Solar Power Good News

Solar is making great progress, unless the Republicans can figure out a way to kill it so their oily buddies can stay deeply in the mix. The Republicans are so insane these days, it wouldn't surprise me if they try to impeach Obama over the failure of Solyndra.

Solar Power's Good News

By Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)

The past couple of months have been grim ones for anybody who favors federal support of renewable energy. First, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, providing gleeful conservative skeptics with weeks of anti-solar headlines. Then this week Beacon Power, a flywheel storage company, followed Solyndra into bankruptcy, and an Energy Department watchdog told Congress that the DOE had been ill-equipped to quickly distribute the $35 billion in new funding it got from the 2009 stimulus bill.

So today let's take a break from the gloom and look instead at some good news on the federally funded renewable power front. A couple of weeks ago, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced a "game changing" new development in solar panel fabrication. It's not sexy: It's called the Optical Cavity Furnace, and it's a new way of manufacturing solar cells that uses optics rather than radiant or infrared heat. There are a couple of big benefits to this new technology.

First, NREL says the new furnace uses around half the energy of traditional manufacturing processes, costs 25 to 50 percent less, and has faster process times. This means that solar panels can be made both faster and cheaper than before.

Second, because its optical technology is more precise, the solar cells it creates have a higher efficiency. "Our calculations show that some material that is at 16 percent efficiency now is capable of reaching 20 percent if we take advantage of these photonic effects," NREL principal engineer Bhushan Sopori said. "That's huge." Lauren Simenauer and Sean Pool explain what this means:

The White House has challenged the solar industry to produce clean electricity at $1 per watt. It has also set a national goal to achieve 80 percent clean energy use by 2035…The good news is that researchers are racing toward that goal at an impressive rate.

In fact, the cost of photovoltaic, or PV, cells had already fallen 50 percent in the past two years prior to the DOE announcement. A June 2011 projection predicted PV module prices would hit the goal of $1 per watt by 2013; now the finish line of the proverbial "race to the bottom" seems even more imminent.

In a way, this is the quiet silver lining behind Solyndra's highly publicized failure. Solyndra's goal was to produce cheaper, better solar power, and it failed because other companies beat them to the punch. But this is good news. Whether it's Solyndra or someone else, what's important is that stiff competition in the solar sector is producing dramatic gains in solar efficiency. Ramez Naam provides the numbers:

Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There's now frequent talk of a "Moore's law"
in solar energy. In computing, Moore's law dictates that the number of
components that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months…If similar dynamics worked in solar power technology, then we would eventually have the solar equivalent of an iPhone—incredibly cheap, mass distributed energy technology that was many times more effective than the giant and centralized technologies it was born from.

…Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the
dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells…If the 7 percent decline in costs
continues (and 2010 and 2011 both look likely to beat that number), then in 20 years the cost per watt of PV cells will be just over 50 cents…The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now…10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today. Solar capacity is being built out at an exponential pace already. When the prices become so much more favorable than those of alternate energy sources, that pace will only accelerate.

Solar power isn't the answer to all our energy needs. No matter how cheap it gets, we'll still probably need nukes or natural gas to provide baseload power. But even if solar can only provide electricity during daylight hours — and improved storage technology may change even that in the future—daylight hours are when electricity use is highest. Combine cheap solar with hydro, wind, and, maybe, biofuels, and the need for fossil fuels could diminish dramatically over the next few decades. What's more, the need for the worst of the fossil fuels, coal, could diminish even more.

All that depends a lot on how serious we get about this, but it depends even more on solar power getting cheaper than coal. Federally funded basic research, like NREL's work on the Optical Cavity Furnace, is a key part of that.

Original.

Political Class Clowns

If I were a Republican, I would be sooooo ashamed of what's happening to the Republican Party. The ONLY way the Republicans can take back the White House this time around is if they manipulate the voting machines (again) to make their candidate win.


Political Class Clowns
By TIMOTHY EGAN

For a Republican Party that has spent the better part of its presidential campaign proving that most of its candidates are not smarter than a fifth grader, the real scandal around frontrunner-of-the-moment Herman Cain is not what he knows. It’s what he doesn’t know.

China, for example. Lost in the wave of contradictory statements about his personal behavior was something Cain said a few days ago about the Asian powerhouse.

China, said Cain with his clueless urgency, is “trying to develop nuclear capability.” Anyone who is gobsmacked by this category five level of ignorance concerning a country that has had nuclear weapons for more than 45 years has not been paying attention. Cain makes Sarah Palin, with her eagle-eyed view of Russia from Alaska, sound like a Council of Foreign Relations scholar on a gasbag high.

