Tea party and Kochs on the opposite side of wind and solar now.

Green tea.  I like that, I don't like everything about it, but I like it.

The granola and organic wine environmentalist have teamed up with the tea party and libertarians.  The Green Tea Party, (actually a group of tea baggers now call themselves this) and people for clean energy found some common language that brought them together, and some in the GOP are rather shocked, and a bit worried.

Here's the language.  Why can't we use the sunshine that falls on our house or property?  Why must we buy from a monopoly when we could make our own energy?  Let me tell the utility I want to buy solar, wind or coal fired energy.  If I make extra energy why can't I sell it to the neighbor?

In Georgia together they fought the GOP controlled state energy board and legislation as well as the Kochs and allies and won.  Georgia will probably mandate more solar and wind  from utilities and you can choose the source, and with coal prices higher this year, people will opt for wind and solar.  In Wisconsin they are beating back a set of rules on solar home installations.  In Arizona the utilites and fossil fuel boys are crying about growing home solar systems, asking the state to change net metering, cutting the rate paid in order to discourage home solar units, the fight is on and it looks like the green tea party and the tree huggers are going to keep net metering at the current rate.

Now I do understand the problem for utilities if lots of customers produce their own power and only buy at night, or in small amounts.  They have the power grid cost, cables to repair, tree trimming etc to pay for.  I propose that if you install a large solar system and buy little from them, they be allowed to raise your monthly service charge.  Call it an insurance policy for those black stormy days or if your PV hits a hickup, you will have access to the energy you need.  This higher service charge for solar owners can pay for the grid infrastructure, while the solar owner still has a lot of independence and saves money overall.  Sure, finding a fair price for this will be a cat fight, but what isn't.

Try Ecosia, environmental mission in the shape of a web browser

Google pisses me off.  On the one hand they are installing solar energy farms, buying wind energy, building server farms in energy stingy buildings, and are preparing to build underwater power lines to bring offshore wind into the grid.  I think they are carbon neutral.   BUT..... they also fund a couple of climate denial groups associated with coal and oil that spread doubt about science and slow clean energy technologies.

Ecosia is a search engine that I started using, it's nearly as good as google.  http://www.ecosia.org/   Ecosia is run totally on wind and solar, and they buy wind and solar credits to cover your computer, in other words, when you do a search, they overcompensate with clean energy purchases to make your search carbon neutral even though your power comes from Timbuk-fucking-2 coal plant.

Plus.... the money they make, 80% of it is spent buying and planting trees in Brazil in an area that was clear cut and left to erode.  Why Brazil, cause thats the best carbon sink forest location, it's heavily damaged and money goes a long ways there, a dollar plants a lot of trees.  The planting is in conjunction with Nature Conservancy, and other hippies, the planting is being done in a way to create jungle corridors across barren areas to restore animals ability to move about and correct the clear cut impact of leaving islands of wildlife cut off.

Plus 2..... if you shop on line, read their how to instructions, some merchants, they are flagged, will pay Ecosia a commission which they use to plant trees and buy even more energy credits.  So far my searches there have created revenue for Ecosia sufficient to plant 6 trees one time, 2 another.

A case for pollution tax, at point of entry.

Who will pay for your asthma or cancer treatment if a fracking well pops up down the street?  Who pays for the landfills heaped like mountains at the edge of our cities?  Who will pay for global warming causing rising sea levels flooding beach front homes and towns?  Who pays for crop losses caused by ever more frequent extreme weather events?   We do through our rising health care costs, higher insurance costs, higher food price, earlier death, tidal flood walls and pumps.  The cost is already thought to be in the dozens of billions yearly in the US, many trillions around the globe.

Regulations against pollution and laws governing factories and cars farm chemicals and activities are hard fought, take years to implement, but they seem to work, though it is hit and miss, fixing one thing exempting another, yet new products and processes come in among us and it takes decades to knock down the bad ones.  It works, a little.

Cap and trade, and carbon credits and carbon markets also work, sort of, but not always and not everywhere.

The easiest and most democratic would be a pollution or carbon fee at the point of entry.  Slap a fee on every ton of coal, puff of gas, gallon of oil, ton of ore.  Thats the end of it.  The cost will find it's way into every product proportionally.  Companies will pass the cost on from the coal miners shovel and from the well head.  This will make some products more expensive, a few a lot more expensive.  Manufacturers who find a way to transport products and make and package products with less of this taxed oil or lead in it will have a decisive market advantage.  The innovation to get off these highly taxed raw products will clean up the planet.  Products imported from nations not using this system will be taxed to compensate as if they had.

