Author Archives: 2KeaheySchoeffler461

Why This Year’s El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared in Slate, and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The odds are increasing that an El Niño is in the works for 2014—and recent forecasts show it might be a big one.

As we learned from Chris Farley, El Niños can boost the odds of extreme weather (droughts, typhoons, heat waves) across much of the planet. But the most important thing about El Niño is that it is predictable, sometimes six months to a year in advance.

That’s an incredibly powerful tool, especially if you are one of the billions who live where El Niño tends to hit hardest—Asia and the Americas. If current forecasts stay on track, El Niño might end up being the biggest global weather story of 2014.

The most commonly accepted definition of an El Niño is a persistent warming of the so-called “Niño3.4” region of the tropical Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii, lasting for at least five consecutive three-month “seasons.” A recent reversal in the direction of the Pacific trade winds appears to have kicked off a warming trend during the last month or two. That was enough to prompt US government forecasters to issue an El Niño watch last month.

Forecasters are increasingly confident in a particularly big El Niño this time around because, deep below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, off-the-charts warm water is lurking:

That giant red blob is a huge sub-surface wave of anomalously warm water that currently spans the tropical Pacific Ocean—big enough to cover the United States 300 feet deep. That’s a lot of warm water. Australia Bureau of Meteorology

As that blob of warm water moves eastward, propelled by the anomalous trade winds, it’s also getting closer to the ocean’s surface. Once that happens, it will begin to interact with the atmosphere, boosting temperatures and changing weather patterns.

There are signs that this huge pool of sub-surface warmth is starting to emerge on the surface in recent days:

Which means that April 2014 could be the month the mega El Niño gets officially underway.

Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, meteorologist Cliff Mass warns that this time of year is known for lower performance in forecasting El Niños. But in general, scientists who follow these things are anticipating what could become a strong event.

“We’re carefully watching the potential development of an El Niño later this spring and into summer,” said forecaster Tony Barnston of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society in a recorded briefing message. “Below the surface we have a lot of warming and that could eventually make its way to the surface and create an El Niño.”

The warm water just below the ocean’s surface is on par with that of the biggest El Niño ever recorded, in 1997-98. That event caused $35 billion in damages and was blamed for around 23,000 deaths worldwide, according to the University of New South Wales. The 1997-98 El Niño is also the only other time since records begin in 1980 that sub-surface Pacific Ocean water has been this warm in April.

Climate change skeptics point to El Niño-fueled 1998 as the year global warming “stopped.” Of course, global warming hasn’t stopped at all. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998. The acceleration of that warming has slowed, though, compared with the previous breakneck pace during the late 20th century.

One of the theories put forth by the mainstream scientific community to explain the slow-down since 1998 has been increased storage of warm water in the Pacific Ocean. If that theory is true, and if a major El Niño is indeed in the works, the previously rapid rate of global warming could resume, with dramatic consequences.

As I wrote last fall, the coming El Niño could be enough to make 2014 the hottest year in recorded history, and 2015 could be even warmer than that. The 1997-98 super El Niño was enough to boost global temperatures by nearly a quarter of a degree Celsius. If that scale of warming happens again, the world could approach a 1ºC departure from pre-industrial times as early as next year. As climate scientist James Hansen has warned, that’s around the highest that temperatures have ever been since human civilization began.

Indeed, even the forecast is already having an effect: An index of global food prices reached a 10-month high in March, blamed in part on shortages an El Niño may exacerbate. Here’s what else we could expect:

A severe drought continues to rage in and around Indonesia, which an El Niño would likely worsen.

Peru’s anchovy catch may be significantly affected should a strong El Niño materialize.

Australia’s ongoing battles with bush fires may be intensified once its dry season resumes later this year.

But perhaps the strangest impact so far has been in India, where monsoon forecasting is at the heart of national politics. The meteorology department there has accused US weather forecasters of “spreading rumors” and colluding to ruin the Indian stock market by forecasting a return of El Niño.

There’s a bit of good news, too: Hurricane seasons in the Atlantic tend to be less severe under this kind of forecast. And people in drought-stricken California could be forgiven if they’re crossing their fingers for a strong El Niño, which is linked to some of the wettest years in state history. Still, it’s certainly no slam dunk that an El Niño would be enough to end the crippling drought there or even bring above normal rainfall. And if the El Niño ends up being as strong as current predictions indicate, there’s a chance it may even tip the scales from drought to deluge across the state, spurring damaging mudslides amid bursts of heavy rain. The two strongest El Niños in the last 30 years—1982-83 and 1997-98—both caused widespread damage from flooding in California.

