Free Republic

When the Green Mountain power company, Vermont’s largest utility, announced earlier this year it will be buying nuclear power from New Hampshire’s Seabrook reactor, many environmentalists felt betrayed. “This is exactly why we closed Vermont Yankee, because we didn’t want any nuclear power,” they complained. But consumer demands left Green Mountain with no other choice. Nuclear is the ultimate reliable source of power – reactors operate more than 90 percent of the time – and Green Mountain needs back-up in case other sources stop working or if demand exceeds supply on a hot summer day. Vermont is struggling with its...

Bill Gates recently noted that the cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is ‘beyond astronomical.’ On June 30, one day after the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury emissions from power plants, resident Obama committed the United States to the goal of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This would nearly triple the amount of wind- and solar-generated electricity on the national grid. The EPA ran afoul of the law by failing to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before it acted to reduce mercury emissions from coal-power plants. There is no objective...

The unfolding Greek financial crisis is front page news. The repercussions – bank runs, unsustainable debts, deadlocked creditors – could easily lead to major consequences worldwide. However misconceived the Euro currency was, its downfall will be painful on a global scale. How much of Greece’s current economic problems were caused by the made Hellenic dash into renewable energy? The answer, unsurprisingly, is most likely quite a lot. Greece, like many small European economies, has placed a substantial focus on green energy, seeing it as a quick leg up into the big league – an easy way to attract generous funding...

The Supreme Court overturned the Obama administration’s landmark air quality rule on Monday, ruling the Environmental Protection Agency did not properly consider the costs of the regulation. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices ruled that the EPA should have taken into account the costs to utilities and others in the power sector before even deciding whether to set limits for the toxic air pollutants it regulated in 2011. The case, Michigan v. EPA, centers on the EPA’s first limits on mercury, arsenic and acid gases emitted by coal-fired power plants, known as mercury and air toxics (MATS). Opponents, including the...

The Undercurrent posted a clip of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush taking question while walking through the hall at the Road to Majority Conference sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in which he said he “embraces” the current “reduction of carbon emissions.” When asked about his climate change position Jeb said, “I continue to embrace the reduction of carbon emissions that have taken place.”

Researchers working with Rosetta have found that the comet harbors organic compounds, carbon-based molecules that are sometimes known as the chemical building blocks of life. This marks the first time organic molecules have been detected on the surface of a comet's nucleus, according to Fabrizio Capaccioni, the principal investigator of the VIRTIS instrument on Rosetta. The northern hemisphere of the comet's nucleus is also filled with dunes and ripples that look somewhat like geological markings on Earth, Mars and Venus. Comet 67P/C-G doesn't have a robust atmosphere and high gravity like those planets, and yet it still has structures resembling...

Despite its solid appearance, 67P is highly porous with a density similar to wood or cork and orbited by a cloud of approximately 100,000 “grains” of material larger than 2 inches (5 cm) across stranded there after the comet’s previous perihelion passage. ... Researchers have identified 19 distinct geological regions on the comet and five basic types of terrain: dust-covered, brittle material, large-scale depressions, smooth terrains and consolidated surfaces. ... Using a spectrometer to scan the comet’s surface researchers discovered complex organic (carbon-based) molecules that could include carboxylic acids – a component of amino acids. These organics only form in...

Bonn (AFP) - Calls by the Group of Seven (G7) Monday to slash world carbon emissions did little to boost UN climate talks in Bonn, where frustration mounted over the snail-like progress. Groups of countries pleaded for greater efforts to streamline a draft text for a climate pact due to be adopted at a conference in Paris in just over six months. "We are very concerned about the pace of negotiations," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) which are deeply exposed to climate change. "We have not made the big jump...

After years of opposing efforts to fight climate change, Europe’s biggest oil and gas corporations have made a stunning about-face. Noticeably absent from the corporate push for a carbon price were U.S. oil behemoths Chevron and Exxon Mobil.

California’s industrial firms spent another $1 billion in the most recent auction of carbon emissions credits, state officials said Thursday. The California Air Resources Board said its latest quarterly auction of carbon credits raised around $1.06 billion, making it one of the largest sales in the program’s two-and-a-half year history.

The atom-thick sheet of carbon, graphene already has a number of amazing properties to it, including strength and electrical conductivity. As impressive its conductivity is though, superconductivity is still greater and has been observed with graphene, but not explained. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have now found how graphene and calcium become a superconductor.Called calcium intercalated graphite, or CaC6 is produced by interweaving calcium and graphite, which is a means of isolating sheets of graphene. About ten years ago it was discovered that this material could become superconducting, but neither the exact means nor...

Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University are making a bold claim: an entirely new state of matter. The team, led by Kosmas Prassides, says they've created what's called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting rubidium, a strange alkali metal element, into buckyballs, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape from a series of interlocking polygons (think of the Epcot Center, but in microscopic size.) Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities. Here, while combining buckyballs and rubidium, the researchers created a...

A team of researchers working at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, has found a way to dramatically reduce friction between two macroscopic scale surfaces—to near zero. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes how they accidently discovered the method and why they believe it might be useful for real world applications. As most people are aware, friction causes energy loss and wear and tear on mechanical parts—lubricants such as oil are used to help reduce friction and to dissipate heat, but scientists would really like to find a way to prevent it from happening in the...

Spiders sprayed with water containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes have produced the toughest fibers ever measured, say materials scientists. Spider silk is one of the more extraordinary materials known to science. The protein fiber, spun by spiders to make webs, is stronger than almost anything that humans can make. The dragline silk spiders use to make a web’s outer rim and spokes is amazing stuff. It matches high-grade alloy steel for tensile strength but is about a sixth as dense. It is also highly ductile, sometimes capable of stretching to five times its length. This combination of strength and...

A team of researchers working in Italy has found that simply spraying a spider with a carbon nanotube solution can cause the spider to spin stronger webs. In their paper they have uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the team describes their experiments with both graphene and nanotube solutions and what happened when they sprayed it on ordinary spiders. As the researchers note, while silk production using silkworms has been quite successful, doing the same to harvest silk from spiders has not, (because of their territorial traits, the complex nature of the silk they make and their cannibalistic tendencies) which...

New carbon emissions standards that were proposed last year for coal-fired power plants in the United States would substantially improve human health and prevent more than 3,000 premature deaths per year, according to a new study. The study, led by researchers at Syracuse and Harvard Universities, used modeling to predict the effect on human health of changes to national carbon standards for power plants. Researchers calculated that the changes in the E.P.A. rule could prevent 3,500 premature deaths a year and more than 1,000 heart attacks and hospitalizations from air-pollution-related illness. Charles T. Driscoll, a professor of environmental systems engineering...

Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a battery that is made entirely out of one material, which can both move electricity and store it. "To my knowledge, there has never been any similar work reported," said Dr. Kang Xu of the Army Research Laboratory, a researcher only peripherally related to the study. "It could lead to revolutionary progress in area of solid state batteries." Envision an Oreo cookie. Most batteries have at either end a layer of material for the electrodes like the chocolate cookies to help move ions though the creamy frosting – the electrolyte. Chunsheng Wang,...

Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order to bring down emissions to 40% below 1990 levels, in the next 15 years. The US state was already one of the most ambitious in its previous targets and has forced companies to pay for their carbon pollution. Mr Brown said the new target must be met for the sake of future generations. He called the plan "the most aggressive benchmark enacted by any government in North America to reduce dangerous carbon emissions". There were few details about how he intends to meet this target, but the governor has previously talked about increasing...

The Vatican has gathered religious leaders, scientists, politicians and businessmen under one roof to agree that acting on climate change is a "moral and religious imperative for humanity". This was the essence of a declaration signed by the attendees of a one-day meeting hosted yesterday by the Holy See. It outlines a vision for the future of the planet, including the adoption of low-carbon energy systems, a shift of investment away from the military and towards sustainable development, and the transfer of money from the rich to the poor. The meeting was organised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG2Xo571v8Q Nope. That's the answer. Oh sure, there are other words said. But the answer is nope. Just nope. Nope nope nope. It's the question that is the thing. No, not Mark Knoller's question, although kudos to him for asking it. The question is "do the elites who demand Americans give up creature comforts in the name of Global Scaring put the same inconveniences and restrictions on themselves? Nope. Do politicians and millionaire busybodies and celebrity "scientists" do without, go without, and forego activities that increase their carbon footprint in order to preserve the earth from certain destruction, as they...