Category: linkstream

A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.

Sequencing Risks

A reporter from Bloomberg joins the PGP, only to discover that he carries a rare and potentially pathogenic acquired mutation, found in people with blood disorders.  He doesn’t know how to deal with it, and neither do the doctors, really.  Which is half of what this study is all about.  What do we need to learn as a society to deal with knowing our sequences?  A lot, I’m guessing.

Picturing Coal

A great series of photos looking at the coal industry worldwide from The Big Picture.  Even ignoring coal’s irreversible long term damage to the atmosphere and climate, it’s a pretty desperate business for a lot of people, who are still scratching it out of the earth deep underground, by hand.  Popular with the kids too — they can really get into those hard-to-reach places.

PACE Lives!

The Federal Housing Finance Administration is taking public comments on Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, at the insistence of California’s 9th Circuit court of appeals.  Here’s what I told them:

Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, as have been initiated by many states and local governments, are a potentially transformative financing mechanism, enabling property owners to make good long term investments in energy efficiency and behind-the-meter renewable energy production.  They address a market failure, in that buyers often do not appropriately integrate a property’s energy costs into their price assessment.  So long as the state and local PACE programs are performance based, and incentivize both efficiency and renewables, preferring those investments which have the greatest (positive) net present value, given the financing rate which is available to the government entity sponsoring the program, they do not pose a significant risk to mortgage holders, and should be allowed in FHFA held mortgages.  Additionally, local energy efficiency and solar power installation provide high quality, skilled jobs which cannot be exported, stimulating the economies of the localities implementing the programs.  These types of energy efficiency and local renewables programs can go a significant way toward reducing the energy intensivity of our existing building stock, and help insulate the US economy from fluctuations in fossil fueled energy prices.

FHFA’s previous ruling has directly affected my community, stalling out energy efficiency programs here in Boulder, CO.  Rather than effectively banning these programs, I encourage the FHFA to work with the building retrofit industry and the state and local governments which have instituted these programs to develop guidelines which ensure the most cost effective use of PACE financing, including the use of before and after energy audits, and other energy efficiency retrofit best practices.

Climate Denial Instruction In Schools

Corporate interests are pushing a model bill in many states that would require schools to teach climate change denial.  It sounds creepily reminiscent of the creationism/evolution mess from a few years ago.  Except with the fossil fuel industry instead of the religious right behind it.  Gah.

Open Climate Science Course

The University of Chicago has created an Open Courseware style Climate Science 101, with videos of the lectures and self-assessment materials online.  It’s aimed at non-science undergraduates.  If you, or someone you know, want to get a little  more in depth knowledge about climate science on their own time, it’s a great resource.

Where Christmas Lights Go to Be Re-Born

In Guangdong there’s a small town that specializes in recycling Christmas lights.  They chip the lights into mm sized bits, and then use a modified sluicebox (a vibrating inclined water table) to separate the brass and copper from the glass, plastic and rubber by density.  All of these bits are then re-used in other products.  The entire process would be uneconomical in the US, because our labor is too expensive, and there’s no market here for plastic scrap.