A lot of companies are switching from old-school fluorescents (which aren't quite as efficient) to LEDs as the fixtures wear out. And yes, they do wear out, along with things like ballasts. There are a LOT of the old T12 fluorescents out there still, not to mention the newer (but still somewhat outdated) T8.

They also make LED tubes now - a line of LEDs in a package the same size as the old fluorescent tubes. They cost a lot, but over the long run, they're cheaper to run. Once you include lowering air conditioning costs and less manpower spent replacing tubes, they're often worth the money. All you need to do is bypass the ballast (which also saves money in the long run - those things wear out too).

A lot of factory floors used mercury vapor lights, and those are going away as they get old, replaced with clusters of LEDs.

Not from "reducing carbon emissions and rolling out renewable energy projects."

They saved money by increasing energy efficiency.

And you can bet that a huge chunk of that is just replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs. These are HUGE companies with many, many employees. A savings of $1.1 billion is relatively tiny overall...

"the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation" ...but not the time to produce enough energy to pay back the actual cost of the machine, including labor and materials.

The actual study is very, very careful to NOT claim that it will pay back the total system cost. It's just the amount of energy used in production and installation, not the cost of raw materials and labor.

"From December capacity will be at 117% of peak demand."

Ignoring, of course, that when talking about solar/wind power and "capacity," the actual output is, to say the least, variable.

They had the big headline recently about how much they generated during one hour of one day - but for some reason, they didn't mention all of those cloudy and windless winter days where effective output was a tiny fraction of that - and they had to use lots and lots of coal to make up the difference.

One of the criteria is "meritorious service."

Writing - on his own - a set of scripts that save that much time for his unit? Should certainly qualify.

...they got tired of all of the scientists following them around, year after year, tagging them and annoying the kids.

"Y'know, Marge, this place is just getting too touristy for me. Let's go somewhere quiet, farther down the beach."

...it's just the screams of alien robots burning up in the atmosphere.

"Prepare to die, humans! Hey, this is sorta hot, isn't it? No, really, I should have thought this through. AAAHHHHHH!"

...and it's almost as if you only find actual monopolies in places where the government intentionally creates them in the first place.

You know, like all of the cable and data monopolies in the US.

"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

Note that this part of the Treaty does NOT say that they have to continually pursue negotiations until the end of time. All they had to do was pursue negotiations ONCE in order to fulfill the Treaty.

There were regular nuclear disarmament negotiations during the 1970s and 1980s - right up until the point where one of the participants in the NNPT effectively disbanded.

Yeah, those darned conspiracy theorists, all crazy and stuff - complaining about a policy that was stupid and evil.

But now that it hit the news and EVERYONE said it was stupid and evil, the government has stopped doing the stupid, evil thing.

So those people are now wrong and crazy.

Until the government starts doing it again.

- E. Venkman

...with your links.

The first one? The guy who uses Rush Limbaugh and other TV folks to show how unredeemable the skeptics are? Instead of actually quoting the folks who did the research and found the quotes?

He makes a big deal about finding "trick" in scientific papers to represent a clever solution for a problem. Fair enough.

However, he pretends that the problem with "hide the decline" is about something other than tree rings... when the hinge of most of the AGW models was tree-ring reconstruction. Basically, the guys "hiding the decline" desperately needed to hide the decline in temperatures for that part of their reconstruction in order for that reconstruction to be used as a metric for past temperatures versus CO2.

Yes, it's a nice snarky propaganda video, but it's wrong.

The second one? the one you refer to as "in depth and impartial?"

You're kidding, right?

For example, he handwaves "the divergence problem" with tree rings, which is something that those particular climate models can't survive. Remember the Hockey Stick? Notice how nobody uses it any more? Based on tree ring models. So yeah.

The thing you also missed about the Climategate problem for AGW fans: a lot of what they said would be fine, in a publication, or in an answer to a paper. It was, however, stuff they never told anyone, because it poked huge holes in the foundation of their work.

Except, of course, that it was not "valid" at all.

When you have to hide your own results, you're doing something wrong.

A lot of dedicated alarmists have tried to pretend that "the trick" was above-board... but it wasn't.

In any other field, if a scientist had tried this sort of thing to hide a bad result, they'd be in deep trouble.

Just so you know: That "97 percent of all scientists in the world" silliness came from a rigged "poll."

Basically, an AGW-supporting scientist polled a number of his AGW-supporting scientist friends and co-workers - 30 or so - and asked them if they thought AGW was real.

That's where your number came from. Which should tell you something about the actual support for AGW among the scientific population at large...

They recently came up with another poll, where they cherry-picked a bunch of papers, and said "97% of scientific papers agree!" While not mentioning that only about a third of them actually addressed AGW, and they got their "new" 97% by only looking at 65 papers. Out of 12,000. Oops.

A big reason you won't see any critiques of that sort is that the influential folks in the AGW alarmist camp made a big effort to block any critical papers from even being considered. Threats to blacklist journals for publishing "anti-AGW" papers, for example, or to take behind-the-scenes action against anyone who tried to submit such papers.

This all came out in the Climategate emails. But you never heard about those, did you?

They also admit in those emails that most of the actual criticisms of "mainstream" AGW were valid, and discussed ways to cover it up.

"Hide the decline" ring a bell?

Or "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on ... shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."