I just read some great news: Nanci Pelosi just met with the mayor of San Francisco to announce her support for the Securing America’s Energy Independence Act It is a similar bill to the one I wrote about last year.

So what’s the details of the new bill? It…

…would extend the residential and commercial ITC for eight years, modify the residential and commercial tax credit for photovoltaic systems to $1,500 per half kilowatt, remove the 30% cap for commercial installations and the $2,000 cap on residential installations and provide three-year accelerated depreciation for commercial solar and fuel cell projects.

It also changes the solar water heating credit from a maximum of 30% to an absolute credit of up to $2000 (which is awesome!). As you may be expecting, I’ve done the math…

Solar Water Heater: Assuming it costs about ~$3500 to have a professional install a solar water heater on your roof, that means you’ll have spent $1500 after taxes. If you add on the incentive from our local utility company ($800), that leaves the price for an INSTALLED solar hot water heater at $700! That means if you’re currently heating your water with electricity you’ll make up the cost in 1.46 years. You’d be crazy not to invest in one!

Solar Electricity: Right now solar panels cost about $4.5/watt. Under normal circumstances you can get about 6 full-sun hours a day. If you bought $18,000 worth of solar panels (4 kilowatts) you could generate about 24 kilowatts/day which translates to approximately $2.4/day in “free” energy. For now I’ll ignore the cost of installation, wiring, and other equipment (inverter) so it would take 26.7 years to make up the cost in an ideal world (assuming 30% losses in the system which is typical).

Now lets add in this new incentive… The bill allows us to get a tax credit of $1500/half-kilowatt. That is $12,000 of free money! This leaves us with a total price of $6,000 for the solar panels or 6.84 years to make up the cost. Since it costs about $5,000 for the extra equipment plus installation the real figure is more like 12.55 years. In other words: It still isn’t worth it financially… but if you finance it you can increase your monthly electricity payment by a small amount while doing good for the environment.

Note: This doesn’t take into account the increasing cost of energy or inflation. Realistically, you could probably get the payback time under 9-10 years. The real key is for the cost of solar panels to come down… If we can get the price/watt down to about $2.50 then you’d be stupid not to invest in solar electricity. At that price you’d make up the cost in 3.4 years! I’m still holding out hope that Nanosolar can keep their promise of $0.50/watt by 2009.

I just received a letter from Senator Mel Martinez that states that global warming is the result of changes in land use! …and that it is perfectly natural! How out of touch with reality is this guy? I mean, next he’ll be telling me that the earth was created in six days and that humans walked with dinosaurs!

Here’s the full text of the letter:

Thank you for contacting me regarding our nation’s initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I appreciate hearing from you and would like to respond to your concerns.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, the recent warming trend of the Earth’s surface temperature can be attributed to the effect of natural occurring and human-generated gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Yet, long term temperature data maintained by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) suggests that changes in temperature might be more closely related to changes in land uses.

In addition, researchers have found that environmental awareness and initiatives are stronger when people enjoy a higher standard of living, which is in turn a result of steady economic growth.

When addressing the complex questions surrounding this issue, we need to make decisions grounded on sound science to ensure our nation’s continuous economic growth and the welfare of the most vulnerable in our communities is not put at risk. Developing a comprehensive climate change policy must include strategies to deal with the growing emissions and energy consumption of large industrial nations such as, India and China; where energy consumption is growing at more than four times the global rate.

25 years ago, China was largely energy self-sufficient. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for oil in China and India will double by 2030. We must continue to engage developing nations to ensure that scarce energy supplies are being used efficiently and that we support new technologies that promote cleaner-burning fuels.

On February 2002, President Bush unveiled a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas intensity in our nation by 18 percent within a decade, thus preventing the release of 500 million metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions to the atmosphere. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2006 includes nearly $3 billion for the development of environmentally sound technologies, and $200 million for climate-change-related international assistance programs.

On June 21, 2005, I joined a strong majority of my Senate colleagues in approving an amendment (S. Amdt. 817) to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6) introduced by Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). This amendment promotes the adoption of new technologies that reduce greenhouse gas intensity and the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. The amendment also offers credit-based financial assistance and investment protection for projects employing advanced climate technologies in our nation.

