Author: Grumpy

Categories
East River Eastport Maine Hydrokinetic Power New Jersey New York Ocean Power Technology Oregon RITES Project River Power SPECTER Organization Tidal Power Verdant Power Wave Power

Hope Unda’ Da East Riva!? Yu serious!? Serious as a tidal rip…

When you think of NYC you actually do think of environmentalism, but it’s usually along the lines of efficiency and quality of life. With it’s progressive mayor for life, Michael Bloomberg (now replaced, but the impact of his 12 years of policies likely won’t be undone by new Mayor DeBlasio), party notwithstanding, making dictates that are in the public interest, no matter how annoying they might have become, and it’s quite settled limo liberal upper class, and just it’s car free big building lifestyle, New Yorkers actually have perhaps the lowest carbon footprints in the United States, about 9 tons a piece I once read, compared to 20 for the rest of the country on average. The way New Yorkers inevitably share walls with each other during hot days and cold winter nights serves in part to make them more efficient, it’s like a big Adobe Pueblo with a great public transportation system, and shows, did I mention the shows!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_Peoples
(if the above link were perfect, i would have thrown in a subway car with photoshop, but I have forgotten how!)
But when you think of the big projects, the big ambitious stuff, you inevitably think of the vast American West, of the West Coast, places where Pick Up Truck Engineers mix with Cash Drunk Entrepreneurs and dream up harebrained schemes that somehow eventually work… these are open land projects, heartland ambitions.. people who will deny global warming until some tornado or freak weather event finally convinces them otherwise, so they throw on their Carhardts and come up with a solution on AutoCad while the kid is asleep and the horses have been fed… but never count out the romanticism of America’s most ambitious city (sorry Chicago, you do go big, but you rarely go refined!) because sure enough, despite New York’s, and especially Manhattan’s distinctly white collar reputation, da workin’ stiffs who risk a bit of slight at a cocktail party for admitting they do something tangible, create a concrete and not just intellectual product, have been up to something on the bottom of the East River.. the East Frikin’ River.. can you believe dat! Get da F%$ outtta here! Right next da FDR.. drive by dere every day! up from da UN, like 50 sometin’! Across from dat frinkin’ Roosevelt Island.. who da hell lives dere? And dat’s like the most polluted river in the world eva! (Translation: I am having a hard time believing you. it’s in the East River alongside the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive. I know the Location well. It’s north of the United Nations. Approximately in the area of the streets numbered 50 to 59. The location is alongside Roosevelt Island, whose residents I have never met and have always been a mystery to me. It’s Ironic because the river is alleged by New York conventional wisdom to be highly polluted.)
http://verdantpower.com/what-initiative/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-23/tidal-energy-project-in-new-york-s-east-river-wins-license.html

now as I research, it turns out that these were perhaps the first Tidal Turbines in operation, and the first US federal permit to install such a device (hey, it’s New York, always regulations!) as they move to phase 5 after struggling with the fortunate problem of torn off blades because there was MORE power than they originally expected,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/nyregion/13power.html?pagewanted=all
(note that that article is from 2007, and they have been moving ahead since..)
but that there is such a proliferation of tidal energy, going back to the first modern commercial project in France in the 60’s, that this one gets last mention in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/678082/how_france_eclipsed_the_uk_with_brittany_tidal_success_story.html
but the turbines made by Verdant are perhaps among the least intrusive, as some of these projects actually require damning an entire estuary… but it also turns out, ambitious though New Yorkers may be, that it isn’t the first operation to go on grid in the states.. leave that to a company from Florida and a location in Maine:
look at the back, above the crowd to see the interesting helical design chosen there…
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/07/24/nation-first-tidal-energy-project-dedicated-eastport-maine/y477E7mCnIpfBPod5hfKXL/story.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/us/turbine-to-harness-the-tides-to-generate-power.html?_r=0
And they are not alone.. Projects in Canada and Europe are installed, producing, and moving ahead with innovation, and there is even a wave power project moving in off the coast of Oregon..
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/us/project-aims-to-harness-wave-energy-off-the-oregon-coast.html
http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/reedsport.html
http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/coos.html
this promises to be 100 MW.. that’s huge, and in a funny way, it’s kind of a de-facto marine reserve as well because you can’t drift net or bottom trawl if they are close enough together without a lot of difficulty either..
turns out that despite my having heard of the Oregon projects first, these guys are actually all over the world now with these SPECTER Organization looking things (5 minutes to world destruction, all personnel clear the area…), and the first one was in none udda den Atlantic City! If only Don Rickles had lived long enough to have his microphone be tidal powered…
http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/projects.html
http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/ac.html
Respect, New York metro area.. respect.. thank’s for pulling your weight.. no wonder there is always a guy from Brooklyn in every WWII movie.. New Yorkers do get excited in a crisis.

It’s been a debate between myself and a friend.. are we @#$%ed, and should we all head to the hills and start canning rutabagas and hoarding ammo, or will technology solve this problem like it has solved so many others, perhaps both, perhaps neither, but this is promising…

Categories
CFC's Global Warming improving NOAA Ozone Hole Ozone Watch status steady

Remember The Ol’ Hole in the Ozone Layer? How’s He Doin’!?

Steady and Improving..Doctor…
Remember the Ozone Hole.. remember how scary it was.. like that guy in high school who seemed so intimidating.. what’s he up to now, now that you have gotten your life together and faced some significantly bigger challenges, kind of can’t wait to see him at Reunion to stare him down, ha.. Ozone Hole.. what a prick he was!

Well, I’m proud to report he is kind of what you expected.. he’s gone nowhere…sure he got worse for a while, but now he’s kind of stuck.. it’s the equivalent of him staying at home and becoming an overly friendly rental car salesman now with a bit of a paunch and a widows peak.. he drinks when he feels guilty about high school, and just smiles a lot and tries to make jokes when you talk to him…he’s gone from being Freddie Kruger to that Pixar Monster in the imagination of your soul compared to the new challenges you are facing with global warming and it’s 3 horsemen buddies, Glacial Melt, Ocean Acidification, and interruptions to the Food Supply when the world’s population is peaking.. you’ll be eating him for Soylent Green in a few years..
So really, what’s he up to, in the 80’s and 90’s he was such a big deal, back when only egg heads and college professors were squawking about global warming?
Seriously!?
He peaked in 2006, later than you might have imagined.. you know, the equivalent of a bully playing some college ball, or moving to a city that is actually desirable and dating the hottest girl in your high school,
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/Scripts/big_image.php?date=2006-09-24&hem=S

