We've discussed the aerial Cuisinarts here many times before, but hey. Even the Associated Press is picking up on these "sustainable" power sources:
CONVERSE COUNTY, Wyo. (AP) -- Wind farms in this corner of Wyoming have killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, one of the deadliest places in the country of its kind.
But so far, the companies operating industrial-sized turbines here and elsewhere that are killing eagles and other protected birds have yet to be fined or prosecuted - even though every death is a criminal violation.
Many times more bats, both insectivorous and pollinating, are killed by the sudden drop in air pressure, which causes their lungs to explode; eagles and other raptors, by contrast, are generally victims of blade-strikes.
"What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK," said Tim Eicher, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent based in Cody.
It's a double standard that some Republicans in Congress said Tuesday they would examine after an Associated Press investigation revealed that the Obama administration has shielded the wind power industry from liability and helped keep the scope of the deaths secret.
It sure hasn't been an especially good week for Barky, whose legacy is increasingly looking as though it'll be remembered as the most scandal-plagued administration in the history of the country. They go after power companies if an eagle is harmed by power lines, but "clean, green, sustainable" windmill companies get a total pass. Funny how that works. Double standards: it's the Chicago Way.
We all knew that the "green jobs" mythology relentlessly pursued by Barky and other Democratics was a colossal waste of money, but stats now out from the Barky administration's DOE are truly phenomenal:
For the over $26 billion spent since 2009, DOE Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantees have created only 2,298 permanent jobs for a cost of over $11.45 million per job.
Back in 2008, Barky claimed he'd "create" five million jobs over ten years by "investing" (Democrat for "waste money") in "renewable energy". Evidently, it was one of those promises that looked great on a teleprompter.
It's worth noting that this number's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; it doesn't include the millions of dollars that state and local Democratics have "invested" as well. Former Porkland mayor Sammy Adams and former Oregon governor Teddy Kulongoski handed over tens of millions of dollars to companies like SoloPower, SolarWorld, Vestas, Iberdola, and ReVolt - with little or nothing to show for it. Most, if not all of those companies are either belly-up or in the process of going belly-up. But it sure made for some great pressers and photo-ops.
The Steel Bridge in Portland, Oregon while fully raised.
Great story in The Oregonian today about yesterday's light rail failure, and the story illustrates why the newspaper's lost another nearly 8% of its circulation during the past year. Crack Zero reporter Joseph Rose homes in on the problem which resulted in a cascade of substation failures: a little surge protector on the top of one power pole. Its failure overloaded a nearby substation, and the others overloaded when trying to take up the slack. The result: a cascade effect that shut down half a dozen substations and brought the entire "system" to a halt; one "train" blocked a downtown Portland intersection, another was stranded on the Steel Bridge, and similar tales of woe emerged across their vaunted "system".
Fortunately, as they haven't completely gutted the bus system thus far, the development agency known as Tri-Met, which runs the rails as well, was able to bring buses in to rescue stranded rail passengers.
But Rose, taking a page straight from the Tri-Met PR manual, spent most of his discussion blaming the Steel Bridge for Tri-Met's light rail issues:
Or maybe it was the fact that electrical problems on the Steel Bridge have increasingly become a pain in the commute for MAX riders. The transit agency didn't have data available on how many times overhead propulsion wires have gone dead in the past year. But in recent years, train speeds have been reduced from 15 mph to 5 mph due to wear where the lift span meets the fixed structure and due to sensitive signaling equipment on the lift span.
Hey Joe, they chose to run trains across that bridge. It's not like anybody held a baseball bat to their heads. You really mean that with all the highly-compensated "managers" at the development agency, it never occurred to anybody that running electric toy trains across a drawbridge might be a problem? You realize, presumably, that Burlington Northern has been running trains across the lower span for decades without major issues?
You see, Joe, the problem is that BN runs real trains, not electric toy trains - and it never occurred to the brain-trust at Tri-Met that electrical connections on a lift span might, just maybe, pose a bit of a problem. Hey, what's the worst that could happen, right?
Of course, at the same time that TriMet announced that trains would start rolling over the Steel Bridge again Monday night, another service alert went out to MAX riders: Another power outage had disrupted Blue and Red lines between Beaverton Transit Center and Sunset Transit Center.
Power was restored in less than than an hour but trains couldn't use the lines because a train that was hit by the outage was stuck on the tracks between the Beaverton Transit Station and the Sunset Transit Station.
Break out the buses again!
Rose likely was constrained by space, so he couldn't really get into that whole westside outage thing, and as AltheDriver noted in the subsequent comments:
On Sunday 5 substations went down at once, that should have been a clue something is wrong.
So, in two days, at least eleven (and likely more, as the westside outage was not explained) substations cascaded into darkness. And nobody said anything until the big commute-stopping outage yesterday. How odd. AltheDriver further noted that during the Monday outage, all controller desktop systems crashed as well; compounding an already huge problem.
An actual newspaper might have taken the time to explore all of these issues; perhaps even considering the potential ramifications in the event that one day the "vaunted" Tri-Met light rail system was targeted by terrorists. Looks like a pretty easy target. But then, The Oregonian can't be bothered. And they wonder why their numbers are tanking.
Westside Express Service train at Wilsonville maint. facility.
As mentioned here yesterday, TriMet's ticket machines are incredibly unreliable, and it's been reported that as many as 2,000 people a month, attempting to pay with a credit card, have had the card rejected and an electronic cancellation message sent to the issuing banks - a claim refuted by a writer for The Oregonian. However, Portland television station KATU last night refuted the refutation:
PORTLAND, Ore. – TriMet admits its ticket machines have been causing banks to cancel or suspend thousands of debit and credit cards.
Spokeswoman Roberta Altstadt said a bug in the ticket machine software caused some of the machines to flag cards as stolen.
“We believe it was affecting about 1,000 to 2,000 credit card transactions a month,” said Altstadt. “For at least five years.”
One of their many PR flacks, Alstadt suggests that people pick up some tickets while they're out buying groceries, adding, "It can be that easy." The arrogance on display at the former transit agency (TriMet having recast itself as a development agency) is simply breathtaking. Of course, there's little reason for accountability there; the board is composed of government appointees, and nobody at the agency is elected.
But the ticket machines, though needlessly inconveniencing some tens of thousands (Vancouver residents are doubtless salivating over the prospect of having a couple of shiny new ticket machines on their side of the Columbia River), are really little more than symptoms of a much larger problem.
CPI notes that the "Westside Express Service", a nearly 15-mile- long commuter rail line that TriMet opened amid considerable fanfare some four years ago, carries approximately 20 to 50 riders on each trip between Beaverton and Wilsonville; each rider subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $40 per round trip. And rather than taking passengers off the roads, thereby reducing congestion, WES actually increases congestion - and only around 800 people actually use the train each week. And while light rail's bad enough, their WES line's even worse:
The operating costs for WES are 12 times higher per hour than bus service, but the public benefits are not 12 times higher. In fact, WES is not even equal to bus service; it is far less flexible, and the equipment is unused most of the time.
TriMet recently predicted that within the next decade, more than half of all bus routes will be eliminated due to operating losses if something doesn’t change. The Board places the blame for this on a labor union contract that saddles the agency with the costliest employee benefits package in the nation. But the union did not force management to build an absurd commuter rail line; that was a choice made by the Board alone, without any consideration of the legacy costs it would impose on future riders.
As has been mentioned here before on a number of occasions, TriMet is busily cannibalizing bus service in favor of efforts to force passengers onto their trains. It hasn't been working as planned; ridership continues to drop. Now, they're making clear their intention to kill half of all remaining bus routes, while blaming the union. Unions are, for the most part, nothing more than Political Action Committees for Democratics, and are justly loathed by many. However, they're not the problem at TriMet; managment (or what passes for management) is.
Team Barky, now operating under the moniker "Organizing for Action", is attacking Republicans as Climate Change "Deniers"; thus inadvertently demonstrating that belief in "man-made global cooling warming climate change" is purely a manufactured religion. In this religion, skeptics are branded as apostates and in true Alinsky fashion, subjected to ridicule as a means of marginalizing them.
This is pure, unvarnished propaganda: When asked, they deny that "overwhelming" science on climate change is real. But, of course, they don't. What they refute are two claims:
"The science is settled."
"Human activities cause climate change."
As has been discussed here many times over the years, the science is not settled, although it has been politicized to an unhealthy degree. Even supporters of the religion are unable to account for the fact that the planet is not warming, despite their dire predictions and modeling.
Moreover, as the campaign's own video shows, Congressional Republicans do not deny that our climate changes; they note that there is little evidence indicative of human influence - and to claim otherwise, as the adherents of the religion do, simply illustrates their preoccupation with self-importance.