The clowns have finally taken over the circus, and I mean this with all due respect to those who labor with painted faces and oversized shoes. The party that got itself into a fever over Barack Obama’s imaginary Kenyan birth, and briefly elevated Donald Trump, the main purveyor of that invention, to its front ranks, is now overwhelmed by its own nonsense.Herman Cain was never — and will never be — a serious candidate. He’s a vanity candidate who got into the race to boost his income as a motivational speaker. And lo, because he can speak, and people like Governor Rick Perry cannot string noun, verb and object together in a coherent fashion, he looks superior by comparison.

As evidenced by his year on the stump, Cain has proved that he knows almost nothing about American life beyond burgers and pizzas, and even less about the larger world.

But Cain is not the problem. It’s his party. Cain gets away with saying that we should have a moat along the Mexican border filled with alligators because there is no reality cop on the Republican beat.

Jonathan Ernst/ReutersHerman Cain was trailed by reporters in Washington on Nov. 2.
Consider Newt Gingrich, something I suspect many Republicans will now start doing as Cain craters. Gingrich fancies himself as the intellectual among high-office aspirants on the right, albeit a grumpy one. Yet he spent much of his early campaign talking about the nonexistent danger of Shariah law in the United States. In March, when President Obama gave the O.K. for American air support to save lives and oust Muammar el-Qaddafi, Gingrich said it would prove to be one of the worst foreign policy blunders in his lifetime.

Or look for just a moment at Rick Santorum, a man who is obsessed with other people’s sex lives. Last month, this former senator said if he were president he’d wage a campaign against “the dangers of contraception.” He’s serious. “It’s not O.K.,” he said. “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

The former Iowa frontrunner, Rep. Michele Bachmann, thinks the poor should pay more taxes, and that vaccines against cervical cancer may cause mental retardation. I think she gets her information from a guy living in a van down by the river. On the eve of the last Republican debate, Politifact, the nonpartisan referee, rated 14 of her 36 major policy statements as false. And 9 of those 14 were given the “pants on fire” lie designation.

While the nation begs for solutions to the troubles of a hurting and diminishing middle class, Republicans have been talking about whether Mormonism is a cult, and how many Mexicans they can kill with Cain’s alligators. In the process of trying to delegitimize Obama, they have done the same to themselves.

More than ever, the public feels disconnected from the political process. They feel like it’s an inside game, and money always wins. They despise a Congress that fiddles with votes to keep “In God We Trust” as a national motto and rails against a nonexistent rule to regulate dust, but will do nothing to forward funds to repair a bridge. In the last CBS/New York Times poll, Congressional approval was 9 percent. The only surprise was that it was so high.

It does not matter if the sexual harassment story about Herm Cain the restaurant lobbyist came from a plant by Rick Perry or from Bart Simpson. What Cain did after hours is not a worthy discussion because Cain is not a worthy candidate. He should run for something — anything — and study the globe for 20 minutes before assuming he can be president. In the meantime, Republicans have the frontrunner they deserve.

The public already knows the real scandal: our broken politics. On Sunday, in case we need reminding, the disgraced criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff will be on “60 Minutes” giving a little tutorial about life in the nation’s capital. He had 100 congressmen in his pocket, he explains. “We owned them.”

And as long as the political class focuses on the happy-hour antics of a pizza man, nothing will change but the name of the lobbyist counting congressmen in his corral.

Original.

RIP Pat Tillman

Reading this one reminds me how despicable the right-wingers, and Bush, were acting during the insane, illegal invasion of Iraq. The rightards were so quick to embrace Tillman as a super-patriot, until they learned that he wasn't a right-winger and he thought the war was illegal and wrong. Then he was suddenly a pariah. Typical two-faced bastard hypocrites.

On this date (November 6) in 1976, Pat Tillman, millionaire NFL Arizona Cardinals player, was born to Mary and Patrick Tillman in San Jose, Calif., the first of three sons. Pat began walking by eight and a half months. He grew up in a household without a television, where he and his brother largely read or played outdoors.

In his senior year in high school, he led his team to the Central Coast Section Division I Football Championship and earned co-Player of the Year honors for the Central Coast Section. He helped lead the Sun Devils at Arizona State University to the 1997 Rose Bowl after an undefeated regular season. He graduated summa cum laude from ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business in three and a half years, with numerous athletic honors. He soon became the Arizona Cardinal's starting safety and broke the franchise record for tackles in 2000 with 224. He also competed in marathons and the Ironman triathlon, and volunteered in youth groups and schools, while pursuing a master's degree in history. Pat married his high school sweetheart, Marie, in the spring of 2002.

