We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Alternative Subsidy 11 Comments

Boston Herald;

The Patrick administration blasted Evergreen Solar Inc., which announced today it’s closing its Devens factory and laying off 800 workers, and a top official said the state will try to get back tens of millions in subsidies from the company.
Evergreen, a Marlboro-based solar panel maker once considered a clean-energy darling of Gov. Deval Patrick, has been steadily shifting jobs to its facility in lower-cost China, but until today had indicated its Massachusetts operations would continue.

Lower cost – and warmer climate.
h/t Maz2

Oilsands “Split” Saskatchewan?

Media 59 Comments

There may be a reason that the Star Phoenix’s Jeanette Stewart’s report on Saskatchewan support for the oilsands from last week reads less like a polling result than it does a math quiz. Readers who tried to decipher the numbers provided would have noticed a glaring omission – the complete polling results.
Well, now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Jan. 4, 2011;

Despite alarm bells raised recently over toxins spewed from Alberta’s oilsands into Saskatchewan, results of a recent survey indicate one-quarter of the province’s residents support oilsands development.
The results of a survey performed by Sigma Analytics for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the Regina Leader-Post show 24.9 per cent of respondents “strongly support” oilsands development in the province. But those who caution against this type of development see a different picture in the survey numbers.
“If you didn’t really know much about the issue, sure, why wouldn’t you support it?” said Ann Coxworth, research adviser for the Saskatchewan Environmental Society (SES) and author of a report titled Carbon Copy: Preventing Oilsands Fever in Saskatchewan.
“I think the fact that 23 per cent of people are opposed or strongly opposed is a fairly high level of opposition,” she added. “Over 50 per cent of the respondents have some reservations about it . . . which I think is significant.”

From the now-released Sigma Analytics poll, January 11th;

oil_sands_support_saskatchewan.jpg

That’s quite the “split”. But no matter – Stewart’s misleading report was regurgitated, unquestioned, by news outlets across the country. Mission accomplished.

Y2Kyoto: Zombie Gas

More Money Than Brains 44 Comments

Winnipeg Free Press;

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases seeping from the soil are killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken soda pop.
The gases were supposed to have been injected permanently underground.
Cameron and Jane Kerr own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan. They released a consultant’s report Tuesday that links high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to 6,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus (TSX:CVE) in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.
“We knew, obviously, there was something wrong,” said Jane Kerr.

However, this is not to suggest that all planet-saving sequestration projects are unsuccessful. There’s still no sign of Dorothy Halton bubbling to the surface.
Update, from the comments;

I am a geologist who mapped the Weyburn field at the time it was undergoing CO2 injection. There are multiple, layered reservoirs of dolomite, separated vertically by thin, non-permeable rock and limited laterally by facies changes and local erosional events. Where the gas goes cannot be predicted with any detail. It is possible that a portion has been jammed into one pod and built up pressures greater than the caprock could stand. There are also small faults that rise to the surface or near-surface, visible in seismic: an unsealed fault could be the problem here.
At the same time, the fellow dug a gravel pit. He could be releasing underlying “swamp” gas from buried post-glacial muds, sands and wood. There are also shallow coals below the glacial gravels: they could be the source of the gas. I’m more experienced in field foolishness to assume that old garbage dumps or local sewage ponds/tile-beds have already been ruled out.
The climate warmists blame CO2 for temperature rises as an argument from ignorance: if not CO2, then what? To blame Cenovus for the gas is similar in validity. C14 isotope and composition analysis will straighten this out. I suspect that we will find a surface source for the CO2.
By the way, the Weyburn injection is not a CO2 “sequestration” scheme. It is a tertiary gas-flood to obtain additional oil from an existing, but only partially-drained, oilfield. The gas is cycled back into the ground as more oil is produced. Ultimately, it may be left in the ground, but it might also be captured later for other oil recovery schemes. CO2 is far to expensive and useful to simply throw away.

I figured we’d hear from somebody about this, sooner or later. Thanks, Doug.

The Israeli Way Of War

Terrorism 31 Comments

An Israeli intelligence officer led me to this concealed yet sweltering viewpoint near the border fence overlooking Lebanon where Hezbollah guerrillas were busy fortifying positions for the next round of conflict, a round that will almost certainly be bloodier and more destructive for both sides than the last. A small green valley covered with Mediterranean scrub stood between us and the Party of God.
“Four years ago you could easily see Hezbollah positions and bunkers from here,” she said. “Now you can’t. Hezbollah pretends to respect United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, but that’s just their public face. Their posts are now hidden in houses and mosques.”