but for 7 years, nothing, flat, gonzo…
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/oct/HQ_12-371_2012_Ozone_Hole.html
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/ozone-layer-hole-smallest-its-been-in-20-years.php
it’s how the mechanisms of the chemistry worked that the CFC’s had to work themselves through the atmosphere, but we seem to have successfully halted the production of CFC’s, so as refrigerators die say in a place like India, are thrown into a landfill or recycled, and the CFC’s leak out and make their way to the South Pole through the normal movements of the atmosphere,where in the extreme colds of the southern polar spring, with sunlight however increasing, they combine with hundreds of ozone molecules to tear them from the sky… but the rate of destruction has not increased, the hole never got bigger, our bully seems to have stopped getting meaner and bigger, and enviously more successful. And one thing that’s true, we are making more ozone to replace it one old car at a time, and I wonder, not knowing enough about the mechanisms,if this might not be working in our favor as well..as we age and start to take the position of the bully, learn perspective taking, we ask ourselves “hmm, I wonder what his home life was like?” and things like that, I start to wonder why it never was a factor in the North Pole. was it the lack of altitude of any land mass below it? I have no idea, but obviously we have moved on to bigger and worse things, but we do keep an eye on it.. that satellite I guess hangs out up there watching, and some office at NOAA or the UN keeps adding up the numbers, like that other guy you went to high school with, that ally, who never quite left town, but does cool stuff, owns a bar and hosts parties, he keeps you up on it, satisfies your sceidenfreund by helping you make fun of the bully by telling you how he gets drunk now and complains about how his life has gone nowhere for 7 years.. and you can’t help but see it as, well, hopeful..
Today’s Hole Size:
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia, of course, has all the answers..luckily it has no sense of humor, otherwise I would just post a damn wikipedia link, but it says some interesting things.. were it not for the Montreal Protocols, which banned CFC’s in 1987 (celebrated, no doubt, by the celebration of another type of hole on St.Catherines Street..), the whole earth would have been as depleted as the hotle above Antractica by 2060, but they are now calling for a statisticallysignificant recovery by 2024, and pre 1980 levels, where they set the bar, by 2068 worldwide.. the Hole in the South Pole During spring.. gone around 2050…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
Whew..glad that’s over with.. now we have nothing to worry about atmospherically.. wait.. what!?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Categories
Charlie Crist Everglades Restoration Plan Governor Charlie Crist Shark Slough Tamiami Trail Tamiami Trail Modifications TamiamiTrail Bridge The Everglades United Sugar Company

Everglades Restoration Project Pt. 3: Restoring the Flow

So when last we left this story, I believe we were discussing how they were a makin’ improvements on the edges, kind of cleaning things up, like a surgical tech prepping the patient, cleaning up little, and not so little odds and ends created by 100 or so years of American habitation of the Florida Peninsula (that’s all it took to screw it up.. industrious people, Flagler and them!).. but you young kids, you whipper-snappers, who haven’t been waiting 60 years for a drink of fresh water like us old alligator types. We know how to just lull ourselves and sit in the sun and not eat for a year or so, but you kids want satisfaction, you want to know about the big show, the big problem, you rush right in..well, I gotto admire that.. you kids got guts.. you realize that unless the flow is restored, the icon of the Everglades, Everglades National Park, is gunna shrivel up, succumb to nitrogen overload and invasive species onslaughts, world sea level rise, and, well, won’t be much left to see..
Now a tourist might not know the difference.. to them, brown grass is well, brown grass, and a gator can survive just about anything, but it’s the million subtle differences we are talking about, Okeechobee being almost dry, and the ‘glades themselves being just about dry as well.. what to do, what to do..

Alright, I’m a torturing you a bit.. it’s an old gator’s job… what to do? A lot.. and finally, it’s happening, and not just on the edges like I described before in part II, but on the Tamiami Trail, and in the sugar lands.. sure we got a bit of a, well, how do they describe it, a budget crisis going on.. but somehow them boys up in Tallahassee and Warsh-ington, DC managed to find just enough bucks to really do two big things.. well, to do the start of two big things.. they kind of pulled short of the ideal, the full restoration, but I think you are going to see that it’s a great start, and there is nothing to keep them from continuing with the two major steps I am about to describe, the two major steps that are essentially restoration as close to complete as one could ask for if taken to the n-th, and for me, the day they open up Shark Slough, maybe in about 6 months, I might have a piece of Key Lime pie or a shot o’ Conch Republic Rum to celebrate.. although I just might make em with sugar from Cuba..

So let’s start with the Sugar Deal, and a sweet deal it would have been… Charlie Crist, the democratic governor that drew a lot of flak, but had a kind of adolescent innocence that made him try things for heck’s sake, he tried something big once.. he tried to make a huge deal to save the everglades, and it didn’t quite work, but it did set the stage a bit..
So Charlie knew all the problems, he’s Governor for Pete’s sake, and he also knew all the guys at United Sugar.. since they are, umm.. big political supporters.. and he knew that the market cap of the business, it wasn’t huge, and the people love business solutions.. they buzzwords back then were ‘Running Government Like a Corporation’, so heck, Charlie decided, why not think like a CEO, since United Sugar owns all this land around Lake Okeechobee that is basically cutting The Everglades in two, and they are farming the crap out of it, dumping more nitrogen than God ever could into the shallow flow that should exist there, and that makes it to the areas south to change the makeup of the plant life that does ever receive water, so why not just buy em out for 2 Billion Dollars, dissolve all domestic sugar production into the lemonade of our global economy, and just call it fixed.. heck, anyone can see that Florida can afford to do that.. well, that was the original intent, but somehow, like a wave crashing against a breakwater, it never made it to it’s final destination.. what ended up happening was a 500 million dollar deal instead of the 2 billion or so full purchase, that was, well, a pretty sweet deal for United Sugar, which never had to dissolve.. wait, scratch that, we are down to a 200 million dollar deal, with options.. it just had to give up a patch work of some of it’s likely less productive lands, but only after being allowed to use them for some 6 more years or so, so that the land could go fallow and help restore the link between the upper and lower everglades.. kind of.. starting I guess in 2016 (lord help us..):
http://enr.construction.com/infrastructure/environment/2010/extras/0818.asp
http://southeast.construction.com/southeast_construction_news/2010/0818_FlaWaterMgmt.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Sugar_Corporation
please note that at the bottom there, they are going pretty green, using their waste products for production and even perhaps for biofuel..

