I read it as people with influence speaking out so that we are less likely to get another incompetent president in office.

And we see a major oil guy saying that it’s time to go all out with renewables.

It’s getting pretty obvious that the Earth is going to get slammed by global warming. But it’s not bad news to hear that big time players are starting to get their game on.

It’s telling us that we’ve gone past the denial tipping point.

The day after the CNBC interview, Simmons and Hart drove up to the University of Maine to visit the Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center (AEWC), a 60,000-square-foot structural testing facility. The lab’s director, Habib Dagher, is one of the world’s leading experts in composite materials. He’s working with Simmons and Hart to develop new windmill-blade technology.

The AEWC guys gave a presentation showing how the project could be ready by 2020. Simmons then donned a hardhat and safety glasses and got a tour of the testing floor. As it happens, the lab had already been hired by a large wind-power company to fatigue-test a prototype for a 55-meter turbine blade. A ten-meter segment of the blade was locked in a device called a hydraulic actuator – what looked like two massive steel vise grips – receiving 38,000 pounds of pressure up and down every second. “This is really incredible,” Simmons announced. “I’m going to come back up here with two or three investor types I know.”

On the way out, I asked Simmons if seeing the lab made his virtual institute feel more real. “Oh, yeah, very impressive,” he said. “But we need to compress the time frame – 2020 is way too far out. That plan is fine assuming that we go along like we are now, and everything is okay in the world. But it’s not going to be okay. We’re going to need this stuff much sooner.”

Between this post and the one on methane leaks, how much bad news do you think we can absorb at one time??

if you’re interested, keep an eye on the web-site – they hope to have the presentations up there fairly soon.

Because some serious money wanted a candidate and John was out of a job and just kicking around.

Read up on Cindy’s father his friends.

–

(I wonder if he can remember why)

Is this right? Matt Simmons called John McCain illiterate? I’m not surprised that he IS illiterate on energy just that Matt Simmons called him on that in public. I mean April 1st was over 5 months ago.

And where does the carbon that was pulled out of sequestered storage end up?

(Love that Naphtha projection. Seems to fit this overall idea.)

Of course, what is really important is the team the candidate selects, and the problem is that that team is inevitably drawn 99% from the President’s own party.

I believe that Americans, unlike Europeans, are not realizing that in voting for a President, they are not really voting for an individual, but they are actually voting for a Party. The President is just a small part of what they are getting, because with the President comes a whole set of members of the same party who then occupy the appointed positions in government. Thus with Bush2 you got the junior folks of the Ford/Bush1 administrations taking over. During Bush2 these people were even more of a problem than Bush2 himself (e.g. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Ashcroft, Yoo, Gonzalez, Cox, and so on). McCain himself may not be so bad (though I would say he is seriously confused), but his administration will necessarily call upon the Republican party bench to fill the appointed positions of government, and those people are largely anti-science, deniers, ideological, militaristic, and dangerous. This “bench” is exactly the sort of people who are hostile to the very functions of government that they would be called upon to oversee, just as Christopher Cox has done nothing at the SEC to avert or mitigate the subprime crisis, because he is ideologically incapable of of believing the markets are not best left alone. This is the sort of person that McCain would have available to fill appointments. Scary.

That said, I simply believe this is a factually wrong statement — “Since nuclear and hydro are the only two power production methods that are both dependable and non-green house gas producing.”

The rest of your post is too opaque to comment on. To the extent that I follow it, I’m just not sure who if anyone is building small reactors of the kind you are describing.