Running On Empty

In April of this year I came down wth a debilitating disease which put me out of commission for over four months. Thanks to the great care of my wife I am back and ready to continue my rants on global warming, alternative energy, and other subjects of interest. And yes, I will continue to use that much politicized word "Global warming." If you still don't believe it is real or think it is a hoax perpetrated by the entire world of scientists, you are an idiot or work for an oil company. After the past year with it's hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, and glacial melting your powers of reasoning are seriously challenged. Or maybe you are just a Republican on the dole from an oil company.

My wife started a novel a year or so ago. It had at its basic premise that the world was being consumed by wild fires, the reasons for which were somewhat obscure. Today this prophesy has in part come true, except the disasters are worse than she imagined and the reasons are well known. The southwest has been burning for the past two months. Wildfires have consumed huge areas in the State of Arizona and are still burning out of control.  Thousands of fire fighters have been employed along with hundreds of helicopters and tanker planes. The cost to the state and municipalities could do much resolve or at least ease their budget shortfalls. But the wild fires are just one aspect of the disaster. We had the Mississippi rivere flooding on its lower reaches flooding farmland and homes and only through extreme measures not being the worst flood in history. Right now the upper reaches of the Missouri river in Iowa and Nebraska also flooding. Wildfires aren't just confined to Arizona, Colorado and the northwest. Texas ans the south East are suffering huges areas of prolonged drought. The year 2011 has been declared the most disastrous year in recorded history. Tornadoes have killed hundreds of people this year and destroyed hundreds of homes. What is going on here?

The Senate voted down a bill which would have removed the tax subsidy on ethanol this week. You would think the Tea Baggers would have embraced this bill. Even John McCain and Jon Kyle, Arizona's two raging right wingers, voted for it. The bill referred to ending the tax credits for blenders of ethanol and gasoline. Adding ethanol to gasoline is desirable as it reduces our need for imported oil. The only problem is where most of our ethanol comes from.  Here in the United States ethanol is made from corn. Corn is a lose/lose material from which to make fuel. Making it uses horrendous amounts of water, our most precious resource,  and uses more fuel to make than it produces. If it weren't subsidized it would never become economically viable. Why do we do this? It was part of George W. Bush's gift in his last election to the Iowa corn farmers along with a tariff on imported ethanol.

Tim Oats, Director of Research at Cambridge Assessment, one of the biggest exam boards in Europe recently stated in an interview with Jessica Shepherd, writer for the Guardian.co.uk, that Climate Change should not be taught in the National Curriculum in the United Kingdom. This is a slippery slope and has political implications. The majority of the scientific community agree on climate change as to the fact that it is real and humans play a significant part in causing warming. Any suppression of this information can only be seen as political. Politics has no place in education. So far in the United States I haven't heard of this effort yet but it fits right into the extreme right wing efforts to suppress the teaching of evolution. Climate change is a vital message that children need to hear. It ties into the message of sustainability which is vital to the coming generations. To allow teachers to pick and choose subjects that they disagree with is a path to disaster. Leave religion and politics out of schools.

The OPEC countries cut off our oil supply 38 years ago when we supported Israel when they were attacked by Egypt and Syria. I don't remember what the price of oil at that time was. Instead of developing a rational energy policy which included alternative energy sources we thanked our good friends Saudi Arabia and continued to allow OPEC to jerk us around. In the recent oil crisis of 2008 a barrel of oil went past $120 per barrel. We drove less by a billion miles in that period and OPEC miraculously reduced the price of oil to around $50 per barrel. Then they said they needed $70 per barrel to be able to survive as producer's of oil so they reduced production and the price went back up. The recent meeting of OPEC just set the price at $100 and change. Saudi Arabia supposedly has the capacity to crank up production much more if they like, although no one really knows as they play it close to their chest. We get a major part of our oil from Canada, Russia, and Mexico but they don't have Saudi Arabia's flexibility. So here we are 38 years later, still dependent on OPEC for the price of oil. When are we going to wake up?

I really don't get it. It's one thing to question climate science and come to the conclusion by some strange quirk of mental gymnastics that we humans can't effect our environment.  It's an entirely different thing to make death threats on climate scientists who are endeavoring to do a job of helping us understand why our climate is changing. Humans being such diverse beings with different ways of living in the world can certainly develop different ways of seeing the world. What I can't understand is what the purpose of killing someone working in such benign field of endeavor as climate science . What the deniers should be doing, if they disagree so vehemently with the other fellow's conclusions is to get to work and prove him wrong. It's kind of like killing an ant. The world is full of these creatures and some other fellow climate scientist will just take his place.

We haven't heard this whacko bull crap since Ronald Reagan. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs oversight subcommittee, has resurrected the tired old idea that the rain forests cause global warming. Therefore all we need to do to reverse global warming is to cut down the world's rain forests. Never mind that trees absorb carbon dioxide, the most prevalent green house gas. Rohrabacher maintains that older trees, when they die and decay are the main source of greenhouse gases. This idea ranks right up there with Jonah Goldberg's idea that gasoline is the true green fuel of all of the alternatives available to us. The Flat Earth society lives hand in hand with global warming and evolution deniers. Rep. Rohrabacher doesn't believe in human cause global warming so it is a puzzle as to why he is wasting his vast brain power on the  subject. He modestly says that he doesn't really know about such things so he is happy to have someone speak about it who is an expert in the field. Why in the world is he sounding off about the subject.A lot of greenhouse gases are naturally occurring, but the portion that comes from burning fossil fuels does the majority of the damage to our atmosphere, and trees are responsible for absorbing large amounts of CO2.

I know that we had tornadoes in the 1940s because I lived in the tornado belt in Kansas City. I even saw one out the back door of our home as a teenager as it happened within ten miles and witnessed the destruction first hand. Has global warming increased their numbers of violent storms? Perhaps; perhaps not. What does seem clear is that the intensity, violence and even size of these killer storms has increased. We are recording 100 year, and even some storm events that are greatest in recorded history, in terms of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and unusually hot weather and drought more frequently. Weather is random and it isn't possible to link any specific natural phenomenon to our spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Data on warming comes from all over the world, but the trend is certain and clear. The atmosphere is warming. Many statistical studies prove that Al Gore didn't cause it.

This blog was started in 2009, quite frankly, to advertise my book, Running on Empty: A Handbook for Understanding and Surviving the Energy Crisis. I wrote the book, not to make a bundle of money on it by scaring the public about global warming, but because I felt that the public needed a reference that brought together the myriad of subjects that comprised the situation lumped into the subject of "energy," with sub titles of "peak oil," climate change, global warming, ecology, sustainability, and dependence on foreign oil.The goal was to provide the information needed to help us to develop a rational energy policy to develop the alternative energies and the means to prevent unintended and unwanted climate change.

In June of 2010 I wrote several pieces about Columnist Jonah Goldberg and his outrageous statements about oil being the really true green fuel. This theme of his surfaces from time to time when he has trouble coming up with equally outrageous things to say in his column. The whale to which I refer in the title of this blog is the whoppers and half truths he tells. This Saturday, April 30 he drew a blank again and is making more ridiculous statements. He starts out saying that the green environmental community has realized that the fight against climate change has fizzled. He states President Obama's "sweeping" efforts to make good on his promise to turn back rising oceans was a total flop. Instead the push for clean energy, clean air and reversal of global warming only succeeded in losing jobs and causing the price of gasoline to go out of sight. Really? His reasons for this bogus statement are the whoppers.