anyhow, the deal got done, with options pending, Charlie got in a mess running for Senate, but here we are with the land now kind of close to going fallow, not all of it mind you, and according to one environmental scientist from Florida, not any lands that were critical, it’s not a clear corridor from the Kissimmie Side to the National Park, but hey it’s Florida, it takes a lot of lard to make a good Cuban sandwich… so that was step one, but what about step two.. the ‘glades are down there starving for water.. they would drink nitrogen soup if it meant they wouldn’t thirst to death, and soon they will have their salvation.. well, in part, but to me, this is the best step of all:

So that system of ditches and dikes I have been talkin’ about, includes a few highways, and sure, again, around the edges, they have been closing off and modifying a few ditches (canal’s as they are referred to) like mentioned before in part two, and a few minor project I haven’t mentioned like changing the flow of water into Biscayne Bay National Wildlife Refuge, not to be forgotten next to his bigger federal brother the Everglades National Park, or the big tank they are building to replenish the everglades aquifers with settling waste water after they get pumped away to satisfy south Florida’s thirsts, but if you had to identify one dyke and canal combo that is stopping the main flow to that aforementioned bigger federal brother, the poster child, the golden hope, it is the Tamiami Trail, US 41, the classic everglades highway, dotted with air boat tours and alligator farms where you can watch some good cracker on gator wrestlin’ action for what might set ya back 30 bucks or so.. it’s the least obscure but perhaps most iconically satisfying of the Florida back roads, the road so interesting it seems to even give the traffic guy a smile every day to say it’s name.. the Tamiami Trail. It’s got Indian Casinos that got their tacky second rate infamy for claiming the Marylin Monroe of the 90’s, Anna Nicole Smith (Bigger, Bustier, and Uncut!), Goodland where the west coast of Florida Midwesterners troop for a good time show, and the subtropical forests where the orchid thief plied his trade, it’s a regular Florida icon bonanza, but it might as well be the Glen Canyon Dam to the Everglades NP’s Grand Canyon. It is blocking off the flow of water to such a degree that along with all it’s northerly cousins, it’s been estimated that in total the lands in the park are getting 5% of their original flow… and that that is changing the composition of the ecosystem so dramatically, with everything from salt water intrusion to species composition change, that it might as well be a different park for all who have to live there even though to the untrained eye it is the same place, hot, flat, buggy and filled with some sort of grass…
So who is the savior that is coming in to change a problem that the experts see.. well, none other than Ken Salazar, the Department of the Interior, the South Florida Water Management District, various funding sources of the Federal Government, and of all things the Florida Department of Transportation… and how are they going to start restoring the flow, as all the culverts on the Tamiami trail now spout with huge head pressure during the rainy season but it still isn’t enough.. you got it! Another big public works project, but you gotta spread the fat around to get something done in Florida.. Here it is, the Shark Slough Restoration Project elevated road bed!

http://photojournalclydeniki.blogspot.com/2011/10/society-of-environmental-journalists.html
http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wetlands/tamiami-trail-bridge-restores-flow-to-everglades-but-it-wont-be-enough/1198510
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/dec/04/work-starts-81-million-bridge-part-florida-evergla/
http://media.naplesnews.com/media/static/bridge_project_plan_view.jpg
well, doesn’t look completely stunning.. umm.. well here was the original set of options
http://www.nps.gov/ever/naturescience/upload/009032009FinalPowerPoint.pdf
You can see, if you wade through some 90 pages of, well, actually, kind of geeky cool graphics, that they had a lot of options put on the table..one of them called for 6.5 miles of bridging, likely a 2 billion dollar project… and heck, if we had all the money in the world, might be fun to make the whole thing a causeway, or pay for planes or hovercraft to take you from Naples to Miami so you can put some money on that Jai Alai match in Dania and make it back in time for Bingo, but umm.. times are tough, and a start is a start..so they.. umm.. picked the cheapest option… but a start is a start!
if that 90 pages wasn’t enough for you, vacuum brain, here is the rest of the discussion:
http://www.nps.gov/ever/naturescience/nessrestoration.htm
now since I am pretending to be the expert here, I must admit that I can’t for the life of me figure out what the Miccusokee’s are crowing about, not sure what their angle is, but I will say for the record, reservations on a bunch of nitrogen being dumped in as well aside, that this must be good for the Everglades, but in Florida, God bless it, nothing is ever quite what you expect.. but hey, the gator’s don’t complain, the law man does what he will, and I bet the fishin’ improves.. in fact, that reminds me.. I’m gunna grab my rod and head out..
The 1 mile bridge is set for completion this summer some time, 2013.. they are a workin’ on it as we speak:
http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Media/NewsReleases/tabid/6071/Article/6614/early-morning-road-closure-on-tamiami-trail-dec-3-and-dec-5.aspx
they’ll lift up the barriers and let her rip.. we’ll see what happens then..
T minus 3-9 months and counting, sometme from Summer to December of 2013 the one mile bridge should be flowing. They are building the road deck as we speak, then they pull out the old levee/road and voilâ:
http://www.evergladesplan.org/pm/projects/non_cerp_sf_projects_tamiami.aspx
Oh by the way, them government boys are already askin’ for them 5.5 additional miles of bridges.. so don’t worry, us gators are waiting patiently..
http://parkplanning.nps.gov/showFile.cfm?projectID=26159&docType=public&MIMEType=application%252Fx%252Dpdf&filename=EVERTamiamiTrailModifications_FEIS_post_chpts1to6%2Epdf&clientFilename=EVERTamiamiTrailModifications_FEIS_post_chpts1to6%2Epdf

Epilogue:
Finally, May 15, 2013.. the scoop that set it free!

Oh and, I guess it was considered a success, even by Tea Party standards,
http://www.keysnet.com/2013/09/04/489780/90m-okd-for-glades-bridges.html
because the Governor found 90 million to match federal cash for a 180 mil total to build 2.2 more miles of bridge during the 1013 budget season.. I guess fiscal austerity will have to wait a bit. Thankfully this swampland boondoggle will make a few gators happy, and not just a few construction companies!

Categories
Charlie Steen Cleanup Colorado River Mi Vida Mine Moab Moab Tailings Pile TARP Funds Train Uranium Mine Utah

Move 16 (Million) Tons…: The Shrinking of the Moab Tailings Pile

Merle Travis might have written it:

Paul Robson might have done it best:

Here’s a mining themed version some guy did:

Hell, the Red Army Choir gave it a try:

but no one is doing it quite like the Department of Energy, UMTRA, and Portage Inc. of Idaho are in Moab, Utah right now, times a million, about 5000 tons a day worth..
What the heck am I talking about? None other than the Moab Tailing’s Pile, the byproduct of some 30 years of Uranium Mining, that currently sits in the flood plain of the Colorado River next to one of Utah’s biggest tourist destination hubs.