When Rep. Bill Cassidy notes that climate change could "be secular, just a shift on the axis", the religious campaign makes no effort to refute the statement - they simply ridicule it - even though it is well established that planetary axis shifts account not only for seasonal changes in "climate", but that minor perturbations can result in relatively long-term effects.
When Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California notes that variations on the planet Mars mirror those here, the campaign makes no effort to refute the statement - because they can't; our sophisticated Mars rovers are entering their teen years now, and they have yet to capture an image of Martians joyriding around in CO2-spewing SUVs. Indeed, many scientists have come to suspect that solar activity may play a more significant role in planetary climate change than previously suspected (imagine that!).
The response from the campaign, again, is ridicule: MARS?
Well, yes. And reasonable people have discussed that here and on other sites many times over the years. But ridicule's the best the campaign can manage.
And when Virginia's Rep. Morgan Griffith notes that Vikings dominated much of the north for several hundred years during the last warming period (as noted here and elswhere previously, they established farms on Greenland that were subsequently consumed by advancing glacial activity), the response of the campaign is again: VIKINGS?!
Since they can't refute facts, they resort to mockery.
They close by claiming that "Denying" climate change is dangerous.
The German operation, which has a plant in Hillsboro, has suffered more losses, sending its stock to a nine-year low. Oregon politicians put taxpayers on the hook to the tune of nearly $42 million in subsidies for the Hillsboro plant, which briefly employed a thousand people. Today, there are around 700.
Some 77 solar companies have died since 2009, and SolarWorld execs are looking for - surprise! - more money as they teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Their best shot for a bailout looks to be a moneybags in Qatar; he's apparently looking to take over the parent company in Frankfurt.
But SolarWorld's at least making panels, unlike a lot of other solar companies. They've sold a bunch to taxpayer-funded Portland Community College, and to taxpayer-funded Oregon Department of Transportation, and to taxpayer-funded Hillsboro Intermodal Transit Facility. Probably to a bunch of other taxpayer-funded agencies and facilities as well. Why would anybody else buy from them? SolarWorld produces mediocre panels that have the distinction of being more expensive than other panels.
Meanwhile, former Portland mayor Sammy Adams and former Oregon governor Teddy Kulongoski, having dumped an additional $40 million in subsidies to SoloPower in Northeast Portland, are nowhere to be found as that company slouches toward dissolution.
Times are bad in the "Man-Made Global Warming®" community of trough-feeders, these days as even the media's beginning to catch on to the fact that - hey, the planet hasn't been warming during the past 16 years or so. If the media's noticing, can the politicians be far behind? Fortunately, yes; yes, they can. Or si se puede, for those of you in southern California. So the "scientists" are struggling mightily to come up with a reason why the damn planet isn't doing what their models say they should do.
It might be the oceans. Then again, it might be down to the fact that these "scientists" approach things bass-ackwards: in actual science, one makes observations, then forms an hypothessis which might explain the observations. That's not how these guys roll; they produce models, and then are astounded to find that observations don't conform to their models. Some, like Michael Mann, simply manipulate data to make it seem like things conform to the model (see: hockey stick, climategate), but that's only a short-term solution; you can only fool people for so long with that kind of idiocy.
But the approach works, to the extent that it's proven successful at gaming the system and securing millions in government grants. It ain't, however, science.
Just how much are they twisting and turning? They're just being silly, at this point, as the following demonstrates:
A rapid rise in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s - when clean air laws in developed nations cut pollution and made sunshine stronger at the earth's surface - made for a compelling argument that human emissions were to blame.
Got it? Developed nations cut air pollution, temperatures increased by a bit, and so stronger laws must be developed to cut even more pollution in order to Save The Planet™ from Man-Made Global Warming®. The venerable United Nations IPCC - which thus far hasn't got anything right - says so:
The IPCC will seek to explain the current pause in a report to be released in three parts from late 2013 as the main scientific roadmap for governments in shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies such as solar or wind power, the panel's chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.
So, since global warming stopped some 16 years ago, it's imperative that "scientists" put their heads together and come up with an explanation that will allow politicians appropriate cover in order for them to continue to (1) keep the grant gravy train rolling and (2) impose ever greater controls over the activities of the little people. After all, freedom is one of those things that must be sacrificed for the good of the collective.
The 19-mile-long light-rail line that opened in 2006 was touted as a quick way for people to reach jobs in downtown Denver or the Tech Center.
The Southeast Rail Line has produced mixed results as a job generator, and few workers along the route ride the line, according to a report by two nonprofits released Friday.
In other words, the Denver experience is much like Portland's: a line "touted" as a job-creator that would "spur" private development does neither. As Portland has repeatedly demonstrated, the only way to "spur" private development around light rail involves dishing out millions in tax breaks and other incentives to developers.
Residents of Vancouver may dodge that bullet yet, however, as the Washington state Senate doesn't appear to be warming up to the idea of funding a train line on a new I-5 bridge over the Columbia River. That means that Oregon taxpayers, whose legislators foolishly agreed to pony up $450 million for the project, won't be on the hook for that, as Republicans were able to ensure that any such funding would be contingent upon Washington doing the same by the end of this year. The top Senators in the Washington legislature have made it clear: that isn't going to happen.
Opposition to the project largely comes down to the inclusion in it of light rail. Project opponents, notably Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, point out that Clark County voters last November rejected a 0.1 percent increase in their sales tax to help pay for the light rail aspect of the project.
They also say the bridge as currently conceived is too low, and that three businesses upriver of the bridge would likely have to relocate because they would be unable to fit their goods under a bridge with 116 feet of clearance. The current span is roughly 50 feet higher and, unlike its planned replacement, is a drawbridge.
The main problem with raising the bridge, those involved with the project say, is making it too steep to safely include light rail.
It's worth emphasizing that last point, as it's been discussed here on several occasions over the years and is now being admitted: the only reason for designing a bridge with insufficient clearance for maritime traffic has been the continued insistence upon the inclusion of light rail by Portland Democratics; light rail simply can't handle the steeper grades that would be required to achieve appropriate clearances.
Thus far, bureaucrats have burned through nearly $200 million and ten years to design a structure that's inadequate, and not one shovel-full of dirt has been turned.
By contrast, The Glenn Jackson Bridge across the Columbia River on I-205 was designed, constructed, and opened in 1982 for a total cost of $169.9 million - less than has been peed away by light-rail-blinded bureaucrats and politicians on design alone.
If the politicians insist on light rail, as has been noted here before, then the logical place to install it would be along the I-205 right-of-way from Cascade Station near the Portland International Airport to, say, the Vancouver Mall. It's a straight shot with no significant gradient issues.
English: President Barack Obama examines a solar panel with Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet (right) and Executive Vice President Ben Bierman, during a tour of Solyndra. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Over at Boned Jello, there's a most interesting graphic depicting the incestuous relationship between various former Democrat staffers and Cabinet members and so-called "green energy" companies. It explains the vast sums of taxpayer-guaranteed funds dumped into supposed "businesses" such as Solyndra, Iberdola, and others.
The Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 UN proposal requiring all nations to reduce CO2 output by 5.2% by the year 2012, became international law after Russia signed on. One major industrialized country declined to sign on, to the dismay of many. And in 2012, one industrialized nation on the planet met the terms of the Kyoto Protocol.
Kyoto, 11 December 1997 – After 10 days of tough negotiations, ministers and other high-level officials from 160 countries reached agreement this morning on a legally binding Protocol under which industrialized countries will reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2%.
They led the world in "investing" in "clean, green, sustainable" solar and wind power - a source of considerable pride. Oh, but guess what? They signed the protocol, and failed to meet it.
Well, Germany: economic powerhouse, also heavily "invested" in "green" power. Nope, not them, they failed to meet the standard they agreed to.
Britain, with wind farms galore? Nope. Russia maybe? Nope.
The only industrialized country to meet the 2012 benchmark was the one country that didn't sign - and isn't bound by - the Protocol.
All views are welcome here, but there are a few rules that most understand intuitively. If you're stupid, you need them spelled out. So this note's for you:
1) You don't get to call people names (referred to in general parlance as an "ad-hominem attack").
2) You don't get to hijack discussion threads. This means that you confine your comments to the the post, and/or to comments related to the post.
3) You don't get to spit, drool, crap on the carpets, nor employ expletives - even if you believe that doing so showcases your vast intellectual capabilities.
4) If you happen to be stupid enough to be unable to comply with the above rules, you will receive one (1) warning - after which your subsequent comments may be removed, and your comment privileges revoked.
The Green Mountain Energy Wind Farm
