A modern windmill is pretty fantastic. Blades half as long as a football field slowly rotate around a hub to generate an astonishing three megawatts of electricity. Over a year, that’s about as potent as twelve-thousand barrels of oil.

All windmills get their energy from slowing down the wind a bit, capturing energy as rotational force. To generate much energy, you need many windmills distributed regularly where the wind blows. Almost all of the investment and cost is upfront–during the manufacturing, placement and wiring up of the mills. This is the opposite of a coal-fired plant, where most of the lifetime costs are buying up fuel to run the plant. Once you’ve built and placed your wind farm, so long as there is wind, you’re basically generating electricity for free.

This actually amplifies the uncertainty of investing in wind power. Building a coal power plant costs less (per megawatt) upfront. And the plant will reliably produce a certain amount of energy, so long as you buy coal. If you can’t count on the wind blowing steadily for decades, the much higher starting costs seem scarier and scarier.

Where you build your wind farm really matters. You want some place close to where people want to buy energy and where the wind is totally consistent, where it blows the same speed every day. Here’s where technological advances are really helping: Climate models and detailed records going back decades help us pinpoint where the winds are the best, along with where we think the wind will be the best in the future.

Wind’s energy comes from differences in pressure. Sunlight hits the atmosphere, heating it. Then its gas molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) get jittery from that solar energy, bouncing around more and increasing the local pressure. They start to move en masse, seeking lower pressure points in the atmosphere. Gravity from the sun, the moon, and the earth all tug, deflecting their course. The molecules of gas in the atmosphere also feel the planet turning beneath them. All of this together makes up the wind.

The rub is, all of the pollutants we’ve added to the atmosphere are changing how the atmosphere interacts with sunlight in relatively unpredictable ways. (This is global warming or climate change.) So, where the wind blows now might not be where the wind will blow in a few decades. Our continued belching of greenhouse gases makes building a wind farm riskier, and therefore less attractive, than building a fossil fuel plant.

For now, we could use better transmission lines to connect Midwestern wind farms with major American cities. And we can improve our wind prediction tech–including new systems that account for climate change–to take some of the risk out. But boy, talk about your screwy logic. The things prompting our desire for alternative energy–climate change, pollutants–are what make wind power, by itself, an unlikely candidate to replace fossil fuels as our major energy source.

(For more, here’s a comprehensive technical report on wind power.)

The “mercury vapor” that fluorescent bulbs require is quite toxic. While new compact fluorescent bulbs are voluntarily limited to five milligrams of mercury each, as little as a tenth of a milligram per square yard will make you seriously ill. Shaking hands, drooling, irritability, memory loss, depression, weakness—sounds like fun. And that’s what happens to adults; kids can be permanently injured by mercury exposure. If you break one of these bulbs in your house—and think of all the times a bulb breaks—the current advice is to open a window and run, not to return for at least 15 minutes. Whereas if it’s a traditional bulb, you grab a broom and screw in a new one.

And even if you manage to not accidentally dump hazardous waste in your living room, what do you do with a fluorescent bulb when it just plain wears out? Most places cannot recycle fluorescent tubes.

There is another. LED (light emitting diodes) have a similar energy efficiency to fluorescent bulbs with a far friendlier environmental impact. In the least, they involve no mercury.

Great! Why not use them everywhere? Huge expense. Most LEDs are based upon a substrate of sapphire. Urk. Requiring a precious stone means LED lightbulbs are about twenty times more expensive than traditional lightbulbs.

Enter some clever researchers at Purdue University:

The Purdue researchers have solved this problem by developing a technique to create LEDs on low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers, said Mark H. Oliver, a graduate student in materials engineering who is working with Sands.

(Who would think something good could come from Indiana?)

Replacing the sapphire with silicon (made from sand) makes the bulbs fantastically cheaper. Good work people. Expect the cheaper, environmentally sound and energy efficient bulbs in stores in about two years.

Former Vice President Al Gore, seeking to shake up an energy debate that is focused mostly on drilling, challenged the United States to shift its entire electricity sector to carbon-free wind, solar and geothermal power within 10 years, and use that power to fuel a new fleet of electric vehicles.

Can it be done?

To answer that, let’s get to know our fossil fuels by rewinding to the Carboniferous era. Pangaea has just come together, with the fusing of the Northern and Southern super continents. Dropping sea levels have generated many new swampland real estate opportunities. Enter lignin, a chemical compound that has made wood hard for 350 million years.

These swamps were filled with plants held together by this funny, new substance—a substance too new to be eaten by microbes. Rather than degrade, the remains of lignin-baring plants soon filled swamps (much like how we’ve filled the oceans with plastic grocery bags).

Lignin, like most things in life, is made up of long chains of carbon atoms. All of this carbon-containing waste built up, becoming buried over hundreds of millions of years before bacteria evolved to eat lignin. And free oxygen didn’t reach this material, either, so those untouched hydrocarbon chains entombed deep in rock became coal. Similarly, algae buried under the ocean floor, without oxygen, eventually becomes oil and natural gas.

