the recall-that-wasn't in Wisconsin which filled the news on Wednesday.  On that day, Fox News reported that Bureau of Labor Statistics Acting Commissioner John Galvin testified at a hearing before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

The Obama administration on Wednesday acknowledged a wide-ranging definition of  “green jobs” that includes bus driver, bicycle-shop clerk and other unexpected lines of employment[.] 

“Does someone who sweeps the floor at a company that makes solar panels -- is that a green job?” Issa asked.

“Yes,” replied Galvin, who also acknowledged that a bike-repair shop clerk, a hybrid-bus driver, any school bus driver and “the guy who puts gas in a school bus” are all defined as green jobs.

But this is the coup de grâce:

He also acknowledged that an oil lobbyist, if his work is related to environmental issues, would also have a green job.

With such an expansive definition, perhaps the administration should look into reclassifying the unemployed as members of Passive Environmental Agents Conserving Energy, a reboot of the PEACE Corps.  The president could claim to have created millions upon millions of new jobs (and "green" jobs, at that,) reduced unemployment to zero, and found a justification for unlimited extension of unemployment benefits as compensation to the new PEACE Corps recruits.  If you think I am stretching the bounds of parody, just play this back a few times (via the Daily Caller):



The new PEACE Corps is sounding pretty reasonable, isn't it?

Seen Being Green

    Last night, I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast that turned out to be from last summer.  The main segment of the show is about “conspicuous consumption” as relates to drivers who like to be seen in their Priuses more for the optics than for the actual energy savings, but it’s the short anecdote right at the top of the show that really grabbed my attention:

Economist Tim Harford of London:  “Now it turns out wind power can be pretty effective. But you need a really, really big windmill in a really windy location to be efficient. These little windmills, especially in an urban environment, where you don’t get a consistent flow of wind, they generate an incredibly small amount of energy. Really, really ineffective. Indeed, there’s a fantastic example from the British physicist David MacKay, who points to building-top windmills in Japan that actually have little electric motors in them to keep them spinning around, because otherwise they would look really stupid on top of the building and not actually moving. So, these windmills actually cost energy.”

It makes me wonder how many people with hybrid cars might actually just fill them with gas and drive them that way rather than bother to plug them in every night.  They'd still get the benefit of being seen driving a hybrid with its clean-energy aura, but without the fuss of remembering to recharge the battery.  Let's face it: when you've got a cell phone, iPad, Kindle, laptop, and iPod to keep recharged, do you really want to have to remember to plug in your car?  As a public service, I'll publish the confessions of any hybrid owners out there who would like to come clean... so to speak...

Solyndra's Dirty Little Secret

    David Burge of Iowahawkblog tweeted Friday morning that the Solyndra building is up for sale.

  Solyndra is the solar panel maker that infamously and spectacularly failed recently despite heavy support from the Obama administration, both promotionally and financially.  Much has been written about Solyndra's downfall, but the sale of the "green energy" company's state-of-the-art manufacturing facility contains one last bit of irony:

Yes, that's right.  Diesel generators - and they're not burning sunshine.  The diesel generator capacity even exceeds the ~1.2 megawatts capacity of the solar panels that this solar panel manufacturer also has installed.  I guess even to make a green omelet, you still have to break a few eggs.

Ford: Focus...

Original photo source: Car Guide Blog

Detroit News:  Ford Motor Co. sold about 12 Focus Electrics in December and January to fleet customers — and none in February and March, said Erich Merkle, a Ford spokesman.

That's it.  I pretty much just posted this because it was fun blurring the photo.  Now if I can just figure out how to make this look like a Chevy Volt...

The Unofficial Campaign

    The president has been whipping up the Democratic base recently with his fiery campaign rhetoric.  Wait, what's that?

