100 Thousand!

The FIXOAHU blog has reached 100,000 all time visits today. That's way more than the readers of my books and scientific articles.

Mahalo, Thank You, Efharisto for reading my opinions from time to time.

Panel Discussion on Rail at University of Hawaii-Manoa

• Rail opponents UH Professors Randall Roth (Law) and Panos Prevedouros (Engineering)
• Rail proponents Dan Grabauskas, CEO of HART and Ivan Lui-Kwan, HART Board Member

Here's an independent "post-debate" assessment:

Dr. Prevedouros,

Thank you immensely for your participation in the April 9 rail debate at UH-Manoa.  There is no doubt that you and Professor Roth prevailed.  You both showed the audience and Daniel Grabauskas and Ivan Lui-Kwan that the case against rail is very powerful.

It would be ideal if the truth about rail could continue to be made known to the public, many of whom voted to approve steel wheels on steel rail without really understanding the downsides of rail.  The more people learn the whole truth about rail, the more ready they could become to rise up and demand that the persons responsible for foisting rail on the public be held accountable when it becomes apparent that the billions spent on this scheme have irretrievably gone into a gigantic "black hole."  I would hate to see the culprits simply ride off into the sunset.

Again, many thanks for your invaluable efforts to expose the monumental steel wheels blunder.

K. Hirata

Big Rooftop Solar Panels Make Sense in Hawaii - Without Any Subsidies!

Question: Does $150,000 installed cost for approximately 45 KW make sense?

Answer: Yes, but only in Honolulu.

Explanation: There’s a lot involved, so off to Hawaii Reporter for the full article.

Want a Fine Electric Car? Not in Hawaii.

The Tesla S is a fine EV, comparable to a BMW 5 series or a Mercedes S class.  Tesla argues that their model S can also be cheaper than its competitors. It has developed a calculator to prove it, based on location, incentives, fuel and electricity prices, and owner annual mileage.

I looked into the Tesla S and made some calculations. A couple of months ago I mentioned on the Rick Hamada Program on KHVH that my estimates indicated that in Hawaii if I was choosing between a $50,000 Tesla S and a $50,000 BMW 528i,  I should buy the BMW. (Cars were optioned so that with EV incentives they came with approximately the same "out the door" cost.)

This is the outcome of outrageous electricity prices which, thanks to renewable energy mandates and meddling politicians who pick winners (for their own self-interests,) are continuously escalating,

As you can see below, the true cost to own a base Tesla S in Hawaii is 17% more than California and 34% more than Colorado (excluding applicable taxes, insurance and registration differences, etc.)

The Lack of New Warming Is a Surprise -- Recall Al Gore!

These two graphs from a major article in The Economist (see source below) clearly indicate that:

1.  Global Warming occurred between 1985 and 1998, but Earth's temp has remained fairly steady for 15 years now!
2. The predictions of Global Warming models are incorrect.
3. The yellow lines indicate the year when Al Gore and IPCC received the Nobel Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" (the bold is mine.)

Global Warming alarmism has caused the inappropriate issuance of two Nobel Prizes (Gore and Obama) and the unnecessary brainwashing of millions of young children at their schools.  Global Warming alarmism gave more support to "environmentalists" whose most prominent successes are to pick the wrong winners (e.g., cost ineffective renewables and rail systems) and make life more expensive in first world populations, and more difficult to rise out of poverty for third world populations.

Now The Economist from Europe, where the core support of Global Warming alarmism is located, has provided some reasonable perspective which shows that:

• There is no denying that some Global Warming (GW) has taken place.
• GW has remained stable for at least a decade.
• Models used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predict the wrong trend.
• GW did not increase despite the billions of tons of anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 emissions
• Arctic ice does melt to unusual levels in the summer months but no appreciable sea level rise has been recorded.
• Nobody knows what the real effects of an increasingly less possible GW are.

The main article of The Economist is titled Climate science: A sensitive matter -- Here are a few interesting quotes from this comprehensive article:

• "Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise."
• "The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now."
• Despite all the work on [the planet's] sensitivity [to carbon dioxide emissions,] no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C.

Three days later The Economist added a short article to calm down Europe's socialists and Obama-like pro carbon taxation politicians (see last bullet below). These politicians need to keep people focused on secondary problems like the GW, because primary problems such as huge budget deficits and problematic pension and health care systems cannot be addressed in the socialist realm of thought. The short article is titled Global warming: Apocalypse perhaps a little later. Exact quotes below. The bold section is mine.

• The science that points towards a sensitivity lower than models have previously predicted is still tentative. The error bars are still there. The risk of severe warming—an increase of 3°C, say—though diminished, remains real.
• Bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases. (Thank you for this. I am sorry to inform you that California, Hawaii, The Blue Planet Foundation and several "environmentalists" do not subscribe to reason, cost-effectiveness analysis or The Economist.)
• Good policies—strategies for adapting to higher sea levels and changing weather patterns, investment in agricultural resilience, research into fossil-fuel-free ways of generating and storing energy—are wise precautions even in a world where sensitivity is low.
• Put a price on carbon and ensure that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come. 

