http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=40

Also useful for cliimate/energy connection is Nobel physicist Burton Richter’s talk [a subset of which I heard at a 30 person meeting in our town 3-4 years ago]:

http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/ do/ brichter/ presentations/ 2004_10_05.htm

More exciting is the current high spot prices for coal. Another Good Thing.

Rutledge (I think that’s his name, not sure), of CalTech, predicts Peak Coal about 2025 CE. Still another Good Thing.

Push bioenergy

http://biopact.com/

http://www.icis.com/blogs/biofuels/

as fast as second and later generation biomass stocks become available.

That is why we need humor:

http://climatejokeawards.blogspot.com/

For too long, AGW believers have avoided discussing the cost and difficulty of making the transition to a carbon-free economy–as if that were even possible.

The developed world will muddle and stumble along while impoverished and arid nations and their population succumbs or migrate to unwelcoming nations.

The environmentalist and progressive blogs are crammed full of ideas with no price tags or resource demands attached. It is as if they are peeling back tabs to reveal the next solution all will must accept and.…..what! pay for! The elixirs are falling like leaves in autumn, ethanol (starvation); cellulosic ethanol (an idea with no hope); hydrogen fuel (splashed down like a rock in a pond)’ Carbon capture and sequestration (an absolute pipedream boondoggle); wind and solar (the 2 percent solution); plug in hybrids (fancy extravagance for cash strapped commuters…stop me, I need to catch my breath.

This current US economic downturn has the legs to go global and it has no precedent despite what educators and economists will tell us. $100+ oil and deflation of US assets in a time of global credit crunch with average Americans carrying more than $7000 of credit card debt…oh, the list goes on and it gets worse with each statistic.

The pushback from the regulars will be ’so, what are you saying? The problem too great and the task too expensive to do anything about AGW?’

No, I am arguing for some serious truth telling and facing the realities that global capital needs and capital availability are on two planets and they are drifting farther apart. Tell the public all the ugly and not just the optimism. Oncologists have a much tougher job than environmental leaders because they have to go one on one with real people. We get to wing off reports that tell us how we can be carbon free by 2030 if we only DO IT.

Werner Earhard - the scientologist - had a long running argument with Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet saying that we could end world hunger if we just get our heads around a solution.

Lappe, god love her, argued rightly it was political and economic schemes that are at the root of world hunger and attacking them was the beginning of the solution to world hunger. He would not hear of that because it meant the rich world would have to see itself as the culprit.

Well, getting our heads around walking to work, growing local foods and the many 1001 ideas to save the planet are just ideas until we put real money on the table and that spells HIGHER TAXES. Yes, if we are in it for the long haul we will have to pay our way out of this one.

John L. McCormick

I have repeatedly blogged on the price. The IPCC writes about it at length. McKinsey too.

Try, if you can, to put some thought into your comments. There is a world of hurt out there already among bill payers, heads of households stuggling harder to keep up. As energy costs increase, why don’t we just cut to the chase and tell the whinners to shiver in the dark.

Terry, weigh in here. YOU made a valid point. David made no sense.

John McCormick

The world of hurt is worse in, say, Haiti. Also, all across Africa, people are very seriously affected by the high prices of petroleum products.

One (partial) solutiion is bioenergy:

http://biopact.com/

http://www.icis.com/blogs/biofuels/

When J. Piermont Morgan was asked, according to the story, what the stock market would do, he allegedly said “It will fluctuate.”

Looking at the historical trend of crude oil prices, there are indeed ups and downs superimposed upon a secular upward trend. The reasons for the trend are clear, the reasons for the fluctuations opaque.

A bet that the price of crude will go down some amount in the next few years is a good one. If you set a particular price on a particular date the bet is quite, quite chancy. Rouhgly akin to the difference between the climate and the weather, IMHO.

So really the story here is that the dollar has dropped and everything else that we buy in dollars is going to cost more.

Many countries in OPEC are talking of using the Euro for it’s transactions. If Bush and the US tries to push OPEC at all, they just would do it.

To get a real view on whether the price of oil has increased world wide, you might want to see what the oil price has done to the Euro, Yen and Pound and other currencies.

As far as heating the house, I’ve made the house so none of the water pipes in the house freezes no matter what the temperature gets down to and the furnace doesn’t run when nobodies home. I’ve isolated 3 rooms in the house with gas fireplaces, (I used to install them for a living) so a person only has to heat the one room in the house that’s occupied. We have only heated the whole house less than 12 hours a week. Last summer I super insulated the bedroom (R70 ceiling, R33 walls) when we thought we should resheetrock (older house.) It’s really made a difference.

Do any of those conditions sound familiar?

Heat pumps require electricity, but they can provide some three units of heat energy for every unit of electric energy expended. We have heat pumps in our (around-year) summer home, and the investment pays itself back in 3-5 years.

There are two types of heat pump: outside air based, or ground based. The latter are more expensive but work better if it is very cold a large part of the year.

About fuel cells, I am less sure about their economy. They are some 60% efficient, i.e. 40% comes out as waste heat. The remaining 60% is “multiplied” by the heat pump to 180%, totaling an efficiency of 220% compared to your current solution.

I hope you can do something with this thinking.

You might care to speculate $$ that such will happen again. I certainly will not.

http://www.iht.com/ articles/ 2008/ 03/ 09/ business/ crop.php

which does not fully report the various ‘food’ riots in South Asia nor the semi-starvation in Haiti, as examples.

The point is that food and energy are both in short supply just now…

Energy up 49 percent
Industrial metals up 21 percent
Precious metals up 48 percent
Agriculture up 59 percent
For the last 12 months

Much of this increase in prices is that the Federal Reserve has to fight the slow economy and has temporarily stopped fighting inflation. But the Federal Reserve will do what it has to do if inflation becomes the major problem.

Prices have I’m sure some component of going up because of demand and supply around the world and some because the dollar is dropping. It gets complicated.