Source

Sorry, let me start over.  The president has been responding to his Republican critics with reasoned arguments, most recently in an official speech at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md.
    Actually, the president has grown increasingly strident as gasoline prices, the budget deficit, and the national debt all continue to rise.  Come to think of it, despite the dizzying rhetorical heights to which candidate Obama soared in Minnesota in June 2008 ("I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the ... moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow"), apparently even the sea level continues to rise unabated.  The president's approval ratings  and fund raising, on the other hand, have bucked the trend and are heading south.
    In an attempt to reverse the trend in the latter two items, President Obama tore into Republicans in general as backward-looking naysayers who like gas guzzling cars and wouldn't recognize a clever use of algae if their lives depended on it. His words were both scripted and off the cuff as the crowd responded approvingly.  In the words of Politico:

Those same people, Obama said, would’ve thought the Earth was flat, that television wouldn’t last, that the automobile was only a passing fad.

In truth, it's the President's political and cultural allies who think it's the earth that won't last, who wish the automobile had been a passing fad, and have so corrupted television that in large measure we'd be better off without it.  The president even included a poorly researched slam on Rutherford B. Hayes as losing a spot on Mount Rushmore for failing to recognize the potential of the telephone.  While one would like to give the president the benefit of the doubt that the Mount Rushmore reference was tongue-in-cheek, his willingness to attack his political enemies in extreme terms gives one pause.
   The Obama 2012 campaign has obviously taken stock of the political landscape.  Despite the bruising battle that the Republicans have been in during a long primary season that is months from ending, Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina issued a fund raising appeal this week that said flat out, "If the general election were held today, President Obama would lose to Mitt Romney." Whatever level of confidence that President Obama continues to exude about his remaining "five years," this fund raising letter has a ring of desperation.   If the political earth were as flat as the Flat Earth Society imagined the real earth to be, the Obama campaign would be justified in fearing that it is headed over the edge.


This post was originally published on March 16, 2012 at Blogger News Network.

Starck Raving Mad

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article entitled "A Starck-Looking Electric Car for Fun". French designer Philippe Starck introduced the latest entrant into the beleaguered field of electric cars at the Geneva Auto Show this week. The headline writer at the Wall Street Journal apparently could not resist the play on words with Mr. Starck's name (nor could I,) but "whimsical" would have been a more accurate description. The Onion could be forgiven for thinking the Wall Street Journal is horning in on its territory, but the article is on the up-and-up and is even written without irony.

The vehicle, pictured below, looks as though a country club employee lost control of a golf cart and plowed through the swimming pool area. Even the designer describes it as “a kid's soap box cart with four wheels.” Save for the windshield, the vehicle is open to the elements, and the wheels are reminiscent of a Segway rather than a true roadworthy car.




But the real fun begins when one looks at the vehicle's specifications. The range is 37 miles on a fully charged battery. The top speed is 40 MPH. And the price? Starck says he expects the retail price to be about $40,000, which is roughly the price of a Chevy Volt, and roughly the price of eight motorized golf carts! (But that's before the Volt's $10,000 tax credit. It is unclear if this new vehicle would qualify for the credit, but given the Obama administration's infatuation with non-fossil fuel powered vehicles, it wouldn't be out of the question.) But even though the Chevy Volt is also electric, at least it looks like a real car, with windows, doors, and seats that do not look like beach chairs. One is almost tempted to ask if Starck's vehicle comes with a remote control.

But it’s the two final lines of the story that really got me. “[The vehicle] recovers 50% of its charge in two hours by plugging into any socket; a full charge takes six hours. ‘You visit a friend's house and recharge while you're having dinner,’ Mr. Starck says.” Brilliant! This will help me avoid that awkward situation I have found myself in countless times of having to say to friends, “Thanks for dinner! Now do you mind if I siphon a few gallons of gas out of your tank so I can get home now?” Isn't technology great?

The Return of Al Gore?

    The last time we heard from Al Gore, he was continuing his quest to see the refining and production of carbon-based fuels replaced with cleaner, renewable sources of energy. According to a recent speech by President Obama, Gore (who at times has been characterized as "wooden") has decided to get more personally involved:

    We’re launching a program that will bring together the nation’s best scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs to figure out how more cars can be powered by natural gas, a fuel that’s cleaner and cheaper and more abundant than oil.  We’ve got more of that.  We don’t have to import it.  We may be exporting it soon.
    We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance -- Al G.

