IS GEOTHERMAL ENERGY GOOD OR BAD?

Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) has become a make-or-break decision-making factor for society.  From affordable housing to energy development and everything in-between, NIMBY-ism has in particular paralyzed the advance of various varieties of sustainable energy.

I remember as far back as 40 years ago when I went to a public hearing at the Hilton Turtle Bay on the first wind energy project for the North Shore of Oahu.  By my count, there were as many opposing forces as favorable ones...and this was soon after the first energy crisis.  Hilton executives were afraid that the presence of a wind power device would mean that this area was windy and tourists would not stay in their hotel.  The Audubon Society was afraid that birds would get killed.

Then the next day I took part in a community discussion on the Big Island about the future of geothermal energy.  Again, I was somewhat perplexed that there were significant elements of the populace against our announced project.  There were rain-forest freaks (yes, I should be more sensitive), Pele-worshippers, and, in particular, some strong resistance from the local Puna residents.  Many of them left the hustle of the modern world to settle in the rural environment of this district.  Turns out that marijuana growers were especially wary and indirectly financed this faction.  The NIMBY factor convinced Federal Judge David Ezra to essentially put the kibosh on any major geothermal development for Hawaii.  But Judge Ezra retired two years ago and left the state.

So, is geothermal energy good or bad?  Henry Curtis of Life of the Land has a balanced view on this subject:

Geothermal Energy

There are many geothermal advocates. Geothermal energy is nearly inexhaustible. The available resource is greater than the amount of oil the world has used and has left. A geothermal plant has a very small geographically footprint (MW/acre) compared to other energy sources. Geothermal produces continuous (baseload) power at a very low cost. When done right geothermal produces minimal greenhouse gases.

At the low end, the California Geysers produce electricity for 3-3.5 cents/kWhr, while some geothermal resources need 6-12 cents/kWhr. Credit Suisse (2009) calculated that geothermal power costs 3.6 cents/kWhr, versus 5.5 cents/kWhr for coal. 

Geothermal has a capacity factor (average output/maximum output) of 0.84 (nuclear is 0.90, wave energy is 0.6, wind is 0.4, solar is 0.20)

Sounds pretty good to me.  However, if you live next to a geothermal power plant, there could be an intermittent noise problem, the smell of hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs) and the fear of industry taking over the territory.  Yesterday Richard Borecca of the Star-Advertiser had an editorial on "Praising geothermal power, from a safe distance away."  Maybe Borecca is anti-Governor Abercrombie, but the slant was anti-geothermal.

Here is my take on this subject.  Would you rather have the mixed blessing of geothermal energy or a coal power plant...or a nuclear reactor across the street from where you live?  There are degrees of goodness and badness.  In my book, geothermal energy can be good.  What else do we (in Hawaii) have that is base load and competitive with the fossil fuels?

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That fearsome Super Typhoon Neoguri is now a mere tropical storm at 65 MPH.  Two were killed on Okinawa and electricity was affected for 100,000.  Still projected to bring a lot of rain, the eye will pass over Kyushu and on Friday near Tokyo.

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GOLFERS LIVE LONGER

This is really reaching back in time, but Science Daily reported on a 2008 study led by Professor Anders Ahlbom from the Karolinska Instutet of  Sweden indicating that golf is a good investment for your health.  The death rate for golfers is 40% lower than other people of the same sex, age and socioeconomic status.  The bottom line is that golfers live five years longer.  Data from 300,000 Swedish golfers were compared with the general population of the country.

You say, isolated and maybe even far-fetched?  Well, from Canada, walking 18 holes drops  blood glucose levels up to 30% in older golfers and helps with weight maintenance.  Last week I walked twice and my weight dropped to 154.8, the first time I had seen 154 on a scale in a quarter century.  Then on Thursday, after walking 18 holes, down to 153.8.  I happened to have breakfast the next morning with my neighbor, who is a retired doctor, and, as he expressed some possible concern.  I ate a lot over the past few days and at last weigh-in after dinner last night, I was back up to 159, so, hopefully, I'm okay.

That same article above also mentioned that older golfers have slower swing speeds and reduced flexibility, but with the advanced technology of today, and subsequent better control, your handicap can be reduced.  In my case, I injured my hand a few months ago, and I can't fully grip my left hand.  Pros say that your grip should not be too tight anyway, but I didn't believe them.  Amazingly enough, as I now have no option but a soft left hand grip, my handicap this year dropped to the lowest ever in my life, 13.  

Finally, older  golfers can improve their game just with confidence, and when you add better balance control, my 13 might approach single digits.  15 Craigside has Tai Chi exercises twice a week, so that will be my next enhancement.

It was a perfect day for golf today.  I scored a 40 in the front nine and horribly in the back.

Knowing 15 Craigside was serving chicken hekka tonight, I dropped by Marukai and picked up some salmon roe (turns out an equivalent weight of eggs was one-sixth the price of salmon caviar from Whole Foods) and the following chu toro (fatty yellow-fin tuna):

My lanai dinner tonight:

Note the rain in the background.  In my Craigside penthouse, I would not have been able to do this.  The chu toro was the best sashimi I've had in a long time:

The ikura sushi was also delicious:

The chicken hekka topped with a raw egg was everything I expected:

I had a small bottle of hot sake (14% alcohol) and glass of cold beer (8.1% Hurricane) with the meal.

I  later joined the 15 Craigside poker gang and won a few bucks.

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Well, Okinawa survived Super Typhoon Neoguri, which is now a mere typhoon at 120 MPH, but still headed for Kyushu:

However, the track of the eye is now completely changed, and Neoguri will lose strength after passing just north of Miyazaki, will re-enter the Pacific and bring some rain to Shikoku and eastern Honshu.

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OAHU HOME PRICES RISE TO ALL TIME HIGH

Yes, the median price of a single family residence on Oahu rose to a record $700,000 last month.  That previous high, surprisingly enough, was set SEVEN YEARS AGO.  Condos also attained an all-time high of $360,000.  All projections show this increase continuing for the rest of the year, and longer.  So now is the time to buy!

I just so happen to have a penthouse (left) that will go back on sale very soon.  Here is how the make-over is shaping up with the shower trees flowering outside--living room, bedroom and kitchen:

Upstairs:

Even some yellow flowers at the base of the building:

Craigside has two towers.  In the other one is a home being sold by Audrey Hutton for what I thought was $6.5 million.  

However, here is an ad for that same penthouse at $9.8 million.  Maybe she raised her prices.  HMMM...  In any case, that apartment is, indeed, fabulous.  But, can you afford nearly $10 million.  My apartment will be placed on sale for less than a million.  On the other hand...

Yesterday, after SNOWPIERCER, I thought I'd have dinner on my 15 Craigside lanai.  So I shopped for the usual foie gras, caviar, truffle pate and Castello Blue Cheese, with a salad and croissant:

Hint:  that caviar above from Whole Foods is three times the cost of salmon roe from Marukai, and, maybe more important, you don't need special tools to get at that Japan ikura.  The wine was a Stanford Chardonnay:

Alas, my view, while okay, and I can still see the Pacific Ocean, is now not as incredible as my penthouse view:

E-mail me at PatKenTak@hotmail.com if interested in an advanced showing of Craigside, Penthouse A2.

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SNOWPIERCER: A Planet Earth and Humanity Allegory

Yesterday was esoteric and maybe even arcane.  Today, allegorical.

I saw a movie yesterday, Snowpiercer, ranked this week as #16.  This is an American-Korean film with a lot of Caucasian actors, shot in Austria and handled by the Weinstein brothers.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers loved it (94%), while the general populace gave it a 75% rating.  Considering that the latest Transformers, #1, got 18% and Tammy, #2, 23%, not bad at all.  Obviously, weekend box office ratings don't necessarily relate to quality of film.

Chris Evans was stressed, John Hurt philosophic, Song Kang-ho sententious and Ed Harris controlled.  Tilda Swinton was incredible and not the Tilda Swinton you saw with George Clooney in Burn After Reading and with Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button:

Bong Joon-ho directed the flick.  He eight years ago was responsible for the popular sci-fi monster film, The Host, which starred the same Song Kang-ho (and some local others who came back for the more recent effort).  As the trailer is evasive, here is that monster with Kang-ho:

There are no monsters and two themes in Snowpiercer:  class struggle and global warming.  Note the cold clime to the left. How can that be global heating?  Well, in 2014 a geoengineering solution went haywire and the world froze, killing everyone but those remaining survivors hurtling through the tundra on a super train that takes a year to circle the globe.  The rebellious poor live in the back and comfortable rich in the front, with cars in-between dedicated to service, protection and the enjoyment of life: discotheque, greenhouse, opium-like den with a high tech smelling agent, elegant dining and so on.    Scarily similar to 15 Craigside.  There is a melange of weirdness, beauty, irrationality, violence, dystopia and elegance that works.  The ending killed almost everyone, but was definitely hopeful, with a clearly warming environment.  While they could have found a more meaningfully moralistic title, Snowpiercer, nevertheless, is the best movie I've seen this year.

What made the film meaningful for me was this allegorical tale involving that train (analogous to Planet Earth) and the occupants (or Humanity).  As chief blogger, depending on the day, I play different roles to protect Planet Earth and save Humanity (note the title at the top of this page).  I identify with the different characters and day after day careen from a solution for the homeless problem to dining on foie gras, from the 10% simple solution for peace to the stupidity of the F-35 joint strike fighter.  Just about five years ago my HuffPo was entitled Geoengineering of Climate Change.  Then I hopped a plane for my annual around the world adventure.   Terrible carbon footprint.

While my intentions are generally humanitarian, I remain a collage of contradictions, and so does the movie.  However, we're both doing fine.  Really.  Can't say the same for Planet Earth and Humanity.

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Super Typhoon Neoguri is now at 150 MPH and strengthening into a Category 5:

However, the latest projection shows this mega-storm now mostly missing Naha today, with the eye instead very close to Miyakojima, the solar island of Japan.  Then, weakening some back to a Category 4, slamming into Kyushu, with the eye now possibly over Kumamoto.  Unfortunately, totally unrelated to Neoguri, Kyushu this past week was inundated with heavy rains, up to 10 inches around Kagoshima and 6 inches over Nagasaki, the heaviest in 50 years.  Then computer models predict Neoguri heading for Niigata on western Honshu and, finally, the east side of Hokkaido. 

It only last year Super Typhoon Haiyan over the Philippines was the strongest tropical cyclone at 195 MPH to ever make landfall, causing up to $6 billion in damages and killing more than 6,000.

Global warming???

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ARE WE INSIGNIFICANT?

Yes, we're almost surely insignificant...BUT.  Let me explain.  (Incidentally, you'll need to click on that graphic on the left to see anything, but these graphs provide perspective.)

You know how fast light travels?  Been around the world?  I have, perhaps a dozen times.  They all took me more than a month.  In one second light travels the equivalent distance of 7.4 times the circumference of Planet Earth.  

For example, our Milky Way.  It would take light 100,000 years to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other.  But here is the part that is mind-boggling.  If some alien civilization located on the other side of the Milky Way, say 50,000 light years away, has invented a telescope that can see our planet, they would not view man-made lights.  

Light would have taken 50,000 years to reach them, and they would just now be seeing the original version of us  humans:

The Drake Equation calculates how many planets harbor intelligent life:

If you ran through this calculation, you would get 11,000 planets with intelligent life, just in our galaxy.

Our closest galaxy is Andromeda, and it is 2.43 million light years away.  We are both on the order of 100,000 light years across, so to scale, the following shows how far we are from each other:

O                                                                         O

Don't hold your breath, but in 4 billion years our galaxies will collide into each other.  That is not a long period of time, for our solar system is older that 4 billion years.

Further yet, say there is an advanced civilization 65 million light years away:

There are only 200 galaxies within 100 million light years of us.  Or, 200 trillion stars. Or, if each solar system is sort of like ours, 2 quadrillion planets.  

A lot, but nothing compared to the entirety of the Universe, for there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe (this means nothing, but for the record, reaching 47 billion light years away from us).  But that is only because that was the best the Hubble Telescope could see.  This number will at least double when better instruments are developed.  This means maybe up to an octillion stars, or 1, followed by 24 zeroes.  But again, there will be many more out there.  Planets?  Make that 10 octillion, at least.  Intelligent life?.......

I don't quite understand how astrophysicists don't know how large our Universe is when they are definitive about the Universe being 13.8 billion years old and this all started with a Big Bang.  To further challenge your curiosity, click on Cosmic Questions to learn that:

• The Big Bang was NOT the origin of the Universe.
• The shape of our Universe is NOT the surface of an expanding sphere.
• Galaxies are found throughout all of space.
• We don't really know how many stars and planets are out there because we can't see the entire Universe and don't know how vast it is.
• It appears, though, that our Universe is expanding.

SO NOW THE PUNCHLINE.  Why the BUT  at the top?  It is entirely possible that there is no God, and life on Planet Earth was the only miraculous evolution in the entire Universe.  We could well be that precious beginning from which will come wonderful things throughout the Universe over the next few billion years.  Life was no doubt a miracle and we almost screwed it up during the Cold War.  We might, perhaps, not be so insignificant after all.  Sadly, there could be an actual end, as when our planet crashes into a cold Sun, predicted to occur in around a quadrillion years.

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Something definitely significant, Super Typhoon Neoguri is now at 150 MPH and will slam into Naha, Okinawa tomorrow as a Category 5.  Frighteningly, Neoguri will roll over Kyushu as a Category 3 and still be a typhoon later in the week when the storm reaches Hokkaido.

Neoguri is so potentially a monumental natural disaster, that I show another graphic:

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