Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Environment

Beating the Heat

snow-plow1.jpgThe last several days have been the usual end-of-summer heatwave here in Southern California. Our house isn’t air-conditioned, so we open the windows and blow outside air through the family room, where we spend a lot of our time.

One thing we did do, was to look through some of our vacation pictures from last winter when we went to the Grand Canyon. Pictures like this one (click to enlarge) remind us why we only visit the snow. Several of these monster snowplows passed us on our way to the National Park entrance that day.

05 Sep 2009 by Environment Travel

EV Phone Home

tesla.jpgTesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of Electric Vehicles (EV). They are the only company to offer EVs for sale to the general public in North America or Europe.

Tesla EVs use the lithium-ion battery technology and have a range of over 200 miles on a full charge. The standard EV roadster is capable of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.

While all that sounds wonderful, the Tesla Electric Car just might have a few drawbacks . . .

Right: The Tesla Standard EV

From Planet Gore:

More on Tesla [Henry Payne]

President Obama, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and an army of Washington politicians with no experience in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future. They’re so sure of it, they’ve invested $489 million of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend’s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.

A few highlights:

  • The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 — or about five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.
  • Tesla’s hard-driving founder, Elon Musk, says Tesla plans to populate American rest stops with QuickCharging stations, which will allow drivers to recharge their batteries in “just” 45 minutes. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. “Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours,” he writes.
  • To charge the Tesla in the five minutes that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it “would require an 840-kW connection, which would drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day.”
  • And then there’s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla — even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: “Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour. And to make them, you need. . . an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now — and we can’t afford not to.”

Emphasis mine. This is just another example of the non-achievable Utopian hope and change that all those uninformed voters (I have some less politically-correct descriptions of them, which I won’t present here) thought they were going to get.

20 Aug 2009 by Environment Technobabble Whacko Politics

Cooper’s Hawk

coopers-hawk.jpg

I went into the back yard this morning and saw a hawk perched on my garden utility cart. I quietly rushed back into the house to get my camera and quietly returned to get some photos. The young bird stayed long enough for me to get several images. The composite image above is made from the best of the perched and in flight images.

According to my copy of “Birds of the Los Angeles Region,” this is probably a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk. This species is a year-round resident in the area and is known to ambush smaller birds as they feed. Cooper’s Hawks are often seen hunting around bird feeders – our feeders are to the left of the perched image, just out of the frame.

This bird and his ancestors have been coming around our yard for several years. We enjoy seeing their beautiful plumage and love the way they glide and soar overhead showing off their flares feathers.

19 Aug 2009 by California Critters Environment

Have a Nice Nuke

have a nice nukeThe Democrats and the Obamadministration think it’s OK for Iran to enrich nuclear fuel for that country’s energy needs, yet the moratorium on new nuclear facilities for the US continues. Why is it OK for them and not OK for us?

At least some members of the U.S. House and Senate are trying to get some traction for nuclear energy by leveraging the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) myth.

Via Planet Gore

We Need 100 Nukes by 2030 [Carl Shockley]

After fumbling over the Waxman-Markey initiative for several months, Republicans have finally hit their stride. Both House and Senate members are quickly falling behind the rallying cry, “100 New Reactors by 2030.”

“I think global warming is a real problem but I don’t think the solutions the Democrats are coming up with are going to accomplish anything,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), head of the Senate GOP caucus. “The only thing that’s going to allow us to cut carbon emissions is clean nuclear energy. We built 100 reactors between 1970 and 1990. We can do the same thing now. If global warming is the inconvenient problem, then nuclear power is the inconvenient answer.”

Alexander and three other Tennessee legislators were on hand Wednesday morning as Babcock & Wilcox introduced its new “mPower” 125-megawatt modular reactor that it will submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011. The $750 million reactor will be built in a factor and shipped to the site by rail, where it would be completely buried underground and refuel only once every five years. “Everything in this reactor would be made in America,” said Republican Bob Corker, Tennessee’s other senator.

Congressman Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.) warned that the United States is falling behind other countries in nuclear technology. “What we’re talking about here isn’t just a revival of the nuclear industry,” he said. “We’re talking about an American industrial renaissance.

Power generation using conventional coal technology has been mathematically proven to have little effect on AGW. We should continue to use coal powerplants. In addition, we should resume nuclear generation, as it is clearly a better and more efficient method of producing the energy our nation needs, regardless of whether it actually does anything to improve the environment.

10 Jun 2009 by Environment Global Warming Whacko Politics

National Parks Web Cameras

Every once in a while, when I’m at my desk working, I get a twinge of wanderlust. When the great outdoors calls me, I go to the National Park Service Web Cameras page. From there, I can navigate to some of our favorite places in near real time.

I made this mosaic from several of the images I looked at during my lunch break.

NPS mosaic

Available webcams on the NPS Page:

NPS Cams

Even though the mission of the webpage is to raise awareness of air quality, I like the instant gratification of seeing what the conditions are like in several different parks across the country.

Disclaimer: Some sites are in maintenance mode and the Hawaiian volcano site does not have a camera. Bookmark the site and when you get wanderlust, you can get a peek into the great outdoors.

From the page:

The National Park Service operates digital cameras at many parks to help educate the public on air quality issues. These cameras often show the effects of air pollution such as visibility impairment. Because these cameras are typically located near air quality monitoring sites, the camera web pages display other information along with the photo such as current levels of ozone, particulate matter, or sulfur dioxide air pollutants, visual range, and weather conditions.

02 Jun 2009 by Environment Travel

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