There’s a storm blowin’ up, a whopper. Just speakin’ the vernacular of the peasantry.

While we’re all working through a thundering enormous energy bill (and a suddenly-meaningful USD16bn changing hands outreached), actual renewable energy (stupid freaking biofuels) gets yet more cool.

Originally found via Inhabitat: The Atmospheric Vortex Engine! Add this to the list with Skysails and Flying Electric Generators.

Mechanical energy is produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. A process for producing a tornado-like vortex and concentrating mechanical energy where it can be captured is proposed. The existence of tornadoes proves that low intensity solar radiation can produce concentrated mechanical energy. It should be possible to control a naturally occurring process. Controlling where mechanical energy is produced in the atmosphere offers the possibility of harnessing solar energy without having to use solar collectors.

The Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) is a process for capturing the energy produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. The process is protected by patent applications and could become a major source of electrical energy. The unit cost of electrical energy produced with an AVE could be half the cost of the next most economical alternative.

Taming tornadoes to power cities

Forget wind farms and their intermittent operation: the future of electricity generation could be tornado power on demand.

…

Here’s how it works: Waste heat, a byproduct of any fossil fuel or nuclear plant operation that is typically vented into the air through cooling towers, is carried by water pipe to a vortex engine facility nearby. The hot water enters a number of cooling cells stationed around the facility where fans push dry air across hot pipes.

The air picks up the heat and enters the vortex through 10 or more angled ducts, causing the air to swirl inside. The heated air begins to rise in a spinning motion, gathering energy the higher it gets and creating a vortex. As the vortex gathers momentum it begins to suck air through the cooling cells, at which point the fans that initially pushed in the air now function as turbines that generate electricity.

As long as the heat is available, the vortex will keep spinning.

…

Compared to nuclear, even coal, it’s a bargain. Michaud estimates that one of his vortex engines would cost less than one quarter the cost of a coal plant, and that’s excluding the cooling tower benefits and the fact that no ongoing fuel expenses are needed to keep it going.

I particularly loved one of the comments left on the post over at Inhabitat:

Happy days – if you keep it under control, you increase energy supply. If you don’t, you decrease demand…

Jim Kunstler has no sympathy for Wall Street

Which is fine, because neither do I. While I watched Jim Cramer absolutely lose it on CNBC last week, my only thought was, “you stupid crybaby prat.”

Jim Kunstler’s post yesterday dealt with this, and more! It’s a very good one, even by Clusterfuck Nation standards. If that doesn’t tempt you, it contains the likes of this quote:

A lot of catered crab tidbits and mini-quiches must have gone uneaten out along the dunes as weeping men in blazers realized that “marked to market” had come to mean the same thing as “holding a bundle of shit.”

It’s like my frank acknowledgement that a lot of the over-leveraged home loan borrowing was done by households that just don’t make enough money to own a home. The financial troubles currently assailing us came about thanks to people like Cramer’s buddies who were happy to bury anyone trying to make more money that you sustainably can in their game. It is blowing up in their faces, and I just don’t see why we should be sympathetic to them, or let them have more easy credit to try to double down (just long enough to get out and leave you and your neighbours with the tanking stocks, by the way).

Nor can Bernanke lower interest rates just for them. Everyone else is raising interest and – as we’ve heard time and time again – the United States needs to a borrow millions every day. Not Wall Street. America. I think Bernanke is slow when it comes to this ‘core’ inflation deal, but he’s not a moron.

Anyway. Jim Kunstler did a wonderful job.

It would be so expensive to fix hundreds of thousands of bridges that it’s just not going to happen.

Speaking of Time Magazine, and apropos recent posts about infrastructure in the US. They have a couple of articles up at the moment. This is a quote from one about bridges, specifically the pieces of the one that used to be a bridge in Minnesota.

…as everyone knows by now, the bridge was deemed “structurally deficient” starting in 1990. That didn’t result in an emergency repair order, but rather an intention to replace the bridge by 2020 — not unusual, evidently, since the designation doesn’t suggest imminent danger.

…

It would be so expensive to fix hundreds of thousands of bridges that it’s just not going to happen. But these numbers highlight the problem of the nation’s infrastructure. No word is likely to make taxpayers’ eyes glaze over more quickly. As a result, officials at all levels of government tend to defer maintenance on bridges and roadways; the voters wouldn’t stand for the required expenditures, estimated at more than $9 billion a year. They might, however, be willing to pay for more frequent and thorough inspections, which could distinguish the structurally deficient bridges in imminent danger of failure from those that aren’t.

In Minnesota, Gov. Pawlenty announced an immediate emergency round of inspections of all of the state’s bridges, starting with the three that have the same structure as the crumbled Minneapolis span.

My wife asked me, yesterday, whether this habit of closing barn doors once horses have bolted (or, as is often the case, once the barn has burned to the ground) was an American one. I said yes, principally because the tendency, with regard to maintenance of infrastructure, to waste time and money on unimportant things, thinking they are important, and ignoring the necessary things, strikes me as stronger, here. I could be wrong: Thames Water might blow up in all our faces tomorrow, and that would just show me.

The United States has a huge amount of infrastructure, and last year passed the Highway Bill, USD275bn of pork, fairly widely panned as being as dead useless as the Congress that passed it. “So expensive to fix hundreds of thousands of bridges”? I submit that that Highway Bill probably could have done it. The money lost, literally, on top of that lost to cost-plus bloody contracting, in Iraq, could have done. The Pentagon just got its USD460bn budget – some of that could have done it. A war on terror? We can’t defend our bridges from gravity or standing water.

This is not to say it would be cheap. I’ve seen a USD240m estimate for the bridge in Minnesota. But estimates put the Iraq war at coming to the trillion-US-dollar mark. If we can afford that…

Alan Weisman’s very wonderful A World Without Us has an excellent description of the problem mentioned in the Time article: that concrete and steel are very different substances. Put the together, and they will work towards their own destruction. Standard theories of entropy apply. His chapter detailing the return of New York city to something resembling a natural state has a Bridge guy (? I don’t know what they’re called) detailing how a bridge comes down, when humans aren’t there to keep them up.

Following bridges:

Setting the Stage for More Katrinas

Once again, it’s President Bush against just about everyone else. This time, he’s vowing to veto the Water Resources Development Act, a wildly popular collection of 940 Army Corps of Engineers projects, including $3.5 billion for post-Katrina Louisiana and $2 billion for the Florida Everglades. The House passed it Wednesday night in a 381-40 squeaker, and the Senate vote should be similar; archliberal Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer of California and arch-conservative ranking Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma can’t agree on the color of the sky, but they’re both pledging to override a veto.

But this time, Bush is right. WRDA is a lousy bill, stuffed with more pork than Sonny’s Barbecue, coddling a dysfunctional agency, perpetuating a dysfunctional system. Louisiana and the Everglades need help, but they won’t get it until Congress fixes the Corps. This bill just sets the stage for future Katrinas.

If only the pork was the reason for Bush’s veto, as opposed to money for New Orleans (about which he clearly does not give a shit) or protecting the Everglades (flood buffer zones are a waste of perfectly good golf course and other development opportunities). The legislation is still shit, though. Once more, legislation supposedly targeting infrastructure is nothing more than a patchwork of horse-trading jobs-for-states.

I don’t think Michael Grunwald (author) is fair in laying this all at the feet of the Army Corps of Engineers. George W Bush is the fucking president. The buck stops with him (or did the last time a guy in his office nuked innocent civilians), and it’s his job to have someone with a mouth, two eyes and a brain find out these problems and tell him, so that he can lean on that other branch of government (no, not Dick Cheney) and make public a public need for responsible government. He’s as culpable as anybody else – and there’s a heft enough body of evidence surrounding Hurricane Katrina to lay plenty of blame at the steps of the White House (or wherever the President is, on another of his record-breaking-number-of vacations).

Grunwald also wrote the cover piece for Time on Katrina, come its second anniversary. The first paragraph should be put on plaques all over the nation:

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city’s defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks.

He does more Corps-blaming than I’d like (there’s that agency problem, again: amongst other things, if GPs respond to financial incentives, why won’t the rest of us?).

This comes to what I tell my students a lot. There’s no such thing as Big Government vs. Small Government. That’s a debate for ideologues who don’t give a shit about you. Or, in the famous words of Chris Rock, anybody who makes his mind up before hearing about the issue is a fucking fool. There is only Good Government and Bad Government. Good Government protects you. It takes no more than it needs to provide you with what, by electoral consensus, you have declared you need or want. However big that makes government, then that is as it should be. The United States government does not need to be smaller. It does not need to be bigger. It just needs to start acting like a Government, instead of an exclusive club for politicians and lobbyists.

My love of Michael Caine grows and grows

I really do need to make my next post something properly economic, or I’ll be in trouble.

Michael Caine

shared Sex Symbol status with David Hemmings (one of my favourite actors)

Hemmings was bloody phenomenal in Last Orders – as was Michael Caine.

Anyway. Michael Caine is releasing a chillout compilation album:

Legendary Brit actor Sir Michael Caine has announced his intention to release a chillout album, and has already come up with the perfect title: Cained.

…

“About 10 years ago I started making my own compilations,” Caine said. “I’ve always been interested in music, and over the years have made literally thousands of tapes. And with chillout I suppose I finally found my forte.”

Cained, which will feature tracks such as Felix Da Housecat’s Sinnerman and Chicane’s No Ordinary Morning, is due for release in September.

Score!

East Timor’s democracy starting not so well

Xanana Gusmao named East Timor prime minister, triggering fresh violence in capital, is the International Herald Tribune’s effort. Not such a good start.

East Timor’s general election was a while ago, now. I wrote, just prior to it, about the President, Jose Ramos Horta, wanting a local version of the Hong Kong model of low taxation. Given the revenues they could expect off the Greater Sunrise Gas Field that they share with Australia, it wasn’t such a bad plan (I didn’t think).

The problem? A President is not much of a goverment, and the general elections haven’t gone so well. Nobody won a majority and attempts to form coalition governments of various stripes all stalled. So?

Fretilin won 21 seats in the 65-member parliament in the June polls, well short of a majority. Gusmao’s party won 18, but with its coalition partners controls 37 seats and argued it should have the right to rule.

After appealing for the two blocks to form a national unity government, Ramos-Horta used his constitutional right to appoint the prime minister on Monday, angering Fretilin leaders who insisted they had a constitutional right to form a government.

Needless to say, Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente, or FReTiLIn) and their supporters were not supportive. The two very bad parts of the reaction. The first:

… youths have already taken to the streets, throwing rocks and burning tyres.

A tax office was set alight before security forces moved in to disperse the crowds with tear gas, correspondents said.

The violence triggered fears of an end to the fragile peace that has held since mid-2006, when violent feuding between rival army and police units spilled out on to the streets.

More than 30 people were killed and thousands were forced to flee their homes in the 2006 unrest.

The clashes eventually led to the resignation of Mari Alkatiri, who was then prime minister.

Second:

…angering Fretilin leaders who insisted they had a constitutional right to form a government.

“We regard it as a political and illegal decision and as such Fretilin will not work with this government,” said party head and former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. “We will do everything we can to raise awareness among the people so they can combat through legal means this usurping of power.”

That’s so you spot the agency problem: the leader of Fretilin is also the Prime Minister who lost his job after the biggest post-Independence descent into violence in East Timor. This may have affected the President’s sympathies, although perhaps not. The bandying about of what is and is not constitutional is a problem, for a 5 year-old country. It spells Future Functional Stalemate. That means no Hong Kong taxation, no proper development of the gas fields from their end. No serious work on the 50% unemployment rate (1 million people) or the refugee camps (150,000 people fled their homes last year; I don’t know how many have managed to return. Currently, many Fretilin supporters have moved in, stirring up trouble – meaning a social and socioeconomic rift is helping along the political one).

The violence is very problematic. East Timor is an international peacekeeper magnet. We will absolutely send troops in (we = Australia) if we think it will mess up our gas field plans. Hell, we’ll do it anyway just about of Asian-Pacific paternalism. Whether that became a problem would depend upon how worked up Indonesia would get – John Howard might just earn us another snub at the next ASEAN meeting, the bastard.

All of which is besides the point. With 50% unemployment, refugee camps, 20% facing food shortages on the backs of crop failures (East Timorese agriculture is as sensitive as Australia’s if not worse), they really need to settle into parliamentary democracy. Which I accept is easier said than done – you can count the number of democratic countries I’ve built on no fingers, so I won’t point the bone.

That Time article to which I linked is actually quite good, by the by. Give it a read if you have the time. It’s only a couple of pages.