In this case, I doubt it. That project was a front runner for DOE loan guarantees without the influence of Harry Reid. Considering they would have got the loan anyhow, golden parachute allocations would just be a waste of money.

Many of the geothermal projects are air-cooled. Those that are water cooled are in areas where you can actually get water rights. Water is not the limiting factor in geothermal development.

Actually, none of it. The deal is between NGP, their financiers, and DOE. The loan backstopping is part of ARRA. So far as I know, loan selections were made by DOE, which Harry Reid does not have any influence in.

NOPE - not on planet Earth

What has a female dominant society got to do with Marxist viewpoint? That being said, the Naxi in China were a matriarchal society.

Anyhow, I got some Marxism in first year, mainly because it was part of the curriculum. Presumably, if others had the same experience, the Marxist boogeyman wouldn't be around today.

I don't think that there should be any long term correlation between humans and climate because the bulk of growth has happened in the last 50 years.

As for core data, it is not the actual temperatures but the variance of temperatures that is of concern. If I remember the seminar correctly, a comparison was made between temperature deviations back in the 90s and in a period where the temperature was 2C warmer. Standard deviation was much higher during the warm period, indicating more severe weather changes.

If more relevant data exists now, then colour me stupid. But for the moment, I am assuming that less carbon means less weather fluctuation. If I am wrong, all it means is that my bank account is smaller.

Way back in the last millenium, I attended a seminar put on by Dr. Weaver. At that time, he was an untenured professor doing climatology. Dot Com was about to explode and oil was less than $15/barrel. Nobody except a few grad students like myself knew or cared about his research.

He reported on ice core drilling in Greenland and mentioned that periods where the average temperature was higher coincided with a higher standard deviation in temperature. In other words, when the average temperature is warmer, the variability of the weather increases. Coupled with climate theory that predicts increasing temperature with increasing CO2 concentration, you get a pretty reasonable argument that the weather is going to get bad in the future.

At that time, he was part of a research institute and what he had to say was just part of his research. He was doing his job and didn't have any incentives from any lobby groups outside academia because at that time, there weren't any. There were no Wall Street backroom boys slipping him dollars, nor was any greenwash organization encouraging him.

I have a hard time believing he falsified data given the circumstances and time. If you are still skeptical, I encourage you to try reading some of the papers he put out or contact him or the climatology center to get a look at the data.

You keep saying you've got something for me.
something you call seaweed, but confess.
You've been eatin' what you shouldn't have been a eatin'
and now your guts is digestin' all your best.

Your guts are made for seaweed, and that's just what they'll do
one of these days my guts will digest seaweed like you

With sincere apologies to Nancy Sinatra

Wind does compete against itself. The way that it works is that utilities offer long term contracts to buy power from wind or other renewables. This is typically a competitive bid process where the best price wins.

You have an interesting argument about nuclear. Some would argue that nuclear has been good for the environment around Chernobyl because it has driven away people. Animals are flourishing in the area, despite higher mutation and death rates. This leads to an odd scenario where it would be in an environmentalist's best interest to encourage construction of nuclear reactors with no safety standards.

So, when corporation X starts poisoning your river for its smelter, and you can't actually stop buying their product because you haven't actually ever bought their product, how will this help you to get them to stop poisoning your river?

Corporations wield power because of the wealth they accumulate from selling product. It is pretty idealistic to believe that a consumer boycott of a raw material by that corporation can force them to make changes.

Of course, if corporations actually followed the rules like everyone else, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Have you ever made one of these? You pull in all the favors you can. $300 in Uruguay will go a lot further than in the USA. Borrow equipment, get talent to work for free in exchange for film credit, get your friends and family to work as extras, use idle editing suites... you get the idea.

If you add up all the effort, the total cost would be way more than $300. The point is that it cost him $300 to put it together. It speaks volumes about his ability to get good results at low cost. That is pretty impressive.

What you are missing is that not wearing a helmet does not increase the risk to yourself or others on the road. A motorcyclist who opts not to wear a helmet only damages himself. Someone who opts to text may damage themselves and others. The insurance company sees increased costs because they must now cover off everyone against accidental texting damages. The only party that has a chance of benefiting is the texter. "I won't be at the mall because I just got into an accident." Myself, I'm not seeing this as being a good tradeoff.

There's no single energy resource that is going to meet the needs of the power grid. Coal and nuclear are too slow to follow load, wind and solar are intermittent, hydro, geothermal and biomass are limited locationally. Natural gas is subject to price volatility.

The grid's energy requirements are too big and complicated to be handled by any one source of energy. Using baseload resources to provide the bulk of the energy with intermittent resources to provide cheaper or more timely energy with hydro and natural gas to fill in the gaps is what it is necessary now.

Maybe we're talking about different things. I would not be able to implement OpenOffice in our environment because of the fear of application (and consequently file) incompabilities. We had an issue with a pdf rendering on a Mac that threw off the page numbering of a legal document. There's no way I'd be able to get off MS after that one.

Without a buy-in from the top, I've got to be able to defend every one of those glitches if I go with OpenOffice. That is not worth my time.

As mentioned earlier, adoption away from MS Office requires a directive from upper management. If you don't have that support, you'll be replaced when a file or application incompatibility delays a project enough to miss a deadline. If you want OpenOffice to be used, you'll need to join the upper management ranks so you can call the shots. It won't happen on its own.