Recently, I was pleased to learn about the President’s initiative to achieve pollution reductions, energy security, and responding to climate change concerns by joining the New Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development. Another five countries have joined this initiative including Australia, Japan, South Korea, as well as developing nations such as China and India, in an effort to enhance cooperation to accelerate the development and deployment of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies.

Rest assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should the full Senate address our nation’s environmental laws. As always, I appreciate hearing from you. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any additional comments or questions. In addition, for more information about issues and activities important to Florida, please sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Sincerely,

Mel Martinez
United States Senator
Next time he’s up for election (in four years?) I’m going to campaign like hell to get him out of office. It isn’t just that he’s stupid, it’s that he is actually harmful. To spread bullshit like this is absurd. He also fully supports the war in Iraq (and sending more troops/having it go on forever), lied about his campaign contributions to the tune of $500,000 dollars (corruption), is responsible for the Schiavo Memo, is against gay marriage (and appears rather homophobic in general), is against comprehensive sexual education, supports the No Child Left Behind program, wants to turn federal parks into hunting sports attractions, is against a single-payer system for healthcare, and is a general all-around trickle-down economics conservative Republican.

An article at the BBC today is talking about how “honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate from 24 US states”. Depending on the state, the losses range from 30% to 70%. That is a very significant number!

I did some googling around because I’ve read similar stories regarding this issue before. The BBC article doesn’t enumerate possible causes so I wanted to find out more. This article at The Ledger (Lakeland, FL newspaper) claims that these losses threaten the entire beekeeping industry and, more importantly, “Without honeybee pollination, the food supply could decrease by a third.”

Further research revealed this article at Suite 101 that actually points out that there was also a beekeeping crisis in 2005 that left “40-60% of honey bees in U.S. dead or weakened.” More importantly, that article has a list of all the crops that require pollination via insects: “Apples, avocados, blueberries, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, melons, oranges, grapefruit, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, tangerines, and watermelon. Also, forage plants like clover and alfalfa need pollination (and cows need clover).”

Regarding that list, I have a pertinent quote by John Muir: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” The bee population problems couldn’t be a better example of this.

After reading several articles regarding the issue, it seems that the bee crisis is due to unknown causes. However, the following problems are suspected:

• Warmer winters causing the bees to come out of hibernation too early (global climate change).
• Pesticide-resistant “varroa mites” and “tracheal mites” (another reason why chemical pesticides are bad/unsustainable).
• Various bee diseases and/or poison from pesticides.
• Over-development of land.

Most interesting to note is that the “bee crisis” originally began in 1984 and has been steadily getting worse ever since.

My personal theory is that it is due to increased pesticide spraying and land development. I also believe that global warming is only making the situation worse. I don’t suspect that warmer winters would have that much of an effect because plants bloom earlier as a result of warmer winters just as the bees “wake up” from hibernation earlier. I’m not saying that they two aren’t out of sync, but I doubt it would be enough to destroy 70% of the bee population.

Pesticides are much more likely to cause problems with the bees themselves, develop resistant mites, and as these problems increase we end up spraying more of the stuff. Irresponsible pesticide use (and land development) are precisely why Florida lost 90% of its bird population since the 1930s.

Update: It seems I scooped Slashdot by a few hours on this story! While not very impressive, it is an indicator that I’m staying on top of things. More importantly, in the comments for that story there are some very insightful posts:

• By constantly moving hives around beekeepers are exposing them to much more diseases/pests and a much wider array of pesticides than the bees would normally be exposed to in the wild. This could be the “magic bullet” that explains the entire bee crisis. There were a few comments that noted this, but here’s the first (by John Jamieson)
• “Minwee blamed Bush’s ‘No drone left behind’ program.”:http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224390&cid=18170300
• Albert Einstein once said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live.” (noting their importance in crop pollination)
• jc42 wrote that the loss of honeybees has resulted in increased populations of bumblebees. He also noted that honeybees are actually an invasive species to North America in much the same way that sparrows and starlings are.
• zacharria noted that this ‘This is what you get when you breed monocultures of plants or animals.’ Which would explain the autoimmune deficiencies some researchers are finding.
• dave562 described a beetle problem they’re having in Colorado that is the result of global warming The bee crisis may not be related, but a reply by goombah99 is one scary post!