He soon made his stunning announcement that he was placing his NFL career on hold to become a U.S. Army Ranger with his brother, Kevin. They served tours in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2004. They were recipients of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 11th Annual ESPY Awards in 2003. Pat died from "friendly fire," as he tried to provide cover for fellow soldiers escaping from an ambush in a canyon in Afghanistan. It took the military five weeks to disclose the truth to his family: that Pat died from fratricide. When his antiwar views—he soon considered the war "illegal"—were documented by his family, they were attacked by right-wingers.

The May 3 memorial program featured a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which had been found underlined in Tillman's belongings: "But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." In an article in October 2006 appearing in Truthdig, Richard Tillman wrote that the best way to honor his brother's birthday was by choices made on "the day After Pat's Birthday" (Nov. 7, 2006, Election Day). Tillman wrote: "Somehow suspension of habeas corpus is supposed to keep this country safe. Somehow torture is tolerated. Somehow lying is tolerated. Somehow reason is being discard for faith, dogma, and nonsense."

D. 2004.

“Hold your spiritual bromides . . . Pat isn't with God. He's fucking dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead.” — Brother Richard Tillman at his brother's memorial service, San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 2004

re-printed from FFRF.

This Week in Crazy

There's always plenty of "crazy" to go around.

Nabeel Khokhar Bhai gave his bride-to-be an interesting gift: A billboard offering a general apology for being a "dirty, sneaky, immoral, poorly-endowed slimeball." We don't know what Bhai did, but it must have been a doozy.

What kind of Psychometer would this be without an elected representative saying something obscenely racist? Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina weaved an embarrassing metaphor to a crowd of college students likening illegal immigrants to home-invading rodents.

He may have directed the hit "Tower Heist," but Brett Ratner didn't have the best week. You know you may be having PR trouble when you have to confirm that you "banged" Olivia Munn but did not masturbate with shrimp in the same sentence, as Ratner did.

James Franco, the Most Serious Artist of Our Time, is going to hold a seance for Tennessee Williams, right on the heels of some kind of James Dean project that involves dildos. To be honest, we're officially exhausted following all the Important Art created by the worst thing about "Spider-Man 3."

Kirk Cameron took a break from scolding people for not loving Jesus to scold people for not knowing this country's important documents. He asked a TV audience whether the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence starts with "Four score and seven years ago," before revealing, trick question, that it was the Emancipation Proclamation -- and not the Gettysburg Address, like it is in real, non-Truthiness-based life.

A Virginia GOP committee celebrated Halloween very festively this year, but they forgot to not pass around a pamphlet depicting a Zombie Obama complete with bullet holes and other wounds.
Should we really feel bad for Herman Cain? He's still the GOP frontrunner without managing a halfway serious campaign. And between his newfound brotherhood with the Koch brothers, as well as a sexual harassment scandal whose facts he can't keep straight, Cain has proven that he's either a genius or the luckiest former pizza CEO of all time.

Ann Coulter says a lot of nonsense simply to rile up liberals, but claiming that that the Republican party's black people are "so much better than" the Democratic party's black people was over the line -- even for her. We know what Coulter meant, but when such poor common sense is displayed, we have to call it out.

Kim Kardashian once again defended her title of World's Most Useless Human Being by ending her marriage only 72 days after her $18 million wedding, offending gays who can't get married, the poor and unemployed, and anyone with a moral compass in one swift stroke.

You could click here.

Last Organic Outpost

Farm Fest 2011

Last Organic Outpost’s annual FarmFest will be on Saturday November 5, 2011!

This FREE family-centered event will be held from 10am to 4pm at 711 N. Emile, in the heart of Houston’s Fifth Ward, and will feature a short fitness fun walk, art, healthy food, music, children’s activities and lectures and demonstrations about sustainable gardening and lifestyle practices.

The Last Organic Outpost is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization maintaining the farm at 711 N. Emile and dedicated to creating a sustainable urban farm belt and “food everywhere” gardens in Houston's underserved inner city.


For the past 11 years we have been developing and running model projects in Houston’s Fifth and Third Wards, some of our city’s largest food deserts. We have worked with children from St. John’s Bread of Life, from Prairie View A&M, mother’s groups, team building groups, various religious groups, and Life is Living.
Some of the other programs and work we do:

• Individuals can work with us, and receive fresh produce in payment.
• Free produce for our elderly neighbors near the Farm who cannot work.
• Free cooking demonstrations and tastings at the Farm.
• Classes, grade school to college, on farming, vermiculture, and nutrition.
• Free or low cost, hands-on, gardening classes and demonstrations.

We are committed to providing quality nutrition that is accessible to all through education, through supportive coalitions with other like-minded groups, and the through the development of novel need-based produce disbursement programs.
We also believe that sustainable communities gain strength by encouraging all members to learn, work, grow, and just have fun together. Please support us in this effort.

For more information on who we are, please visit our website:
www.lastorganicoutpost.com 713-931-6100