The moral of the story here is: Be careful what you wish for.

Excerpt from: 

Why This Year’s El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, Eureka, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why This Year’s El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster

Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

David Brooks smoked marijuana in his youth, but then got bored with it and stopped. He says it never seemed like a very uplifting pastime, and this makes him nervous about about legalization:

I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

….I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Brooks’ column is getting a lot of mockery in my Twitter feed, but for once I guess I can’t really join in. It’s not that I agree with Brooks—and I’ll concede that his comparison of pot smoking with “higher pleasures” is kind of silly. But for the most part, all his column does is express a fairly modest sense of unease about the fact that legalization will almost certainly increase pot smoking a fair amount. There’s really nothing wrong with being a little nervous about that. These new laws will increase marijuana use.

But the big thing Brooks misses is the question of whether this will increase overall intoxication. It might. Alternatively, marijuana might largely displace alcohol use, producing little or no net increase in intoxication but producing a safer society overall since pot tends to be less damaging than alcohol. In the lingo, this is a question of whether marijuana and alcohol are economic substitutes or economic complements, and the research on this point is inconclusive. One of the great benefits of legalization in Washington and Colorado is that it will finally start to give us some decent data on this. For various reasons, it won’t settle the question definitively, but two or three years from now we’ll certainly have a much better idea than we do today about the net effect of marijuana legalization.

And if it turns out that legalizing pot reduces alcohol use? Then Brooks should be happy. There will still be plenty of idiots getting drunk and stoned, but there won’t be any more than there are now. We’ll have an increase in personal freedom; a reduction in drug war costs; and no significant change in the number of people pursuing higher pleasures. It’s well worth finding out if this will be the case.

See the article here – 

Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

Shutterstock

The Obama administration will soon require new coal-fired power plants to capture the carbon dioxide they produce and store it underground. Coal companies that had long touted “clean coal” turned on the idea, arguing that carbon sequestration isn’t commercially viable.

But don’t you worry about the poor coal industry. The fossil fuel guys have a trick up their sleeve. Here is the AP, reporting on an approach adopted at a new coal power plant in Mississippi:

At first, the idea behind “carbon-capture” technology was to make coal plants cleaner by burying the carbon dioxide deep underground that they typically pump out of smokestacks.

But that green vision proved too expensive and complicated, so the administration accepted a trade-off.

To help the environment, the government allows power companies to sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies, which pump it into old oil fields to force more crude to the surface. A side benefit is that the carbon gets permanently stuck underground.

The program shows the ingenuity of the oil industry, which is using government green-energy money to subsidize oil production. But it also showcases the environmental trade-offs Obama is willing to make, but rarely talks about, in his fight against global warming. …

Four power plants in the U.S. and Canada … intend to sell their carbon waste for oil recovery.

So say goodbye to carbon dioxide, and hello to oil that will be burned to produce more carbon dioxide.

As if it weren’t bad enough that this approach undermines the whole intent of carbon capture, scientists recently linked the practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields to a major flurry of earthquakes in Texas in 2009 and 2010.


Source
To clean up coal, Obama pushes more oil production, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Visit site: 

The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

US Ranks 43rd on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Recently, there’s been some good news when it comes to US greenhouse gas emissions: They’re actually going down. The bad news, though, is that despite this progress, we still only rank 43rd in the world for the overall effectiveness of our climate policies.

That’s the upshot of a new report by the Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch, a public policy think tank with offices in Bonn and Berlin. The two groups release an annual Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) to assess how much individual countries are contributing to the global carbon problem, and how much they’re trying to do about it. The rankings include the globe’s 58 leading countries for greenhouse gas emissions—countries that, together, account for 90 percent of the globe’s carbon emissions from fossil energy use. Each country is assessed based its emissions trends, its energy efficiency, its progress on renewable energy, and its overall climate policies.

The US ranked 43rd last year and ranks 43rd this year as well, right between New Zealand and Croatia. We get particularly good marks for our 8-percent decrease in carbon emissions from energy sources in the last half decade, but we still fall well short of a stance that could be considered truly progressive or proactive on climate and energy. Still, if we want to gloat then it’s easy to compare ourselves to our northern neighbor, Canada, which was “the worst performer of all industrialised countries” and only fared better than Iran, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia. (For more on Canada’s recent dismal climate performance see here.)

Here are the Climate Change Performance Index rankings for the top ten biggest emitters (most of which have declined in rank since last year):

CCPI ranking and data for the ten largest greenhouse gas emitting countries. CAN Europe/Germanwatch

Based on the new report, here are some other surprising and intriguing facts about the nations of the world and how they’re performing in the uphill battle to save the globe from humans and their energy habits:

* Europe is one of the best performing regions overall, but there’s wide variability, especially among countries hit hard by the Eurozone debt crisis. On the one hand, bailed-out Portugal ranks sixth in the world on the CCPI index, suggesting economic hardship does not necessarily entail regression on climate policy. But on the other hand, bailed-out Greece ranks 47th, having “almost totally abandoned all climate policies” in the wake of its economic crisis.

* Morocco is a surprising success story, ranking 15th overall thanks to its “national solar plan” as well as a “national action plan against global warming.”

* Industrialized countries in the Pacific region have a lot to answer for. Japan slipped to 50th overall from 44th last year. Korea dropped to 53rd from 50th. And Australia plummeted to 57th thanks to its recent change in government.

* Large developing nations (the BRICs) are also lagging. India declined to 30th and Brazil slipped to 36th. Perhaps most important for the planet, China climbed to 46th in the rankings, a turnaround due to the fact that its dramatic rate of emissions growth is slowing somewhat, even as renewable energy investment continues apace. The Russian Federation is the worst of the BRICs, coming in at 56th.

Overall, there isn’t a ton of good news around the world this year when it comes to climate policy. No wonder, then, that the CCPI doesn’t put any country in positions 1, 2, or 3 of its rankings, noting that “no country is doing enough to prevent dangerous climate change.”

Taken from: 

US Ranks 43rd on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US Ranks 43rd on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)

A Push Away From Burning Coal as an Energy Source

green4us

Be the Pack Leader – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

Bestselling author Cesar Millan takes his principles of dog psychology a step further, showing you how to develop the calm-assertive energy of a successful pack leader and use it to improve your dog’s life–and your own. Filled with practical tips and techniques as well as real-life success stories from his clients (including the Grogan family, owners of Marl […]

iTunes Store
Codex: Inquisition – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

iTunes Store
Duct Tape Your Heart Out! – Leisure Arts & Patti Wallenfang

With today’s colorful duct tape and the fun projects in this book, you can craft to your heart’s content! Dress up school stuff and rain gear, make hip headphones and a purse or wallet, give new life to old shoes, bend covered coax cable into wall art words, and create unique jewelry to share with friends. These ideas are irresistible! Step-by-step photos an […]

iTunes Store
Warlords of the Dark Millennium: Fabius Bile – Games Workshop

Having once fought alongside the Chaos Space Marines of the Emperor’s Children, Fabius Bile is now a renegade even from his own Legion. A foul experimenter, he possesses dark knowledge of alchemy and genetic manipulation, and leaves a trail of sinister abominations in his wake. About This Series: The galaxy burns with the fires of countless wars a […]

iTunes Store
Codex: Inquisition (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

iTunes Store
Codex: Adepta Sororitas – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b […]

iTunes Store
The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

iTunes Store
Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

iTunes Store
How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

iTunes Store
Trident K9 Warriors – Michael Ritland & Gary Brozek

As Seen on “60 Minutes”! As a Navy SEAL during a combat deployment in Iraq, Mike Ritland saw a military working dog in action and instantly knew he’d found his true calling. Ritland started his own company training and supplying dogs for the SEAL teams, U.S. Government, and Department of Defense. He knew that fewer than 1 percent of […]

iTunes Store

Continued here:  

A Push Away From Burning Coal as an Energy Source

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Push Away From Burning Coal as an Energy Source

Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge

Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge

Shutterstock

So much power at our fingertips.

The global digital economy, also known as the ICT system (information-communications-technologies), sucks up as much electricity today as it took to illuminate the entire planet in 1985. The average iPhone requires more power per year than the average refrigerator. It’s like you’re walking around all day with a fridge’s worth of electricity in your pocket (but no hummus!).

This info comes from a report [PDF] by Mark Mills, CEO of the Digital Power Group, sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. So part of the report’s point is that coal keeps the iPhones on. But instead of inspiring gratitude for coal and all the blessings it bestows on us, knowing the source of all that juice just makes the digital economy’s ginormous energy footprint of even greater concern.

As Bryan Walsh points out in Time, the ICT system’s power hunger only stands to keep growing as our devices become ever more powerful and ubiquitous. Walsh explains:

[T]he cloud uses energy differently than other sectors of the economy. Lighting, heating, cooling, transportation — these are all power uses that have rough limits. … you can only heat your home so much, or drive so far before you reach a period of clearly diminishing returns. Just because my Chevy Volt can get 100 miles per gallon doesn’t mean I’m going to drive back and forth to Washington each day. …

But the ICT system derives its value from the fact that it’s on all the time. From computer trading floors or massive data centers to your own iPhone, there is no break time, no off period. (I can’t be the only person who keeps his iPhone on at night for emergency calls because I no longer have a home phone.) That means a constant demand for reliable electricity. … As the cloud grows bigger and bigger, and we put more and more of our devices on wireless networks, we’ll need more and more electricity. How much? Mills calculates that it takes more electricity to stream a high-definition movie over a wireless network than it would have taken to manufacture and ship a DVD of that same movie.

No matter how energy conscious you may be in your habits — religiously unplugging your toaster, screwing in CFL bulbs, and keeping the AC at 80 — as long as you’re connected to the cloud, you’ll be a first-class energy vampire whether you like it or not. Ironically, as we and others have already noted, a growing movement toward more sustainable lifestyles goes hand-in-hand with an increase in wireless-technology dependence, even if the link doesn’t represent a conscious choice:

At a moment when young people are buying fewer cars and living in smaller spaces — reducing energy needs for transportation and heating/cooling — they’re buying more and more connected devices. Of course the electricity bill is going to go up.

Walsh argues that the hidden and artificially cheap cost of electricity (“Compare the feeling of paying your utility bill to the irritation of forking out $3.50 a gallon to fill up your car”) reduces the incentive for technology companies to push for energy efficiency in their devices. Having to charge your iPhone constantly is annoying, but we don’t think of it as expensive. We don’t think about the fact that 10 percent of the world’s total electricity generation today is devoted solely to the ICT system.

But as wireless technology only grows more and more accessible — according to predictions, 1 billion people could be using the cloud by next year — its share of the world’s power will keep ballooning. We’ll need to invest more research in making digital devices more efficient. More urgently, we’ll need to wean the cloud off coal.

Luckily, we have plenty of viable alternatives.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Living

Read the article: 

Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, Dolphin, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge

Social Security Report: Nothing Much Has Changed This Year

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The previous post covered the latest actuarial report on Medicare finances. So how’s Social Security doing this year? Answer: about the same. Last year the trustees projected that the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted in 2033. This year they project that it will be exhausted in 2033. The long-term actuarial deficit actually increased slightly, mostly due to changes in economic assumptions, but the change was so small that it had no impact on medium-term projections.

Given the inherent uncertainty in this kind of stuff, it’s wise not to dive too deeply into these numbers. The bottom line is that SSA is projecting slightly higher long-term costs than last year, but not enough to really affect anything over the next few decades.

See original:  

Social Security Report: Nothing Much Has Changed This Year

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Social Security Report: Nothing Much Has Changed This Year

8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

“Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful.”—Former President George W. Bush, July 2012

On Thursday, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum will be officially dedicated at Southern Methodist University, a school attended by the likes of former first lady Laura Bush, actor Powers Boothe, and Kourtney Kardashian. The invitation-only event will be attended by President Obama, before he visits a memorial at Baylor University for victims of the West, Texas, plant explosion. A spokesperson says attendance at the library dedication is expected to be in the thousands.

Continue Reading »

See original article here:  

8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

If You Have a Cash Cow, You Should Milk It

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Matt Yglesias thinks that Apple’s strategy of earning very high margins on Mac desktops and laptops isn’t very smart:

Apple already has an awful lot of cash. Getting even more cash is not particularly useful for any goal at this point (diminishing marginal utility). So they ought to do something. One smart thing to do would be to make a strategic investment in Mac OS market share since with its current rather small market share Mac profits are not a particularly important part of overall Apple profits, but Mac could and should be an important part of Apple strategy.

I’ll play devil’s advocate here. As I recall, Matt himself has made the point in the past that plowing money into a declining business usually doesn’t make sense. If you make buggywhips, you should forget about trying to make a better or cheaper buggywhip. Just milk the product for all it’s worth, return the profit to shareholders (or plow it into another product line), and shut the whole thing down when it finally gets too small to be worth running.

This is actually conventional wisdom, and my guess is that this is how Apple feels about Macs. Could they get more market share if they slashed prices? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Mac buyers tend to be devotees who are willing to pay more because they love Macs. Anyone who’s truly price sensitive is never going to be a customer anyway—especially these days, when Windows and Mac OS have converged enough that, frankly, there’s not a big difference between them.1

But the kicker is the fact that the PC market is declining, and no one thinks this is going to reverse in the long term. It’s losing out to tablets and phones and Google glasses. Given that fact, why bother trying to increase your market share a point or two? There’s no long-term benefit since the entire segment is doomed.

Now, there’s still the question of what to do with the mountains of cash that Macs spin off, and it’s pretty clear that Apple doesn’t yet have any bright ideas on that front. Neither do I. But using it to buy more market share in a declining segment probably isn’t the answer.

1Yes, I know this is going to start a flame war. Save your breath. I’ve used both Macs and Windows boxes, and modern versions work about equally well and have pretty similar feature sets. There are differences, some that favor Macs and some that favor PCs, and those of us who live and breathe tech will defend them against all comers. But for your average consumer, who just wants to browse the web and send some emails, they’re about the same.

View this article: 

If You Have a Cash Cow, You Should Milk It

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , | Comments Off on If You Have a Cash Cow, You Should Milk It

Fracking for uranium, first accidentally, and now on purpose

Fracking for uranium, first accidentally, and now on purpose

Shutterstock

What has 92 protons, deforms growing children, sickens adults, and is being squeezed out of its underground lair by frackers operating in Pennsylvania?

U[hh], uranium!

The toxic and radioactive heavy metal is naturally trapped in the Marcellus shale, the fossil-fuel-laden rock formation popular with frackers that stretches from upstate New York through Pennsylvania to West Virginia and Ohio. We know the uranium is in there, and we know fracking sets it free, because scientists have been saying as much for years.

Pennsylvania is finally launching a systematic study to measure uranium contamination caused by fracking. From Shale Reporter:

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection this month will begin testing for radioactivity in waste products from natural gas well drilling.

In addition to analyzing wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, the study also will analyze radioactivity in drill cuttings, drilling mud, drilling equipment, treatment solids and sediments at well pads, wastewater treatment and disposal facilities and landfill leachate, among others.

The study also will test radiation levels for the equipment involved in the transportation, storage and disposal of drilling wastes.

The U.S. Geological Survey found in 2011 that fracking wastewater wells in the northeastern U.S. were contaminated with uranium at levels 300 times greater than the national limit for nuclear plant discharges. Yet Pennsylvania has insisted that there is no problem. The state was reluctant even to test for uranium in fracking wastewater. Now the state has agreed to study the issue, but officials insist that the studies will not reveal anything of any concern to anybody. From a press release from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection:

Based on current data, regulations and industry practices, there is no indication that the public or workers in the oil and gas industry face health risks from exposure to radiation from [fracking waste and equipment].

Meanwhile, the realization that fracking dislodges uranium particles has lit up nuclear-powered lightbulbs over the metaphorical heads of some energy executives. From a February report in Forbes:

[Uranium Energy Corp. CEO Amir] Adnani insists that he can close [America’s] yellowcake gap through a technology that is similar to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has created the South Texas energy boom. Fracking for uranium isn’t vastly different from fracking for natural gas. UEC bores under ranchland into layers of highly porous rock that not only contain uranium ore but also hold precious groundwater. Then it injects oxygenated water down into the sand to dissolve out the uranium. The resulting solution is slurped out with pumps, then processed and dried at the company’s Hobson plant.

Fracking for uranium. Energy companies are already doing it accidentally as they frack for natural gas, so what could possibly go wrong once it’s done deliberately ?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See the original post:  

Fracking for uranium, first accidentally, and now on purpose

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Northeastern, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, Sprout, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fracking for uranium, first accidentally, and now on purpose