LifeItself

I still cannot get over the interview Mr. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of corn-ethanol agriculture, gave to the Economist.  The stunned reporter observed that Mr. Vilsack's pandering defense of agricultural subsidies was so thoroughly bereft of substance that he began to fear that Mr. Vilsack would be sucked into the vacuum of his mouth and disappear.

I think that Mr. Vilsack has calculated that thinking is an activity foreign to most Americans, and internationally as well. Is Mr. Vilsack correct in his cold political calculation?  I doubt if I know the true answer to this question.

When I talk to the numerous Polish immigrants of my generation, who really should know better, I often cannot believe my ears. How they mindlessly repeat the assorted talking points-of-the-day that were drilled into their heads by the various roaring heads on a TV channel they watch, a talk radio station they listen to, and an internet "source" they scan for a confirmation of their prior belief…

Almost every day on the way to campus I watch all kinds of monster trucks overtaking my small diesel engine-powered car.  The drivers look down at me with amusement and proudly roar from all of their 8 monster cylinders, spewing their monster exhaust fumes.  All these dinosaurs on wheels usually carry one person, who is not getting anywhere any faster than I do.  They do burn, however, four times more precious liquid hydrocarbons than I.  And herein lies the quintessential  U.S. infliction: blithe, mindless waste everywhere.

Since this blog post will likely be used for all kinds of political spins from the left and right, here is my disclaimer:
I am enthusiastic about most renewables (the giant-scaleethanol from anysource and biodiesel fuel are excluded), and I would love to see a wiser use of much less energy in the U.S., as well as fewer people. Unfortunately, my fellow Americans - most notably politicians and journalists -  are rather oblivious to the challenges of living off of ren…

Click on the image above to see its full size.
A human society can be viewed as a macro-organism, a far-from-equilibrium creature that exists by pumping energy through it.  The more complicated the society is, the more energy per unit time it needs to pump through to keep itself going.

What you see above is a plot of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in US dollars per day per person, versus the total rate of hydrocarbon use in Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOE) per day per person.  The plot is doubly logarithmic, so a straight line here is a power law curve in Cartesian coordinates. The source of data is CIA, and all 200 countries on the Earth are plotted in different colors by their continents.

The three poorest countries with the least use of hydrocarbons are Congo, Burundi, and Chad.  On the other extreme, I show Qatar, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and US.  China and Brazil are in the middle of the cloud of points that clearly form a linear trend.

The two solid lines are the power law sca…

In Part II of his work, "Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process," published by NYT on March 1, 2011, Mr. Ian Urbina states that 
[I]n the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. But at least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced, according to state data posted Tuesday. First, 320+260=580, not 680, as Mr. Urbina writes, but that's a minor problem.  Second, let's do the arithmetic:

580 million gallons of wastewater over 1.5 years is equal to 580/1.5/365=1.06 million gallons of wastewater per day, on the average.  Out of this volume of water, 320/1.5/365=0.58 million gallons of water per day was recycled, and the remaining 0.48 million gallons of water per day was sent to water purification plants for processing and discharge into rivers.

Now, let's com…

My dear friend, poet, writer, farmer, and a sterling human being, Wendell Berry, was just recognized with the 2010 National Humanities Medal.  This medal could not have gone to a better person.

But do not take my word for it, please read Wendell's books, including the latest one on economics. Here is the forward to this book, "What Matters?" by Herman Daly, one of a handful of economists, who actually know what they are talking about without hiding behind gobbledygook, senseless non-physical equations, and meaningless quasi-religious ideology.

You and I use a lot of energy. Every second of each day and night we devour 100 times more energy than we need to live.  If I were to eat that much energy as food, I would be a 50-foot long bull sperm whale, weighing 40 tons.  There are 300,000 sperm whales worldwide, half of them bulls (females are much smaller), and 300,000,000 Americans (females are about the same in size).  Our Earth cannot feed and protect 300,000,000 male sperm whales.  She is simply too small.
Our voracious appetite for energy must be either extinguished or quenched with local sources of energy (and, no, wind turbines and PV cells are too small to provide even single ample energy meal per day).
So here are some of the choices we have:  We can drill and hydrofracture deep gas wells, and produce natural gas closer to where we live, or we can go after coal leftovers. We can also opt not to use fossil fuels and live differently, more Amish-like. For example, we can opt to live in the well-insulated houses that are 40…

In this post I attempt to provide a context for an article in NYT, Drilling Down: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers by IAN URBINA, published on February 26, 2011.  The article seems to imply that much of the potentially deadly radioactive contamination of drinking water supply in Pennsylvania comes from "frac water" produced after hydrofracturing the deep natural gas wells there.  Such an assertion is not supported by facts, and here is why.
The raw data from the NYT spreadsheet, emailed to me by Mr. Urbina, are plotted here.  In the spreadsheet, there are up to five different measurements of radioactivity in the water produced from each of 212 natural gas wells in Pennsylvania.  Total alpha radiation refers to all alpha-particle-emitting radioisotopes present in the produced water.  In some wells there were additional measurements of alpha-radioactivity from two isotopes of radium and two isotopes of uranium.  By subtraction, the difference of between t…