I Was Totally Right To Be Skeptical!

By: Aaron Datesman

I wrote here that I was skeptical about a claim an NREL scientist made in my presence at an industry conference that the offshore wind resource in the US is sufficient to meet the country’s electricity demand. It turns out that I was totally right to be skeptical!

The gross resource has been quantified by state, water depth, distance from shore, and wind class throughout a band extending out to 50 nautical miles from the U.S. coastline.

This total gross wind resource is estimated at more than 4,000 GW, or roughly four times the generating capacity currently carried on the U.S. electric grid. (underlining mine)

The excerpt comes from a report recently released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL. Although I’ve been watching for more than a month, I haven’t seen this remarkable finding published anywhere in the press except for a brief mention in Salon.

The Salon article does include the very important additional point that only a portion of the available resource could possibly be harvested - perhaps only 60%. That’s still more electrical energy, totally renewable and zero-carbon, than we currently use, although numerous fundamental issues regarding grid integration and intermittency represent serious technical hurdles. Nevertheless, the scale of the opportunity is absolutely staggering.

What’s interesting to me is this: while you probably didn’t see any news about this fascinating engineering study, you probably did see some related news about the business-doings of Google. But this news doesn’t make very much sense without the context I just provided above.

Google and a New York financial firm have each agreed to invest heavily in a proposed $5 billion transmission backbone for future offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard that could ultimately transform the region’s electrical map. The 350-mile underwater spine, which could remove some critical obstacles to wind power development, has stirred excitement among investors, government officials and environmentalists who have been briefed on it.

The press in this country lets us down in so many ways, absolutely every day, that it continuously stretches my ability to believe their uselessness. I think there would be more demand for ambitious goals in renewable energy deployment if the public knew more about the scale of the opportunity which our leaders currently are resolutely not exploiting. But I’m grateful to the Times for including this gem, buried so deep in the article I doubt very many people noticed it:

Mr. Kempton of the University of Delaware and Mr. Wellinghoff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the backbone would offer another plus: reducing one of wind power’s big problems, variability of output.

“Along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, we tend to have storm tracks that move along the coast and somewhat offshore,” Mr. Kempton said.

If storm winds were blowing on Friday off Virginia, they might be off Delaware by Saturday and off New Jersey by Sunday, he noted. Yet the long spine would ensure that the amount of energy coming ashore held roughly constant.

Now THAT’s fascinating: if we built a large enough generation and distribution network for renewable energy, a system which starts off as variable, unpredictable, unmanageable, and unusable at small scales could become consistent, predictable, and manageable. Once again, it’s not that we don’t have the resources, the knowledge, or the wealth to make the energy transition we need to make to meet the global warming challenge. Our failure is simply a failure to think at a scale appropriate to the opportunities we have and to the challenges we face. We have no talent for thinking big, no audacity.

On a personal note, I was gone for several months because I have moved my home to Washington, DC, where I am now working for the Office of Science within the Department of Energy. My expertise does not lie in the energy field, however, and all of the views I express in this blearff are strictly both my own and normal.

— Aaron Datesman

Can't Argue With That

Chris Hedges says:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

The rest.

In defense of liberals, though, we...uh. Yeah, I got nothing.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Almost...There...

I realize this site has been extremely quiet lately. The reason is that a bunch of new stuff is being prepared here that will be appearing in the next few days. And even that's just going to be the beginning over there. I'll explain more soon.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Five Dollar Friday

Explanation of Five Dollar Friday here. Follow who else is giving on twitter.

As on every Friday this month, $5 goes today to Emily Henochowicz. I feel exactly the same way as this giant fleshy teardrop she's drawn:

—Jonathan Schwarz

New Video from Allie Brosh

It's called "How to Put Yourself Inside of a Coat." I'd say it's Robert Benchley-esque, except I've never actually seen the short movies he made, so I don't know.

She also has a new post:

I spent the rest of the evening in a hyperglycemic fit, alternately running around like a maniac and regurgitating the multi-colored remains of my conquest all over my grandparents' carpet. I was so miserable, but my suffering was small compared to the satisfaction I felt every time my horrible, conniving mother had to watch me retch up another rainbow of sweet, semi-digested success: this is for you, mom. This is what happens when you try to get between me and cake.

This reminds me of a similarly-triumphant moment of my childhood that involved copious vomiting, except with me it was mayonnaise sandwiches and a mother who didn't believe me when I told her at the National Geographic lecture that I was sick and wanted to go home.

—Jonathan Schwarz

The Funny Part About Massive Worldwide Financial Corruption

I think my favorite thing about Inside Job (go see it) is how it's like it's entire million-dollar movie created simply to make one person happy: Dean Baker.

"I went to see that movie Inside Job in Washington, D.C. It was pretty good, but there was this guy with a beard behind us who spent the whole movie crying and saying 'yes, yes!'"

—Jonathan Schwarz

10,000 Ways for Banks to Say Fuck You

This is buried in a New York Times story about the government's legal settlement with Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide (now owned by Bank of America):

Bank of America is paying Mr. Mozilo’s legal bills. Countrywide is paying $5 million toward Mr. Sambol’s repayment to investors and $20 million of Mr. Mozilo’s reparations.

So for all of 2009 before Bank of America repaid their TARP money, we owned them and were paying for Mozilo's defense. And of course we essentially still own Bank of America in less formal ways, and so continue to get to pay his legal team and part of his settlement. Sweet.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the exact amount Mozilo took home from 2003-8 while he was destroying the world economy was $470,686,861. His legal settlement with the government required him to pay $67.5 million in penalties and reparations to investors. But since Countrywide covered that $20 million, he's only coming up with $47.5 million personally—or just over 10%. Like a bad tip.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Inside Job

Go see Inside Job. It's not a perfect movie; for instance, a better title for it would be "7,000 Jabbering White People." The director, Charles Ferguson, is an elite technocrat, and 98% of it is an elite, technocratic view of what happened. But it's still well worth watching—even someone like Ferguson is so shocked that he clearly ends up wanting to see Wall Street crushed. And certainly everyone else will want to jump up on the screen and gouge out the eyes of all the investment bankers with their thumbs.

The best parts are when Ferguson humiliates several corrupt Ivy League economists. I was particularly happy to see him deal with Harvard's Martin Feldstein, for exactly the reasons mentioned here last year. Of course, this is most satisfying only to a certain type of person (*raises hand*) but embarrassing them is the only satisfaction we're going to get, so we might as well enjoy it. I just wish I'd been interviewed for the movie, so I could have said: "A lot of top economists are basically mob lawyers...except better paid."

If you need more persuading, check out the two thumbs up from Dean Baker and Balkanization.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

By: John Caruso

Given that even someone as hip to Democratic chicanery as Jon was bamboozled by Obama's charms, I thought I should re-post this advice from February of 2008. Please, I beg you: read it, share it, live it.

If a Democrat wins the presidency, no matter who it is, I'll consider them guilty until proven innocent.  I'll give them zero benefit of the doubt.  I won't feel one shred of hope or optimism about their impending time in power, and in fact I'll expect the worst.  I'll take every positive thing they say as a lie and every negative thing they say as an understatement.

After they assume office, there's only one thing that will make me consider changing my mind on this: concrete actions on major issues that indisputably contradict it.  And even then I'll assume that each good action is sui generis—improbable to have happened in the first place and unlikely to be repeated.

This isn't a prediction (though in light of American history, especially over the past few decades, it may as well be).  It's also neither pessimism nor hopelessness.  It's a recognition that lofty rhetoric not only has the power to blind us to what really matters, but that practically without exception in mainstream politics, that's exactly what it's intended to do.  It's an acknowledgment that those who seek power almost universally do so at the expense of their integrity and to the detriment of their humanity, and that to allow ourselves to lose sight of that is to participate in our own deception.

True hope comes from below—not from above.

— John Caruso

Five Dollar Friday

Explanation of Five Dollar Friday here. Follow who else is giving on twitter.

As on every Friday this month, $5 goes today to Emily Henochowicz. Hopefully it will, among other things, give her a little help completing a possible movie:

My film, my film! My beautiful baby film! Intimate thoughts.

Line.
Wondrous feelings.

Color.
Truest story.

Time.
Echo my life:

Loose sight of levers.
See divided landscapes.
Reveal scars.

Looking for ultimate freedom.

—Jonathan Schwarz

No Good Idea Ever Dies

Justin Elliot of Salon is reading a new book by General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. And apparently Shelton describes how in 1997, someone in the Clinton cabinet—from the way it's written, probably Madeleine Albright—suggested that the U.S. let a plane get shot down in order to provide a pretext to invade Iraq:

...one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?”

The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, “Of course we can ...” which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.

“You can?” was the excited reply.

“Why, of course we can,” I countered. “Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go.”

This sounds completely plausible, since coming up with some bullshit excuse to attack Iraq was in the air for several years. Kenneth Pollack suggested it in his book The Threatening Storm, although no one celebrating what a brilliant and wise book it was ever mentioned it:

Assembling a [] coalition would be infinitely easier if the United States could point to a smoking gun with Iraqi fingerprints on it—some new Iraqi outrage that would serve to galvanize international opinion and create the pretext for an invasion...

There are probably [] courses the United States could take that might prompt Saddam to make a foolish, aggressive move, that would then become the "smoking gun" justifying an invasion. An aggressive U.S. covert action campaign might provoke Saddam to retaliate overtly, providing a casus belli...Other means might also be devised.

Then of course there's this:

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, [Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser...

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

And they absolutely did try something along these lines:

THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

But in any case, it's always interesting to find out how the Democratic foreign policy establishment are not just scumbags, but scumbags in exactly the same way the Republican foreign policy establishment are.

BONUS: Recall that Madeleine Albright played the Colin Powell role in our previous dramatic-presentation-of-airtight-evidence-at-the-UN-Security-Council-for-why-we-had-to-attack-Iraq that also turned out to be complete bullshit.

—Jonathan Schwarz