Hmmmmm. Maybe I'd better go back and check the transcript.

Theology in Politics

    Rick Santorum has taken some heat for his recent words regarding the theology of President Obama.  While Santorum has clarified that he was primarily focusing on President Obama's beliefs regarding climate change and radical environmentalism when he made his comments, it's worth asking the broader question, "What is President Obama's theology?"  Back in 2008, then-candidate Obama said the following regarding same-sex marriage and civil unions:

Obama said that while he does not believe in gay marriage, he does think the state should allow civil unions that allow a same-sex couples to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other.
"If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans," Obama said.

That "obscure passage in Romans" is in chapter 1 where the Apostle Paul begins to lay out the Biblical case for the fallen state of man that he builds upon to frame one of the most well known and time-tested Gospel presentations of salvation by grace through faith.  And Rick Santorum is the one with the theology problem?

Al Gore's Current TV - The "Anti-Fox"?

    In a Newsweek piece at the Daily Beast reporting on Al Gore's struggles to keep his fledgling TV network alive, there is this paragraph:

Gore and partner Joel Hyatt, had finally come up with what could be a game-changing plan: to reinvent the station as a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week liberal cable-news outlet, a bastion for progressive ideas and politics on television, a way to harness and influence the Democratic Party—in short, as Hyatt says, the “anti-Fox.”

"We Decide, then Report."

The Silence of the Greens, Part II

    A post by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air reports on the recent revelation that Chesapeake Energy funneled $26 million to the Sierra Club to fund a campaign against coal-powered energy.  There is a quote from the original blogger at Time magazine (via the Daily Caller) that referenced the Sierra Club's deep concerns with hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking":

The Fracking Regulatory Action Center (or FRAC tracker) is a resource for activists to help secure strong safeguards for fracking. It tracks state efforts to update their rules to stay ahead of the fracking boom, and to blunt its most dangerous effects. It also collects a growing library of technical comments and reports on these rules, which activists can use in their own work.

The last time I wrote about fracking, it was in reference to the upcoming exploration at the dormant Newberry volcano in Oregon and the relative silence from the environmental movement and the media in general, despite the fact that a process similar to fracking was being used.  I speculated that since the Newberry volcano project involved "renewable" energy, the green movement might be giving it a pass.  At the time, I was unaware of the Sierra Club's FRAC tracker.  Now a general search of all Sierra Club websites for "fracking" returns 362 results.   But interestingly, although not surprisingly, conducting searches on the FRAC tracker for "Newberry" and "volcano" come up with zero results.
    A further internet search did yield some references to the project and the Oregon chapter of the Sierra Club.  As far back as November 2007, the Juniper Group of the Oregon Sierra Club has been commenting on and opposing the Newberry project.  But in fact, it is only on the "oregon.sierraclub.org" portion of the Sierra Club's website where these references are found.  And despite the upcoming test this summer that will pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of the volcano, my research found that there have been no references to project on their website in at least a year.  Could it be that the Sierra Club's championing of geothermal energy is influencing its consistency on fracking?

Save the Polar Bears! Be Quiet!

   I received the following email today from the National Wildlife Federation:

Dear Jeryl, 

 Polar bears' survival depends on us slowing global warming--which is melting the ice they depend on to hunt for food. But, right now polluters are attacking the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to reduce the carbon dioxide that is threatening the livelihood of this beloved species.

In the last week, over 9,000 people like you took action to protect polar bears, but we can't stop there.
Polar bears need you to speak up for their future--please take action today! -Sue

Isn't speaking up just going to create more carbon dioxide?

Accu-Whether... or Not...