Before I tell a sad but hopeful story about the pile, lemme set a time and place with the rags to riches to rags story of Charlie Steen, the man who found the mother lode of Uranium in the United States, the Mi Vida Mine in the Lisbon Valley of Utah, about 40 miles to the South East, near the little Mormon berg of La Sal. Don’t confuse him with the Tiger Blood swilling TV hack that never would have made it in this man’s old west! He’s Sheen, not Crazy ‘ol Charlie Steen, who is a legend of a different sort.
Image result for moab tailings pileWhen America started the Nuclear Age with a series of experiments in places like the University of Chicago, Oak Ridge, TN, Idaho, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, NM, culminating in the Big Bang at White Sands (“Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds” quoteth Robert Oppenheimer at the time). From what I can tell, we had to get our Uranium from the former Belgian Congo for the most part to do the dirty deed in White Sands, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I will leave the meditations on this act to Oppenheimer and John Hersey, because I am trying to depict the Gee Whiz exuberance of the birth of the Atomic age and the Money Money Money that caught up a guy named Charlie Steen, the Charlie Sheen of Moab, who took the town into it’s third incarnation from Indian Village to Mormon Settlement to Nuclear Mecca, which paved the way for the final incarnation, Gateway to Canyon Lands, but not without a little environmental impact.
Image result for moab tailings pileCharlie Steen was a geologist, and at about the time that the US government started promising beaucoup bucks for Uranium, to make our Nuclear Age a home grown affair, in the Aftermath of World War II, he moved his family to south west Utah,because for some reason, from Australia to Namibia to Canada, Uranium seems to like the red rock areas, and Utah turned out to be no exception. Charlie had his own theories about Uranium and Anticlines, a geological feature that is a bit like a dome, and some hole he had dug down 200 feet proved to be his fortune when his family was broke as could be.Charlie couldn’t afford a Geiger counter, so the guy at the Moab Gas Station had to spot it for him when he pulled up in his beat up old truck with a load from 80 feet deep, when he was well past it to 200 ft… He had struck it rich, the counter went nuts, and from this moment was born the crazy legends of how Steen was so sick of doing laundry by hand he would have all his clothes flown to Grand Junction to be Dry Cleaned, and he would fly up over the canyons to watch TV from the back of his plane too, since he could catch signals from Denver and Salt Lake up there… it was a grand time, and Charlie helped fuel the flood of Uranium, sold at top dollar until 1960 when the US Government finally figured out how to buy Wholesale, that gave us the Dr. Strangelove era of a 20,000 warhead arsenal and the growth of the Nuclear age that ended one morning in the 70’s on Three Mile Island.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Steen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Utah
unfortunately, if you’ll pardon the pun, there was a bit of fallout from all this.. Moab got rich, which is channeled into such cultural gifts and indulgences as Milt’s Stop & Eat:
http://www.miltsstopandeat.com/
people started to discover Moab and Parks were created and the tourists came, and the bottom fell out on the price of Uranium, leading to a pretty seamless transition, violence only being done in the written world, by Ed Abbey who just might have assumed that Moab would have been left just the way it was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey
photoBut the most tangible piece of fallout was this huge pile of Uranium, and given the Merle Travis Song it almost seems too perfect to be true, an estimated 16,000,000 tons of it, so tall you didn’t used to be able to see Moab from north of town when you came in on the Highway from Green River. You see, like in so much mining, The Uranium didn’t come in pure veins, maybe some of it was pretty dense, but they were processing 1400 tons of rock a day on average right there north of Moab to get the Uranium they wanted, and the rest was tossed in this pile on a flat spot by the river, loaded with heavy metals and lower grade radioactive materials, heck, probably some missed uranium as well, and there it has sat, kind of like the chunk of almost pure uranium they once found in a guys back yard in Moab after a fly by with a helicopter sporting a Geiger counter, not obviously hurting anybody, but likely not in the best spot.. as people started to come to Moab for recreation more and more, not just filming westerns and mining bomb bricks , and the nation’s environmental consciousness started to invade even the last redoubts of old school industry like Utah, a plan was hatched to clean it all up. Now the Moab Tailings Pile ain’t a Superfund Site, people point that name around like a rattlesnake points his snout,
http://www.epa.gov/region8/superfund/ut/index.html
but it is being supervised and paid for by the Federal Government, the Department of Energy, as they are to some degree the guys who caused the whole mess to be made in the first place. They are moving the whole pile to some big hole far from rivers where it might even be reprocessed to get just a wee bit more uranium out of it. How much have they moved, well, 36% at last count, about 6 million Tons, so while we’re all another day older and perhaps, due to the TARP spending, truly deeper in debt, I can’t say it didn’t need to be done.
They post updates often. Due to running out of Stimulus Money, they are no longer working winters but are on the move 4 days a week, maintain equipment one day a week schedule, and oh yeah, you can see Moab from the crest of the highway now…
http://www.grandcountyutah.net/pdf/UMTRA_Status.pdf
http://www.gjem.energy.gov/moab/
http://www.new.ans.org/pubs/magazines/download/a_838
Maybe someday soon, the natives of the Future, some funny combo of Mormon, Hippie Raft Guide and Navajo, will be banging drums on that very spot unaware of what had occurred, safely smokin’ dope, makin’ sacred undergarments out of river reeds, and having fun as the river floods once again, free of the contamination Charlie Steen and The Space Age unleashed upon the river.. 2025 if not before…

Colorado River Canyonlands National Park
Colorado River in Canyonlands NP just down from tailings pile

Image result for colorado river
Categories
Alaska Heida introduction Mountain Lion natural reintroduction repoplation Southeast Alaska Tlinkit

A Cougar Addendum: Self Reintroduction to Alaska

As we are learning, or perhaps you learned long ago, the story of the environment and man, and the idea of an ideal state of nature influenced or uninfluenced by man, is a bit of a complicated question…. there is not only science involved here but philosophy.. this is a short entry however, so I will try to cut to the chase..
The Cougar is introducing it’s self, or reintroducing it’s self, to Alaska..
Whether to chalk this up to Hope or Fear is a matter of question, but I’m going to toss it in the Hope category.
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=26
Reason why it might belong in fear: Global warming might be making previously inhospitable territory hospitable, but I kind of don’t buy that in this situation because the lands of South East Alaska, where they are most likely to live, haven’t changed that much.. what a solid land it is… amongst the most beautiful places in the world I might add.. to see the Lynn Canal or perhaps gaze across Frederick Sound from Mitkoff Island with whales breaching is to behold something special.