The tax collected will be used for two things, part of it will be issued as a payment as Alaska does with oil profits, yearly everyone gets the same check, same value.  This will level the field for low income people to purchase goods that at least in the first few years may be high priced.  The rest will be used to clean up pollution in the worst areas.

The fee on fossil fuels and pollutants at their point of entry into the economy along with rebate will prime the market to cure much of this problem.  Manufacturers will lower their cost by cleaning up their products, consumers will migrate their purchasing to those products of lower price due to the lower content of harmful and wasteful products.  Markets cannot fix themselves, they are imperfect, biased to profit and market share, not for any other purpose.  With these two modifications, a re-purposing, the market will for the near future fix our problem.  Later on, it will find a way to subvert it, but for now, this could work.

More junk science from the Fringe, love bugs.

Spiders make meadows grow by increasing fear.  ???  Grasshoppers eat all types of plants in these meadows, unchecked they sometimes harm, even destroy them.  Where spiders are prevalent plants grow more and have overall better health.  It's more complex than just the spiders eat grasshoppers, reducing the number of grazing insects.  The real benefit is they make grasshoppers wary, hoppers spend more time exercising their survival instinct, on alert and moving from area to area.  Grasshopper in the vicinity of spiders consume less, but even more importantly they eat less at one place or on one plant.  Like pruning for higher fruit production, if done in small amounts it actually stimulates the plant to add growth and fruit, if overdone the plant suffers.  Taken further, if sprayed for pests, the resident spiders are killed, grasshoppers are nomads.  Killing the defenders the chemicals actually deliver a safe grazing meadow for the new hoppers, without predators they do terrible damage.  If noticed the farmer or gardner may spray again, now we poisoned our food source twice with little benefit.
I have read that organic grape (wine) farms are crawling with spiders, they even bring in certain types to get started.  Likewise, the best defense against bugs in your house are spiders outside it, do not run around spraying spiders on your eves or foundation, these guys are catching critters that will get in otherwise.  Right now a huge spider has a web high over the front door sidewalk from the eve to a red leaf maple, almost every morning he is wrapping up some flies and moths when I go out for the paper.

This same scientific exercise was observed to work the same with elk and wolf, elk spend less time eating a meadow to the ground and more time watching and walking about if wolf are in the area.  Who would have thought predators help the health of meadows.  Don't panic hunters, the elks weight stayed about the same, they still eat enough, just cut back on the binge grazing.

Ants running up and down your downspout, resist spraying them.  Termites and ants are not friends, a healthy population of ants around the foundation discourages termites.

As for bug spray, Lowes has sprays made from lemon grass and one from spearment and chilis.  They kill most bugs fast and they are not poison to us or pets.  Yes I spray bugs, but rarely, and never with chemicals, just these things.  If you like to watch stuff die, squirt lemon grass oil on a spider and watch, drop, run, die, as fast as black flag.

Watts up - shocking low risk investment.

If you buy a PV solar system installed on your house, how long for the payback, is it a good investment?

S&P 50 year return is 9.9%.  The chart shows the best 16 states for payback.  Variations due to: cost, amount of light, local tax breaks, cost of purchased electricity and net metering rates.

I'm not going to give a lesson on the incredible power of compounding interest, but god damn man even if you have to count on your toes you see the top states on this chart will have a full return on investment in 4 to 6 years.  Even #16 Florida is around a 10 - 11 year payback.  After that your leck-trcity is free.

This kind of stuff depresses the fossil fuel boys.

Mister Ornery, where are you?

Clicked the link to MO, Blogger says the blog has been removed, end of statement.  Our New Zealand connection is gone.  New Zealand has just come through the warmest winter ever recorded, very little cold weather, maybe the Kochs don't want us to communicate with them or we would learn that global warming is here, now.  Good luck MO!

Outta the Cornfield: Labor Day - The Reason For It And The Innocent Men Who Went To Their Death

Outta the Cornfield: Labor Day - The Reason For It And The Innocent Men Who Went To Their Death

So far this morning, I have found only one post that mentions labor day, shame on you/us all.  It's a great read, you might learn something.