Google's Solar Grove  

Wired has an article on the planting of solar groves at the GooglePlex. I bet the denzens will be amongst the first people to be mostly plugin hybrid drivers in 5 years time.

Parking lots are the traditional wasteland of the suburban biosphere -- flat, ugly, resistant to landscaping and immune to whatever aesthetic ideals animate the adjoining architecture.

But now these asphalt acres are getting their day in the sun, with search giant Google joining other companies in planting groves of pole-mounted solar panels between the rows of Saabs and SUVs, generating clean power and providing a little shade at the same time.

Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters is getting a 1.6-megawatt solar system -- enough to power about 1,000 homes -- that will feed about 30 percent of the complex's power demand. About a third of the 9,000 solar panels Google's installing will take the form of overhanging parking shades at the million-square-foot campus in Mountain View. The others will be mounted on rooftops.

Google hired Energy Innovations to design and build the project, which should be completed by spring. Taking advantage of Google's parking lots helped surmount some of the challenges inherent in grafting solar panels onto the company's eclectic architecture.

"It was a design challenge," says company spokesman Steve Chadima. "What you want is a gigantic, flat Wal-Mart roof; what we had was a campus with 11 buildings, interesting architecture and challenging angles."

Beyond utility, a parking lot solar project makes a statement, says Bob Noble, an architect at San Diego-based Envision Solar, which offers similar, but more organic-looking, "solar trees" to green corporations.

"Parking lot installations are a visible demonstration of the company's commitment to the environment," says Noble. "You can talk about your energy savings, your recycling and green practices, but the sight of solar panels in the parking lot is an emblem of that commitment."

While Google is its most ambitious project to date, Energy Innovations has already done a half-dozen solar installations in parking lots. Last year, the company finished a park-and-ride lot in Vacaville, California, that uses overhanging solar panels to generate power on fair days, and protect passengers from the rain during foul weather.

Planting solar trees in parking lots is far easier -- and cheaper -- than retrofitting rooftops with panels, Noble and Chadima agree.

Wired also has an interview with the author of "Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction", Terry Tamminen.

Our love of driving is killing us. While we think of car crashes as causing fatalities, the production and transportation of fuel also significantly undermines public health.

In his book Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, Terry Tamminen outlines the direct and indirect impact that petroleum consumption has on millions of Americans every year.

Tamminen, a former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, spoke with Wired News about how we got into this mess, who is to blame, and his state's current efforts to hold energy providers and the auto industry responsible for their environmental impact.

Wired News: How many casualties do petroleum products cause each year?

Terry Tamminen: Nationally about 100,000 people die every year from preventable air pollution, and another 6.5 million go to the hospital with respiratory and other diseases related to smog and polluted air. But that's probably just the tip of the iceberg, as many people die of heart disease or heart attacks caused by hearts or lungs strained by air pollution and restricted airways.

People outside of the U.S. also pay for our oil addiction because of the damage done to their environment at the sites where oil is drilled. There are entire villages where the tribes were decimated because there was virtually no environmental regulation, and oil pipelines broke and huge fires swept up communities.

Also, many people die in conflicts over oil rights as local rebels and warlords fight to get oil companies out of these places through kidnappings and terrorism. And then there's the military lives we expend when trying to protect our oil interests in places like Iraq.

WN: You pin most of the blame on the auto and oil companies for polluting our skies, but aren't we free to choose our vehicles and how we use them?

Tamminen: We are not blameless as we do ... drive cars when we could walk or take a bike. But consumers haven't really had a choice because they didn't have accurate information about the health risks. Much like the tobacco industry responded to pressure from regulators about the dangers of smoking by forming the Tobacco Institute, the automobile industry formed an alliance to study the health impact of their products, but it was really an organization created to produce bogus studies and conspire to hide the truth.

The auto industry worked to stall the science that could reduce pollution by saying that it was too expensive or technically impossible. This delayed the introduction of catalytic converters and the removal of leaded gasoline and has kept the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards from changing. Today we continue to overpay in "lives per gallon" because the auto industry pushes high octane gasoline which requires more energy to produce but provides no benefit to most of the vehicles on the road.

