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Geothermal Power? The Ticket to 100% Renewable Energy Might Be Underneath Our Feet |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26261"><span class="small">Nathanael Johnson, Grist</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 June 2019 13:00 |
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Johnson writes: "Imagine if there was a carbon-free form of energy hiding in the ground beneath you. One that we could turn to anytime, even on cloudy, windless days."
Icelandic bathers swim in front of a geothermal plant. (photo: Getty Images)
Geothermal Power? The Ticket to 100% Renewable Energy Might Be Underneath Our Feet
By Nathanael Johnson, Grist
01 June 19
 magine if there was a carbon-free form of energy hiding in the ground beneath you. One that we could turn to anytime, even on cloudy, windless days.
There’s no need for imagination: It exists. Research suggests that geothermal energy could be the key to running the country on purely renewable power. A recent memo from the conservative clean-energy think tank ClearPath estimates that geothermal energy could supply as much as 20 percent of the country’s electricity. That would put the United States nearly on par with Iceland, which gets roughly a quarter of its power from underground heat. But getting there depends on loosening regulations and borrowing drilling techniques from the oil and gas drillers.
“It’s a great resource, but one that doesn’t get a lot of love,” said Spencer Nelson, who directs the energy innovation program at ClearPath and wrote the memo.
Members of Congress might well pass subsidies and regulatory reform to encourage geothermal energy, if they realized its potential, Nelson said. It’s the sort of issue — far from the supercharged partisan battles — that could get bipartisan support in this strange political climate.
At the moment, geothermal energy is limited to a few spots in the western United States, in California, Nevada, and Utah, where steam from underground hot springs turns electrical turbines. It supplies a total of O.4 percent of the country’s electricity, in part because politicians keep forgetting about it, Nelson said.
When Congress has passed incentives to encourage clean energy, lawmakers have tended to be less enthusiastic for geothermal power. Wind and solar get 30 percent tax credits, but the geothermal tax credit is just 10 percent. “It was a mistake,” Nelson said. Congress didn’t think to include geothermal back in 2005, when it passed a law easing environmental regulations for oil and gas wells. As a result, drilling for geothermal energy requires a much more lengthy environmental approval process than drilling for oil.
Red tape is a major reason we don’t have more geothermal energy, according to a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It generally takes eight years to do the environmental studies required to start a geothermal project, which could be prohibitively expensive for anyone trying to build a power plant. The study estimated that if we cut that approval process to four years, it would encourage a surge of new projects, perhaps enough to double geothermal electricity production by 2050, compared with the production expected with current regulations.
To get 20 percent of the country’s electricity from geothermal power requires new techniques. By drilling deeper, drilling horizontally, and fracturing rocks to create artificial hot springs, geothermal energy could spread across the entire country. Just about any city could heat houses and offices by sticking a straw into the ground and running hot water through pipes. All together, geothermal could provide 100 gigawatts of electricity at competitive prices, according to the Department of Energy. That’s as much electricity as all the nuclear power plants in the United States produce, enough to power 100 million homes.
Harnessing so much energy would require innovation. But that could be as simple as borrowing from an industry that’s developed a bounty of drilling techniques to capture more natural gas. In other words, clean energy could get a boost from the folks who brought us fracking.
“It’s astronomical how fast the drilling industry has advanced over the last 15 years,” said Tim Latimer, co-founder of Fervo Energy, a startup working to harness those innovations to generate geothermal energy.
Fracking brings its own unique risks, like earthquakes. The South Korean government recently said one geothermal plant likely created a magnitude 5.4 earthquake in 2017 that injured 135 people. The high pressure used to pump fluid into the ground to fracture rocks and release heat spurred small earthquakes. The shaking then reached nearby faults, setting off the country’s second-largest quake on record.
A recent paper suggests some lessons from that disaster: Monitor earthquakes to see if they are getting too big, and don’t drill too close to fragile buildings. No energy comes without problems. The trick is to lower the risks as much as possible. “We need to take the appropriate safety measures as we move forward with this,” said John White executive director of the nonprofit Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology.
Latimer pointed to other challenges. Frackers generally work with soft shale, but the hot rocks that Fervo targets are often hard granite. It’s also relatively simple to pump oil out of the ground compared to cycling water in a closed loop to capture heat, he said. And there’s the need to make sure the water injected down to hot rocks doesn’t simply disappear into the ground. Latimer ervo has modeled potential solutions for these problems and plans test them at drilling sites soon.
All this matters because wind and solar can’t meet all our energy needs on their own. In California, renewables sometimes provide more than 60 percent of electricity when the sun is high. But when the sun dips below the horizon, gas plants around the state and coal-fired generating plants in Utah crank into high gear, spewing out over 4,000 megatons of carbon dioxide an hour. There’s a desperate need for clean energy that can run at night, especially when it’s not windy.
White said it’s time to figure out how different forms of energy can fit together so that people can use clean energy around the clock. The recent research suggests geothermal could be one of the missing pieces needed to solve that puzzle. “We don’t just need wind or solar or batteries or geothermal,” White said. “We need it all.”
Most experts agree wind, solar, and hydroelectric dams could provide around 80 percent of the United States’ electricity. To get all the way to 100 percent clean energy, we’ll probably need to reach deeper into our bag of tricks.
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FOCUS: Censure of a Renegade President* Is Next to Worthless |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 June 2019 11:20 |
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Pierce writes: "Rep. Ro Khanna disappointed me the other night. He floated the idea of censuring the president* as opposed to opening an impeachment inquiry."
Rep. Ro Khanna. (photo: Jeff Malet/Newscom/ZUMA Press)
Censure of a Renegade President* Is Next to Worthless
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
01 June 19
Start the inquiry.
 ep. Ro Khanna disappointed me the other night. He floated the idea of censuring the president* as opposed to opening an impeachment inquiry. This, of course, was the notion that the Republicans laughed at in 1998—MoveOn.org began in those days as "Censure and Move On"—because their goal was to overturn the 1992 and 1996 elections by any means necessary. This alternative is even more lame in our current circumstances.
This is a president* and an administration* that does not take congressional subpoenas seriously, and that respects the constitutional order even less than it understands it. A censure would do absolutely less than nothing. One of the ways you can tell it's a terrible idea is that Peggy Noonan has raised her glass to it. She believes that impeaching El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago would be too "divisive." And this from someone who once pondered in print whether Fidel Castro had blackmailed Bill Clinton into sending Elian Gonzales back to live with his father in Cuba, memorably wandering off the trolley with the immortal phrase, "Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to."
Even in the best of circumstances, which this assuredly is not, congressional censure of a renegade president is next to worthless. The only president ever censured was Andrew Jackson and he ignored it and, later, had it expunged from the congressional record, and largely from history. You could get pretty good odds that this president* wouldn't even know it happened. If you believe, as I do, that this is the most perilous presidency* in American history, there is only one way to end it. Start the inquiry. Get the wheels in motion.
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FOCUS: The Joe Biden That MSNBC Won't Show You |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50900"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, RootsAction</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 June 2019 11:11 |
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Excerpt: "In a party that officially condemns dog-whistle appeals to racism, Joe Biden is running on Orwellian eggshells."
Joe Biden. (photo: Sun Sentinel)
The Joe Biden That MSNBC Won't Show You
By Norman Solomon, RootsAction
01 June 19
 oe Biden: “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble.”
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble... The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
– Joe Biden, speaking to the Brookings Institution
(5-9-18)
“Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.”
– Joe Biden, speaking in Alabama
(10-3-17)
“Biden voted for repeated rounds of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy – often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.”
– Journalist Ryan Cooper, The Week
(3-20-19)
“In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party.... Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years.... Biden’s regular Joe credibility is based entirely on his personal background, as someone who grew up working class and speaks with the rough masculinity that Washington interprets as authenticity. But his politics have always relied on elite assumptions about the economy.”
– HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter
(5-5-19)
“Biden’s team apparently is fixated on the relatively small number of workers in the building trades unions who want to keep on constructing natural gas pipelines (and perhaps, since he hasn’t signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, on big donors from the hydrocarbon sector). This is old-school thinking at its best: throw young voters, overwhelmingly fixated on climate change, under the dirty diesel bus in an effort to win a narrowing pool of union leaders, who gathered in the Oval Office with Trump to celebrate in the early days of his presidency.”
– Bill McKibben, The Guardian
(5-11-19)
“Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights.”
– Rebecca Traister, feminist author, writing for TheCut.com
(3-29-19)
Vice President Mike Pence “is a decent guy.”
– Joe Biden, speaking in Omaha
(2-28-19)
“I really like Dick Cheney for real. I get on with him, I think he’s a decent man.” – Joe Biden, speaking at George Washington University
(October 2015)
“It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible.... In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show [in summer 2002] designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.”
– Middle East Studies professor Stephen Zunes, University of San Francisco, Foreign Policy in Focus
(8-24-08)
“It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about.”
The 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration.” – Joe Biden, campaigning in New Hampshire
(5-14-19)
“My greatest accomplishment is the 1994 crime bill.”
– Joe Biden, speaking to the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2007
“I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don't care why someone is antisocial. I don't care why they've become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”
– Joe Biden, speaking on the Senate floor for what became the landmark 1994 crime law
(11-18-93)
“We must take back the streets. It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.”
– Joe Biden, speaking on the Senate floor
(11-18-93)
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”
– Joe Biden, interviewed by The People Paper in Delaware, September 1975
(Congressional Record, 10-2-75)
“It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about.... As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden didn’t just craft the 1994 crime bill – he also ushered a variety of other draconian measures into law.... During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people).”
– New York magazine journalist Eric Levitz
(3-12-19)
“[Biden] earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to
school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation.” In 1984, Biden “joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist
Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners
and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to
push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and
powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass
incarceration.”
– Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Cornel West, The Guardian
(5-1-19)
“One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” – Joe Biden, 1990
“Turnout from the Democratic Party’s base will be crucial to whether Trump can be defeated in November 2020. Biden’s record of dog-whistling is made to order for depressing enthusiasm and turnout from that base, especially among African Americans. Apt to be a big political liability among voters who normally vote Democratic in large numbers, Joe Biden’s historic dog-whistling for racism is an incontrovertible reality. Denial of that reality could help him win the party’s nomination – and then help Donald Trump get re-elected.”
– California Democratic Party Central Committee member Norman Solomon, CommonDreams.org
(5-23-19)
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RSN | Julian Assange: Prisoner of Conscience |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 June 2019 08:29 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Federal authorities in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) last week issued a superseding indictment and charged WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of espionage. Along with a charge of conspiring to gain access to a government computer, he faces 175 years in prison. Julian's current plight is well-known."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
Julian Assange: Prisoner of Conscience
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
01 June 19
 ederal authorities in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) last week issued a superseding indictment and charged Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of espionage. Along with a charge of conspiring to gain access to a government computer, he faces 175 years in prison. Julian’s current plight is well-known. He’s serving a 50-week sentence for bail-jumping in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, awaiting extradition to the United States. Swedish authorities have reopened a sexual assault investigation against him. And in the meantime, his attorneys are challenging any extradition to the United States, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, if necessary.
I want to get a couple of points out of the way before I get into the substance of this column. I believe unreservedly that Julian Assange is a journalist, a publisher, a whistleblower, and a prisoner of conscience. His revelations of US war crimes were examples of exactly what a journalist and publisher should be doing. His actions meet the legal definition of whistleblowing: Bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety. And he is clearly a prisoner of conscience, incarcerated for his belief in transparency and that all governments should be held accountable for their actions.
Somebody should mention this to Amnesty International (AI). The global “human rights” organization has turned its back on Julian, just as it did to Chelsea Manning, CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, and me.
In a letter to the Julian Assange Defense Committee (JADC) dated May 17, 2019, Amnesty International UK said curtly, “Julian Assange's case is a case we're monitoring closely but not actively working on. Amnesty International does not consider Julian Assange to be a Prisoner of Conscience.” There’s a pattern here, too. AI said unequivocally in 2012 that Chelsea Manning also was “not a prisoner of conscience.” And AI said the same thing about me.
Here’s how AI defines a prisoner of conscience: A Prisoner of Conscience is “someone who has not used or advocated violence but is imprisoned because of who they are (sexual orientation, ethnic, national or social origin, language, birth, color, sex or economic status) or what they believe (religious, political or other conscientiously held beliefs).”
Following my arrest in 2012 for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, I contacted AI to ask for a simple statement of support. Surely, I thought, an organization so clearly committed to human rights would want to say something about the person just arrested for exposing an official torture program. But they didn’t even bother to respond to me. I then asked a contact of mine, a senior person in Amnesty International USA, to weigh in for me with his bosses in London. “Sorry,” was the response. “They just don’t believe that you’re a whistleblower or a prisoner of conscience.”
(Ironically, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, arguably the most famous and important living artist in the world, believes that Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and I are all whistleblowers and “prisoners of conscience.” He created portraits of us out of Legos for a show at Alcatraz on prisoners of conscience and then sold the entire installation to the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum.)
I used to be a regular donor to Amnesty International. No more. I guess I never realized how much in the pocket of the State Department the organization is. First, it simply doesn’t recognize the fact that an American can be a prisoner of conscience. Sure, every once in a while, AI will issue a statement about somebody who has been arrested for opposing nuclear weapons or something like that. But it pains them to have to criticize the US. We’re the “land of the free,” after all. Right?
AI does not publish a list of prisoners of conscience. But a Google search indicates that almost all of the prisoners AI has campaigned for in the past several years come from Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, and the former Soviet Republics. There are no prisoners of conscience from the US, UK, or even France, where journalists are being threatened with arrest for their criticism of the French military’s involvement in the war in Yemen. Go figure.
And lest you think that this is just John Kiriakou venting (which I tend to do), AI was involved in something of an ideological scandal in 2010 that cuts to the heart of what kind of organization it is.
In 2010, AI suspended and then fired Gita Sahgal, the head of its gender unit, after she complained that the organization had embraced Moazzem Begg, a Briton of Pakistani origin, who headed a group called Cageprisoners, purporting to represent men held in prisons extrajudicially. Sahgal maintained that Begg was a terrorist sympathizer and Muslim extremist and that AI was weakening its brand by associating itself with him, while legitimizing him politically.
That’s being kind. I captured Moazzem Begg in Pakistan in February 2002. I targeted him because he was Osama bin Laden’s computer expert. I put him on a plane for Guantanamo but, because he was a British citizen, he was quickly released. And what did he do? He went right back to Afghanistan and rejoined the fight. The CIA caught him again, and again went through the same rigmarole. Begg was exceptionally intelligent. He was able to recast himself as an innocent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was kidnapped by the CIA, abused at Guantanamo and finally released because he was innocent of any crime. That’s nonsense.
AI, though, never bothered to investigate who, exactly, it was associating with. And when a senior-level employee blew the whistle, AI attacked the whistleblower in favor of the terrorist.
AI was wrong on Moazzem Begg and it’s wrong on Julian Assange. There’s still time to do the right thing, if not for Chelsea Manning, then at least for Julian. There’s still time for AI to stand up and say that Julian Assange is a prisoner of conscience. Julian Assange is a fighter for transparency and human rights. That ought to be right in AI’s wheelhouse. As Donald Trump is fond of saying, “Let’s see what happens.”
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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hat kind of economic system is most conducive to human wellbeing? That question has come to define the current era, because, after 40 years of neoliberalism in the United States and other advanced economies, we know what doesn’t work.
