clean energy

A leading climate scientist whose pirated e-mails were bared for world scrutiny in the so-called "climategate" incident is making some points about the climate-change debate, and scientists' relationship with the public, that have needed saying for some time.

Hat tip to Matt Preusch of The Oregonian for spotting one piece in The Wall Street Journal by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia in England. Hulme also held forth in a longer and more involved column, written in conjunction with science critic-questioner Jerome Ravetz, for the BBC. (It's also worth noting that Hulme is the author of a book I intend to find, Why We Disagree About Climate Change.)

Now, I have to say that I was taken aback by the way scientists involved in the email exchanges seem to have been trying to squelch the dissemination of data, and even schemed to block publication of science they found ... sorry, can't help myself... inconvenient.

The e-mail exchanges between prominent American and British climate researchers revealed some disturbing points about how some of the scientists involved in this field have conducted themselves.

But as I read Hulme's piece, it came to me that he is on point about this: We are all arguing about the science of climate change, when what we ought to be arguing about is our value systems and our political inclinations.

Hulme's WSJ article, which is fairly short, is worth a read.

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Utah's Bureau of Land Management went on a tear.

In December, it auctioned off 77 leases -- to 100,000 acres of federal land -- to oil and gas companies intent on drilling Utah.  Some of the leases would have allowed drilling within view of the Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

Now, 60 of those leases have been deemed illegal and revoked by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in response to a federal restraining order that halted the sale of the drilling rights. 

He based his decision on a report that "found that people in the Bureau of Land Management's Utah office, which oversaw the sales, believed that energy concerns should override environmental or recreational ones," according to the LA Times, which quoted Salazar as saying, "There is no such preference for the use of the land."

Environmentalists hailed Salazar's decision, which was decried by energy groups as antithetical to the Obama Administration's wish for energy independence.

Amazing as it may sound, that two-coal-fired-power-plants-a-week building orgy going on in China could prove to be completely unnecessary.

It was on Twitter that I discovered a kinda wonky news service that calls itself SciDevNet (I think I've got the capitalization right...)  that just ran a story headlined "Wind power could blow away coal in China."

Do tell! This could be significant. 

Seems that by 2030 China could be getting all its juice from wind turbines. There is a tradeoff, though: They'd have to cover an area three-quarters the size of Texas with those big propellers.

As with the idea of blanketing much of the United States' southwestern deserts with solar arrays, you have to wonder what kind of environmental effects that might have. For example, what will this do to migrating birds? It's a question we've been asking ourselves here at InvestigateWest as we report on the Pacific Flyway.

But when you consider what an environmental and human disaster Chinas' Three Gorges Dam is becoming, and the population growth the country is facing, wind turbines seem like something that's at least got to be considered. (What about solar? Folks -- are there downsides to solar other than the fact that it uses water in the desert? We're all ears.)

SciDevNet's Shanshan Li and Yidong Gong tell us that the study they're writing about, by Chinese and U.S.

A Colorado company is growing pond scum on Southern Ute Indian tribal land for biofuels energy, reports the Durango Herald. "We are using the oil that algae create for diagnostic purposes right now," Douglas Henton, chief executive officer of Solix Biofuels tells the newspaper. "Our commerical partners are testing it to see how suitable it is in different (fuel) conversions."

Joel Connelly of seattlepi.com has a lengthy and detailed post on Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire's testimony at the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, with Gregoire in her traditional form as she extols the jobs benefits of green energy. Her prepared remarks for the testimomy today have Washington as the fifth largest state for wind power.

Are geothermal energy projects a boon for Western states or the beginnings of environmental disaster?

President Obama has heralded geothermal energy's role in the U.S. “clean energy transformation” -- funded by millions of dollars from the Department of Energy. But a series of earthquakes set off by small geothermal projects in Northern California's Lake and Sonoma Counties has residents worried that those seeking energy in the earth's depths will hit a major fault line.

Now, The New York Times reports that two federal agencies are halting a California project to break up bedrock deep in the earth to extract its geothermal energy until they review whether the project by AltaRock Energy could spawn earthquakes.

AltaRock Energy downplayed the dangers of its California deep-drilling project to tap geothermal energy by breaking up hard rock two miles deep to extract its heat.  Seismologists agree that human activity can trigger quakes, which residents of Switzerland remember well.

AltaRock Energy is a renewable energy development company with headquarters in Sausalito, CA, and a technology development office in Seattle, WA.