Consumer choice has been reduced by companies including General Motors, Standard Oil (which later became ExxonMobil) and Firestone Tires, which conspired to eliminate the clean electric trains that were being used for mass transit around the country. During the 1940s and 1950s, these companies created the National City Lines, a shell company that bought up the local clean electric transit systems and tore up the tracks so that no one else could ever use them. The companies replaced the trains with dirty diesel buses and encouraged people to buy cars. The group was eventually found guilty in federal court for anti-trust violations, but it was too late to do anything about it.

TreeHugger has a report on a new high efficiency LED light from Korea.

Seoul semiconductor has created a light emitting diode that emits roughly 240 lumens and claims the highest efficiency (amount of electricity to amount of light) of any light source. Fluorescents hit 70 lumens per watt, incandescents max out at 15, but this new LED emits roughly 100 lumens per watt. The results, if and when this technology gets cheap enough for the mass market, will be smaller, more efficient light sources, and lights that can exist in far different form factors than the current bulb or tube shapes. The devices also have applications in consumer electronics, specifically LCD back lights and projectors.

LEDs with similar efficiencies have been produced at universities, but this is the first time a corporation has begun creating these superefficient LEDs. Seoul Semiconductor says that, while this advancement is significant, they're moving forward with even more efficient LEDs. They expect, for example, a 145 lumen per watt LED by 2008, which would double the efficiency of standard compact fluorescents. We just have to wait and see how expensive they are.

TreeHugger also reports that there are moves for all new homes in the UK to be Carbon-Neutral by 2016.

All new homes in England will have to be carbon neutral by 2016, under proposals announced by the Department for Communities and Local Government. The UK's 21 million homes are responsible for 27% of carbon emissions; the plan to neutralize those emissions, which is light on specifics at this point, includes tighter building and planning rules, and a star rating system that reveals a property's energy efficiency to potential home buyers.

Conservation group WWF gave it a preliminary thumbs up; said WWF's director of campaigns, Paul King: "The code sends the right signal, loud and clear, for house builders to put zero carbon development at the top of their agenda." On the other side of the coin, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), who published a report warning that key environmental targets were "undeliverable" unless households cut the amount of resources they consumed earlier this year, noted that existing properties also needed to be made more energy efficient if the UK will come close to its goals of reducing carbon emissions by 60% from 1990 levels by 2050, when at least 75% of current properties are still expected to be in use. We'll hope that the proposal becomes law so we can hear more about how this idea will transform from paper ideas to real world practice.

The BBC has a report about the lurking menace of the deep - methane hydrates - which have been found at surprisingly shallow depths off Canada.

Scientists drilling ocean sediments off Canada have discovered methane ices at much shallower depths than expected. The finding has important implications for climate studies, they believe.

The melting of hydrates, as they are known, is a suspected contributor to past and present increases in atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas. If shallow ices are destabilised in a warming world, it could have a positive feedback effect and drive temperatures even higher, the researchers warned.

"The rate of increase in the Earth's atmosphere for methane is much faster than that for carbon dioxide," said Timothy Collett, the co-chief scientist of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). "Methane is 20 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The source of this methane is uncertain, but there are a number of scientists who have looked at gas hydrates as contributing to this recent change."

Hydrates are a frozen mixture of water and gas, primarily methane. They form under the frigid temperatures and high pressures found in ocean sediments and under the permafrost on land. In the ocean, hydrates exist in a "zone of stability" under the seafloor in locations where water depths exceed 500m.

...

As well as suggesting hydrates would be more concentrated at deeper levels below the seafloor, the old model also predicted the ices would be evenly distributed among the various grain sizes that comprise the sediments. This has now been found wanting, too.

"After repeatedly recovering high concentrations of gas hydrate in sand-rich layers of sediment, we're reporting strong support for sediment grain size as a controlling factor in gas hydrate formation," said Dr Collett, who is affiliated to the US Geological Survey.

Vast reserves of the ices are thought to exist. One calculation suggests some 10,000 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the form of gas hydrate around the world. That is twice the volume stored in all known reserves of fossil fuels - oil, coal and natural gas.

"If you start looking at this as a carbon sink - the amount of carbon that could be available to climate change and to altering the atmosphere and its chemistry - this could be a very significant contribution," explained Dr Collett.

Hydrates have naturally excited the attention of mineral companies, and a number of them are now investing considerable sums of money in trying to exploit the resource.

BP will begin an exploratory programme to drill hydrates under the Alaskan permafrost in the New Year.

The BBC also reports that American scientists are mounting a counter-attack against the Republican / Exxon axis and their war on science.

Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process. The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in government policy.

According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is being misrepresented for political reasons. It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives.

The Union has released an "A to Z" guide that it says documents dozens of recent allegations involving censorship and political interference in federal science, covering issues ranging from global warming to sex education.

Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity.

"It's very difficult to make good public policy without good science, and it's even harder to make good public policy with bad science," said Dr Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "In the last several years, we've seen an increase in both the misuse of science and I would say an increase of bad science in a number of very important issues; for example, in global climate change, international peace and security, and water resources."

The lysenkoists at Exxon themselves are continuing to ignore global warming and predicting that humanity will continue to burn fossil fuels at an exponentially increasing rate for the next 30 years. I think one day they are going to have a nasty collision with the limits to growth and a climate crimes tribunal.

Exxon Mobil Corp says it expects global energy demand to increase 1.6 per cent a year through 2030, spurred by population and economic growth, especially in developing countries.

Exxon, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, expects worldwide energy demand to reach about 325 million barrels of oil equivalent per year in 2030, about 60 per cent higher than 2000 levels. Energy demand is expected to grow at a rate of 2.4 per cent a year in non-Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the company said.

That figure includes energy derived from oil, natural gas, coal and other sources, according to Jaime Spellings, the company's general manager of corporate planning. "The global energy mix in 25 years will look very similar to what it is today - oil, gas and coal will remain predominant," Spellings said in a presentation to analysts and investors. The company expects fossil fuels to account for roughly 80 per cent of energy demand in 2030.

Demand for liquid fuels - including crude oil, oil sands and biofuels - is expected to grow at an average of 1.4 per cent per year to about 115 million barrels of oil equivalent per day from about 85 million barrels of oil equivalent currently, Exxon said.

Spellings also said the company expects carbon dioxide emissions to rise about 1.6 per cent per year through 2030, with most of the growth coming from non-OECD countries.

Maybe they are counting on a small nuclear winter to cool things down a bit before then ?

A small-scale, regional nuclear war could disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, with environmental effects that could be devastating for everyone on Earth, researchers have concluded.

The scientists said about 40 countries possess enough plutonium or uranium to construct substantial nuclear arsenals. Setting off a Hiroshima-size weapon could cause as many direct fatalities as all of World War II.

"Considering the relatively small number and size of the weapons, the effects are surprisingly large," said one of the researchers, Richard Turco of the University of California, Los Angeles. "The potential devastation would be catastrophic and long term."

The lingering effects could re-shape the environment in ways never conceived. In terms of climate, a nuclear blast could plunge temperatures across large swaths of the globe. "It would be the largest climate change in recorded human history," Alan Robock, associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers' Cook College and another member of the research team.

Meanwhile, Exxon's roughly-equally-as-evil twins at Gazprom have grabbed Sakhalin island back from Shell and are looking at some BP fields in Siberia next (Energy Bulletin also has a roundup of other goings on in Russian energy geopolitics along with one on Iraqi oil politics).

Shell is being forced by the Russian government to hand over its controlling stake in the world's biggest liquefied gas project, provoking fresh fears about the Kremlin's willingness to use the country's growing strength in natural resources as a political weapon.

After months of relentless pressure from Moscow, the Anglo-Dutch company has to cut its stake in the $20bn Sakhalin-2 scheme in the far east of Russia in favour of the state-owned energy group Gazprom.

The Russian authorities are also threatening BP over alleged environmental violations on a Siberian field in what is seen as a wider attempt to seize back assets handed over to foreign companies when energy prices were low.

The moves will alarm many investors in the City of London as Shell and other share prices are hit, but the news will also increase ministers' concerns about Britain's energy security.

Bruce has another Viridian Note out - coming thick and fast lately - this one going to work on the piece from John Petersen I quoted yesterday - as usual, Bruce's interjections are surrounded by ((())) in the quoted text - lots more at the link.

Viridian Note 00482: Big Changes Ahead

Key concepts:
2012, futurism, John L. Peterson, Arlington Institute, prognostications


Attention Conservation Notice:
Happy new years... these meditations by Washington-based pundit John Peterson seem to reflect the current mood of the times in the Beltway, which are about as dazed and miserablist-apocalyptophile as one can imagine. Looks like the world will be hit on the head with a series of hammers until morale improves. I'm having a lot of black-humored fun at this guy's expense here, but I think he's dealing with the season as best he can. His newsletter FUTUREDITION is consistently amazing.