Now we could get complex and say that perhaps they were out competed by other species, the Lynx and the Wolf, the Bears and the Wolverines, but these species all co-habitate with it all over Canada, or did,and I think they all got along fine with plenty to eat most of the time. It’s a tricky matter to place the blame on indigenous groups, as we tend to assume, and there are kind of post enlightenment arguments perhaps in the first place, although some natives might argue otherwise, that most of the damage in the world was done, if you can call it damage, by Europeans in the post Colombian onslaught of global markets and the unification of all the global techniques for surviving and thriving that has been occurring since 1492.. complex indeed, and made more complex by the book 1491 by Charles Mann, that does inform the reader, if they had made assumptions otherwise, just how complex some Pre-Colombian cultures were, and how extensive their impact on the land might have been. I have some knowledge of the Tlingit and Heida Cultures, and they were a pretty impressive bunch before we showed up, yeah, the totem pole guys, and as much as some of the interior tribes of the great northern areas like the Athabaskans might not have been too culturally complex or tough on the land, there is a chance that the Tlingit or Heida could have gotten together and gotten rid of a bunch of Mountain Lions… anyhow, all speculation, and since the age of the rifle up there, who knows, but I figured I would toss this one in the hope category.. why not… mountain lions are cool…or, to be coldly scientific about my feelings towards felines, as this post kind of suggests, maybe I just have toxoplamosis..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
Like you didn’t have enough to worry about in the wilds of Alaska, enjoy this too.. I can’t wait to bump into one..`
Addendum September 2014:
20 months after writing this, I had the occasion to talk to a pair of Canadian Conservation officers whose territory appeared to be North West British Colombia. They are basically national game wardens, and they were working the areas along the Cassiar Highway, Rt. 37, that runs behind the Alaska Panhandle to the east. The Coastal Range that backs up to towns like Juneau and Wrangell is an uninterrupted wilderness that the Cassiar, usually only 20 feet wide and barely habituated, a town or settlement every 50 miles perhaps, hardly separates from the wilds to the north and east. I asked these guys about Mountain Lions, which they casually referred to as ‘Cats’ in response, a reference so casual I could tell they were bumping into them. They told me they just had their first issues in Whitehorse, Yukon, which would definitely have been thought of as way too far north, way too cold normally (Whitehorse can get stuck at 50 below F, it’s the Canadian equivalent of Fairbanks culturally and geographically) and that sightings around the Cassiar were becoming regular. The confirms the move. I did speculate to myself after meeting them, the possibility that instead of man displacing them, perhaps wolves might have, when logging both in the Alaska Panhandle and in this adjoining area of Canada was much more intense. It was banned under the Clinton Administration in the 90’s in the Alaska Panhandle, a sweetheart deal for the cruise ship industry which did hurt some local economies, but has benefited tourism perhaps more than compensatarily. Maybe the logging back then led to prey scarcity that had Wolves eliminating competition. I also saw two coyotes in the same area in this visit, also perhaps new territory for them. Their short legs distinguish them from Wolves. Both areas are recovering from all the logging as the Puma’s enter…

Categories
Dead Sea Dead Sea Level Dead Sea Works Evaporation Pans Jordanian Red Sea Project JRSP Red Sea Dead Sea Canal

The Jordananian De-Sal Canal that will fill the Dead Sea back up..

So I love the Ol’ USA, but my posts lately have gotten a bit domestic… Us Americans, we can be a bit self involved.. put 20 guys on the moon, create the Super Bowl and Southern Bar BQ, and all the sudden the rest of the world don’t exist. We do fix problems when we get around to it, and our true freedom of the press, with a few warts through it may have, and our love for the Internets, this system of tubes, makes for easy blogging about just about any endangered hog nose snail, and boondoggle public works to fix a problem we never should have had in the first place under the sun.. Believe me, I understand.. but I do want to bring in some exotic elements here..
The world is a big place, and as we are learning more and more, it’s environmental problems are interconnected, so I feel a need to write about a piece of potential hope someplace else, someplace exotic, someplace complicated.. and I’m not sure it gets any more complicated than the Middle East. Although Jordan is a relatively uncontentious little place, so this story might be kind of cut and dry, and well, distantly hopeful after all.. but ah the setting, what a complex pile of sand it is…ah, Israel, The West Bank, the Dead Sea, lowest place on Earth, extension of the Great Rift Valley, but if the Rift Valley was the Cradle of Human life, than the areas around the Dead Sea do kind of compete for being the cradle of Human Contention.. but nature is neutral to all that, nature either has no opinions, or just kind of wants to survive… we project almost everything else onto it, from needs to value, but it’s fair to say that given that, the Dead Sea is kind of a cool place.. well, not cool, it’s pretty damn hot.. lemme see.. Dead Sea Weather Report…
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-13-2006/emotional-weather-report
well, that’s kind of it, but this is a bit more specific.. congrats on the record by the way, Middle East!
http://www.google.com/search?q=dead+sea+weather+report&aq=f&oq=dead+sea+weather+report&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
So all other problems aside, the Dead Sea, a bit like the Aral Sea now famously, is shrinking, rapidly, and it’s not a natural occurrence..
what is happening is that an Israeli firm set up a Salt Works on the south end of the Sea complete with some big evaporation pans, actually, more like a potash mine, and it has dropped the level of the sea precipitously… 1 meter a year in recent times.. there is an eerie photo I once saw of a hotel from the 60’s that used to be beach level, but however is now like 30 feet up, but I can’t seem to find it, perhaps the hotels that do exist somehow managed to get rid of it, but here is some data:
http://saveoursea.org.il/?p=329
http://www.h2ome.net/en/2011/03/the-blue-peace/
http://guyshachar.com/content/blog/2011/live-dead-sea-photos-from-a-winter-day/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea
scroll down to the environmental bits if you want to skip all the history..
Anyhow, so it’s coming apart, turning into the Salton Sea or the Aral Sea, one of those disasters that you hear about but few go to see, but oddly, about a million people a year go to float there, it’s kind of a pass time in Israel, go down and turn your hair all kinky…. they just keep building the hotels closer and closer, and tearing down the old ones, or now they are even splitting the salt pan level from the northern part of the sea so they don’t have to move the hotels,
http://www.restorationplanning.com/deadsea.html
The Dead Sea Works, the company that evaporates most of the water, allegedly went on a huge ‘Greenwashing Campaign’, to displace blame, but their production goes on as usual
http://www.iclfertilizers.com/Fertilizers/DSW/Pages/BUHomepage.aspx
and no one has done anything about the falling sea levels, yet..
There was once a proposal to create a ditch from the Mediterranean, then somehow siphon the water over the mountains and down to the sea..it was supposed to cost about 2 billion dollars, but it never took off.. there was a lot of controversy in Israel, where survival is always placed first, and money is always purported to be tight… despite a fairly good environmental record amongst the Israelis, who love to plant trees anywhere they can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Canal
But they also love to and need to farm, and they are like California, siphoning water from everywhere.. I have seen the Jordan River at it’s source, the outflow of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was supposedly baptized by John the Baptist, and it’s a nice enough spot, but it’s not a big river.. I was able to do a full crawl up it, and there are a few rope swings, but it only comes up to ones chest at deepest, and is just 30 or so feet across..if it ain’t for Israel being so small, and the history surrounding the Jordan being so big, trust me, you never would have heard of it.. There are thousands of bigger rivers around the world, and I saw the extent of the agricultural use even just at it’s source..
So what to do…well, across the sea in Jordan, the quiet little kingdom by Middle Eastern Standards, a bit like Oman, that actually has a caring monarchy and some charm, there is a need for water, and although the merits of desalinization are questionable, if they have an appropriate place to discharge the briny water, and they can produce the clean water with renewable energy, since the sea level is going up it’s not like the Ocean will mind too much… are you thinking what I am thinking.. well, Jordan is:
http://www.jrsp-jordan.com/
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/is-the-red-sea-dead-sea-canal-about-to-become-reality.premium-1.494217
http://static1.dot.jo/uploads/repository/f7fd77c82e35fa4eb17b311b0bc092d498b864c2.jpg
http://jordantimes.com/article/implementation-of-jordan-red-sea-project-to-begin-early-next-year
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_dead_sea_is_dying_can__a_controversial_plan_save_it/2551/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Canal http://static1.dot.jo/uploads/repository/f7fd77c82e35fa4eb17b311b0bc092d498b864c2.jpg
So there is controversy, no doubt, but something has to be done, and I will admit that if you can’t halt agriculture, or get them to stop using the evaporation pans, which would be the biggest help, this project just might do the trick..hopefully with a little environmental vetting.. it ain’t perfect, but they are a long ways down a bad road, and there aren’t many options to just turn around…
There is some funny power to this story, as with each minute that passes, the area around the Dead Sea sets new lows for the world… I’m just talking about altitude, of course… but let’s try to raise the level a bit here, shall we folks..

