More cities — of all sizes — taking the plunge to use 100% renewable energy

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/13/more-cities--of-all-sizes--taking-the-plunge-to-use-100-renewable-energy.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]More cities — of all sizes — taking the plunge to use 100% renewable energy[/font]

Jodi Gralnick | @jodigralnick
Friday, 13 May 2016 | 4:07 PM ET

[font size=3] When Superstorm Sandy hit eastern Long Island in October 2012, virtually every resident of East Hampton lost power for days, some for weeks. Town leaders knew they couldn't let it happen again; they needed to find a way to protect their community and make it more resilient in the future.

"It was a wake-up call for everybody who lives on the East Coast, certainly in our community out here on the eastern end of Long Island," said East Hampton town supervisor Larry Cantwell.

So, the town acted quickly to adopt an ambitious goal: converting 100 percent of its electrical energy to renewable sources by 2020. Its plan includes solar and wind energy, and it's exploring creating one of New York's first microgrids as a backup power source for emergency facilities.

"Every household, every business, it's going to require that we think differently about traditional power sources and that we reject traditional fuel sources," said Cantwell. "It's going to take every citizen accepting responsibility for becoming more energy efficient."

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[NNadir]

1. East Hampton isn't going to shut off the lights when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't...

...blowing.

And it's a trivial little town chock full of obscenely rich people, many of whom don't have a clue.

There are no towns anywhere on the planet that live on 100% so called "renewable" energy, except for extremely impoverished places that no one cares about: There "renewable energy" consists of burning trash and biofuels, this at a cost of millions of human lives. Nobody gives a rat's ass about the people who really live on "renewable energy," straw, dung, pieces of wood, with some garbage thrown in for good measure.

I grew up on Long Island. It's a sandy moraine with no real resources and highly variable water. Solar won't work when it snows, and it's not like they're going to strew their beaches with wind turbines.

It was a center of the vicious and deadly anti-nuke industry; and I regret that when I lived there, I was a very stupid and gullible kid who thought opposition to Shoreham was a good idea. It wasn't. The decision not to run Shoreham killed people. They died from air pollution created because Shoreham wasn't there to prevent it.

The entire program in East Hampton will consist of a shell game wherein they send checks to some bullshit company like "Green Mountain Power" who will pretend their electricity won't come from gas while "certifying" with no real justification, that the energy is "green." Anyone with an ounce of sense knows this. People who lack an ounce of sense, on the other hand, will buy into this nonsense.

But the real energy will come from gas, the fastest growing source of electricity on this planet, and certainly in the United States. The gas that is mined in fracked fields will be provided at the expense of every human being who lives in the next generations, hundreds of generations, should humanity survive itself and its capacity to lie to itself.

As a person who experienced Hurricane Sandy directly, I have very little patience for the scammers in the so called "renewable energy" business scamming with that event as another of their disingenuous and dishonest marketing tools.

The atmosphere is collapsing, more rapidly than ever. If anyone wants to know why, it's because many of us, like the citizens of East Hampton, lie to ourselves.

Enjoy the week.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Funny… much larger cities believe they can do it

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/13/more-cities--of-all-sizes--taking-the-plunge-to-use-100-renewable-energy.html

[font face=Serif][font size=3]…

Some much bigger cities have also taken up the challenge, including San Diego (with a goal to convert by 2035), Honolulu (by 2045) and San Francisco (by 2030).

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[NNadir]

3. This "by such and such a date" bull has been going on for half a century.

Some people believe that the Madonna will reappear and save all humanity from sin.

Other people believe that Donald Trump would be a fine President.

If even half of these predictions proved true, predictions would be unnecessary now. It would have happened. It's pretty boring, if illuminating that people continue to be continuously wrong on this crap.

I have lived my entire life with these predictions. They started getting really popular with that asshole Amory Lovins, back in 1976 who said that Americans would have 25 exajoules (he called them "quads&quot of solar power by the year 2000.

Where was it? Where is it?

It's now widely reported, except in fantasy land, that it's 2016. There aren't 25 exajoules of solar energy on the entire planet, never mind the United States.

That asshole Lovins now "consults" for oil sands companies.

In fact, back when I joined this website in 2003, we were hearing the same bull, except "by 2035" was "by 2023." At that time the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing, on average, at roughly 2.00 ppm a year.

2023 is seven years from now. Surely there would be one city that formerly burned as much gas as San Francisco and San Diego burn that is 100% renewable. Name one. Name one that's close.

In 2015, we saw our first year where the increase in the dangerous fossil fuel waste went above 3.00 ppm in a single year. The data for 2016, despite a more than 2 trillion dollar investment in so called "renewable energy" in the last ten years, we are routinely seeing data points close to 4.00 ppm a year, sometimes exceeding them significantly.

And what is the response?

"By 2035...by 2045...by 2030..."

All these claims are reported by journalists who have obviously, not once, taken a science or engineering course.

How is that these "by 2035...by...2045...by 2030" people are so sure that future generations will do what they themselves have been incompetent and unwilling to do themselves.

Is there one person in this delusional set who recognizes that they are destroying the future of these children they expect to do great things.

I'll be dead in 2045, for sure. Since I will be dead by then, I will spend the rest of my disappearing life apologizing to the young people who must live with future generations because people in my generation possessed such ethical indifference were allowed to destroy the planet while whispering the same insipid science fiction platitudes year after year, decade after decade with no result.

