Public Intelligence Blog

Who? Mini-Me?

Gasoline: The new big U.S. export

Steve Hargreaves

CNN Money, 5 December 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.

The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.

The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it produced here plus had to import gas from places in Europe.

But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public.  In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.

John Robb

SOLAR FARMING

Photovoltaic (PV) technology (aka solar panels) is advancing steadily.  That advance will occur regardless of whether we have an economic depression or booming prosperity.  This advance means that price of PV modules are dropping at a rate of 7% per year (as it has been doing that for decades). This means that by 2020, the price of a PV module (with micoconverters etc. included) will likely be close to $1 a watt (not including installation, which is also falling).  That puts PV tech within the range of being cost competitive with today’s alternatives.  As an added benefit, it’s possible that modules that approach this level of cost efficiency might also be locally printable (as in: they could be made in a 3D fab or grown in a bio-lab).

The implication: for those communities able to deploy it in quantity, it will mean increasingly inexpensive energy for as many years into the future as you want to project.  For those that don’t, you will increasingly fall behind.

There is a caveat though. The real potential for this technology isn’t going to be found in a large number of big, commercial solar complexes.  Why?  The infrastructure and investment necessary to make this happen on a scale that really matters doesn’t exist in the US or EU anymore.  We are broke (and even if we weren’t, NIMBY is nearly impossible to overcome as the record of new power line construction over the last 30 years attests to).  So, it should be easy for us to conclude that it won’t get built at national/regional level (if you think otherwise, I have a planet I’d like to sell you).

Fortunately, there is a ray of hope.  For those of us building resilient communities, we WILL see this infrastructure deployed.  How?  Through the hard word and dedication of a resilient entrepreneur: the solar farmer.   The solar producer that keeps his/her entire community fed with increasingly inexpensive and bountiful solar energy, 24x7x365 (via energy storage for round the clock production).

A Platform For Local Solar Farming

Read the rest of this entry »

John Robb

RC ENERGY TIDBIT: Leveraging the Earth for Heat/Cooling

Who? Mini-Me?

New international report shreds Japan’s carefully constructed Fukushima scenario

John C. Daly

Arab News. com, 13 November 2011

EXTRACT

Needless to say, in the aftermath of the disaster, both TEPCO and the Japanese government were at pains to minimize the disaster’s consequences, hardly surprising given the country’s densely populated regions.

But now, an independent study has effectively demolished TEPCO and the Japanese government’s carefully constructed minimalist scenario. Mainichi news agency reported that France’s l’Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire (Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, or IRSN) has issued a recent report stating that the amount of radioactive cesium-137 that entered the Pacific after 11 March was probably nearly 30 times the amount stated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. in May.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota:  Governments lie.  Corporations lie.  Non-Governmental organizations lie.  They all lack integrity, and in lacking integrity, they are a cancer within the human body.

See Also:

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

John Robb

Resilient Energy: Municipalization of Power

How can you help your community build a resilient energy system?  One of the first steps is to buy back the energy system from the regional power company by condemning it and then municipalizing it (it can be run as a power co-op or as a standard company …  The structure really depends on the community.).  This moves provides you with the control of the local grid so that your community can:

• Ensure higher levels of maintenance (tree trimming, etc.) and faster response to failure.  During the two big power outages on the east coast this summer/fall, power was out for much of the region for nearly a week.  In many cases, the municipal power companies get power back on to all of their customers in 1/2 the time of the big regional companies.
• Cut rates and change energy mix.  As a municipal company, you can select the different types of energy you will use locally.
• Add advanced micro-grid features.  Everything from community energy markets to local energy backup to power smoothing.   Extra benefit of this approach:  it will prevent the regional power company from using smart grid tech to snoop on everyone in the community by micro-analyzing energy use (which they will then resell to marketing companies or provide to the government w/o warrant for “signature” sniffing).

All of the benefits listed above will double or treble in importance as the global economy nose dives into depression over the next couple of years.  So, it’s better to get started early than later.

Here’s a few links from the Boulder Colorado effort to condemn and municipalize it’s power.  A combo of bad service and a low level of renewables use prompted the effort (use whatever hooks you need to get it done, but get it done):

•  Renewablesyes.org The site of the citizens coalition.  The astroturf site of the national power company.
• Citizen groups do the hard work.  A technical group does the modelling and analysis for a municipal grid.  They compare rates, costs, and energy mix  Here’s an amazingly video of a member of that team, Sam Weaver.
• Homer software. The software you need to model a municipal grid from rate analysis to energy mix.  The numbers.

NOTE:  Great article in the NYTimes today on how the big regional companies are so focused on acquisitions, regulatory gaming, and extractative finance; they are delivering terrible service.

NOTE:  Great pushback in the comments on how tough it is to do this.  Basically, crony capitalism (revolving door, bribes, etc.)  + regulatory capture (same mindset) + gov’t granted monopoly = lots of opposition.

Who? Mini-Me?

Below is a SALES PITCH. However, it offers a useful view.

Standberry Research on Saudi Oil

Phi Beta Iota:  A real conspirary theorist would wonder if the “Iranian plot” was actually a half-assed Exxon plot.  The sales pitch is annoying, finally getting to the point, shale gas, but along the way, does itemize the level of commitment.  This is not a paradigm shift–it still assume centralized development, it uses water we cannot afford to give up to push the gas, and it adds chemicals to do the fracking.  In other words, it externalizes all risks and costs to the future public, while privatizing a dubious resource.

The real paradigm shift is decentralized energy and shared energy, as Buckminster Fuller envisioned.  The Saudis would be much better off creating new models of integrating housing and commercial that generate their own energy, capture all water, process their own waste, and generally leverage solar, wind, human, and other forms of energy in place.

See Also:

Wikipedia/Shale Gas

Join us November 6th in Washington DC

On Sunday November 6 the Tar Sands Action will return to Washington DC to send an unmistakable message to the President.

Exactly one year before the election, we want to encircle the whole White House to ask President Obama to reject Keystone XL and live up to his promise to free us from the tyranny of oil. In doing so, we want to remind him of the power of the movement that he rode to the White House in 2008. This is bigger than any one person – President or no – and we will carry on, with or without him.

Learn more.

Phi Beta Iota:  November 6th is also a useful target date for demanding that Congress and the White House accept for action the public demand for Electoral Reform.

CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.

ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.

SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.

INTEGRITY is the core value.

COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.

John Steiner

TransCanada Pipeline Foes See U.S. Bias in E-Mails

E-mails released Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the environmental group Friends of the Earth paint a picture of a sometimes warm and collaborative relationship between the lobbyist for the pipeline company, Trans-Canada, and officials in the State Department, the agency responsible for evaluating and approving the billion-dollar project.

Public disservice: Pipeline hearings run by Keystone XL contractor

In a stunning conflict of interest, public hearings on federal approval for a proposed tar-sands pipeline are being run by a contractor for the pipeline company itself. The U.S. Department of State’s public hearings along the proposed route of the TransCanada Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline this week are under the purview of Cardno Entrix, a “professional environmental consulting company” that specializes in “permitting and compliance.”

Terry Stuart of Colorado Comments:

Read the rest of this entry »

Chuck Spinney

Radioactive Rice “Far Exceeding” Safe Levels Found in Japan

Published on Saturday, September 24, 2011 by Reuters

by Chikako Mogi

TOKYO  – Japan found the first case of rice with radioactive materials far exceeding a government-set level for a preliminary test of pre-harvested crop, requiring thorough inspection of the rice to be harvested from the region, the farm ministry said late on Friday.

Read full article.

Who? Who?

EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion

Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”

Release Date: 9.28.11

Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report

EXTRACTS

The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.

Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.

Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.

In 2005, 25.7 million Americans needed food stamps, currently 45.8 million people rely on them.

…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.

Read the rest of this entry »