LifeItself

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...

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-i...

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 d...

Given the noisy propaganda about the positive impact of renewables, or "clean energy,"  or "green energy" on global emissions of carbon dioxide, one expects there would be some.  Unfortunately, there is none as far as I can tell.  In fact, the situation is even more hopeless than I feared in my darkest dreams. Here is the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), plotted originally by P.F. Henshaw, and replotted a little differently by me. You can click on the plots to see them in high resolution. Above you see a semi-logarithmic plot of the normalized Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),  Rate of use of energy in the world (Energy),  Rate of global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and  Dollars of income generated per unit of energy expanded globally per year ($/Btu).   All values are relative to those in 1971, and all curves start from 1. All trends are exponential, so they plot as approximately straight lines on the semi-logarith...

Our society, like a novel lunatic, needs bad ideas, so that our collective craziness can have shape and direction.  Biofuels are one of such brazenly bad ideas that have crystallized a bunch of lunatic government policies and attracted other, completely unrelated lunatics. All these lunatics became friends of biofuels. "Ideas on Earth," observed Kilgore Trout, "were badges of friendship or enmity.  Their content did not matter.  Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness.  Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity."  And so it goes. Unfortunately, there were more bad news for the imaginary "advanced biofuels."  These no doubt miraculous, but yet undiscovered substances seem to fall into the domain of dot-con ventures sponsored by the fabulously well-to-do ventriloquists.  [Ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is...

Barely three days have passed since I posted " Lies, health, hunger and biofuels ," hoping that this sore subject would go away for several days.  Today I opened the Business Section of NYT, rubbed my eyes, and cried: "This cannot be!" I just read that madmen inside a federal government agency are trying to usher a new era of self-decomposing food supply in the U.S.  Can you imagine?  Your cereal, bread, corn flakes, anything, will be self-digesting and liquefying on your table if you wait a little, regardless of how well you keep it?   These madmen are attempting to introduce the U.S. public to a practical lesson in enzymatic chemistry:  just 1 genetically modified corn grain with the alpha-amylase enzyme in it per 10,000 other grains will make corn flour and its products go soft and unappetizing.  That's 1/100 of 1%! One could hardly think up a better allegory for the intellectual rot and moral decay blowing from Washington. What happens when t...