New Water Heaters Compliant with EPA Regulations

Photo: Wikipedia

If you ask an engineer, he will tell you that CO2 is not a pollutant, and burning fossil fuels has made the Earth greener because their emissions are rapidly assimilated by sunlight. As Dr. Klaus Kaiser had explained, “incomplete combustion can cause air quality problems, not because of CO2 but due to soot particles and nitrogen oxides,” particularly in high density urban areas where the air tends to be stagnant. There is a reason why Chicago, the ‘Windy City,’ has not had an air quality problem.

The green biomass, including trees and plants, is 99 percent carbon and water. This carbon comes from atmospheric CO2, including CO2 dissolved in rain water or taken up by the oceans. “Higher atmospheric CO2 dramatically accelerates growth of green biomass above a minimum concentration of 200 parts per million (0.02%).  Below that concentration (about 50 percent of CO2 level in the air today), it’s difficult for plants to keep growing.”

The carbon cycle/photosynthesis is a complex bio-energy process where solar energy is converted into green biomass. Almost all atmospheric CO2 comes from volcanoes, decaying biomass such as forests, oxidized by atmospheric oxygen, and then from forest fires and the burning of fossil fuels. When fossil fuels are burned, CO2 is released into the atmosphere and the carbon goes back into the carbon cycle, forcing the growth of new green biomass. It is a known fact that greenhouses add CO2 in order to accelerate plant growth. Somehow, the climate change industry proponents have calculated that the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide, the gas of plant life, to society is $38.

Solar and wind energy are excellent sources for powering low-power appliances during emergency conditions and for powering high-power appliances in remote locations. Marxist environmentalism has been used to advance the corrupt agenda of “climatism,” escalating in the war on coal which resulted in expensive electricity, hurting the poor and the middle class.

 According to Jonathan Fahey, quoting a University of Chicago study released in June 23, 2015, installing new windows, replacing insulation, and making other home efficiency improvements fell 2.5 times short of the projected energy savings. Because the study looked at low income homes, a second study surveyed middle-income homes and the results were similar. http://econresearch.uchicago.edu/content/do-energy-efficiency-investments-deliver-evidence-weatherization-assistance-program

Making older homes more energy-efficient may not be the “cheapest way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.” Weatherizing and cash-for-caulking may not reduce energy use much either. “Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said that weatherization programs for low-income households are typically among the least cost-effective energy efficiency measures.” http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/2015/06/24/study-home-efficiency-upgrades-pay/29233141/

It is very expensive for low income homes to replace windows, water heaters, and air conditioners when they are still serviceable. Can you convince homeowners when your data is based on computer models that exaggerate the energy savings? It is much cheaper to fix a leak or replace a bulb.

According to the Plumberologist, a Virginia contractor service, starting in 2015 customers can no longer buy traditional electric water heaters like those they already own.  What is available now is called heat pump technology. Your new water heaters “will have an AC unit on top that pulls heat from the air in the room to heat the water rather than producing all the heat by itself.”

As a former southern resident and owner of an AC heat pump, I can attest to my ten-year struggle with such an expensive unit that froze in summer time and never cooled my house adequately, and froze in winter time when it never warmed my house sufficiently. After ten years of so many repair calls that I lost count, I finally replaced the monstrosity with a much more efficient, less expensive, and traditional unit. And there was certainly no shortage of hot air in the atmosphere year round.

The Plumberologist identified several issues with these new heat pump water heaters:

-          At 2 feet taller, they may not fit in older homes or condos where space is an issue

-          The lightest units weigh at least 450 lbs., necessitating an extra person to install, doubling the service cost

-          Because heat pump water heaters need several hundred cubic feet of warm air to work,  homeowners will need more than a closet or small basement space to install one; and, wherever it is installed, “the room will be as cold as a freezer”

-          Because you are buying now two appliances, a water heater and air conditioner, “heat  pump heaters are twice as expensive” as the old electric water heater

Why is the EPA making homeowners buy appliances such as this heat pump water heater we do not need nor can afford, for paltry water heating efficiency in the months when we aren’t heating our homes, which for Virginians is about six months a year?

The Plumberologist suggested switching to a gas-powered water heater – if you can afford it. A tankless gas water heater is “up to 25 times more efficient than the most efficient electric water heater and, the unit pays for itself in less than 10 years.” http://plumberologist.com/electric-water-heater-replacement/

One way or another we’ll have to pay the EPA piper in order to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere that supposedly causes manufactured global warming. My plants are already suffering from the short and cooler summer.  At least the EPA will let us have hot water.

By Hook and By Crook, You Are Going to Pay for Climate Change

“Science has become the new stepchild of politics.” – Michael Savage

It’s the first day of spring and we are having snow again. Not much, a couple of inches, just enough to prove that March always goes out like a lion. Undeterred, global progressives, intent on sending us into the stone age of technology, are forcing their agenda of redistributive taxation of man-made global warming/climate change on everyone.

