Clean Energy 101

If you want a good starting point for learning the facts about clean energy, The Union of Concerned Scientists is offering an excellent resource, "Clean Energy 101." If you'd like to learn about the pollution caused by coal plants, and how sustainable energy would cut this pollution, check the article called "Benefits of Renewable Energy."

A Typical Coal PlantA typical 500-megawatt coal plant produces 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year -- enough to power a city of about 140,000 people. It burns 1.4 million tons of coal (the equivalent of 40 train cars of coal each day) and uses 2.2 billion gallons of water each year. In an average year, this one plant also generates the following: 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, equivalent to half a million late-model cars 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to cutting down 100 million trees 500 tons of small particles 220 tons of hydrocarbons 720 tons of carbon monoxide 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber 170 pounds of mercury, 225 pounds of arsenic, 114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, and other toxic heavy metals Trace amounts of uranium
Here are each of the main topics covered:

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To spend or not to spend

According to this article at MSNBC, the failure of U.S. consumers to spend lots of money has screwed up the U.S. economy:

For the time being, it looks like American consumers are AWOL. And until they come back, don't expect to see any real recovery in economic growth and the job market. Consumer spending typically accounts for roughly 70 percent of the U.S. economy.
But here's another way of looking at things. Annie Leonard has made a good case that out-of-control consumer spending has been wrecking our society, as she explains in "The Story of Stuff." Leonard now offers a free school curriculum based on The Story of Stuff. It is called "Buy, Use, Toss?"

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When experts make predictions about economics, science or politics

It's bad enough that we often have to listen to blowhards while we're out and about--I'm referring to people whose are rendering long strings of opinions even though they have no credentials, expertise or curiosity about the facts. Now what do you think when you hear those many experts pontificating about the future?   I'm talking about those many experts the media provides to us, people talking with great confidence about upcoming catastrophes, including the prices of houses or stocks, or the consequences of social unrest (and, what the hell, let's add sports "experts" to the mix). Dan Gardner wondered about this, and he wrote a book titled: "Future Babble:  Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless and You Can Do Better.   I learned about Gardner in a well-written article by Ronald Bailey in Reason, "It's Hard to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future":

In Future Babble, Gardner acknowledges his debt to political scientist Phililp Tetlock, who set up a 20-year experiment in which he enrolled nearly 300 experts in politics. Tetlock then solicited thousands of predictions about the fates of scores of countries and later checked how well they did. Not so well. Tetlock concluded that most of his experts would have been beaten by “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Tetlock found that the experts wearing rose-tinted glasses “assigned probabilities of 65 percent to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15 percent of the time.” Doomsters did even worse: “They assigned probabilities of 70 percent to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12 percent of the time.”

The problem with experts was also discussed in a March 2011 issue of Scientific American, "Financial Flimflam:  "Why Economic Experts' Predictions Fail," which offers this finesse to Tetlock's findings:

There was one significant factor in greater prediction success, however, and that was cognitive style: “foxes” who know a little about many things do better than “hedgehogs” who know a lot about one area of expertise. Low scorers, Tetlock wrote, were “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters.” High scorers in the study were “thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible ‘ad hocery’ that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”

I suppose the bottom line advice is that you need a psychological profile of an expert before determining whether to believe him or her.   But maybe a nice long impressive track record would be a reasonable substitute.

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The growing global warming gap . . . psychoanalyzed

MSNBC offers the following on the global warming gap, based on a recent Gallop poll:

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.
Notice that the question wasn't about causation. It did not ask the cause of the warming (human caused versus natural fluctuation), but merely whether the Earth was warming. Perhaps Gallop should have coupled its question with these just to get at the root of this insanity (and see here):  A) Do you trust thermometers? B) When your mother used a thermometer, did you trust her? and C)   When scientists announce the following data, are these highly credentialed professionals actually acting as conniving scam artists who are out to try to somehow make a bunch of money? Caveat:  I know that I've betrayed my beliefs that the earth is, indeed warming.  This is not to suggest that I ever advocated any sort of cap and trade approach to the problem, which I consider to be a fraud in general and riddled with corruption wherever it has been allegedly implemented (based, for example, on this Harper's Magazine article titled "Conning the Climate," (October 2007). Rather, I believe that we need to have the intelligence and courage to directly regulate our production of CO2.   I'm not confident that we'll be able to do that.  Why?  Because America has an extremely long track record of failing to do what intelligence and self-restraint would require.   We are a nation steeped in ignorance, as demonstrated by the large numbers of people who refused to believe basic thermometer data. People don't engage in climate denialism because they are "stupid."   Most evidence deniers are quite capable of considering evidence and making rational decisions, but there is a lot more going on in humans than rational thought.  There is also our emotional/social side. To describe human animals, psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a lawyer riding an elephant.  Public assertions that contradict clear evidence are public displays of group loyalty, and sometimes people are more compelled to display loyalty than to crunch data to a logical conclusion that conflicts with tenets embraced by the group.  For the most part, this decision to choose loyalty over evidence is not a fully conscious one, but it can often result in a compelling display of loyalty to the extent that it is an expensive display.  Amotz Zahavi has written extensively on this topic of expensive and therefore reliable displays.  I discuss this urge to display as a badge of group belonging in my five-part series called "Mending Fences."  See also, this post on the work of Richard Sosis. I would describe the process like this: It's as though the felt compulsion to show loyalty to the ingroup erects an electrified fence in the mind of the group member protecting the group's creed of beliefs from serious critical inquiry.  If humans were really heating up the planet, it could call for humans (to the extent that they acted as good-hearted moral beings) to make dramatic coordinated changes in the way we run our society.  But if this could be done at all, it could only be done by government fiat.  But modern conservatives hold it as a religious belief that government is feckless and wasteful.  Although it seems pointedly absurd for those of us who trust the readings of thermometers, it is much easier to deny rising temperatures than to admit this evidence but then explain why one is not doing anything meaningful about the problem. Especially given the fact that conservatives tend to live inland (coastal areas tend to have more liberal inhabitants--Jonathan Haidt explains this geographical dispersion).

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Islamic terrorism, by the numbers

While Islamaphobia rages here in America, we might do well to pay attention to some numbers from Europe:

In 2009, there were fewer than 300 terrorist incidents in Europe, a 33 percent decline from the previous year. The vast majority of these incidents (237 out of 294) were conducted by indigenous European separatist groups, with another forty or so attributed to leftists and/or anarchists. According to the report, a grand total of one (1) attack was conducted by Islamists.

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