Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

I am very fond of that stanza from the poem also, Danon.

For reasons beyond me, I can no longer copy an entire article for transfer here. Only the beginning portion. For the rest, you have to go to the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/business/energy-environment/20float.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25


Solar on the Water

By TODD WOODY
PETALUMA, Calif. — Solar panels have sprouted on countless rooftops, carports and fields in Northern California. Now, several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water.

Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.

“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”

The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.

Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”

Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reser

PETALUMA, Calif. — Solar panels have sprouted on countless rooftops, carports and fields in Northern California. Now, several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water.

Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.

“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”

The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.

Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”

Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reserSolar on the Water
By TODD WOODY
PETALUMA, Calif. — Solar panels have sprouted on countless rooftops, carports and fields in Northern California. Now, several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water.

Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.

“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”

The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.

Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”

Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reser

That is astounding !!! I like the West Coast people sooooo much. They are sooo innovvvattive. And, besides that, they can understand and laugh at jokes........

Very few people around here in NE TX do that......

Thanks for your links and articles - and for saving a tree today.!!!!!

Students were put outdoors and asked a series of questions about a number of topics, such as firearms, marijuana, and climate change. How they rated climate change—on a scale from unproven theory to proven fact—correlated with their political stance, with Republicans/conservatives tending toward the unproven end of the scale. Not very surprising, you might say. Yet their answers also correlated with the ambient temperature, with colder days favoring ratings at the unproven end. How did this occur? Risen and Critcher supply a sequence of experiments demonstrating that this effect is not due to participants using ambient temperature in an evidentiary sense: Repeating the study indoors and explicitly calling participants' attention to the over- or underheated interrogation room did not abolish the effect. Nor is this effect due to conceptual accessibility, meaning that implicitly priming the concept of heat failed to reproduce the correlation. What they did find is that participants who experienced warmth viscerally were more apt to form clear mental images of hot environments and that this simulational fluency was linked in turn to a greater belief in climate change as a fact.
J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 100, 10.1037/a0022460 (2011).

Thanks, sumac. There is one undisputable fact facing us all - eventually Mother Nature will win the battle for our global resources.

Interesting selection of topics - statistics is easily manipulated you know.

Thanks for the tree asmiling............

I know, Danon, but that doesn't mean that studies have questionable statistics. Did my clicking for the day and the sun finally came out this afternoon.

Good Sunday clicking and Happy Easter -----------

April 24, 2011
The House Strikes, and Wins, Again
In another House-engineered setback for the environment, the compromise budget approved by Congress and the White House prohibits the Interior Department from spending any money to carry out a policy protecting unspoiled federal lands.

Under the 1976 Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, the secretary of interior has the power to inventory, identify and protect such lands. President George W. Bush’s secretary, Gale Norton, who was more interested in development than conservation, renounced that authority. Ken Salazar, the current secretary, reaffirmed it in December only to have House Republicans strike back.

The amendment, like much from the House, was based on demagoguery. Western Republicans claimed the policy would pre-empt Congress’s right to designate permanent wilderness on federal lands. That isn’t true. What the Interior Department does, and has done until Ms. Norton came along, is identify lands with “wilderness characteristics” and manage them carefully — preventing rampant motorized vehicle use, for instance — until Congress can decide whether they deserve permanent protection.

The same Republicans also said the policy would lock up valuable oil and gas reserves. If the department does its job, some lands would, indeed, be declared off-limits. But the policy does not prevent drilling altogether. And, as government figures show, the oil and gas industry already has access to most of the known oil and gas reserves in the Rocky Mountain West, as well as about 7,200 approved permits to drill that it has yet to use.

We don’t know if there is a way around the restriction. We do know that Mr. Salazar and the White House should begin pressing now to ensure that the next budget lifts the ban and provides the Interior Department the money to set aside fragile lands for future generations.

April 26, 2011

Hiding the Truth About Factory Farms

A supermarket shopper buying hamburger, eggs or milk has every reason, and every right, to wonder how they were produced. The answer, in industrial agriculture, is “behind closed doors,” and that’s how the industry wants to keep it. In at least three states — Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota — legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations in factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The legislation has only one purpose: to hide factory-farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.

These bills share common features. Their definition of agriculture is overly broad; they include puppy mills, for instance. They treat undercover investigators and whistle-blowers as if they were “agro-terrorists,” determined to harm livestock or damage facilities. They would criminalize reporting on crop production as well. And they are supported by the big guns of industrial agriculture: Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, the associations that represent pork producers, dairy farmers and cattlemen, as well as poultry, soybean, and corn growers.

Exposing the workings of the livestock industry has been an undercover activity since Upton Sinclair’s day. Nearly every major improvement in the welfare of agricultural animals, as well as some notable improvements in food safety, has come about because someone exposed the conditions in which they live and die. Factory farming confines animals in highly crowded, unnatural and often unsanitary conditions. We need to know more about what goes on behind those closed doors, not less.