But that’s not all. According to Dr. Klaus Kaiser, Central Europe experienced a Mother Nature event – a total solar eclipse around 9 a.m., March 20, 2015, the spring equinox,  and a super-moon. It will be interesting to see how electric power plants dependent heavily on solar power fared in a shut-down during the day when energy demand is at its peak. And the most vulnerable was Germany which derives a larger percent of its electricity needs from solar power. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/70574

Dr. Kaiser said, “With well over 10,000 wind turbines in operation, the European electric grid has already experienced instability close to collapse.  The (far) offshore system Bard-1 in the German Bight, built for approximately $5 billion two years ago is slowly rusting in the sea. It is a real money maker—for the legal profession.”

Dominion Virginia Power has offered customers in their monthly billing the whimsical “Green Power,” to reduce the family’s carbon footprint in 2015, a “voluntary option that enables customers to match their electricity use with clean, renewable energy from wind (78%), solar (1%), and biomass (21%).”  Dominion offers two choices:

-          100% Option, matching 100 percent of a customer’s electricity use with Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), at a cost of 1.3 cents per kWh.

-          Block Option, purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in fixed monthly increments; each $2 supports 154 kWh of renewable energy.

Such voluntary options are nothing more than customers subsidizing unnecessarily expensive energy generation that is not really clean, it is the industry’s “dirty little secret,” as someone called it years ago.

Having researched the wind and solar power generation extensively, and having written a bestseller and numerous articles on the topic, I know that renewable energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor victimless. There are millions of animal casualties, chopped birds by wind turbines and fried birds by solar panels’ heat flux; animals experience bizarre behavior, fertility issues, and spontaneous abortion of fetuses when living in close proximity to wind farms; humans experience serious health effects as well when in close proximity to wind turbines and from their home smart meters attached to the smart grid.

One of the more interesting presentations I heard at CPAC 2015 was the panel on “Climate: What Tom Steyer Won’t Tell You.”

Representative Bill Flores (TX-17) addressed the global warming alarmism, pointing out that this administration has done everything in its power to stop domestic energy production in this country, spending billions of dollars for bankrupt solar energy producers like Solyndra. He enumerated the six “inconvenient truths” of those promoting the climate agenda:

1.       It kills U.S. jobs.

2.       It costs trillions of dollars.

3.       It’s based on junk science.

4.       It uses fantasy technology that is yet to be developed.

5.       It manipulates cost/benefit analysis by using junk economics.

6.       It fails the smell test.

Rep. Flores stated that Obama’s energy agenda, via EPA’s tightening regulations such as ozone levels and Waters of the U.S., kills 3 million American jobs, exporting them to China and India, and importing their pollution back to the United States. “By 2020, the EPA’s ozone regulations will eliminate $3.5 trillion of economic output.” There is no credible evidence that ozone levels cause increased health issues for Americans but poverty does, Rep. Flores added. Because the EPA knows that California cannot meet its stringent ozone standards, then California is excluded from the equation.

It is EPA regulatory malpractice, said Rep. Flores, as evidenced by the attempt to change the definition of water in the Waters of the U.S. from “navigable waters” to any puddle of rain that falls in a farmer’s field.

Tom Steyer, a “green” energy devotee, has pledged $100 million in 2014 to Democrats who oppose the Keystone pipeline and favor the disuse of fossil fuels over renewables.  Steyer opposes coal in an attempt to boost the value of his solar projects.  According to John Hinderaker, “Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financiers of coal projects.” http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/the-epic-hypocrisy-of-tom-steyer.php

Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, jocularly introduced as the “enemy number one to the climate change agenda,” talked about the environmental noose that was put around the world’s global economy in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro and the decades since then that tightened that noose. Obama took control of the economy through ever more stringent environmental regulations even though there has been no global warming in the last 18 years.  

Pointing out that the entire global warming fiasco is based on faulty IPCC computer modeling, Ebell said, “Do you trust the models or the actual data?” Ninety-seven percent of climate change scientists say, trust us, we have the models. “If the models and the data don’t agree, change the data.” The deception was exacerbated by the infamous hockey stick graph, Ebell added.  Every agency of the federal government views global warming as the greatest national security threat.  John Kerry, our Secretary of State, said in a speech that climate change is his number one priority.

Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation, the largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on coal” via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling 25,000 pages.  Quoting Robert E. Murray, Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about 30%, at a maximum.”

Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American taxpayers.

In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate the availability and cost of electricity.”

According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700 megawatts of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the Polar Vortex of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired plant every week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last year.”

CEO Robert E. Murray offered multiple examples that “the global ‘climate change’ scare is purely political and not based on any science:

-          According to NASA satellites and ground-based temperature measurements, the earth has not warmed for the last eighteen years and five months. But CO2 levels have risen almost ten percent since 1997.

