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November 2011

No Pain? No pain.

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
This will blow your mind.  How many large power plants (500 MW) does it take to cook the thanksgiving turkey across the nation – just the ones cooked with electricity?  Answer is provided below.  Guess.  Don’t be a loser.  Guess. I’ve seen perhaps 100 ads for dust collecting contraptions that everyone including the buyers know will end up under the bed, in the closet, or basement, and finally onto the garage sale to somebody else who will decycle it.  These include the things like the Ab Buster 5000 (just made it up), junk you sit on, junk you rock on,…
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Peer Review This, Please

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Renewable Energy, Sustainability No Comments
This week I provide my own analysis of raw data to nail this Jell-O to the wall, and I’m done.  It’s all good.  Does anyone know what the “O” stands for?  Orama?  Jell Orama? First a recap from last week from which I got some blowback.  But would you believe it if I told you I received substantially more support and backslapping from critics of climate change?  As with any highly charged issue, readers/observers tend to attack on a hair trigger anything that challenges established positions and assign you to a broad group of in-duh-viduals to which you do not…
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Bombast from the Heresiarch

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Renewable Energy, Sustainability No Comments
I’ve moaned about global warming, aka, anthropogenic climate change, aka man-made global warming off and on over the past couple years so this week let’s get down to business. I’m all in favor of cost effective, as in benefits/cost ratio, reasonable environmental policy, resource preservation, and the minimization of irreversible damage.  I wouldn’t be passionate about what I do or spend Saturday mornings doing this rant every week if I weren’t.  I am also a professional engineer, which carries ethics of protecting the public health and well being.  Well being would include financial soundness, which is where the cost effectiveness…
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Occupying Ignorance

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Sustainability No Comments
Have you had your fill of Occupy Wall Street, (OWS) which has spilled over into dinky, surrounding, wannabe towns including one nearby with a population of a whopping 4,000?  Apparently, these in-duh-viduals are protesting rich people and the fact that the rich keep getting richer and the poor, well, are the poor.  My response: that’s life.  Life isn’t fair.  I don’t like the word “fair”.  Rather, I like “not cheating”.  “Fair” is too often used by whiners.  Some of these OWSers are self described anarchists and communists.  Oh yeah, there you go.  That’s what we need is communism.  There’s a…
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