One of my favorite things to do is to reveal truth. Some would say that this is merely a passion for saying, “I told you so” and they would be right. In fact, they’d be saying “I told you so” themselves! Who doesn’t like to be right? It is the delivery of the message that differentiates the statesman from the ass.

So the key would be to make sure that the message of truth is delivered in a non-derogatory manner. So I will state simply that government regulations can be a good thing

I noticed on Boing Boing today a great flowchart comparing the scientific method to the “faith” method. I thought it was very well done, so I’ve decided to share my own version.

I created this flowchart many months ago to try out the auto-flowchart-generator built into TWiki. Feel free to share (copy) this chart with your friends and coworkers, post it on websites, or make your own version. Just make sure to give me credit as the guy who came up with the idea and provide a link back to this post (so I can see how far and wide my creation has spread =)

I was just looking at this article covering the various 2008 presidential candidates stances on IT-related issues. When I followed the links to their websites, however, most of them were talking about fixing our health care system with hardly passing mentions of things like Net Neutrality or improving high-speed Internet access and competition. Since they’re all so adamant about “fixing health care” I thought I’d share my opinion regarding one of these big “plans”…

One of the first sites I perused was John Edwards and it left me rather upset. John Edwards Health Care plan is so bad I just had to write about it. I had to let everyone know that it

• Will hurt the economy.
• Won’t reduce drug prices.
• Won’t reduce health care costs.
• Won’t reduce health insurance premiums.

• Promotes inequality in health care and especially will hurt the poor and the middle class.

  Here’s his plan (quoted from his website):

  1. Requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
  2. Making insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.

1. Creating regional “Health Markets” to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.

   Here’s why it is so awful:

2. Requiring employers to pay for employee health coverage will further increase health care pricing (and drug prices) by continuing to hide the real cost of health care in employees paychecks. It may also prevent them from opting out of bad plans and may restrict them to very limited drug coverage. Not only that, but it still leaves employers with the burden of paying more for their employees than their foreign competitors do; hurting the U.S. economy.
3. Tax credits are great, but why is health care spending taxable at all? If you pay for your health care through an HSA you’re already avoiding paying taxes on it. It is a stupid and unnecessary system that confuses taxpayers and puts them in the impossible position of trying to predict how much they’re going to spend on their health in any given year. Also, State Childrens Health Insurance Programs(SCHIP) are equally as dumb. Why is it OK to provide for the health of children but not for adults? “Sorry, you’re 18 now so you’ll have to pay the $30,000 yearly it costs to keep you alive on your own.” Are we really that cruel that at a certain age you’re left out in the cold? People seem to forget that there’s a HUGE gap between when you start working and when you can afford health care (if ever). Starting salaries are lower than ever.

1. It’s a fact: Every time you divide up health care costs, the more inefficient the system becomes. Is it OK that New York will get cheaper coverage than Kansas because it has richer residents and more people paying into the system (and thus, more negotiating power)? Regional coverage is a stupid idea. It should be national coverage. Think of all that bargaining power compared to say, Hawaii or South Dakota.

   There’s many ways to get every U.S. citizen covered, but some things must be implemented in order for it to work. Here’s the basics of how it needs to be done if we want it to work:

2. Employers can’t be paying for health insurance anymore. It makes it harder for them to compete with foreign businesses—none of which (in 1st-world countries) pay this cost. The U.S. is the only 1st-world country that doesn’t have universal healthcare.
3. You can’t allow people to supplement government health insurance with their own. What do I mean? Well, if the government negotiates to pay $3,000 for appendectomies but they actually cost $4,000, a person with supplemental insurance would pay a monthly premium so they wouldn’t have to pay that extra $1,000. It sounds great in theory, but the problem is that care providers will continually increase rates since they know that many people will have the supplemental coverage and their insurance company will pay the rest—the patient won’t get the bill and they won’t care. Sure, they might see the cost in a HIPAA form that’s mailed to them but if they don’t have to pay it, why should they care? The overall effect of allowing supplemental coverage is year-over-year ballooning of costs as providers increase costs to whatever the supplemental insurance will pay. Worse than that, people can still be denied supplemental coverage and some may not be able to afford it—you’d end up with a system that is more inefficient and at a higher cost than it is today!

1. There has to be a single payer for the whole country and everyone who can must pay into the pot. The more people that pay, the lower the premiums will be and the better the bargaining chip for the single payer. If people can opt out of paying into the system, it will not only hurt people on the “government plan”, it will hurt people on private plans as well. Why? Because the more payers there are the more inefficient (and expensive) the system becomes. It is the complete opposite of how you’d expect capitalism to work because there’s no competition on price—only quality of care¹.

   Everything else regarding universal healthcare is a matter of, “What should we cover?” and “How much are we willing to pay?” Any government system will need to be tweaked and refined over time and I have no doubt that at its onset there will be problems with whatever is implemented. However, this should be expected and should not be used as a reason to do away with it.

   ¹ In order capitalism to work you must have businesses competing on both cost and quality. In the few choices that patients have regarding care, they will always choose the best available since the insurance will pay regardless of the price. Not only that, but information regarding care providers is extremely scarce and requires expertise of the highest level to discern who’s good and who’s bad at what.

So it is about time for me to do my taxes (finally got the last piece I needed in the mail on Friday). Before I go ahead and actually file them somewhere, I would like to state publicly that this will be the first time in five years that I will not be using H&R Block. Why? Quite simply:

They called me THREE TIMES to try to market their mortgages about six months ago. I still remember. I will always remember… And I’m going to recommend to everyone that they avoid H&R Block like the plague: “You should avoid H&R Block because they’ll spam your phone AND your email address.”

Goodbye and good riddance! I do not do business with companies that make unsolicited phone calls and/or spam their customers with inappropriate and un-asked-for marketing BS.. I recommend everyone else do the same.

I just read a Slashdot article talking about a giant mud volcano that has erupted in Sidoarjo, Indonesia. WTF?!? I know! So here’s how it happened… An oil company was utilizing faith-based drilling (apparently) without…

1. Appropriate surveys by qualified geologists.
2. Practicing safe penetration (properly encased drill heads).

1. Brains.

   So they ended up drilling through a thick layer of clay that was sitting on top of superheated (and pressurized) mud. As we all know, Indonesia is within the “ring of fire” which encompasses most of the world’s volcanoes. This leads me to believe that someone wasn’t thinking clearly, or thinking at all when they came up with this plan.

   So mud is spewing out of the ground, big deal—right? Actually, ”…the volcano has spewed out up to 126,000 cubic metres of mud a day, flooding an area of more than 4 square kilometres.” More importantly,

   Some 10,000 people have been left homeless and 20 factories have closed. Another 200,000 homes could be at risk if the mudflow combines with the rainy season—which has just begun—and weakening dams to flood more land.

   So it is a big deal. Now the question remains, “What to do about it?” The Slashdot article talks about how they plan to drop giant concrete balls (it takes balls?) into the volcano in order to slow the flow of mud (images of the world’s largest projectile come to mind) but that wasn’t the first thing that they tried… What did they try beforehand? Here’s a hint:

   Army Sergeant Sumariyanto, who is in charge of granting permits for rituals, says firstly it was gruesome and many animals were running amok trying to escape their fate. It didn’t work either, he adds drily, saying that in some cases the mud got worse immediately after a sacrificial ceremony.

   Animal sacrifices! Specifically, “350 paranormals and psychics” were brought in to solve the problem in man’s latest attempt at mind-over-mud. “Cows, goats, chickens and even monkeys have been sacrificed live into its boiling hole.” Which begs the question, “What did that look like?” (Note the official uniform of Team Paranormal)

   
   

   The caption of this image from the Courier Mail says, “HOPEFUL … paranormals sacrifice a live cow into the boiling mud volcano.” Besides the fact that the image is of a calf and not a cow (nitpicking, I know), there is something even more ridiculous about this whole story:

   The government of Indonesia has an official military position that is in “charge of granting permits for rituals” and these animal sacrifices were officially licensed!

   Aside: I wonder where I can get one of those official psychic uniforms.