I Want the Freedom to Pour Hot Coffee on My Balls

We know from the last Green Chain post, that Jerry Brown (aka Governor Moonbeam) is a Prophet. Fewer folks know that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth–son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown–and a stick up his butt. As a prophet (a Jesuit one, at that), he believes that people ought to

California’s Solar Virtue Signal Could Put Housing Out of Reach

The California Energy Commission (CEC) said, “Eureka, we have a refulgently brilliant idea! Let’s require installation of solar panels on new home and low-rise apartment building construction.” Assuming the California Building Standards Commission ratifies the CEC’s proposal (a purported slam-dunk) it will take affect starting January 1, 2020. Less than two years from now. ”The

Cataclysmic Climate Change

Damn, I am pissed. I was supposed to be dead by now. Hell, we all were. Baby-boomers weren’t supposed to live longer than their parents’ generation. Experts expected pesticides and other synthetic chemicals to kill us. We would be killed by the very technology meant to save us—hoisted with our own malathion petards. Rachel Carson

The Cost of Coal

A recent tweet trumpeted a report that 250,000 Chinese died in 2013 due to smog from coal (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coal-emissions-smog-deaths). The report on the deaths came partly from Greenpeace, of course. There is little question that coal is dangerous. It is dangerous to mine. Its emissions are a problem; coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.

Green Games

  Here is today’s Green Chain column for the Lake County Record-Bee. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes. It appears we are witnessing the crumbling of the green movement, as we know it. Dr. James Lovelock, who postulated the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of earth operating

Trees ain’t thermometers

I used to work on Mountain Home State Forest in the southern Sierra. MHSF has about 3000 specimen-sized sequoia within its boundaries. Dendrochronolgists often visited to see the stumps from logging in the mid to late 1800s. These were often over 2000 years old when they had been cut. The Dendrochronolgists were interested in the

A warmer and wetter world

I found a link the other day to a government website with global mean precipitation data from 1900 to 2000. Of course, I can’t find the link now (please comment if you have the link, but first see the note at the end of the post). Anyway, I put the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet

Making money out of thin air

What do the South Seas Company and carbon exchanges have in common? A desire to make money from an idea.

Escaping the climate energy trap

CFACT hosts tour of energy poor village of La Libertad at Cancun climate talks (Cancun, Mexico) Few things divide rich from poor like access to affordable energy.  Today, it’s estimated that 1 out of 5 people have never flicked a light switch while nearly half the world cooks with solid fuel, such as wood or

Climate security, no. Job security, yes we Cancún.

As we know equivocally from the website of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the cabaret in Cancún, Mexico (29 November to 10 December 2010), encompasses the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP),