by Andrew Freedman, via Climate Central

The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history continues to burn, having already charred an area larger than New York City. Known as the Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex, the wildfire has become another in a series of “megafires” to torch the American West due to an unprecedented combination of drought conditions, climate change, and alterations in land-management practices. To make matters worse, according to The Guardian newspaper, congressional budget cuts may restrict the federal government’s firefighting efforts during what is widely expected to be a busy wildfire season.

The Whitewater-Baldy Complex is burning in New Mexico’s rugged and mountainous Gila Wilderness, an area with steep terrain that has rendered much of the fire off limits to firefighters. Instead of attacking it from within, firefighters are trying to dig in around it, hoping to slow its spread.

The megafire is the result of a merger of two separate, relatively modest-sized fires. When the two merged in late May, the fire dramatically expanded, burning 70,000 acres in just one day. As of Friday, the fire had burned 216,000 acres, and was only 10 percent contained. More than 1,200 personnel were battling the fire. There have been no fatalities or major injuries.

The fire has surpassed New Mexico’s record fire, which occurred just last year. The Las Conchas fire burned more than 156,000 acres and came perilously close to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez took a helicopter tour of the fire on May 31. “She described the terrain as “impossible,” saying there was no way for firefighters to directly attack the flames in the rugged areas of wilderness,” the Associated Press reported. She warned that it would continue to burn more acres as firefighters struggle to contain the blaze.

Much of New Mexico is experiencing drought conditions. Credit: U.S. Drought Monitor.

As Climate Central reported on May 23, the 2012 fire season is likely to continue the trend of severe wildfire seasons in the Southwest, due largely to the prevalence of long-term drought conditions in the region. Long-burning, massive wildfires have become more common in the U.S. recent years.

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Time lapse photo of Makani’s tethered wing flying in a circle (Photo: Makani Power)

by Jonathan Koomey excerpted from his blog

I like site visits—there’s nothing like seeing a company’s innovations in person.  In the case of Makani Power, I harbored some core misconceptions about their technology, and the visit set me straight.

Corwin Hardham, CEO and one of the co-founders of Makani, invited me to visit in Fall 2011. An intern of his was taking the class I taught that semester, and he heard me mention the company’s efforts in lecture, so he put Corwin in touch with me.  Things have been so busy that I wasn’t able to arrange a visit until a few weeks ago, but I’m sure glad I stopped by.

When I drove up to Makani’s building, which formerly housed the control tower for the Alameda Naval Air Station, the first thing I saw was three rusted artillery guns.  That was a jarring sight, but the location makes sense.  Corwin explained that this site was the largest available open space in the Bay Area and was perfect for building and testing Makani’s prototypes.

Others had told me about Makani’s technology, and the words “kite” and “high altitude” always come up, but these terms are misleading.  When I think of kites, I think of Ben Franklin flying the traditional diamond-shaped kite with a tail.  The Makani turbine is a carbon fiber wing with propellers (see photo), which Ben Franklin wouldn’t have known what to do with.

And the words “high altitude” made me think of kites flying in the path of airplanes at 10,000 feet, which isn’t at all right.   Makani’s turbines fly at about 300 m (roughly 1000 feet) above the ground.

Instead, imagine building and operating just the most important part of the wind turbine, the outer part of the turbine blade (which generates most of the power) without the rest of the supporting structure.  In essence, that’s what Makani’s tethered flying wing is—the end of a turbine blade that flies in a circle and generates power.  The initial prototype generates 20 kW— the next version should generate 600 kW, assuming they get the money to build it.

The wing itself (without the generators and propellers) is incredibly light—I could easily pick it up with both hands, even though it’s about 20 feet long.  That’s the beauty of carbon fiber.  Super strong, without much weight for the wing itself.

The wing has four propellers mounted perpendicular to plane of the wing.   Each is attached to a generator that can reverse itself to serve as a motor.  This capability is needed because the wing starts from a cradle on the ground and lifts itself off to achieve the needed altitude, then switches to generator mode once the wing starts its normal circular path.  If the wing needs to come down for maintenance, the process works in reverse (and the wing can go from normal flight to sitting in its cradle in less than 5 minutes, which means that it can safely avoid adverse conditions on the ground.

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by Donald Brown via Climate Ethics

For over a decade the coal industry has funded campaigns designed to convince Americans that coal can be burned without adverse environmental impacts. These campaigns raise troubling ethical issues. In fact, as we shall see, these campaigns have often been misleading and deceptive in several different ways.

This deception is classic propaganda because propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information presented. Although many entities on both sides of an issue who are trying to persuade the general public to think a certain way will frequently resort to the use of propaganda, as we shall see, deceptive propaganda is particularly morally odious when it engages in lying or lying by omission. A lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. The clean coal propaganda has frequently engaged in propaganda that must be understood as lying by omission, if not outright lying. It is also lying by omission about something which is potentially very harmful, making the lies even more morally abhorrent

Given that academies of science around the world have concluded that climate change is a huge threat to millions of people around the world, that coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels currently used for electricity generation in regard to climate change, that there are no commercial scale coal-fired power plants in the United States now nor likely to be in wide-spread commercial operation for decades capable of actually removing heat trapping gases, a fact not revealed in TV commercials funded by the clean coal campaign, this campaign which implies that coal is “clean” is deeply misleading about likely harmful and dangerous human activities. In other words, this is deception with huge potential adverse consequences for life on earth and ecological systems on which life depends.

Some TV commercials funded through clean coal campaigns visually or verbally reference clean coal without acknowledgment that coal combustion could be considered clean only if new unproven technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal combustion are widely deployed. Other commercials contain often vague references to clean coal technologies that could in theory reduce greenhouse gas emissions if commercial scale of these technologies is determined through future research to be environmentally benign and economically feasible. None of these commercials, however, reveal that there are serious open questions about whether geologic carbon sequestration or other unproven greenhouse gas emission reduction technologies for use with coal combustion will be proven to be environmentally acceptable and economically viable at commercial scale. The New York Times reported this month that there is new evidence that carbon capture and storage, the technology most frequently considered to be the best hope for reducing greenhouse gases from coal combustion, may not be economically viable because of cheaper and abundant amounts of natural gas. (Wald, 2012)

Claiming that coal is clean because it could be clean if a new technically unproven and economically dubious technology might be adopted is like someone claiming that belladonna is not poisonous because there is a new unproven safe pill under development that sometime in the future might be economically affordable and that may be taken with belladonna to neutralize belladonna’s toxic effects.

Who has been behind this campaign? According to Source Watch, these campaigns were initially created by the Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED) in 2000. CEED also created Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign aimed at emphasizing the importance and downplaying the environmental impacts of coal-fired power production. CEED was founded by Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Southern Company, and DTE Energy (Source Watch, 2012a). ABEC’s members also have included mining companies, electric utilities, and railroad companies. The CEED was merged with Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) to form a new coal industry front group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, on April 17, 2008 (Source Watch, 2012a).

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