Author Archives: Unique Article

White House Loses Gamble on Canceled White House Tours

by Unique Article Posted on March 14, 2013

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Nobody really cares about canceled research projects, furloughed workers, or reduced food safety inspections. As Steve Benen points out, the current Beltway obsession over sequester-related budget cuts is with canceled White House tours:

By my count, there were eight questions about the tours at yesterday’s White House press briefing. George Stephanopoulos wanted to talk about this during a rare interview with President Obama, asking two questions on this. Congressional Republicans wanted to talk about this when the president met with them privately, and they’re weighing a new resolution on the issue.

And don’t forget the Washington Post editorial board, which dedicated a big chunk of space to this today. They justify this by explaining that the cancellations were pretty obviously designed to be high profile in the first place: “The ham-handed tactic is employed when government is faced with budget cuts and officials go after the services that are most visible and appreciated by the public. It’s a kind of bureaucratic hostage-taking, so the pushback that the Obama administration has encountered is a proper comeuppance.”

Well, maybe. It’s certainly true that White House tours are booked through your local member of Congress, which means that when they’re canceled, that’s who you’re going to complain to. Supposedly this puts pressure on Congress to do something about the sequester. In reality, though, it’s mostly given Congress a chance to scream about how the president is politicizing the budget cuts. And since the press loves nothing more than a catfight that requires no tedious explanations of policy issues, this kind of shiny bauble is irresistible.

At the same time, the world is what it is. The White House isn’t staffed with political naifs. They knew what they were doing, they knew how Congress would react, and they knew how the media would treat it. They took a gamble that canceling the tours would apply some useful pressure, and they pretty much lost that gamble. Everyone saw right through it, and they were not amused.

That’s life. Nobody comes out of this episode looking especially good. Onward.

Mother Jones
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White House Loses Gamble on Canceled White House Tours

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Japan Just Opened Up a Whole New Source for Fossil Fuels

by Unique Article Posted on March 13, 2013

An artist’s rendering of methane hydrate’s small-scale structure, with a methane molecule in green and gold trapped within a blue and silver cage of water. Photo: Masakazu Matsumoto

Found deep underwater in coastal oceans worldwide, a slushy mix of natural gas and water ice is on path to becoming an energy source of future, reports the BBC. Japanese researchers announced that, for the first time, they have managed to successfully extract useful natural gas from the mix, known as a methane clathrate.

Previous work on methane clathrates found on land have been used to produce natural gas, but this is the first time that ocean floor deposits have been tapped. The stores of offshore methane clathrates around Japan, says the BBC, are estimated at around 1.1 trillion cubic metres of the mix, enough to supply “more than a decade of Japan’s gas consumption.” The United States Geological Survey, says The Washington Post, estimates that gas hydrates worldwide “could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”

Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Japan says that the technology to usefully produce natural gas from methane clathrates is still around five years off.

Burning natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal, and replacing coal or other fossil fuels with natural gas is often looked at as a a way to limit global warming. However, fossil fuels are still fossil fuels, and burning this new source of energy could do a wondrous amount of damage. The Washington Post:

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there’s more carbon trapped inside gas hydrates than is contained in all known reserves of fossil fuels.

…Bottom line: It could prove impossible to keep global warming below the goal of 2°C if a significant fraction of this natural gas gets burned.

The New York Times:

“Gas hydrates have always been seen as a potentially vast energy source, but the question was, how do we extract gas from under the ocean?” said Ryo Matsumoto, a professor in geology at Meiji University in Tokyo who has led research into Japan’s hydrate deposits. “Now we’ve cleared one big hurdle.”

The other big hurdle is deciding whether this is a path worth following.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Massive Field Of Frozen Greenhouse Gas Is Thawing Out

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Japan Just Opened Up a Whole New Source for Fossil Fuels

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