I’ve been thinking about energy lately, or more specifically how to save some in my house.  I made a switch to CFL light bulbs in many cases, but I think I’m going back to good old incandescents.

I can’t use CFL’s in cases where I want to use a dimmer, like over the vanity in our master bathroom, and in the basement where we dim some lights for good movie viewing.

CFL’s are also a bit inconvenient in that you can’t just throw them out with the rest of the garbage due to the fact that they contain mercury.  And that’s another major point; they contain mercury.  If you break a CFL bulb, you have to ventilate the room, scoop up the debris and put it in an air tight container.

Some people will argue that there isn’t enough mercury in each bulb to really harm you, but my position is that if there’s too much mercury to throw out in the trash, there’s too much mercury in them, period.

Another alternative?

LED lights.  These things are amazing, and they’re showing up everywhere.  From big screen TV’s to laptops (they’ve been around in laptops for a while), to the red lights in stop lights…  They’re solid state bulbs with no moving parts and no volatile or poisonous gases.  Most of them will last as many as 20,000 hours or so, which means I’d have to replace them when my 5 month old son graduates from high school.

The one drawback is that they’re still pricey, and the traditional 40 to 60 Watt replacements haven’t matured quite yet, although you can already buy the “flood” type bulbs at Home Depot.

An investment of two types…

If LED lights can last as long as advertised and can come down in price quite a ways, I’d certainly entertain the thought of replacing my CFL’s and incandescents with straight LED’s.  I look at is an investment with a return of lower energy costs, both in the form of direct electrical consumption and thermal savings (did I mention LED’s don’t produce much heat?).

In addition, I could also make an investment in the company that develops LED’s as well.  A company like CREE (CREE: chart, web, Y!)) would be a good bet, and they’re making advances in LED technology nearly as fast as prices on technology are dropping.

I’ll be researching CREE over the next several days, as I think this could be a company worth investing in that produces a product that’s worth buying.

MJ over at Dyslexic Research is giving away two ReJAVAnate bags as part of his 9 Days of Dyslexic Research’s Guide to Green.  All you have to do is post a comment either on his blog or on The Corner Office Blog between May23 and May 31.

I’ll spare you the details of the givaway, as MJ has them lined out here.

Effectively, these bags are similar to the ones you’d buy at the grocery store instead of using paper or plastic bags that jam up our landfills.  They’re made from burlap bags used in the coffee industry.  They’re completely biodegradable, so there’s really little effect on the environment.

Tune in for MJ’s 9 Days of Dyslexic Research’s Guide to Green and get yourself some free swag!

The adage; “never waste a good crisis” continues to be more and more transparent as people start opening their eyes to what the government is saying versus what the government is actually doing. If you listen to what the Obama administration says, and compare it to what they do, you’ll certainly see a disconnect. Obama wants to create jobs, but also wants to increase taxes on those with the most money. I would like to think that he understands it takes capital to create jobs, and if you reduce capital, you reduce the incentive to create jobs. So does he really want to create jobs, or just continue to line the pockets of special interest groups and politicians alike under the guise of creating jobs?

I’ve always said that if you follow the money, you’ll find the incentive.

A prime example of this is Al Gore and his efforts to combat climate change. Ask yourself, why would an ex-politician go to such great lengths to promote such a controversial theory? And why would he spend so much money in his efforts? Follow the money.

Gore is Chairman of Generation Investment Management, LLP (GIM) that focuses on investing for the long term based off the idea that “sustainability factors—economic, environmental, social and governance criteria—will drive a company’s returns over the long term”. (If you have any idea what that really means, let me know.)

One major area that GIM tries to take advantage of is the “regulatory developments in climate policy and carbon markets, and the attitude shifts that are occurring among consumers, leading businesses and investors.”

Climate change is an urgent challenge that affects long-term corporate profitability, and therefore must be systematically integrated into investment analysis. The pace of climate change is accelerating and will have material effects on equity markets in the short, medium, and long term. -Source

Al Gore also founded and chairs the Alliance for Climate Protection whose mission is as follows:

Our mission is to persuade the American people—and people elsewhere in the world—of the importance and urgency of adopting and implementing effective and comprehensive solutions for the climate crisis.

The Alliance for Climate Protection is undertaking an unprecedented mass persuasion exercise based on scientific facts. Through a new combination of non–partisan alliances with Americans from all walks of life and innovative and far–reaching communication techniques the Alliance will focus on presenting the facts about climate change and its solutions to the general public in an accurate, clear and compelling manner.

Americans have always risen to meet the most important challenges to our nation’s and the world’s future. Together, we can address the climate challenge domestically and provide a robust economy for now and for our children. -Source

Based on the “Gore Connection” between these two entities, it would make sense why the Alliance for Climate Protection would want widespread emissions regulation and proactively support cap-and-trade legislation so that companies will be forced to lower their greenhouse gas emissions and buy carbon credits.

Surely they would recommend buying those carbon credits from none other than Generation Investment Management!

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see why Al Gore is so adamant about saving the planet from us dirty humans.  After all, the guy needs to make money somehow, and what better way than to scare those humans into giving him money for the greater good of the planet?

Actually, there would be a better way, and that would be if the government got involved and mandated that those dirty humans give him money for the greater good of the planet!

The Ties That Bind

Last week Gore came out and tried to push critics into a corner by suggesting that it’s silly to question the science (see the video below).

Rubbish.  You always question science, because there’s no such thing as a consensus in the scientific community.

It’s interesting that T. Boone Pickens appears in this discussion, as he’s in the same boat as Gore.  Pickens continued to push his “Pickens Plan” (which I wrote about in a skeptical post last year) to America in an effort to reduce the dependence on foreign oil and invest heavily in natural gas and wind energy.  Both efforts in which he already has billions of his own money at stake.

Can it be more “transparent”?

Follow the money, and you will find the incentive.

According to a report out on Bloomberg today, China is continuing its curb on vehicles put in place on July 20th to help with the pollution problem ahead of the Beijing Olympics, which apparently was quite effective.  The air quality is better now than it has been in over a decade, and in fact, pollutant levels dropped by as much as 50% during the Olympics.

The city will “seal off” 30 percent of government and Communist Party-registered vehicles Oct. 1, the Beijing government said on its Web site today. It will also limit the time the remaining government vehicles, as well as company- registered and private cars will be allowed on the roads, it said. -Source

The city of Beijing also put a stop to building work and shut down factories during that same time frame.

The effort is actually quite elaborate.  For instance, the last number of a license plate of each car will determine which days that car will be disallowed from the roads in Beijing. Social organizations and various businesses are shifting work schedules to stagger the traffic flow.

Unfortunately, this means that I won’t be able to gauge what effect this curtailment has on oil prices.  A while back, I mentioned that around the same time China took the cars off the road and shut in manufacturing facilities, the price of crude oil started dropping.

Now that Beijing is going to keep the curb in place, it will be tough to tell if this was all simply coincidence or if China’s demand for crude is actually a measurable quantity in this regard.

Crude oil is down $30 since the curb went into effect.

Interesting commentary in the Washington Times on Saturday. It seems a few “facts” are surfacing about the research conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global warming.

Contributor Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Dallas) and made some interesting points about the IPCC’s “study of climate change”. I’ll print a few of those points here, but I encourage you to read the full article here.

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the “hockey stick.” This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000…

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted. -Source

It also appears that there is a bit of conflict of interest in the scientific community. Mr. Burnett points out that many in a small group of climate specialists, nearly 43 different individuals, had coauthored papers with the head of research, the same guy who had “formulated” the so called hockey stick chart.

In the end, Mr. Wegman and his team could only conclude that:

“…the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming “cannot be supported.”"

One thing was made very clear to me in college when conducting research and running tests: eliminate any personal bias from the research you are conducting, and make sure your tests can be reproduced, eliminate as many variables as possible, and only state scientific facts. This mantra seems to have been lost in “global warming research”.

A good example of a principle clearly violated is “Make sure forecasts are independent of politics.” Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval.

Sadly, Mr. Green and Mr. Armstrong found no evidence the IPCC was even aware of the vast literature on scientific forecasting methods, much less applied the principles.

The truth on the IPCC is coming out, slowly but surely. It’s interesting to note that these new developments haven’t made it to the nightly news. Until it’s foreseen that the truth will instill outrage in viewers, it won’t get the ratings, and hence won’t be broadcast.

Corner Office Commentary

Every reader of this blog knows I’ve been skeptical about Al Gore and his man-made global warming agenda from day one. I still am, and I’m excited to see that conflicting opinions are now making it into the main stream media, slowly but surely.

As with every post on global warming, I must bring about a point of clarity. I am not disputing global warming all together, as I firmly believe that climate change goes in cycles, as evidenced by the number of ice ages our planet has been through, and these cycles have been scientifically proven and accepted world-wide. I am disputing the “consensus” that has been forced upon the general public that mankind is largely to blame for the increase in global temperatures.

I am encouraged by the change that this hysteria has brought upon our research and development of new green ways to conserve and reduce. The amount of smog and ozone that has blanketed major cities in the last few decades CAN be attributed to mankind, and it is not good for our overall health. So if this scientific farce brought on by a politically motivated former politician is stimulating these changes, so be it. But I think the scientific community owes the general public the unbiased facts about mankind’s involvement in global warming before our do-nothing politicians find a way to really screw up our economy based on bogus political conjecture.

It seems that not everyone in the scientific community is so hip to the Global Warming movement. Yesterday a detailed report was released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee revealing that over 400 prominent scientists disputed man-made global warming claims in 2007, as embellished by former Vice President Al Gore in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth’.

It’s about time!

The scientists named in this report, who are from more than two dozen countries, recently voiced objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom participated in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), spoke critically about the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

Additionally, of the scientists that did speak out, many claimed that they had peers that refused to voice their concerns out of fear of retribution if they spoke up.

“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” -Dr. Nathan Paldor, Source

Now why on Earth would anyone fear telling the truth?

What’s more, there were over 100 prominent scientists that warned the U.N. over futile climate control efforts.

“Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems,” -Source

Amen to that! You can read their full letter here, but here are a few excerpts from their letter to the U.N.:

“The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.” -Source

The reports main focus is to debunk the myth that man-made climate change has reached some sort of consensus. I’ve been saying all along that if you’ve reached a consensus among scientists, you haven’t talked to enough scientists!

In short, the open letter to the U.N. along with the Senate report are absolutely littered with names of prominent scientists, all of which have PhD and other acronyms tacked on to their name, debunking nearly every “scientific” aspect of man-made global warming.

So again, why fear the truth?

Money and politics. There is tons of money to be made in an effort to fight man-made global warming, fact or fiction, and leveraging a Nobel Peace prize to re-claim a place in United States politics is a sure-fire way to win over the American public who has been bamboozled by the media into thinking our grand children will fry if we don’t do something now!

Al Gore, eat your heart out, as the truth will set you free… but it may not get you elected.