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Energy efficiency is often about numbers. Here are some that the Town Council of Portola Valley will consider at its Wednesday, Dec. 9, meeting in the Historic Schoolhouse.
■ Portola Valley ranks seventh of the 10 communities with the largest residential consumption of energy per household in the service area of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., according to Acterra, the Palo Alto-based environmental nonprofit. (Holding down first and second place are Atherton and Woodside, respectively.)
■ Portola Valley is eligible for $25,000 in state grant money for residential energy audits, enough to evaluate 150 homes. (This program also will evaluate 240 homes in Atherton and 180 in Woodside.)
■ Audited homes tend to reduce electricity use by 20 percent and natural gas use by 10 percent. If all 150 homes were audited, Portola Valley could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 184 metric tons.
The council will consider a resolution that would include authorizing Acterra to publicize and arrange the energy audits.
Field fee hike
The council will also hold a public hearing on a proposal to increase fees for the use of athletic fields. The increase would raise a total of $65,900 in 2010, up 62 percent from the $40,650 raised in 2009.
The proposal for 2010 would raise $84,300, still short of the council’s goal of having those who use the fields pay about half the $168,600 cost to maintain two ball fields and two soccer pitches.
A staff report included a 25 percent fee increase for 2011, but the council chose to consider that at a future meeting.
Given the unconstrained construction of over-sized (5-6+ thousand square foot “hummer homes” rising nearly 30 feet high) on small parcels (around a quarter acre or 10-12 thousand square feet lots), I’d be curious to see what Menlo Park’s residential energy consumption and carbon footprint is looking like these days. The City Council’s mouthing of environmental concern is overshadowed by the gross scale of residential development it actively encourages. This Council spends millions on a downtown plan that expresses great concern with ‘scale of development’ and yet allows the residential areas to be populated with elephantine structures better suited to Atherton’s multi-acre parcels (Atherton, by the way would never allow the Menlo Park scale of development on similar sized parcels).
I agree with Phil. The build-it-to-the-max mentality is increasing Menlo Park’s problem. The worst examples are oversized residential projecst are west of University. Most are spec houses. Certain current councilmembers were elected to help with the McMansion problem and address environmental concerns like this, but don’t have much to show.
The push for a large amount of additional commercial and mixed use development will greatly worsen Menlo Park’s problems overall. Even a zero-net additional project makes it harder for the entire city to reduce from 2000 or 1990 levels.
You have to look no further than Al Gore to realize that the draconian rules that the left wants to impose on you do not apply to the leftist elite.
According to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research TCPR), “Gore’s home consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year.” “Gore’s heated pool house alone uses more than $500 in electricity every month.”
TCPR shows “The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.”
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” website, states “Fly less. Air travel produces large amounts of emissions so reducing how much you fly by even one or two trips a year can reduce your emissions significantly.”
According to an article in Wired Magazine, “The resurrection of Al Gore” by Karen Breslau, the Gores racked up an “estimated 1 million miles in global air travel” which was “offset” by purchase of carbon credits. What is not mentioned is that Gore and Richard Sandor own the carbon credit industry.
Gore has been instrumental in passing various greenhouse gas legislation, both in America and abroad, which regulate private industry (When the capitalist market system starts working for us…). He has also been the front man for the global warming propaganda through misinformation, omission of facts, false scientific studies, his own television channel, and the mockumentary “An inconvenient truth”, (…get the information flows right…).
Although the majority of scientists rebut the “truths” presented by Gore and his global warming conspirators, and the recent informational leak proving that global warming “scientists” intentionally manufactured these “truths” by manipulating and falsifying data, they dismiss these facts ( …removing the distortions…) due to their financial interests in the carbon offset industry which will become mandatory under cap-and-trade (…paying attention to the incentives.)
With the release of this information, the majority of the public (74% according to Rasmussen poll) believe that scientists have falsified research data supporting global warming (climate change).
A Concerned Citizen (that you, Hank?), You’d do a lot more good for your cause if you stopped with the political attacks (Gore is SOOOO 2006) and focused on fact. Attacks like yours — liberal “hypocrites” and scientists “falsifying” data (what garbage) — are only blatant attempts to divert attention from the real issues that we need to focus on.
And by the way, what evidence do you have that supports your claim that “the majority of scientists rebut the “truths” presented by Gore and his global warming conspirators”?
Gore falsifies the record
Andrew Bolt
Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:
Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?
A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.
And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:
Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.
A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.
In fact, thrice denied:
These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.
In fact one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 – just a month ago. The emails which has liberals choking on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.
How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?
Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations.
Could those carefully vetted journalists who are allowed an audience with the Great Green Guru please – for once – confront him with his exaggerations, distortions, fake evidence and absurd predictions? I’ve done this myself over this issue, and can guarantee you will get a far funnier and more interesting reaction than another of his sermons. You may also get something rather closer to the truth.
“Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations.”
How does a time stamp of 2:41 pm thru 7:17 pm lead you to such a conclusion?
“Andrew Bolt” (that you, Hank?), So your “evidence” is provided by blogger. And Andrew Bolt? Shakespeare was right.
It is fascinating to watch the mainstream media in America duck (and/or make excuses for) the greatest scam in modern history: the “science” behind man-made global warming. Even more entertaining, and far more enlightening, is to follow the analyses by the experts in computer programming of the recently disclosed methods used by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) from the University of East Anglia.
Most commentators in the media have been talking about the “REM” statements in the purloined e-mails and computer codes from the CRU [i]. True believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), especially those in the mainstream and “scientific” media, are pooh-poohing such words as “tricks” or “hide the decline” as interoffice slang that had no real impact on how the science was conducted.
But the real action (and the evidence for chicanery) is in the computer code obtained from the CRU. Our own computer guru Marc Sheppard, writing for American Thinker here and here, was one of the first to offer an accurate diagnosis of this fraudulent method of computer programming. Analyzing the code, as Marc has indicated in his work, is a complex business. As he pleads in one article, “please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.”
For the layman readers of American Thinker, I want to explain in a simple manner what went on in the construction of one piece of the controversial programming.
The cornerstone of the evidence for global warming presented by Al Gore and the AGW crowd was a notorious graph that became known as “the hockey stick graph.” The graph is based on computer models that supposedly prove our planet has heated exponentially in the last half-century due to increasing amounts of man-made CO2 released into the atmosphere. Proponents further claim (and the computer models purport to show) that temperatures will continue to increase exponentially. The implication is that unless we drastically curtail human output of CO2, the “escalation” in temperature is going to get even worse even faster.
Turns out that these claims are absolutely false, and the computer models have been rigged.