   The dire long-range predictions of "global warming" and the less dramatic but more nebulous "climate change" are dubious at best and conspiratorial at worst.  Some recent dire short-term predictions have the misfortune of being subject to comparison with reality, unlike forecasts of temperature increase by the year 2100, when the temperature of the forecasters themselves and most of humanity will be that of the room.
   In the case at hand, the optimistically-named AccuWeather had projected back in October 2011 that the 2011-2012 winter was likely to be "Another Brutal One."  Indeed, most of AccuWeather's meteorological colleagues were similarly confident about the havoc winter seemed poised to wreak.  However, as today's Los Angeles Times notes, not much wreaking has come to pass so far.  Drudge went so far as to proclaim with Drudgian hyperbole, "USA seems to have escaped winter!"  To be fair, we still have to get through February's proverbial dead-of-winter and then the volatile month of March, so there is plenty of time to salvage reputations and improve forecasting accuracy percentages.  But that is the whole point of climate change/global warming skepticism.  Inaccurate short-term computer models don't improve by moving the ending date further into the future.
   Anyone who had invested in the skiing industry based on the forecasts in October would currently be having some serious second thoughts.  Calls to invest $10.5 trillion to fight climate change based on models peering decades into the future are certainly worth some equally serious second thoughts.  Mark Twain famously said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  And maybe that's the way it ought to be.

The Silence of the Greens

   President Obama expended no less than 700 words in his State of the Union speech last night discussing energy, although to be fair, many of those words were recycled.  And appropriately so, since "renewable" and "clean" energy consumed a significant percentage of those words.  The president emphasized his priorities by even roping the Navy into "purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year" using "clean energy."  (As an aside:  if one is using the Navy to make a point, wouldn't some quantitative measurement of power using "ships" instead of "homes" have been more apropos?)  In any case, the President made it clear that his administration will continue tout its green credentials loudly and often.
  So when the Drudge Report recently linked to a story outlining plans to try to harness heat generated by the inactive Newberry volcano in Oregon to produce power, the most remarkable thing about the story is what it has not generated, that being media attention.  A Google news search for "Newberry volcano" as of January 25th generated only 188 hits.  Contrast this with "Keystone pipeline" which generates 7,720 hits or "hydraulic fracturing" which returns 2,420 hits.  According to USA Today, the Department of Energy has put $21.5 million into the project, and a peer review on the DOE website dates all the way back to May 2010, so it is not as though this project is a secret.  And yet "Newberry" was not among those 700 words the president used to highlight his administration's most exciting developments in energy in the year's most prominent address to the American people.  What gives?
   Of all the recent ideas for developing new sources of energy, this volcano project is the one that sounds most like some junior high school boys pouring all the chemicals in the science lab into one beaker just to "see what will happen." Volcanoes and earthquakes remain two of the least predictable natural phenomenon in nature and are capable of truly cataclysmic consequences.  Wouldn't it seem reasonable that we'd hear from the usual The-Sky-is-Falling green groups when a seismologist says of the plan, "That's the $64,000 question.  What's the biggest earthquake we can have from induced seismicity that the public can worry about?"  And, though it may be a long shot, what if this exploration touches off a volcanic eruption?  Think of the air pollution, acid rain, greenhouse gases, and general mayhem that would result!  Talk about an Inconvenient Truth!
   So why the deafening silence?  Why does a search for "Newberry volcano Al Gore" return the disappointing "did not match any news results"?  The answer is found in the first two words of the third paragraph of the story: "Renewable energy".  The same phenomenon leads environmentalists to disregard the noise pollution and bird/bat deaths from windmills and the toxic chemicals that are by-products of solar panel manufacturing.  Unlike any energy production related to fossil fuels, the "renewables" get a pass on possible or even actual collateral damage.  But "hydraulic fracturing", which uses a process similar to the one employed in the volcano research but is used to extract natural gas and oil from rocks deep below the surface of the earth, has already suffered some setbacks due to fear of earthquakes.  It is said that when the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883 the sound was heard 3,000 miles away.  Is it not safe to say that if some oil company were planning a test to extract petroleum from under a volcano, a similar explosion would be heard from the environmentalists?
   Primitive societies have been known to throw virgins into volcanoes to appease the angry gods.  Is the environmental movement willing to risk sacrificing what remains of their own credibility in this case in hopes that their god Mother Earth, in spite of the risks, will finally deliver the goods on a practical, marketable, affordable source of energy that so far she has stubbornly and embarrassingly denied to her true believers?