Categories
Bald Eagle Catalina Island DDT Montrose Chemical Corporation Two Harbors

Close to the end of the Era of DDT? Bald Eagles brought to term on Catalina Island

Bald Eagles are spreading back over their original range again in a way that is making a lot of people happy, myself included. They are majestic, but I might agree with Ben Franklin about the Turkey, they are a bit smarter, in fact, more than a bit smarter:

My Life as a Turkey from ASECIC_VIMEO on Vimeo.

but nothing quite says ‘America Kicks Ass! like a baldie… but having watched 14 of them hang out on a truck full of fish nets in Dutch Harbor once, I can’t argue they serve for stimulating conversation. Sadly, I think Jim Henson’s Sam the Eagle got the personality pretty right..

National Symbolism aside, I doubt I need to explain to many readers the story of DDT, Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, and how thin eggshells, which caused massive moralities in recently laid eggs, nearly wiped away birds of prey from the Lower 48 and perhaps many other places on earth..

One of the footnotes to the global impact of DDT was that a company that manufactured it, perhaps ‘the’ company that manufactured it, Montrose Chemical Corporation, dumped tons of the pesticide into a drainage ditch near it’s factory in Torrence, Los Angeles County, LA to dispose of it, (interestingly right next to a neighborhood called Carson, bringing to mind Rachel Carson). That ditch appeared to drain into something called the Dominguez Channel, what serves as kind of over engineered ‘river’ for this area if you could call it that, and the Dominguez canal would find it’s way into Long Beach Harbor.

 After a while they stopped this and just started pumping DDT into the sewage system, about a ton every 3 days, therefore tens of thousands of tons over decades, where it went uncleaned through the system, which usually exists to break down excrement, not complex chemicals, and out into the Pacific Ocean near Paloes Verdes, the Hill in the South West corner of Los Angeles with some pretty nice views of both the LA basin and the Pacific,if you don’t think about what might have been in the water.
http://industriallosangeles.org/sites/montrose.html
So how does this fairly commonplace tale of environmental ignorance from the Big Car Era lead to Hope!?
Well, I was once staying in Banning House Lodge, perhaps 2 years ago, the old house of the family that owned Catalina Island for quite a while, above Two Harbors, dodging buffalo on my walks around day and night, and in the office they had a monitor always displaying one of these web cams since the actual location happened to be just a few hundred yards out the window:
http://www.ustream.tv/west-end-cam
Now realize that Catalina is about as close to Paloes Verdes and Dominguez Channel as any self respecting eagle is going to setup shop. They need room to soar..they gotto be free baby.. they ain’t pigeons. What makes this all significant and hopeful, is that up until about two years ago they were stealing the Eagle Chick Eggs to rear in an incubator so it would be free of DDT impacts, basically so the mom wouldn’t crush it because it was assumed that she would be eating walrus carcass or seal or what have you, and it’s fat especially would be contaminated with the tons of DDT that Montrose dumped 70-30 years ago as they flap around the local waters, and she would sit on the shells to warm them and they would get crushed, which had been the trend for this long Silent Spring. But about 5 years or so ago, they decided to leave the eggs be, and lo and behold, they survived…
http://www.fws.gov/news/NewsReleases/showNews.cfm?newsId=FB243CE4-9CEC-E367-C02C0A0B255EA85E
Vigilance is the eternal price of freedom perhaps, but this is a pretty good sign that despite all the environmental challenges ahead of us, perhaps the DDT problem is slowly fading into the rear view mirror..

Categories
Appalachians Catamount Cougar East Eastern United States Florida Panther Midwestern United Stated Mississippi river Mountain Lion New England Puma Repopulation

Cougar, Puma, Mountain Lion, Catamount, Panther.. call it what you want, but they are at the Mississippi River and moving east!

