Tag Archives: U.S.

Keystone XL pipeline rejected in U.S. Senate

We are all Indians to the fossil fuel cowboys, but this time the
Indians won.
The U.S. Senate

yesterday rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.
It won’t end there, but it should, because solar power is cheaper, faster, cleaner,
and actually does bring jobs to the U.S.




Picture from US Uncut

Of course, TransCanada has a backup plan for getting its dirty Alberta tar sands
oil to overseas market:

a pipeline entirely through Canada to New Brunswick.
Which means the past several years of TransCanada insistence that Keystone XL
was necessary was just so much bs.
Which indicates how much we should believe other Keystone XL claims,
such as

those about jobs the pipeline would supposedly create.




Source: Reuters

Angelo Young, International Business Times, 8 October 2014,

No Keystone XL Pipeline? No Problem, Says Canadian Firm Planning To Send Crude East Instead Of South, Continue reading →

Solar power record installation and acceleration in 2013 in U.S.

Solar power is already second only to methane in new energy generation,
and solar is increasing its growth rate much faster than “natural” gas.
Solar is going to win, and quickly.
How many unnecessary, destructive, and hazardous pipelines will we let
the fracking industry gouge through here before we get on with solar power
for local energy, local jobs, and local lower electric bills?

Mike Munsell wrote for greentech solar 7 March 2014,

US Solar Market Grew 41%, Had Record Year in 2013:
The U.S. installed 4,751 megawatts of PV, according to the Solar Market Insight Year in Review report.



According to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries
Association’s

Solar Market Insight Year in Review 2013, photovoltaic
installations continued to proliferate, increasing 41 percent over
2012 to reach 4,751 megawatts. In addition, 410 megawatts of
concentrating solar power came on-line.

Solar was the second-largest source of new electricity generating
capacity in the U.S., exceeded only by natural gas. Additionally,
the cost to install solar fell throughout the year, ending the year
15 percent below the mark set at the end of 2012.

At the end of 2013 there were more than Continue reading →

Chinese nukes in Britain

Bad news from Britain.
Let’s hope U.S. NRC doesn’t take this as a precedent.

The Telegraph, today,

Chinese companies to buy big stake in next generation of British nuclear power,



George Osborne, the Chancellor, has announced that the UK will allow
Chinese companies to take a stake in British nuclear power plants.

The decision could lead to China taking a future majority
stake—and even be allowed to own up to 100 pc—in the
development of the next generation of British nuclear power.

Mr Osborne made the announcement on Thursday the last day of a
week-long trade visit to China after a visit to Taishan nuclear
power station on the coast near Hong Kong.

Taishan is a collaboration between French energy company EDF and the
China General Nuclear Power Company.



EDF is at the heart of UK Government Continue reading →

Dutch closing prisons for lack of prisoners

Imagine that!

Huffpost UK wrote 26 June 2013,



Netherlands Close Eight Prisons Due To Lack Of Criminals,

As prison populations surge in the UK, with overcrowded cells and
repeat offenders, the opposite in happening in the Netherlands.

The country is actually to close eight prisons because of a lack of
criminals, the Dutch justice ministry has announced.

Declining crime rates in the Netherlands mean that although the
country has the capacity for 14,000 prisoners, there are only 12,000
detainees, reported the nrc.nl.

The decrease is expected to continue, the ministry said, with Deputy
justice minister Nebahat Albayrak saying that natural redundancy and
other measures should counter any forced lay-offs.


112 prisoners per 100,000 people in the Netherlands,
vs. 715 in the U.S.
Somebody remind me, what do we get in the U.S. for spending
all that extra money locking people up?

-jsq

U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere —Jennifer DeCesaro of DoE



Jennifer DeCesaro of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)
said she liked showing a map of U.S. insolation
outside the U.S. southwest because
then she could point out that
Spain has not as good resources and a larger solar market,
while Germany, the world leader in deployed solar,
has solar resources like the state of Alaska.


So the U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere.

She made a few other comparisons between U.S. and Germany.
U.S.: 30% investment tax credit.
Germany: National Feed-in Tariff.

She talked about

SunShot: the Apollo mission of our time.
It aims to reduce solar costs by 75% by the end of the decade,
making solar cost-competitive with fossil fuels without subsidy.

Actual panels cost about the same in U.S. and Germany,
but the rest

Continue reading →

Jailing Too Many People Costs Too Much



John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika Gupta write about

The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration:

The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year, with the large majority of these savings accruing to financially squeezed state and local governments. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.

These cost savings could be realized through a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of exclusively non-violent offenders, who now make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population.

A review of the extensive research on incarceration and crime suggests that these savings could be achieved without any appreciable deterioration in public safety.

There’s a 19 page PDF report published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
but that one graph pretty much spells it out:
incarceration went up abruptly starting in the early 1980s and continued up,
while crime did not.
What we have here is a very expensive policy mistake.

And where does most of the cost come from?

Continue reading →

Drug War Goals Not Met



Geoffrey Alderman writes in the Guardian about

What next – penalising students for taking caffeine?

For the past 90 years this debate has been dominated by the professional purveyors of moral panic in our society – a toxic combination of politicians, pressmen, prelates and policemen, aided and abetted by ill-informed parents, who have sought to pre-empt any serious discussion of “psychoactive” substances.

That’s in the U.K.

Meanwhile,

AP IMPACT: US drug war has met none of its goals:

Continue reading →