Renewable Energy -- Nothing About The Bakken -- January 24, 2019

Link at NOAA. 

Clearing off the desktop.

1. The best overall blog for issues in general: Powerline. Run by a retired lawyer a few years younger than I am.

2. The best blog on renewable energy: not a lot of people know that.

3. Falmouth, reposting: Remember Falmouth, MA? That was the bellwether city in Massachusetts that led the state into wind energy. I blogged about it often in the early days of the blog. One can find posts about the two wind towers in Falmouth at this link. From The Boston Globe today: "Green energy blues" in Falmouth. The city will tear down the two wind towers that cost $10 million to install. Will cost $2 million to take down. City of 450 people see huge debt for many, many years. Developers said the wind turbines would eventually return $1 to $2 million to the city annually. If unable to get past the paywall, many other links to the story, including this one.

4.  EVs and Rube Goldberg.

5. Why I know the AGW crowd is not serious. More jets than ever to Davos, and they are getting bigger.

6. China coal output hits highest in three years.

7. Flashback, 2017: Hot summer temperatures in California led to periods of high electricity demand, which neared record hourly levels in the late summer. Wholesale prices during peak hours averaged $55/MWh in August, 42% higher than in the same month in 2016. On September 1, day-ahead electricity market prices in the California ISO were higher than $200/MWh for four hours and reached $770/MWh in one hour.

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South Dakota Shark

Prehistoric shark  discovered alongside the most famous Tyrannosaurus -- the fossil, not the living animal, of course. Link here.

Fossilized shark teeth were discovered in what is now modern-day South Dakota and were found in the same deposits as Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex, perhaps the famous T. rex specimen fossil ever unearthed. The freshwater shark had odd triangle-shaped teeth and, due to its resemblance to the spaceships in the 1980s video game "Galaga," it's been dubbed Galagadon nordquistae.

Discovered by a volunteer digger.

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Miscellaneous

1. Dutch Orchestra Walks Out on Muslim guest conductor .

When the most liberal country in Europe pulls the plug on Islam, the world is beginning to see the light.

Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands attended a concert in the capital, Amsterdam. The Guest Conductor, who just happens to be Muslim, proceeded to give the Queen a lecture on the "beauty" of Islam.

The entire orchestra got up and walked out, refusing to be associated with someone lecturing their Queen. The staff of the music hall escorted the conductor off-stage, and after questioning, out of the building.

Now that took courage.

Good for the people of Holland. Watch the walk out. Bet you didn't see this on your local news or the ABC. 

No date is given for this story. The link. Something tells me the orchestra didn't like this guy from the very beginning and knew what was going to happen if they let this nut direct.

2. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.The link. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

3.  From one of the three greatest American science fiction writers, from To Sail Beyond the Sunset, published 1987, link here:

“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)”

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Trump And SOTU

Not ready-for-prime-time. It will be interesting to see how Scott Adams spins this one.

Huge mistake by Trump to have canceled the SOTU address.

Huge mistake.

I agree with Trump: no venue outside of the US House of Representatives would have been appropriate.

But he should have simply sent a written transcript of his SOTU address to the House and Senate and moved on. But this will now hang over him. When he finally does deliver the SOTU it will be a spectacle in the House with crazies and signs.

But he really blew. He lost his base and didn't gain anything in exchange.

Scott's spin:

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Next

Trump now needs to do something quickly to change the narrative. Something very, very big. He will probably wait until the two US Senate bills go down to defeat. But he needs to do something very, very big.