I enjoy The Economist for its variety of subjects, reasonable depth of analysis and humor.  I'm sorry, humour. I was disappointed that nowhere did they ask for a recall of Al Gore's and IPCC's Nobel. The two shared a Nobel Prize in 2007.

Hawaii Government Cannot Perform Basic Government Functions

Inspections is a very basic function of government. Inspections minimize errors and fraud.

On March 2013 Hawaii State Auditor reported on the Hawaii's Measurement Standards Branch.

The three bullets below are highlights of the auditor's summary. The third bullet is a true Jay Leno joke. But this one is real.

• The Measurement Standards Branch is tasked with enforcing the U.S. standards for weights and measures. Because of budget shortfalls since FY2010, the branch experienced a significant decline in the number of inspector positions. Currently, six of the branch’s 11 positions remain vacant, and we found that the branch’s two remaining inspectors can only perform eight of the branch’s 15 key regulatory functions.

• Inspections of measuring devices have fallen significantly. From FY2007 to FY2009, the branch inspected an average of 21% of small scales, 10% of medium scales, and 31% of gas pumps registered in the state. However, from FY2010 to FY2012, the branch inspected an average of only 2.6% of the small scales, less than 1% of medium scales, and 6.7% of the gas pumps registered in the state. Moreover, enforcement functions on the neighbor islands and packaging and labeling inspections throughout the state have ceased as of 2009.

• Recognizing these deficiencies, the 2012 Legislature appropriated $420,000 to restore a program manager and three new inspector positions. Almost a year later, the branch has been unable to fill these positions because the acting administrator has not addressed questions raised by the department’s personnel office regarding the program manager position. According to the acting administrator, the inspector positions cannot be filled until a program manager is hired to develop a training program. As a result, the branch is unable to resume its inspection duties or fulfill its responsibilities.

 

Local and International Threats to Hawaii's Sustainability

Earthquakes, Energy Supply, Tsunamis, Taxes and ... Politicians. A dozen long term threats to Hawaii's sustainability are explained in this installment of my O'lelo show PANOS 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

Wind Power (DOWN), Natural Gas (WAY UP)

Forecast Dims for Future Growth in Wind Power

• "Even though total wind power capacity grew by 30 percent last year, with 13,000 megawatts in new wind turbines, the actual portion of our electricity coming from wind energy did not increase proportionally. "
• This is a huge understatement because next paragraph says: "But overall, wind power contributed only about 3.5% of all the electricity generated in the U.S. last year, up from 2.9% of the share in 2011."
• +30% in wind installations resulted in US wind power change from 2.9% to 3.5% a 0.6% gain.  NUTS!

Japan Just Opened Up a Whole New Source for Fossil Fuels

• The stores of offshore methane clathrates around Japan, says the BBC, are estimated at around 1.1 trillion cubic meters of the mix, enough to supply “more than a decade of Japan’s gas consumption.”
• The United States Geological Survey, says The Washington Post, estimates that gas hydrates worldwide “could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”
• Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In case I am not mistaken, Hawaii is surrounded by ocean ...

Honolulu Rail: A Textbook Case Of Poor Planning, Denial And Diversion

I sent this article to all elected officials in Honolulu's and Hawaii's government.
Mahalo to Honolulu Civil Beat for hosting my article.

This is an important article of national and local significance.
Honolulu's only daily, the Star Advertiser, would not publish it.
They have not published anything I have submitted since 2009.
Please show them that information cannot be suppressed.
Forward and share it widely.

I added this postscript: Now as a responsible pro-rail politician, go ahead and deny all these as not applicable to Honolulu. But then:

• The project is about three years late.
• It has incurred tens of millions of dollars in penalties.
• There was a costly (over $150 Million mistake at the airport alignment) for which no one was punished or paid for it.
• The project violated state law and was stopped.
• Ansaldo is the most unreliable of all major rail manufacturers. But this was Honolulu's choice.
• Ansaldo's parent, Finmecannica is in financial trouble and for years it's been trying to jettison Ansaldo. It will.
  
• HART is a clueless board. Imagine the same people as the board of Boeing or Hawaiian Air. Worse than useless.
• City erected a bunch of columns in the middle of (agricultural) land for which it has no ownership, deed or guarantee.
• The project budget is sored up with TheBus capital funds and city Sewer Fund guarantees. This will play out just fine...
• Do you recall the purchase of hundreds of tons of steel rails which are now properly rusting at Barbers Point Harbor?
• (I just recalled all these in 10 minutes. There is more. All these occurred with YOUR approval and consent.)

And

• As of mid-March 2013 the project is less than 3% constructed!
• Federal court appeal has been filled.
•  Several eminent domain suits or class action suit are likely.