Hey, I agree with that article, sumac.

Thanks and good clicking.

Hope everyone E. of the Rockies survived the storms...........

Great tree saving all.

ril 28, 2011

A Stronger and Clearer Clean Water Act

The Obama administration’s new guidelines for the Clean Water Act are an important first step in restoring vital legal safeguards to wetlands and streams threatened by development and pollution.

The guidelines are opposed by the usual suspects — real estate interests, homebuilders, farmers, the oil companies. They were welcomed, rightly so, by conservationists and others who have watched in despair as enforcement actions dropped and water pollution levels went up.

For nearly three decades, the 1972 act was broadly interpreted by the courts and federal regulators as shielding virtually all the waters of the United States from pollution and unregulated development — seasonal streams and small, remote wetlands, as well as lakes and large navigable waters. The basic idea was that small waters have some hydrological connection to larger watersheds and should be protected against pollution that would inevitably find its way downstream.

Then came two Supreme Court decisions that left uncertain which waterways were protected by the law. A 2001 decision suggested that the law applied only to large navigable waterways, while a 2006 ruling suggested that only waters with a “significant nexus” to navigable waterways could be protected. Those decisions — plus subsequent guidance from the George W. Bush administration — confused regulators and exposed millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams to development.

The new guidelines now restore protections to small streams and wetlands that have a “physical, chemical or biological connection” to larger bodies of water downstream. That is good news with the clear caveat that they are administrative guidance, with no force in law, and subject to fairly easy reversal by another administration.

Legislation reaffirming the original scope of the law would be the best solution. But since that is not in the cards in this Congress, we urge the Environmental Protection Agency to turn the guidance into a formal rule that would, at least, be harder to undo.

That's a wonderful article, sumac............
Pres. Bush during the first three months in office removed all EPA associated regs from business and opened the door to business as usual --- ie, destroy our National lands. I saw it at the time and said so to my Patti.
Now, we suffer the damage done by him.

Well, we can save one more tree today. Thanks.

Clicking away on this good weather day.

One more tree is asmiling !!!!!!!!!!

Thanks..............

Another tree is asmiling. Also.

Still asmiling........... They told me so.

Will click today. I missed clicking yesterday. Beautiful weather here and just purchased $72 worth of plants - all at half price.

Great clicking, sumac.

We bought some plants (herbs) yesterday. Hoping for a nice Summer down here.

Happy Birthday, HBG!!!!!!!!!! ((tomorrow))

Hope all is well with you.

Great day to make another tree smile.........

May 6, 2011

Energy Dept. Panel to Revise Standards for Gas Extraction

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, seeing increased domestic natural gas production as a linchpin in its long-term energy strategy, has named a panel of experts to find ways to make hydraulic fracturing, a fast-growing method of extracting natural gas, safer and cleaner.

The administration hopes to avoid the safety and regulatory breakdowns that led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout a year ago as it oversees onshore drilling using hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has asked the panel’s seven experts, to be led by John Deutch, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy defense secretary, to recommend within 90 days immediate steps to make fracking cleaner and safer.

The group will have an additional three months to come up with comprehensive safety and environmental policies for state and federal regulators who oversee gas drilling.

Mr. Chu said that he was acting at the direction of President Obama, who outlined a new energy strategy last month that calls for stepped-up domestic oil and gas production but also new rules to make the business safer.

Hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of fluids into underground shale formations to break open natural gas pockets. The technique, which has been in limited use for decades, is expected to significantly increase recovery of domestic gas supplies and keep prices moderate for years.

But the practice also pours millions of gallons of dangerous chemicals into the ground and into wastewater treatment systems, which in some cases cannot remove all the potential toxins. There are also numerous documented cases in which fracking fluids leaked into aquifers and contaminated drinking water.

“America’s vast natural gas resources can generate many new jobs and provide significant environmental benefits,” Mr. Chu said in a statement late Thursday, “but we need to ensure we harness these resources safely.”

Within hours, House Republicans issued a press release denouncing the study as wasteful, duplicative and another example of red tape run amok. They said that fracking has been used safely for more than 60 years and that the Environmental Protection Agency already has sufficient authority to regulate it.

Mr. Deutch, a chemist, is a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served in a number of top government posts. He is a director of Cheniere Energy, which operates a major liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana and a number of gas pipelines.

Other members of the panel include Stephen Holditch, chairman of the department of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University; Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund; Kathleen McGinty, an aide to Al Gore when he was a senator and a former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection; and Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary of energy for policy and Massachusetts secretary of environmental affairs.

Also serving are Daniel Yergin, chairman of I. H. S. Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the author of the “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power,” a history of oil exploration; and Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford.