Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Matthew R Marler
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by John Vonderlin
Gary,
“While every penny collected and spent by a utility is both monitored by and controlled by adversarial negotiations with the CPUC, the public believes the CPUC is in the pocket of the utilities.”
You must not live in the Bay Area if you believe the first part of that sentence. Web search “San Bruno pipeline disaster PG&E CPUC emails” and learn the truth. For five years locally we’ve been exposed to the depressing drip of details of the incestuous relationship of the CPUC and P.G.&E on a whole spectrum of issues.
“Federal prosecutors have told Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that they are investigating five years’ worth of back-channel communications (a crime)between company employees and the California Public Utilities Commission, including several that enmeshed utility executives in a judge-shopping scandal, PG&E said Monday.”
Mr Peavey, the CPUC’s former head, “retired” and several other top aides were booted because of an earlier batch of revelatory emails. But then lately there’s been a “call for an immediate forensic investigation of all erased correspondence on the computers of the new California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) president Michael Picker.”
and this cozy, not adversarial, relationship resulted in a Federal indictment and huge fine because: “The suit alleges that, for decades, the defendants ignored safety violations, diverted funds earmarked for pipeline replacement projects and repeatedly cut budgets needed to safely maintain PG&E’s natural gas transmission and distribution lines – all of which ultimately culminated in a Sept. 9, 2010, explosion in San Bruno, Calif. that killed eight people and caused dozens of injuries.
Every penny monitored and controlled? Be skeptical. Be very skeptical. I am, even when I’m cashing the hefty dividend checks I get quarterly from their stock.
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Planning Engineer
Good link Barnes. Thanks
Comment on Week in review by Danny Thomas
Interested Bystander,
Assuming you’d replied to me as the poster RE: CFC’s, I found this of interest “Thus, a slow reversal of global temperature to the 1950 value is predicted for coming 5 ~ 7 decades. It is also expected that the global sea level will continue to rise in coming 1 ~ 2 decades until the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar O3 hole recovery; after that, both will drop concurrently.”
Two reasons. It further indicates a “self healing” nature of our planet much as “the pause” vs. CO2 (unproven?) and also as an alternative to CO2 being the cause of G.W.
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by rogercaiazza
The scary thing is that they have not doubts that the micro grids will work with no problems
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Steven Mosher
http://www.americaspower.org/sites/default/files/Energy_Cost_Impacts_2012_FINAL.pdf
“Electricity is the bargain among all consumer energy products. Among consumer
energy goods and services, electricity has maintained relatively lower annual
average price increases compared to residential natural gas and gasoline.
Electricity prices have increased by 51% in nominal dollars since 1990, well
below the 72% rate of inflation in the Consumer Price Index. The nominal prices
of residential natural gas and gasoline have nearly doubled and tripled,
respectively, over this period.”
“Higher gasoline prices account for nearly four-fifths of the increased cost of
energy for consumers since 2001. In nominal dollars, average U.S. household
expenditures for gasoline will grow by 136% from 2001 to 2012, based on EIA
gasoline price projections for 2012. In comparison, residential energy costs for
heating, cooling, and other household energy services will increase on average by
43%, from $1,493 in 2001 to a projected $2,131 per household in 2012.
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Steven Mosher
“For low- and middle-income families, energy costs are now consuming a portion of aftertax
household income comparable to that traditionally spent on major categories such as
housing, food, and health care. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2010 Consumer
Expenditure Survey reports that 121 million “consumer units” in the U.S. with an average
pre-tax income of $62,481 in 2010 spent an average of $16,557 (27%) on housing,
$6,129 (10%) for food, and $3,157 (5%) on healthcare.”
Comment on On determination of tropical feedbacks by Greg Goodman
Continuing my consideration of Paul_K’s comments and his similar analysis of AOD etc at Lucia’s:
DK2005 used an analytic approximation for the observed change in optical depth before computing the forcing values associated with the volcano. Since I am using a numerical solution, there is no value in doing this, and so I will revert to the original optical depth values from Ammann et al (2003) used by DK2005; these are then converted to forcing values using the DK2005 conversion factor of 21 W/m2 times OD, which is supported by Hansen (2002). This should bring the DK2005 and the Wigley2005 forcings into line except for a small difference in conversion:- Wigley converted using a factor of 20W/m2. ]
Now Paul is adopting the current orthodox values for volcanic forcing scaling : about 21 W/m-2 * AOD.
However, as I pointed out in this article, and as was shown in D&K 2005, this result comes from directly regressing AOD against temperature which Paul agreed in his comment here:
An interesting and thoughtful paper. I certainly agree with your comment that “It is quickly apparent that a simple, fixed temporal lag is not an appropriate way to compare the aerosol forcing to its effects on the climate system.” I have made similar comments before.
Yet in D&K2005 we find this is exactly how they derive the scaling factor for volcanic forcing:
δ(TLT) = k * δ (AOD) …… eqn (8)
In contrast, the leftmost panel of Paul’s replication of D&K fits rather well, and this is constructed from their analytical method with is effectively another way of deriving what I have done here by convolution of AOD.
This is the fit of D&K’s eqn 6 to TLT. At this point D&K, Paul_K and I are all in agreement and the model fits.
Where opinions diverge is where D&K, paradoxically, contradict their eqn 6 by eqn 8. ( they can’t both be correct ). It seems to me that Paul missed this incongruency since he explicitly states he does not agree with what eqn 8 is doing. However, he adopts the current orthodox scaling of AOD that it produces.
The need for him to introduce the deep ocean diffusion comes from this mismatch as he shows in his article.
D&K’s defence against Wigely’s published rebuttal is that the diffusion constant used (by IPCC modellers ) is unrealistic and is chosen for convenience. They deal with the Wigley’s criticism and calculate that the diffusion, while a legitimate argument, is insignificant.
Now if the diffusion flux is insignificant that brings us back to the AOD scaling which was incorrectly regressed in eqn 8. As I cover in my article the newer Hansen values depend ( according to the authors themselves ) on assumptions about the distribution of aerosol droplet size. ie it is a ‘tweakable’ parameter. It has been chosen to fit other assumptions and to reconcile model output with the climate record.
Thus far it seems that Paul’s diffusion calculation is based on his adopting an erroneous value of AOD scaling derived from a regression that he ( and I ) says is not valid.
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Rob Starkey
Wrong– a revenue neutral carbon tax does little to reduce consumption long term and is an expensive tax to administer
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by kim
As I’ve said, it is still to be determined whether rowing machines or treadmills are the more efficient way to galvanize the potential of the community, in times of microgrid stress. Perhaps a combination for a whole body workout.
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Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Lucifer
‘Revenue neutral’ is a delusion held by washington goobers who believe in their own significance more than the decisions of producers and consumers.
The whole idea to tax carbon is to get people to stop using it, right?
Then what happens to ‘revenue neutral’ if they actually do stop?
What taxing carbon would do is induce taxpayers to alter behaviour, not on business merit, but on tax code, which is the definition of inefficiency.
I guess that’s why washingtonians are so excited about exaggerating global warming so they can have justification for taxing something that’s difficult to quit.
Comment on Week in review by Tonyb
Danny
I note that you referenced a paper by Quinn bin lui who I have corresponded with in the past
He has written a number of interesting papers on ozone/CFCs and if I remember correctly Cosmic rays, which of course were a core component of svensmarks theory for warming as postulated in his book ‘the chilling stars’
Lui seems to continually slightly change his position and I don’t know what stage of his journey he is currently on
Tonyb
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by KenW
We hav everyzing unter Kontrolle, dank you
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Tonyb
Kim
This very subject of electricity being supplied by cycle power wAs explored in a uk tv programme from 2009 described here
Tonyb
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by beththeserf
‘A Staff Report and Proposal sets forth a vision …’
‘ Vision ‘ indeed!
http://www3.dps.ny.gov/W/PSCWeb.nsf/All/26BE8A93967E604785257CC40066B91A?OpenDocument
Comment on Planetary boundaries, tipping points and prophets of doom by Vaughan Pratt
@Peter Davies: I will be 81 in 2021 and look forward to having a glass of top quality red wine purchased by someone who currently is betting on global temperatures trending upwards.
Can’t pass up a win-win bet like that, Peter. Let me toss a coin to see which side I want to take. Oh wait, you’ve already picked your side. Ok, in that case I bet you that in February of 2021, clicking on
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/hadcrut4gl/last:120/trend
will show a least squares trend line with slope greater than .01 per year.
The intent here is that in February 2021 “last 120 months” should denote the range January 2011 inclusive to January 2021 exclusive. .01 per year is an upward slope of 1 °C/century.
The loser to fill the winner’s glass in person in the latter’s home town.
If Paul Clarke has since stopped updating his website, then the trend line to be determined directly from the annual HadCRUT4 data for the 10 years 2011 inclusive to 2021 exclusive, as calculated to the mutual satisfaction of the parties.
I’m open to adjusting the terms of the bet before you commit.
Comment on On determination of tropical feedbacks by Greg Goodman
coming back to Paul_K’s issue with the timing of the model.
It can be seen in my figure 9 that what I’m deriving as the climate response peaks around 1992.5, that is about 12mo after the eruption and in agreement with the negative quadrant of Spencer’s lag correlation plot that I reproduce as my fig 7.
Now for the simple, single slab, relaxation model to be reasonable representation of the system this time should correspond to the zero crossing of AOD anomaly…..
Comment on Planetary boundaries, tipping points and prophets of doom by Vaughan Pratt
My answer is above,dated February 9, 2015 at 3:32 pm. (I hit the wrong Reply button.)
Comment on On determination of tropical feedbacks by Greg Goodman
Now, it’s a little hard to see accurately but that does seem to be close to what is shown in my figure 5
I will try to do some additional processing to remove the strong residual, but to my ( impartial ) eye, the blue line seems to cross close to 1992.5 as well.
Hopefully, Paul will have time to pop back in and kick my butt if I’m kidding myself or misrepresenting his study, but it seems to me that all this falls into place if we stop trying to regress things that should not be regressed and adopt volcanic forcings as calculated by Lacis et al in 1993 ( and your humble servant in 2014 ).
Comment on Clean Air – Who Pays? by Joshua
Interesting. Would be even more interesting to see updated statistics.
Interesting is that 80% of the increase was due to increases in the price of gasoline. Interesting that the cost increase in household energy is some 1/4 that of gasoline. I wonder what updating would do to that number?
Interesting that electricity cost increase has been less than inflation in the CPI.
Interesting to think of what the implications would have been for synergistic positive externalities derived from greater subsidizing of electric cars/electric-powered public transportation (less increase in fuel costs, less pollution, less enriching of autocrats who deprive their populations of basic civic infrastructure with the potential for significant opportunity cost in human capital).
So I wonder if simplistic assumptions about the “coupling” of GDP growth and energy demand and the impact on different demographic sectors of the public might just be…um…er…eh…simplistic?
I wonder that Danny thinks about those numbers?