Links:
Global warming affects the very fringes of the atmosphere, so much so that spacecraft can feel it.
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39427/story.htm

Daisies are blooming in a Moscow December. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39439/story.htm

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39455/story.htm "Regional Nuclear War Could Spark Climate Change." It's our dear old friend, "nuclear winter," now creatable by most anybody. Imagine global warming AND a nuclear winter. "We are at a perilous crossroads," said Owen Toon of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "The current combination of nuclear proliferation, political instability and urban demographics form perhaps the greatest danger to the stability of society since the dawn of humanity." Hey, Merry Christmas, Doc! How 'bout and oil peak and some bird flu to go with that mistletoe?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6211250.stm Two percent of the planet's richest people now own fifty percent of the world. Hey, rich folks, you bought it, you fix it! If anything remotely practical gets done by the year 2012, it's obviously gonna get done by rich people. They own the works. Any "solution" that they can't buy and install is kinda silly.

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/columns_third.cfm?NewsID=34308&pic=2 Look, (says irate Aggie engineer), knock it off with the bullshit leftist social-engineering! Just suck the damn CO2 out of the sky! Simple! End of problem! "Air-capture" it!... Okay, fine, great; if you can do that, you can scold Greenpeace as much as you want. I won't mind a bit! Honest!

http://wpweb2k.gsia.cmu.edu/ceic/phd.htm I mean, so far you don't seem to have much more than a PhD dissertation versus all those melting icebergs. Where are the giant miracle-solution sodium hydroxide racks and sulfur-cure atmosphere sprays? Get after it, dude! Let Exxon pay!

Getting to 2012: Big Changes Ahead John L. Petersen

Consider this recent BBC headline: "Current global consumption levels could result in a large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century, environmental group WWF has warned." One that followed was: "Climate change threatens supplies of water for millions of people in poorer countries, warns a new report from the Christian development agency Tearfund" (((Great name for a Christian development agency.)))

About the same time the Washington Post said: "Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released yesterday by the National Research Council."

Reuters added: "Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down."

Author James Howard Kunstler chimed in: "The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on.” (((You gotta love J. Kunstler. A situation that dire creates "a religion of hope?" The top religious activists in the world already cultivate a religion of holy suicide and blow up their own mosques! Imagine the jolly, affirmative, carry-on mood those jihadis would be in during a Regional Nuclear Winter.)))

"Then, in a landmark report compiled by Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK government, comes the admonition: The world has to act now on climate change or face devastating economic consequences. Sir Nicholas estimated that at most humanity has ten years before the shift is unrecoverable. (((What if it's already ten years too late? Or twenty years? Shouldn't we be giving this prospect a lot more serious thought? We're not averting anything much; there are daisies blooming in Moscow.)))

What's going on here? What does this all mean? (((Settle in, folks; he's about to let fly.)))

These are extraordinary statements about massive earth changes. Are they just random trends that happen to be coincidentally showing up at the same time, or perhaps they reflect some big, historic, underlying dynamic == maybe the world is about to experience a shift unlike anything ever seen before. (((You know what's worse than a futurist who over- promises? A futurist who over-delivers.))) There are reasons to believe the latter could be the case. Many sources, both conventional and unconventional, suggest that we are living in a special time == that between now and 2012 the world will undergo an epochal shift to a new era.

This rapid evolution will produce a world that operates in fundamentally different ways than it has in the past.(((For instance, it might well operate the way a 500-pound gorilla operates when it (a) has Ebola (b) is on fire and (c ) has recently converted to Islam.))) ...

George Monbiot ponders how and why America has destroyed its image internationally courtesy of its increasingly bizarre torture practices. For those who haven't read it, "The Men Who Stare At Goats" by Jon Ronson is a great introduction to this subject (which also manages to be rather funny, which is quite an achievement given the subject matter). Monbiot's article isn't very funny though - "how many lives per gallon ?" doesn't really do the topic of the middle east justice...

US interrogators have devised a new form of torture. It debases the democracy they claim to be defending.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

Last week, defence lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk – taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture”. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.” Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.

He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another “enemy combatant”, Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”.

Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation”. The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position – maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation – a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for twenty-two and a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation”. The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.” People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far – in Texas and Washington state – both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds – physical or mental – produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.