-          Seventy percent of the years since the Ice Age were warmer than today.

-          There has been a decline in the world land area under drought in the past thirty years.

-          Rates of sea-level rise remain infinitesimal, averaging only about one millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges.

-          Satellites show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979.

-          2012 and 2013 IPCC reports concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era.

-          The past year was not the warmest on record, as Mr. Obama claimed during his State of the Union address, which I attended, on January 20.”

On this sunless first day of spring, with cold temperatures, rain, sleet, and snow in the northeast, we should be thankful to the cold industry for producing enough energy to keep us warm and our large economy running smoothly. There is no secret that the environmental NGOs such the Sierra Club, Natural Resource Defense Council, and rich individuals promoting “Beyond Coal,” are influencing EPA’s overregulation of the manufacturing sector under the guise of saving the planet, to the detriment of our economy, and destroying wealth and the middle class in the process. The war on coal is real and so is the war on our free market-based way of life.

 Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

"Engineering" Climate Change

Ice formations. Photo: Jeremy Smith, 2014

 

 

Our omniscient government is going to spend $1 billion in addition to the billions already wasted so far in order to attempt the impossible, “engineering” climate change to satisfy the Green agenda.

What is the scientific, measurable definition of a “normal” climate change and what is the measuring stick used to determine acceptable variability?  What are the parameters of deciding “normal” and what makes the global warming crowd the soothsayers of climate, especially since they’ve been wrong in their predictions in the last fifty years? Can the Green Agendders describe a “normal” climate change?

The global warming scheme became a very profitable enterprise, a veritable cash cow, until people started asking questions, and Mother Nature froze in thick Arctic ice the scientists’ vessel on their global warming ice-melting fact-finding mission, or dumped unusual amounts of snow every time environmentalists gathered to protest global warming. Returning to the drawing boards, the liberal euphemists came up with a different explanation, Polar Vortex, and the profitable enterprise called global warming became climate change.

It is the same climate change our planet has been experiencing for millions of years called seasons. The seasons caused by the yearly revolution of the earth around the Sun and tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the plane of revolution.

Singling out oil and coal companies, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a crowd in Jakarta on February 16, 2014 that “In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”  He called climate change skeptics adherents to shoddy science and Flat Earthers. “We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

The solution he proposes is a “new global energy policy that shifts reliance from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies” like the one championed by President Barak Obama recently in California.

The problem is not that people deny the existence of climate change. Most people agree that there is a climate change but they deny that it is man-made. There are now over 1,000 real scientists and climatologists that agree that global warming is a hoax. The scientific evidence provided from the left to support global warming is based on “consensus.”  Consensus does not constitute scientific fact. It just means that a group of people are in agreement on a particular issue. The MSM is not interested in hearing or airing any opposing views, marginalizing, intimidating, and suing anybody who disagrees with them. They have decided that it is settled science and that is the end of the conversation, case closed.

The “engineering” of climate change by government fiat, executive orders, taxation, and EPA regulations reminds me of Don Quixote de la Mancha “tilting at the windmills,” an English idiom sometimes used to mean jousting  (the windmills), “attacking an imaginary enemy.”

The consensus argument is that “climate change is real and human activity is playing a major role in an increasingly volatile climate.” The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming that humans are producing more CO2 is just a hypothesis that has been debunked. Even EPA Director Gina McCarthy said that reaching all U.S. goals for climate change compliance, “will not have an impact globally. You don’t make good, sustainable laws when you make them on unproven sciences.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the “repository of the global warming hoax.” Consensus scientists engage in political advocacy and economic restructuring of the developed world.

As the data scandal from the University of East Anglia proved, there has been serious damage done to climate science, real research, and industrial progress by United Nation’s 30-year “green agenda’s” war on fossil fuels and economic development. IPCC, which is not a scientific organization and is not accountable to any nation or group of nations, has influenced the masses to believe that climate change is anthropogenic (man-made).

What could possibly go wrong with the Green Agenda, the War on Coal, EPA strangling industry with costly and unnecessary regulations, and spending billions of taxpayer dollars on expensive renewable energy such as wind and solar?

-          Utilities are struggling to meet the demand for electricity due to cold weather

-          The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule by EPA put such a financial pressure on the coal sector that many plants were retired

-          After billions of dollars were invested in renewable energy resources, there is not enough solar and wind energy generated to replace the electricity that was generated by now closed coal power plants:

37 percent of electricity generated in 2012 came from coal fired plants; in 2008, 49 percent of electricity came from coal fired plants, a sizeable drop of 12 percent; natural gas fired plants replaced some of the electricity; solar power generated only 0.1 percent of electricity needed, and renewable energy, including hydro-electric produced only 5 percent of that total electricity production (U.S. Energy Information Agency or EIA)

EIA reports 3 percent loss in 2012 of coal fired capacity and by 2020 20 percent of electricity generation from coal will be lost due mostly to EPA regulations (Rick Manning, Americans for Limited Government)

-          The world’s largest generating plant (5 square miles) Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in the Mojave Desert near the California/Nevada border, scorches, burns, or singes birds flying into the 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit “thermal flux” around the towers. The 350,000 huge mirrors were killing birds even during the construction stage of the facility. Birds also mistaken the mirrors for water and fly directly into them. The mirrors and towers are used to store heat and to keep generating electricity after the sun goes down.

