Conservationists Push Back Against Desalination in California

Wow.  We have become so blind by our greatness.  This sentence really gets me:

California is in the process of building a series of massive ocean desalination plants on a scale not seen before in the United States.

The desalination plant will produce 50 million gallons of drinking water.  A "scale not seen before in the United States".  They say this like since the USA has never built anything this big it must be REALLY BIG.

But let's look at other countries.  Especially Saudi Arabia which has been doing desalination for decades.  This article mentions that presently, Saudi Arabia uses desalination to produce what calculates out to 1.1 TRILLION GALLONS per day.

The desalination we plan on doing here in the USA is PEANUTS.

Here's the video about the Carlsbad, CA desalination plant:

Thieves steal $400,000 worth of California walnuts

This is about the fourth story I've run across about this going on.  I reported on the theft of walnuts earlier.

In one of the biggest heists to hit the booming industry, bandits made off with 140,000 pounds of walnuts worth $400,000 Sunday in Escalon, a city just north of Modesto.

“It was just brazen,” said Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau Federation. “They took a massive amount -- several truck loads. We need to find these folks.”

The nuts were taken from GoldenRiver Orchards, a grower and processor established in 1912. The company declined to comment.

California parents angry about school hands-on-knees policy

What an incredibly stupid idea.

The 'freeze position' has already been discontinued at one school in the Folsom Cordova District.

Parents said they are now fighting for what's right for their kids.

"My daughter is bent over and assumed this position. She could be like that for 10 minutes, until you get kids to bend over and freeze," said one parent during an interview with KXTV.

School officials, said it's supposed to calm kids down, make the walk back to class more orderly and prevent injuries.

So...walking back to class after recess is fraught with perils? Who are they kidding?

You Also Can't Keep Your Doctor

In the Leftist's zeal to "help the poor" they have sentenced this woman to death.  I hope they are happy.

So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive—but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.

Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

What happened to the president's promise, "You can keep your health plan"? Or to the promise that "You can keep your doctor"? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

I hope God has a special place in Hell for Leftist Ideology.  A place where the ideology will burn forever where everyone can gaze and watch it scream and writhe in the eternal pain it deserves. People will gaze horrified saying "did people really believe in that?"

Energy Dept. Seeks Company to Turn Sunshine Into Gasoline

I'm not sure why we would want to take food - that being the carbon dioxide - away from the plants.  But, ok.  Let's go with it.

Researchers have been working on this idea for some time, according to a 2007 press release from the Sandia lab. At that time, one of the researchers speculated that although a prototype of a device to carry out the chemical process was already under development, it was "a good 15 to 20 years away from being on the market."

You can follow the link to the 2007 press release here.

Using concentrated solar energy to reverse combustion, a research team from Sandia National Laboratories is building a prototype device intended to chemically “reenergize” carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using concentrated solar power. The carbon monoxide could then be used to make hydrogen or serve as a building block to synthesize a liquid combustible fuel, such as methanol or even gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

...

“Our overall objective with this prototype is to demonstrate the practicality of the CR5 concept and to determine how test results from small-scale testing can be expanded to work in real devices,” Miller says. “The design is conservative compared to what might eventually be developed.”

Diver says the prototype should be completed by early next year. He hand-built the precision device in a shop at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility and is now waiting on a few parts to finalize it. Initial tests will break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. That will be followed by tests that similarly break down carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and oxygen.

The idea is interesting, and looking on the web it looks like others have come up with the idea (follow this link)....but.  And there are two buts.

The first kicker is the conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is for the most part, thrown away and the hydrogen is used with a Fischer-Tropsch reactor to convert the hydrogen and carbon monoxide to usable fuel.

At the present, there is no cheap or efficient way to convert the water to oxygen and hydrogen.  The near term solution - which is not a GREAT solution but relies on conventional technology - is to perform what is called a Shift Reaction.

You take some of your CO (carbon monoxide) combine it with water and  create hydrogen...and CO2 - carbon dioxide.  In essence, you put all that effort in converting the CO2 to CO, only to have to take half of your CO to convert it BACK to CO2 in order to get the amount of hydrogen you need to make the fuel.  That's the second but.

Just like for conventional refineries, the technology bumps into the scarcity of hydrogen.

California resident: ‘I was all for Obamacare’ until I got the bill

I would love to hear from others in CA that have experienced the sticker shock.

As Pam Kehaly, the president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, reported, she received a letter from one woman who saw her insurance rates rise by 50 percent due to Obamacare.

“She said, ‘I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,’ ” Ms. Kehaly said, in the Los Angeles Times.

...

Jennifer Harris, Fullerton resident, said she was shocked to receive a letter from her Health Net Inc. insurer that her plan — which costs $98 a month — was being dropped. The cheapest plan she said in the Los Angeles Times that she found is $238 a month.

“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” she said, in the report. “This increase is simply not affordable.”

Climate change pact signed by California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia

Climate Change Pact?  This is more like a suicide pact!  What utter incompetence and stupidity.  I am amazed at the complete idiocy of the people of these states/provinces.

Each state and the Canadian province promised to take roughly a dozen actions, including streamlining permits for solar and wind projects, better integrating the electric power grid, supporting more research on ocean acidification and expanding government purchases of electric vehicles.

"You are witnessing a historic small-but-powerful first step," California Gov. Jerry Brown said during the event, held at Cisco's San Francisco campus.

So, streamlining permits for wind probably means they will continue to ignore the endangered birds that are getting their heads chopped off from the turbine blades.