The generation that will live then will live on a planet with close to 500 ppm of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, be desperately impoverished, suffering greatly and cursing the assholes who spewed this appalling nonsense that led them there.

I am happy I won't be here to face them. Neither will the assholes who stood around muttering that San Diego will convert to 100% of so called "renewable energy" by 2030. What will be San Diego by 2050 will be a desiccated desert, no water, a set of largely uninhabited ruins baking in an unrelenting sun.

The fact is that "350.org," Bill McKibben's set of crazy wild eyed anti-nuke "renewables will save us" assholes need to become 450.org, and do so pretty damn quickly. Even then they have little chance of being any more realistic then they were 20 years ago, when we were still well below 400 ppm, although we can now never expect to be so again.

The definition of a fool is a person who keeps doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result. The two trillion dollar so called "renewable energy" scam didn't work, isn't working and ten times as many trillions won't work.

Enjoy the rest of the week, as we chug along, inexorably and tragically to 2045. May you avoid having to face whoever might survive then.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Some places are doing it today…

…

Aspen, Colorado; Burlington, Vermont; and Greensburg, Kansas, have already proven it can be done. But, like East Hampton, which has 20,000 residents, those are all relatively small towns.

…

https://www.burlingtonelectric.com/about-us/what-we-do/where-we-get-our-power
http://www.energy.gov/eere/about-us/wind-farm
http://www.aspenpitkin.com/Living-in-the-Valley/Green-Initiatives/Renewable-Energy/

[NNadir]

5. Aspen Colorado? Greenberg Kansas? Burlington Vt? Is this a joke?

Nothing is more hilarious than this list. If nothing else, it obviates exactly how delusional this crap is.

Hydroelectricity has been, and will remain for a long time, the world's largest, by far, source of so called "renewable energy" even if the environmental effects of rendering the Colorado Delta a desert, the pollution at the 3 Gorges Dam, the Destruction of Glen Canyon and Hetch Hetchy Canyon and, almost certainly, vast if ignored changes to the Saint Lawrence River system.

It seems to me every "renewable will save us" advocate, after having caused humanity to squander two trillion bucks in 10 years on wind and solar, ends up announcing how great "renewable energy" is when you include massive dams. This is because wind and solar's entire capacity, constructed over half a century don't even produce five of the 570 exajoules of energy humanity consumes. In the United States the entire wind industry constructed over all time can't even match the growth in dangerous natural gas in the last ten years.

So Burlington Vt. gets its electricity from the NY Power authority, which gets its electricity from the Saint Lawrence river. What's your guess, when Vermont shut it's nuclear plant because dumb shits were terrified by a few atoms of tritium, less than the equivalent of tritium in a tritium watch dial did the Saint Lawrence people build a new dam to replace the lost electricity.

Or did the Saint Lawrence River authority start selling electricity to Vermont instead of New York, with the result that New York burned more dangerous natural gas, dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere where every damn future generation will have to deal with it?

Now, as it is, only 17% of the world's rivers run free, a disgrace actually, given that one can easily produce as much power in a few buildings with nuclear reactors without destroying quite as many ecosystems as dams destroy.

You were talking, not about a shell game being played in a backwater Vermont town, but in your last post referred to San Diego and San Francisco

You ever been to those cities? I lived in Mira Mesa and La Jolla in San Diego County for five years.

Where is San Diego going to get the water to provide another dam on the Colorado? What's your plan for San Francisco? Turn Yosemite Valley into what the Hetch Hetchy Valley has become, a lake?

Aspen is a joke, a place where every winter Land Rovers, BMWs, and Infinity Q5's get in huge traffic jams. It runs on "renewable energy?"

And of course, comparing Aspen and Burlington to San Francisco and San Diego is a joke, or would be a joke, if this kind of credulous horseshit continues to do the damage that the failed, expensive and useless so called "renewable energy" industry has done by generating more complacency and wishful thinking than energy.

We will never see 390 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere again. Not in our lifetimes, not in our children's lifetimes, not in their children's lifetimes...should humanity survive.

And if humanity doesn't survive, the reason will be writ large. The reason will be that we had a set of people, awful people, who carried on mindlessly because 63 extra uranium miners who happened to be members of a Native American tribe that lived, almost for its entire history, on a natural uranium formation, died over a forty year period from lung cancer. These same people, the people with the uranium miner fetish, are same people didn't give a shit that seven million people die each year from air pollution.

Nuclear energy might have saved these lives, numbering in the tens of millions, in a normal human lifetime, hundreds of millions, were it not for fear and ignorance and the kind of mentality that thinks Aspen Colorado is a city just like San Diego.

I would laugh, except what is really appropriate, if one thinks how every future generation will suffer as a result of this ignorance, I am only left to weep.

Have a nice evening.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. If you don’t like it, I can’t make you.

I won’t try.

[NNadir]

7. Don't. You would fail as much as so called "renewable energy" has failed to address climate change

We've been over 405 ppm for months. Next year we'll go over for 410 ppm in many cases, and in ten years, over 420 ppm

I won't try to convince you that this matters to humanity. Clearly you don't agree.

You, and those like you, think the means is more important than the end. You can't talk sense to anyone who believes that.

Have a nice evening.