Hard not to love a Mountain Lion.. for one, they eat people on occasion.. puts a little legitimate stress back in life.. something to worry about other than that text you haven’t received yet..
The official line from various state agencies and the US Department of Interior is that they haven’t moved east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of the isolated Florida Panther with one or two famous exceptions:
http://www.ct.gov/deep/lib/deep/press_releases/2011/2011-07-26_mtnlionpresentation.pdf
I have had friends knowledgeable about the outdoors give me pretty reliable stories of sightings in Vermont, South Carolina and Tennessee. Most recently I was told of game camera photos taken of them in North West Indiana. Maybe it’s just young males looking for a good time, but they are in the east, have no doubt.

My first interaction with them was in New Mexico where my college roommate, his girlfriend and I spotted a spot on huge track near Gila Hot Springs in the South West part of the state. Another time a college buddy showed up in my room needing to talk after a night hike in Colorado. He had been stalked by a Mountain Lion he was pretty sure and wanted to get the story out, which had both thrilled and disturbed him. Their population and health in the west is uncontested, but they are moving east, and if you have ever seen how deer run wild east of the Mississippi you wouldn’t blame them. Often sightings are blamed on released pets, quite possible, but the move from the easternmost known wild populations in South Dakota into places like Wisconsin, and, well in the case above, Fairfield County, Connecticut, home of Martha Stuart and essentially the East Coast Version of Orange County, California, is undeniable. I might regret saying this if some 5 year old gets gobbled up while his mom tends the Bar B Q in some Jersey Suburb, but bring it on!
The lack of apex predators in the east, with the near extinction of the red wolf, displacement of the grey wolf and Mountain Lion, sparsity of the Black Bear and again extirpation of the Grizzly that did roam at least close to the Appalachians has left the easy pick’ins for deer hunters but not a health ecosystem by any measure. The White Tail deer roams with such impunity over the whole east, with so much forage from fractured edgeland woods that they are considered a nuisance in many areas, and unhealthy due to the only natural selection taking out the stronger speciments through trophy hunting. One good mountain lion could eat one or more a week, which is a nice start.

links to the controversy and latest facts:
http://www.mountainlion.org/cal_ch3.asp
http://www.mountainlion.org/featurearticleeastwardho.asp
http://www.strangeark.com/nabr/NABR7.pdf
These Guys, the Eastern Cougar Foundation, appear to be a pugnacious group who are actively trying to put together a picture of where the natural reintroductions, migrations perhaps, are happening and could happen:
http://www.easterncougar.org/index.htm
There are now websites that focus on aggregating sightings. It’s a veritable feline Where’s Waldo? This is a good one for the State of Michigan:
http://savethecougar.org/
Another for Connecticut, including a sighting near Sandy Hook just before the now infamous school shooting:
http://ctmountainlion.org/
Western TN:
https://www.uu.edu/forms/cougars/sightings.cfm
One for central New York State which is using mapping as well:
http://www.trackincats.com/mapslash.php
I noticed more for Virginia, and a few other places, and a number of State Environmental Departments with reporting sites. The Motivation of State officials for not reporting can be complex. some might not want to cause a panic, which could harm the animals they might secretly want to see naturally reintroduced. Others might be too strapped to want to deal with it, and some might want to not muddy the waters and just collect data and let their various leaders and law makers make the decisions. The Federal Government, as well as all state governments, are always dealing with Legislation surrounding these things, including the Endangered Species Act, and that can start a lot of requirements with just one spotted breeding pair under certain classifications for a species. IT call can be quite controversial, tie peoples hands, and if a department or specific agent or biologist is sympathetic, he might find his best course of action is to say and do nothing. Also, if the department is not sympathetic when it comes to meeting those requirements, the same is true. The Eastern Cougar, a subspecies distinguished by not much perhaps, was declared extinct by the USD of I in just 2011, and this move might have meant a few things: There is no difference between the two, and we know the western cougar is going to refill this land, and rather than try to chase animals that can move thousands of miles all over the place, let’s not turn that into an ESA issue. This is the Logic I am projecting and assuming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/science/earth/03cougar.html?_r=0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_cougar

In regards to say the resettling of the Elk in the East, a similar story, and something I wrote about in another post with glee, although all extirpations are sad, bad for the environment due to the way they allow populations to get out of blance with the carying capacity of the land, the timing of these two could be seen as fortuitous, because a settled Eastern Mountain Lion population would definitely have put some wrinkles in this effort, the same as a settled Wolf Population would have.. in this case, introducing the elk, letting their populations grow and become healthy, then adding the other predators should the political will ever be there, is the smart way to go, and the way things appear to be happening both with and without man’s help. The mistakes of the Red Wolf Wolf Reintroduction to Smokey Mountain National Park and the lack of suitable game for them is present in the minds of all east coast biologists and conservationists. I wrote about that effort as well here.
There was a website I was trying to find that attempted to aggregate Sightings from all over the East, ah, here it is:
http://www.cougarnet.org/
but that appears to no longer be a moot point..they’re heeee’re!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVC2vyVCWJI

Categories
Beaver European Beaver Reintroduction Scotland UK

Beaver Reintroduction to Scotland, and Much of Europe it turns out..

In the 16th Century, the last of the Beavers of Scotland were killed, and it appears that as early as 1188 there weren’t many left in the whole of the British Isles.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110627142642AAg83v0
They make a nice hat, so I can understand why.

Well, after a 200-400 year absence depending upon whom you talk to.. still, murky waters have returned a bit of reserve and mystery to the British Isles. My research of the Scottish project, the first one I heard about and the one that intrigued me the most for some reason, has shown some success. Beavers as as common as mice in some areas of the US, we take them for granted, so I picture Willie the Scottish Janitor from The Simpsons wranglign with one like Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler in Caddyshack. The Project, likned to below, counts 24 living individuals as I write in January 2013, out of an introduced population of 16, and it appears a nearby river has somehow been miraculously repopulated on it’s own so that they are deciding to expand their study to observe there as well (could be amateur reintroduces, escaped pet’s, or stream hating eco terrorists!). The population there is estimated at 150, so we are climbing towards 200 all told…
http://beaversinengland.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Tay They tried to capture them for a while, but gave up.
This accidental or not reintroduction on the River Tay is actually way ahead of the official reintroduction project.

Below is the family tree of what has transpired so far in the official project which is about 2 hours north west of Glasgow between Oban and Lochgilphead in the Knapdale forest.
http://www.scottishbeavers.org.uk/docs/003__143__general__Beaver_family_tree___Oct_2012__1351071740.pdf
http://www.scottishbeavers.org.uk/

The Welsh appear to be studying the project like.. well.. eager beavers.
http://www.welshbeaverproject.org/home/

The English are, well, also still studying it as well, for two locations.. not men of action like the Scots yet! Actually, reading the wikipedia entry below leads me to believe there are fenced beaver populations in a few locations in England and Whales, but the only ones Born Free are the ones in the two groups mentioned above in Scotland, although movement is afoot to let ’em all scurry free over Albion…
http://beaversinengland.com/reintroductions/

And then there is Mainland Europe, and it appears, parts of Asia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_beaver
Eco-Wonk away!

Categories
Carbon Savings Growth Hope Large Offshore Poster Child Projects Symbol United States Wind Power Wind Power Overview Windmills

The Expansion of Wind’s Power

Somehow Windmills have become the poster child of the Green Revolution..

they are, well, pretty in the abstract, and in person, kind of impressive, form follows function, and they are somehow calming, and like a wind chime, cooling, and they are popping up in large installations it seems just about everywhere (except for the coast of California, but for once I will try not to be grumpy)..the biggest onshore I can find is 5 Gigawatts of potential in north west China, and another in the North Sea might hit 9 Gigawatts.
I can name a few spots I have seen them in my travels. The old famous Farms were the highways east of San Francisco and LA, on 580 and I-10, Altamont and San Gorgonio Pass respectively (the latter also the home of the giant dinosaurs at the truck stop in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which I know is more important to you than anything that follows). These installations are somehow a vestige of the first Obama administration, known to many as the Carter Administration (or maybe the third Wilson Administration perhaps..), since it was the environmental movement of the 70’s that laid the seeds of today’s progress, but they lay dormant in some ways for years as we kind of cleaned up many a mess from our wild industrial times before we could step it up to move forward as we are now.

Recently I drove with a friend to Mammouth Ski Area from the West Coast Hipster Capitol of Silver Lake, and made my buddy pull his Subaru over to and swing his skinny jeans out of the car to check this wind farm out, on a ‘Long Cut’ that helped us avoid Palmdale and Lancaster and check out more of I-5 and the countryside. The light blinking in the night kind of provided a fascinating modern spectacle.. no California Road Trip for a Gen X’er complete without some gaping at the weird combo of man made and natural that is The Golden State, and it turns out this is the second largest one in the US.. Tenchapi Pass. One Gigawatt of Potential, Marty McFly, one million American Households, and it was a spinning that night!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Wind_Energy_Center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjCRUvX2D0E
I’ve now seen them from Gaspe Penninsula to near Fairbanks (Alaska has had for a while a collection of like three windmills in a little place called Delta Junction, and a handful of native villages to supplant Diesel generators when possible, but they finally had two Major Utility Farms go online in the last few months, one on an island off of Anchorage, and another south of Fairbanks, near Healy) down to California and then a few in the Midwest, that are easiest to find on an FAA Sectional (Aviation Map) because they show up as a huge collection of flight hazards, like a multi square mile antennae farm. Somehow Illinois has taken a jump into wind, and Indiana is following suit.
The South East isn’t known for it’s wind, but Texas is, and Texas, under T Boone Pickins, has gone big as well. Did you expect anything less from Texas?
Here is a list of the Big ones.. it appears China is building one 5 Gigawatts.. well, I guess it is to be encouraged.. as much as it gets my goat to put nationalism aside..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_onshore_wind_farms
Potential seems to be growing at the speed of Planck’s Constant.
Wind is the closest to competitive of the Green Energy Sources, usually measured in Price per Kilowatt Hour (how much it costs to build and maintain an energy source compared to the energy it produces), which is kind of the power industry standard, since it is how they bill.. It seems to come in around ten cents per KWH, a little under, but with subsidies can compete with hydro (which I will call pseudo green due to the environmental consequences of Dam Building) at sometimes as low as 4 cents a KWH, Coal and Natural Gas which might be around 6 cents per KWH. The wind industry was about to board up and close shop when it was anticipated that Romney would win re-election, but it looks like they are good for another 4 years as from the Inauguration speech to even the back rooms of the Fiscal Cliff debate, the Administration seems to be earnestly keeping these green incentives on the table. There are permitted projects in places like North West Indiana, Marshall County, that will likely go through now, and in Mexico the bread company that makes Bimbo, Gamesa, essentially North America’s Largest Bakery, has decided to offset it’s carbon footprint by financing a 90mw Farm in Oxaca. A company called Gamesa,not to be confused with the Mexican Cookie Manufacturer of the same name, but given the Bimbo story, I did, is planning Wind Farm near Tecate, perhaps the most charming border town in Mexico right now (and a good place to have your teeth fixed. To explain to me why Tecate had not gone the way of Juarez or Tijuana, the dentist told me that the border actually closes at like 10pm, which kept Tecate from being a party town).
But I have failed to mention offshore. The fight over Cape Wind, the wind farm near Nantucket, settled at the federal level over the strong protests of Nantucket’s many Billionaire Residents like one of the Koch Brothers, was kind of a landmark fight, but it was won by the utility installing the wind farm, or so I thought.. it appears Save our Sound might have yet filed another injunction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
http://www.capewind.org/index.php
http://www.saveoursound.org/
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kkennedy/the_cape_wind_offshore_wind_fa.html
Unfortunately the fight has tied the project up for now some 12 years, so that nothing has actually happened yet physically as far as I can tell except for constructing a new office. That project pales in Megawatt-age compared to this that I just discovered on Googles Blog:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/energy-environment/an-offshore-wind-power-line-moves-ahead.html?_r=0
http://atlanticwindconnection.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Wind_Connection
This is an Ambitious project! Looks like the kind of thing that eventually ends up in the last scene of a James Bond movie
And that’s just America… Europe appears to be the leader for now in offshore, but Nantucket and now Atlantic promise to be Bigger, perhaps holding the record for a while.. Go Jersey!
If I could voice just one reservation, that as much as I don’t want to be a wind power naysayer, the legitimacy of the bird kill possibilities aside (although habitat loss and global warming have and promise to kill a lot more), there is something beautiful about the sea not being defined, that other than navigation or a GPS, it is a space without reference, and the idea of offshore wind farms does somehow spoil that fantasy, gives it a checker board of definition, but I guess to save the sea, we must take away some of it’s mystery..
On with wind power!
http://energy.gov/articles/wind-farm-growth-through-years#buttn
http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_installed_capacity.asp