The Real Reason More Homeowners Are Going Solar BY JACKIE DEANGELIS, CNBC October 10, 2014 Pat Kennell's motivation for installing sun power in his home is typical of the solar industry's new customer: He did it to save money. The retired police officer from Stony Point, New York, said his cost of energy per kilowatt hour will go from 20 cents with the local utility company to 13 cents with his new solar technology. And it didn't cost him anything to install. The firm Kennell worked with, SolarCity, offered him a lease program, where customers with long-term contracts can have the equipment installed and maintained for free. Rivals of SolarCity offer similar programs. "I needed to save money. I'm retired, my wife is 70, we needed to save some cash, and solar is good for the environment. I expect to save about 25 percent off my energy bill," Kennell said. Kennell isn't alone. The residential solar market is on fire, with homeowners installing solar systems all across the country—sometimes trying to help the environment, other times just looking to save money. And while the trend has sent solar stocks on a tear, it could disrupt some traditional energy companies. U.S. home solar penetration still stands at less than 1 percent, but estimates suggest it could grow to as much as 20 to 30 percent by 2020. In dollar terms, the market is expected to hit $6 billion in just a couple of years. SolarCity, one of the industry leaders with 36 percent market share, says that its crews are working seven days a week to meet demand, and sales representatives have multiple consultations per day to talk to people looking to make the transition to solar. Other solar firms express confidence in the overall market as well. "The market has a ton of potential. It's already sizable. We have three players valued at over a billion dollars, yet we're only in less than 1 percent of U.S. households," said Lynn Jurich, CEO of privately held Sunrun. "So if you look at the 140,000 homes that received solar last year, we can be competitive with local utility power in about 20 million homes." The Kennells expect their home to generate 83 percent of its yearly power needs from its new solar panels. And for times when the sun just isn't enough, the home continues to be connected to the traditional utility grid so that it can have a backup source of energy generation. When it comes to that traditional utility grid, however, the solar companies' gain could be utilities' pain. Companies like SolarCity are operating in their current capacity essentially as utility companies, so they're disrupting the system and taking market share. Government rules require utilities to support green energy initiatives, so they have to comply and keep solar homes on the grid. "Basically, we provide power to the customer just like a utility does—it's just at a reduced rate. We like to consider ourselves a producer of power," said Tim Ferdinand, a regional operations manager at SolarCIty. "There are government mandates in place that influence the utilities. So right now, they're accepting solar systems on a pretty wide scale—maybe not for forever, but for the foreseeable future," Ferdinand said. Some solar firms, at least, indicate that they're interested in partnering with utilities, not threatening them. "The relationship [between solar companies and utilities], is mixed, honestly," said Jurich of Sunrun. "I think we're a threat to some, and I think people see the adoption, they see that it's inevitable that solar is going to become a mainstream product. And for some, that's threatening, and for others, they look at it like a business opportunity." Investors have long loved solar stocks, the group has been on a tear. SolarCity, for example, has gone on a run of greater than 400 percent over the last five years. But analysts still like solar stocks because there is so much growth potential. The exchange-traded funds are one way to play solar, with the Guggenheim Solar ETF and the Market Vectors Solar Energy ETF two of the most popular. Individual names to watch include SolarCity, First Solar , Suntech, Trina Solar, and NRG Energy.
The Kink in the Human Brain-- How Are Humans OK with Destroying the Planet? George Monbiot October 12, 2014 | This is a moment at which anyone with the capacity for reflection should stop and wonder what we are doing. If the news that in the past 40 years the world has lost over 50% its vertebrate wildlife(mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish) fails to tell us that there is something wrong with the way we live, it’s hard to imagine what could. Who believes that a social and economic system which has this effect is a healthy one? Who, contemplating this loss, could call it progress? In fairness to the modern era, this is an extension of a trend that has lasted some two million years. The loss of much of the African megafauna – sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyaenas and amphicyonids (bear dogs), several species of elephant – coincided with the switch towards meat eating by hominims (ancestral humans). It’s hard to see what else could have been responsible for the peculiar pattern of extinction then. As we spread into other continents, their megafaunas almost immediately collapsed. Perhaps the most reliable way of dating the first arrival of people anywhere is the sudden loss of large animals. The habitats we see as pristine – the Amazon rainforest or coral reefs for example – are in fact almost empty: they have lost most of the great beasts that used to inhabit them, which drove crucial natural processes. Since then we have worked our way down the foodchain, rubbing out smaller predators, medium-sized herbivores, and now, through both habitat destruction and hunting, wildlife across all classes and positions in the foodweb. There seems to be some kink in the human brain that prevents us from stopping, that drives us to carry on taking and competing and destroying, even when there is no need to do so. But what we see now is something new: a speed of destruction that exceeds even that of the first settlement of the Americas, 14,000 years ago, when an entire hemisphere’s ecology was transformed through a firestorm of extinction within a few dozen generations, in which the majority of large vertebrate species disappeared. Many people blame this process on human population growth, and there’s no doubt that it has been a factor. But two other trends have developed even faster and further. The first is the rise in consumption; the second is amplification by technology. Every year, new pesticides, new fishing technologies, new mining methods, new techniques for processing trees are developed. We are waging an increasingly asymmetric war against the living world. But why are we at war? In the rich nations, which commission much of this destruction through imports, most of our consumption has nothing to do with meeting human needs. This is what hits me harder than anything: the disproportion between what we lose and what we gain. Economic growth in a country whose primary and secondary needs have already been met means developing ever more useless stuff to meet ever fainter desires. For example, a vague desire to amuse friends and colleagues (especially through the Secret Santa nonsense) commissions the consumption of thousands of tonnes of metal and plastic, often confected into complex electronic novelties: toys for adults. They might provoke a snigger or two, then they are dumped in a cupboard. After a few weeks, scarcely used, they find their way into landfill. In a society bombarded by advertising and driven by the growth imperative, pleasure is reduced to hedonism and hedonism is reduced to consumption. We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created. We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly. Yet the extraction of the raw materials required to produce them, the pollution commissioned in their manufacturing, the infrastructure and noise and burning of fuel needed to transport them are trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce. The loss of wildlife is a loss of wonder and enchantment, of the magic with which the living world infects our lives. Perhaps it is misleading to suggest that “we” are doing all this. It’s being done not only by us but to us. One of the remarkable characteristics of recent growth in the rich world is how few people benefit. Almost all the gains go to a tiny number of people: one study suggests that the richest 1% in the United States capture 93% of the increase in incomes that growth delivers. Even with growth rates of 2 or 3% or more, working conditions for most people continue to deteriorate, as we find ourselves on short contracts, without full employment rights, without the security or the choice or the pensions our parents enjoyed. Working hours rise, wages stagnate or fall, tasks become duller, more stressful and harder to fulfill, emails and texts and endless demands clatter inside our heads, shutting down the ability to think, corners are cut, conditions deteriorate, housing becomes almost impossible to afford, there’s ever less money for essential public services. What and whom is this growth for? It’s for the people who run or own the banks, the hedge funds, the mining companies, the advertising firms, the lobbying companies, the weapons manufacturers, the buy-to-let portfolios, the office blocks, the country estates, the offshore accounts. The rest of us are induced to regard it as necessary and desirable through a system of marketing and framing so intensive and all-pervasive that it amounts to brainwashing. A system that makes us less happy, less secure, that narrows and impoverishes our lives, is presented as the only possible answer to our problems. There is no alternative – we must keep marching over the cliff. Anyone who challenges it is either ignored or excoriated. And the beneficiaries? Well they are also the biggest consumers, using their spectacular wealth to exert impacts thousands of times greater than most people achieve. Much of the natural world is destroyed so that the very rich can fit their yachts with mahogany, eat bluefin tuna sushi, scatter ground rhino horn over their food, land their private jets on airfields carved from rare grasslands, burn in one day as much fossil fuel as the average global citizen uses in a year. Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture. Is this not the point at which we shout stop? At which we use the extraordinary learning and expertise we have developed to change the way we organise ourselves, to contest and reverse the trends that have governed our relationship with the living planet for the past two million years, and that are now destroying its remaining features at astonishing speed? Is this not the point at which we challenge the inevitability of endless growth on a finite planet? If not now, when?
The Planet Just Had Its Warmest September On Record, Continuing Hot Streak The Huffington Post | By Nick Visser Posted: 10/13/2014 3:37 pm EDT This past September was the warmest since records began in 1880, according to new data released by NASA this weekend. The announcement continues a trend of record or near-record breaking months, including May and August of this year. The newly released data could make it very likely that 2014 will become the warmest year on record. September temperature anomalies (in degrees Celsius) compared to the 1951-1980 average. (PHOTO: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told The Huffington Post last month that although these temperature records are significant, they are just one piece of the data that "point towards the long-term trends" of warming. He cautioned against focusing too intently on any one month or year, but rather the broader scope of human-caused climate change.
Here is an article that shows the minimal integrity of the scientific paper review process... Oft-cited ‘total *sshole’ physicist credited in scientific literature is a fake http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/...-credited-in-scientific-literature-is-a-fake/ As Tartamella notes, the continuing citing of Bestiale as a real person lays “bare how vulnerable control systems in the review of scientific research were (and still are!) . If you are able to insert in a publication the name of a nonexistent author in a publication, who will guarantee that even the scientific contents have been examined with care? Incredibly, even today, 27 years later.”
Global climate models have underestimated the amount of CO2 being absorbed by plants, according to new research. Climate change: Models 'underplay plant CO2 absorption' http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29601644