August 23, 2010 at 4:00 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Futures Research, Telework/telecommuting
T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men (1925) ends with the following stanza:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We collectively seem to be striving toward Eliot’s end as we fail time after time to change our momentum toward heat death. Although weather is not the same as climate, are we warm enough these day? Naysayers about climate change, who crowed about its fraudulent predictions last winter, are strangely silent this summer. Even in coastal California where, until the past few days, the summer was day after day of fog and gloom, temperatures below normal. Now it’s in the upper 90s (mid-30s Celsius). But last winter and this summer are just the vagaries of the weather, right? The same goes for the floods in Pakistan, China and Tennessee and the drought and fires in Russia. Just a series of flukes.
Continue reading . . . but a whimper
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July 26, 2010 at 1:47 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
First the (hopefully) good news: On 15 July the House of Representatives passed HR 1722, the Federal Telework Improvements Act. If finally enacted, the bipartisan bill would:
- Instruct the Office of Personnel Management to develop a uniform, government-wide telework policy for federal employees;
- Strengthen the federal government’s capacity to effectively integrate telework into Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP);
- Designate one person as a Telework Managing Officer within every agency;
- Provide telework training and education to both employees and supervisors [Note: the government apparently has developed some training materials for this; you can get a copy of their book for $99 if you're a government person, $149 if you're not. On the other hand you can buy a copy of Managing Telework from Amazon for $40 and change.];
- Require the Office of Personnel Management to compile government-wide data on telework; and
- Require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate agency compliance and produce an annual report to Congress that is publicly available on the internet.
The Senate, although it has a version similar to HR 1722, has yet to approve the bill and time is short before the summer recess. Final approval by the Senate and signing by the President would finally put some teeth into the decades-old plan to seriously increase the amount of teleworking performed by federal employees. The telework-tracking provision of the bill would also enable much more accurate estimation of the environmental impacts of telework.
If you support telework and wish to give a boost to its extension to a much larger group of people, please let your local representatives know about the possibilities.
Now for the bad news: last week the Senate dropped all pretense of passing an energy/global warming bill. Continue reading Good news and bad news from DC
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June 25, 2010 at 2:05 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Peak oil
Aside from the finger pointing by the various parties involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster at the Macondo oil well, as discussed in the previous blog, another theme has grown in importance over the past few weeks. In addition to “Who’s to blame?” we now have “Who’s really in charge?”
Brittania roils the waves
BP, often called recently by its former name British Petroleum, says it’s responsible but so, too, are a few other firms who might share the blame. Those firms might also share the costs of the cleanup (assuming that the continuing oil flow is ever stopped) unless BP is proved in court (some time in the next two or three decades) to be negligent. BP has ponied up at least $20 billion to be held in escrow as a start for repairing the damages caused by the spill. Meanwhile the damages mount and the compensation for them seems, to the victims at least, to be trickling in at best.
Continue reading Pique Oil: Digging the Whole
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May 25, 2010 at 3:37 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Peak oil, Telework/telecommuting
The latest events in the Gulf of Mexico have given a new dimension to the energy dilemma. With anywhere from 5,000 to 80,000 gallons of crude (depending on the expert you believe) spewing into the Gulf every day. BP (the well owner) is mad at Transocean (the owner of the exploded oil rig), Cameron (the company that built the failed blowout preventer) and Halliburton (the people who were supposed to have sealed the well). Fishermen, environmentalists, everybody (except attorneys) is mad at BP, et al. The public’s heat has now added the federal government to the list of “how could you let this happen” culprits.
Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
For years it has been clear that, as the easy sources of oil are depleted, riskier and more expensive methods of mining more reclusive oil fields have been necessary. That means, for example, going offshore instead of drilling on dry land. The crucial difference between dry land and offshore drilling is that oil spills are much more easily contained and stopped in the dry land version than they are out to sea. If the spill occurs at the underwater wellhead, then its seriousness depends on how far underwater the leak is. When the leak is in relatively shallow water, as it was in the Santa Barbara oil spills in the late 1960s, the process of stopping the leak and cleaning up is far simpler than when the leak is a mile below the surface of the water.
And guess what? A substantial portion of the Earth’s yet-to-be drilled oil reserves is in even deeper water than the BP well. So if you liked the current Gulf leaks you’ll love the ones yet to come. This is not a comforting thought for many people who are, finally, beginning to rethink our need for oil.
Because the real, fundamental culprit in this fiasco is . . . US!
Continue reading Pique Oil
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April 25, 2010 at 4:09 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
There’s an old joke about an effective way to train a mule. Step one: Hit him over the head with a two-by-four because first you have to get his attention.
This past month Iceland’s volcano Eyafjallajökull has definitely gotten the attention of almost anyone bound to or from Europe. Although estimates vary, the costs of the ash-induced travel interruptions since the beginning of April are in the tens of billions of dollars/euros/pounds. Those costs are measured in flights canceled, insurance claims, hotel and restaurant charges and lost productivity, among others, and are guaranteed to continue to mount as the volcano keeps erupting and the wind patterns closely resemble the recent ones. (For a different view of the productivity issue check Lucy Kellaway’s article in the 26 April Financial Times.)
There has also been a sudden rash in videoconferencing and similar forms of teleworking, according to press reports.
Now the question is: has anybody learned anything from all this?
Continue reading It takes a volcano?
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August 18, 2009 at 10:25 am
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
On August 18th, 2009, the New York Times published an editorial that pretty much sums up the current state of affairs: Congress appears to be impervious to the usual scientific statements about global warming but just might listen to an argument that focuses on national security. The trigger in this case is a report published in 2007(!) by “the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank”. CNA warned that, as global warming increases so, too, will the threat of climate-induced political tensions, mass migrations, local and regional conflicts, and so on. All of these changes can negatively affect our security as well as that of other nations.
Having spent almost two decades in one phase or another of national security pursuits I can attest to the superior ability of defense issues to get the attention of Congress. This was particularly the case for issues that might take decades to unfold, as is now the case with measures to avoid the global warming tipping point. Having later spent a few decades in non-defense research I can also attest to the feeling that it is much harder to get a million dollars for non-defense research than it is to get the same amount for defense research.
So, unfortunately, the Times editorial has a cogent point.
Continue reading When all else fails try war
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July 20, 2009 at 10:59 am
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Futures Research, Telework/telecommuting
It seems like yesterday that we watched the first men to actually walk on the moon. When I was a freshman in Lawrence College (now University), an avid science fiction fan, the woman sitting next to me in Physics 101 asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated. My answer was: “Put man on the moon!” Thus continued the steps I took to become a “rocket scientist” (at age 15 I was the youngest member of the American Rocket Society). Although my post-BA career mostly wound through the military space program I was able to help NASA decide on the cameras to use for surveying the Moon in order to pick suitable landing sites.
And now it’s 40 years later. In the words of Walter Cronkite on the grand occasion of the first landing; “Whew!” What a magnificent sight! Yet much has happened—and failed to happen—since that day.
Continue reading Wow! 40 years! An autobiographical note
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May 24, 2009 at 4:04 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
There’s a growing mound of evidence that my previous comments about the need for concern over energy use and global warming have been too optimistic. The 30 April 2009 issue of Nature has several articles, under the heading: The Coming Climate Crunch, that make the scientific case for a higher level of teeth gnashing. Its editorial Time to Act begins with the statement:
“Without a solid commitment from the world’s leaders, innovative ways to combat climate change are likely to come to nothing. It is not too late yet — but we may be very close.”
The rest of the climate-oriented reports in that issue contain a mixture of bad and maybe not so bad news. At the current rates, as determined by a variety of analyses, the earth is warming even faster than the upper-limit scenarios of a few months ago. As we collectively increase our mining of carbon for later release into the atmosphere as CO2 we will accelerate our race toward the day when we reach the point where catastrophic climate changes are upon us.
To avoid that fate there are some possible alternatives. These include development of thousands, even millions of scrubbers to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and geoengineering schemes to increase the earth’s albedo or block incoming solar rays. The problem is that none of these options are beyond the lab test phase. Even if the lab tests are successful, getting from there to thousands of operating installations is likely a matter of decades.
Clearly, business as usual is not an option if we want to avoid roasting ourselves, our kids, and any generations that survive after them. So, with that as background, guess what our global leaders are doing about it.
On average they’re saying: “Wait until we’re sure.”
Wait until when, exactly? 2050? 2100? When will they decide to act? Either of those dates is way too late if the scientific evidence so far is even close to correct. Continue reading The waiting game
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April 22, 2009 at 1:21 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
It’s that time of the year again. Time to celebrate the dwindling number of options available to us to save the earth in a form in which we’d like to dwell. One of the best ways to celebrate is to spur, goad, urge, nag and/or incite others to actually do something about energy and the environment.
Here’s an option: Join Repower America‘s and Al Gore’s campaign to support Henry Waxman and his fellow Congresspeople in their new energy legislation efforts. Here’s their message:
Hi,
Right now, Congress is debating clean energy legislation that will jumpstart our economy and help solve the climate crisis. I’ve joined with Vice President Al Gore and millions of others to show my support — will you?
Please click here to sign our petition in support of this crucial clean energy legislation: Here!
That should get you off to a good start without a huge amount of effort. But wait, there’s more!
Continue reading Earth Day ToDos
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March 25, 2009 at 4:41 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment
Homeostasis n. The tendency of a system to maintain internal stability, owing to the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus tending to disturb its normal condition or function.
Let’s apply that description to the status and dynamics of that largest of all local systems: the earth. One of the most common topics of discussion among the chattering classes these days is global warming and climate change. Humankind, it appears increasingly certain as the scientific evidence grows, is warming up the earth’s surface by our activities. Foremost among these is our burning of carbon-based fuels. This is causing the earth to deviate from “its normal condition or function” according to this growing heap of historical/geological evidence.
Continue reading The homeostasis solution
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