Ivanpah’s electricity cost about four times as much as electricity generated by natural gas-fired plants but produces far less electricity, not to mention the amount of land required to install the mirrors. The much larger cost will be passed on to consumers.   

A kWh of electricity generated at Ivanpah, if you take into account the price tag of the facility ($2.2 billion), cost $5,561. However, since the plant produces electricity 8-10 hours per day, the cost goes up by a factor of three, making the cost per kWh jump to the “bargain” price of $15,000!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560494/Worlds-largest-solar-farm-SCORCHING-BIRDS-fly-it.html

-          Wind turbines kill 70 Golden Eagles each year at California’s Altamont Pass http://www.theblaze.com/stories/wind-energy-under-attack-for-thousands-of-wildlife deaths/

-          U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Estimated that 440,000 birds per year were killed by U.S. wind turbines http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/collisions/wind_farms.html

-          Study showed 600,000 bats killed by wind turbines in 2012 http://cbsnews.com/news/about-600,000-bats-killed-by-wind-turbines-in-2012-study-shows/

-          President Obama issued executive order to triple government’s renewable energy use by 2020 http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/12/oh-by-the-way-obama-issues-executive-order-to-triple-governments-renewable-energy-usage-by-2020/

-          Department of Energy gave Green Energy loans to President Obama backers http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/12/new-doe-loans-support-green-obama-backers/

-          Department of Interior explores expansion of permits to kill Bald Eagles in order to accommodate wind energy

-          http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/09/interior-looks-to-expand-permits-for-killing-bald-eagles-to-accommodate-wind-energy/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FoundryConservativePolicyNews+%28The+Foundry%3A+Conservative+Policy+News.%29

-          The administration excuses wind farms on Bald Eagle deaths but prosecutes oil companies

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/14/obama-administration-gives-wind-farms-pass-on-eagle-deaths-prosecutes-oil/?test=latestnews

-          US gives permits to kill Bald Eagles to wind power providers  http://news.yahoo.com/wind-power-us-extends-permit-eagle-deaths-145931345--finance.html

-          Wind farms killed 67 Bald Eagles in 5 years, a slaughter by any measure http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/11/eagle-slaughter-wind-farms-kill-67-eagles-5-years/

-          Fifty administration-backed Green Energy companies went bankrupt or were failing http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/30/as-many-as-fifty-obama-backed-green-energy-companies-bankrupt-or-troubled/

The Green Agenda cost many California farmers their livelihood and American consumers a large supply of food when the government shut off the water in St. Joaquin Valley to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish that nobody really cared to save. It was not climate change that caused the drought in California – the drought was “exacerbated by federal and state regulations,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca), which positioned “the well-being of fish… ahead of the well-being of communities.”

While blaming this man-made drought on climate change, President Obama promised $160 million in federal aid, $100 million to livestock farmers, $60 million to California food banks, and $15 million to the hardest hit areas. For the past five years, environmental groups were successful in diverting water from farmers in order to save the Delta smelt, flushing into the ocean 3 million acre-feet of water slated for the Central Valley.

The House Bill 3964 to restore water to the area passed by 229-191 votes. The Democrats are holding up the bill in the Senate because the administration is not really interested in passing it. Instead, they are giving more “pork to environmental activists and their victims, offering the farmers they’ve put out of work, a “summer meal plan.”

Preaching global warming and the climate change agenda are more important than a long-term solution for the man-made water shortages that are affecting the $45 billion agricultural industry. These water shortages could be easily resolved, but the government’s solution is to spend $2 billion in a temporary “relief” package that will not solve the long-term problem.

At the end of the day, crony capitalism and environmental interest groups drive the climate change agenda. Their “consensus” political groups and scientists are pressured to tailor climate models to ensure the desired results that confirm man-made global warming. The solar flares, the sun’s orbit, its tilt, the cosmic radiation, the oceanic currents, the fast dissipating cloud cover, volcanic activity, and other natural causes are not considered as variables in the climate change models.

 

Butler on Business WAFS 1190 Atlanta Solar Power

Ten minute radio commentary on Butler on Business WAFS 1190 Atlanta, August 8, 2012. Topic: Solar power. I come on at the 30 minute mark.
http://www.cyberears.com/cybrss/16630.mp3