The rest.

SDA flashback.

Climategate: The Next Generation

climategate2 30 Comments

In an almighty battle to salvage credibility…

[T]hree British government institutions are embroiled in a new global warming scandal with the BBC mounting a legal challenge to force ministers to admit the truth. Sceptics ask: Is the UK government’s climate propaganda machine finally falling apart?
Last week the weather service caused a sensation by making the startling claim that it was gagged by government ministers from issuing a cold winter forecast. Instead, a milder than average prediction was made that has been resoundingly ridiculed in one of the worst winters in a century.
With the BBC appearing to take the side of the Met Office by seeking to force the government to give honest answers, untold harm will likely befall Prime Minister Cameron’s global warming policies on energy, taxation and the environment.

h/t Maz2

Here’s A Partial List

Political Animal 66 Comments

…of some of the incidents the left has tried to pin on conservatives.

The Columbine shooters… The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing… The DC sniper… The New York City Times Square car bomb attempt… The February 2010 IRS plane attack in San Antonio… The Pentagon subway shooter… The Fort Hood attack… The Discovery Channel hostage taker…Amy Bishop who shot her colleagues at that Alabama college.
The list goes on and on and on. They are countless. The list actually is never ending of incidents like this where the media is damn certain, damn well certain they can give Obama his OKC bombing. They can give a Democrat president some kind of massive murder or disaster caused by conservatives. That remains the number one effort. They sit around and they wait for these events to happen, hoping and praying that what they know are lies — what they know are false allegations, nonexistent associations — can somehow be made to be believed by the public at large.

Related – “They can’t win the debate on talk radio so they try to silence us by intimidation and smear.”

Those Moderate Muslims!

Religion Of Submission 50 Comments

Tens of thousands…

… marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.
The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.
Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.

They Miss W.

The Tolerant Left 93 Comments

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Paul Krugman;

“You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers..”

From DLC.org

BP_0405_heartland1.gif

Jay Nordlinger

Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

Related! Climate of Hate: 2000-2010

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult 22 Comments

Rigzone;

Bacteria made quick work of the tons of methane that billowed into the Gulf of Mexico along with oil from April’s Deepwater Horizon blowout, clearing the natural gas from the waterway within months of its release, researchers reported Friday.
The federally funded field study, published online in the journal Science, offers peer-reviewed evidence that naturally occurring microbes in the Gulf devoured significant amounts of toxic chemicals in oil and natural gas spewing from the seafloor, which researchers had thought would persist in the region’s water chemistry for years.
“Within a matter of months, the bacteria completely removed that methane,”said microbiologist David Valentine at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The bacteria kicked in more effectively than we expected,” he said.

h/t Adrian

More Pavilions At Folkfest

Religion Of Submission 48 Comments

The lights are going out in Denmark.

Last month, Danish MP Jesper Langballe was convicted of “hate speech” — “racial discrimination,” for having highlighted the pattern of “honor killings” in Muslim families. (Here is his “confession.”) Now in the crosshairs is my very dear friend and colleague, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society. (A historian as well as a journalist and author, Lars took me on a special tour of Copenhagen, which I wrote about here.) On January 24 he goes on trial. His crime? Discussing the high incidence of family rape within Islamic cultures, which the prosecutor is attempting to outlaw as “racism.”
In fact, the Danish prosecutor is attempting to enforce Islamic “blasphemy” laws, which outlaw all criticism of Islam.

Featured Comment

Featured Comment 141 Comments

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” – Barack Obama

BATB;

For many in the States, who are convinced that the Obamessiah’s agenda is madness, their solution has been to join the Tea Party, which is not a violent or terrorist group. The Tea Party is a legitimate, grass-roots coming together of individuals to propose alternative programs to those of the Obama-led government. The Tea Party is a bona fide element of the democratic process in the U.S. — and to suggest that U.S. citizens shouldn’t form groups like this because they might incite violence or domestic terrorism is tantamount to political blackmail: Don’t push back, folks, because something violent might happen.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday– If you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Sarah Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting — which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie — or you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. So which is it?

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