U.S. peace movement plans to “escalate” street protests

Los Angeles protest
Today, Thursday, January 11, 5pm
Wilshire Blvd. & Western Ave.

There will be protests in dozens of other cities too.

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That’s right, 2006 was the hottest ever. One side effect of this is natural gas prices are tumbling because of decreased need in heating homes. In the coming years we will see all manner of weather shifts and price gyrations from global warming. This will lead to politically instability in some areas.

It’s not just happening in the States either.

Joe Hartley emails

Weather, of course, is statistical. However, you might want to start monitoring weather in South America. Córdoba, inland in Argentina, is flooding, as are cities in Brazil. Lots of rain in what should be pure summer, which is unusual down there.Not that a few variations means much, but they are at least anecdotal evidence.

Reader Suvro comments on our post about China and India facing up to global warming.

India has woken up to the fact that its growing energy hunger will NOT be satisfied by C-based fuels. Indian coal is quite dirty - high sulfur content. Better grade coal is available from Indonesia and other places, but transportation costs add a large penalty. Indigenous coal, while plentiful, is low grade with high ash content also.

Coal is a terrible way to generate power. Not only is it a gross pollutant when burned, the mining of it destroys huge areas forever. We must find and use better, less-polluting and more renewable ways to generate energy before climate change causes irreversible problems.

India’s natural gas and oil reserves are quite small. Neighbors have plenty of natural gas (Bangladesh, Iran, central Asia), but are either inimical politically (Bangladesh) or there are physical barriers to pipelines (Pakistan). Also India has NOT been successful in competing with China for overseas oil and natural gas reserves (Myanmar, Russia and former Soviet States, and western Africa). Thus India is in dire need of alternative sources for energy.

The politics of energy are like the politics of water, they underpin and are a root cause of many conflicts and wars.

As they say - Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Indian wind energy tycoon Tulsi Tanti is now running Suzlon Energy, the world’s largest wind energy manufacturer. On a recent visit to India, I was told of Reliance Retail’s (to compete with Wal-Mart’s entry in India) plans to run most of its new food stores primarily on solar energy panels. Right now the solar energy industry in India is nascent and quite immature, but I expect it to become a significant player in the next 5 years - about the same time frame as here in California!

India (as well as California) has multiple ways to generate power renewably; wind, solar, hydro, wave, tidal, geothermal, and biofuel. Doing so would distribute power generation over large areas, with much less central control, which again will have a political effect.

Some friends of ours live in southern Utah “in the middle of nowhere.” They have solar power now and will probably get wind power too. They aren’t totally off the grid, but getting there, while others around them are off the grid. The political effect if millions started doing that would be considerable indeed. What if towns and cities started doing it too. You’d start to see entirely new political structures form.

So, out of the global warming crisis, we may start to see entirely new forms of politics emerge and grow.

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GM recently announced plans for a concept car, the Chevy Volt, which will be all-electric and plug-in. Sounds good, but as always, one needs to be careful about GM announcing alt energy vehicles. They have a long and tired history of not following through, like they did when releasing the EV-1 then killing it. Also, the Volt is a concept car. They say it’ll be in production in 2-3 years, if they figure out the battery thing. That’s a big “if.” If it works, the Volt will be a next gen EV with a range of 640 miles. Sort of.

But here’s that GM spin again. Is it really an EV? It has a 3 cylinder flex-fuel engine which will need fuel to run to get that 640 mile range while the electric battery alone will only take you a puny 40 miles.

The battery has always been the problem with electric cars. It takes several hours to charge them and the range is only 100-150 miles. This hasn’t changed for over one hundred years. Yes, electric cars have been around that long.

In The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History by David Kirsch, he details how electric cars were quite prevalent from 1890-1915. There were even magazines about them, one of which ran an article in about 1912 saying we almost got that battery thing figured out now…

So, while GM wheezes towards getting alt energy cars on the road, Toyota, who gets it, is already selling hundreds of thousands of them, primarily the Prius. I have a 2001 Prius, it gets 45 mpg in LA and goes over 500 miles on the tank of gas. So, pardon my skepticism about the Chevy Volt. I hope it happens, but given GM’s history on such things, don’t hold your breath.

[tags]electric vehicles, EV, Chevy Volt[/tags]

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