Convert that story to hard numbers: All of the fossil fuel consumed in 1997 represented over 400 years of the total plant and animal growth on the ancient planet Earth.

Almost all living systems eventually come back to energy from the sun. But that fact has its own astounding ratio: It took a half-millennium of solar energy capture by all of the living things to generate the energy we typically consume in a single year.

Those ratios are alarming, but they also make fossil fuels’ case. The upsides are so attractive: density (huge amounts of energy in small volumes/masses), stability (won’t lose much energy during storage or transport), and usability (fossil-fueled machines are far less complex than virtually any other power source).

All of the alternatives available to humanity are, in some way or another (complexity, initial investments, geography, distribution), inferior to fossil fuels. So when we consider ending our use of fossil fuels, the combination of alternatives we settle upon must match or exceed these properties–or we must adjust our lifestyles to reflect the inherent inferiority of the non-carbon fuel sources.

Now, in the twilight of fossil fuels, we have a shot at building such a combination. We can take the last remaining supplies of carbon fuels and build the networks of solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear power plants neccesary. Or we can accept that in the future–the near future–our lives will be far less rich than they are now.

So starts a new series here on Dear Science, where I’ll be reviewing some of the science behind wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy. I’ve already covered nuclear power, the unwelcome (by some) member of the carbon-free energy club.

“Customer: It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it?

Owner: Finest in the district!

Customer: (annoyed) Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

Owner: Well, it’s so clean, sir!

Customer: It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese….”

What happens to biodegradable trash in a landfill?

Entombed deeply in a landfill, your biodegradable trash is forced to degrade without oxygen, creating copious amounts of methane gas. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, far worse than carbon dioxide. If you’re sending something to a landfill, it’s better for the planet if it never degrades.

A landfill is intended to be a place without time, where trash is meant to stay isolated from the surrounding air, water, and soil—somewhat like the Republican plan for America, through immigration reform (a completely sealed USA). Degrading isn’t in the plan; it happens anyway, just in a different way.

When shopping, I’m always astonished to find packaging or products loudly proclaiming their biodegradability. For some products, like anything that goes down the drain, this can really matter. Take detergents and soaps, for example. The better they biodegrade, the happier you make your sewage treatment plant.

But non-recyclable packaging boasting it’s biodegradability? Not so hot. About the only circumstance this really helps is with litter.

In the triad, it’s reduce, reuse and then recycle. Buy less crap. For every bag of garbage you put on the curb, several bags of industrial waste have already been landfilled making the crap you’re now throwing out.

W’s August of 2001 speech on the evils of embryonic stem cells was an early classic of his presidency, one of the first indications of his deciderish, rather than uniter-not-a-divider, tendencies. All his favorite hobbies were covered–simpleminded and peevish sanctimony, rigid adherence to a bizarre and inconsistently absolutist moral code, and disinterest in any sort of logical, thoughtful or informed critique. In short, it was a delightful preview of the following eight years.

Bush’s policy was to deny federal funding for any research on new embryonic stem cell lines created after August of 2001. This wasn’t a ban. Nor was it a system of regulations, well thought out or idiotic. Research involving any embryonic stem cell line created before August of 2001, all requiring the destruction of an embryo? Fine. Dandy. Not murder. Moral, according to Bush. On a line after August 2001? Murder, as it involves the destruction of an embryo–a murder good decent American taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to participate in, even indirectly.

Put another way: Under the Bush policy, if you have money you can do whatever you damn well please. Commission embryos for the sole purpose of destroying them? No problem. Pay women for their eggs? Sure. Create a jello-mold out of human embryo? If you have the cash, you can do it.

Federal funding of contentious research buys you, the public, the right to set rules and demand oversight. Ask the animal rights activists. Instead of banning federal funding for animal research, they focused on demanding massive regulation and oversight. Killing a mouse in a research lab involves a prodigious amount of paperwork, hours of training and going in front of a panel of vets to explain yourself. Even if your research is privately funded, most non-federal grants require you to follow the federal grant rules. Bush’s innovative policy of “do what you want, just not with our dollars” successfully shoved the most ethically contentious work out of the public’s eye and into the shadows.

Well, weren’t some embryos saved? Hundreds of thousands of fertilized embryos are sitting in cryogenic storage at in-vitro fertilization clinics around the country, largely because it is much more difficult to freeze unfertilized human eggs. Therefore, eggs collected for fertility treatment are typically fertilized with sperm, allowed to develop for a few days into a very young embryo and then frozen. The overwhelming majority of these embryos will eventually be destroyed, after the couple has decided they want no more children and the insurance stops paying for storage.

If you really believe that human life begins when the egg fuses with the sperm–as Bush’s new family planning policy asserts–this is the worst imaginable outcome. At least with federally funded embryonic stem cell research, a few of these embryos destined for destruction could be used to generate new embryonic stem cell lines, advancing medical science and potentially improving human health.

(I think calling an embryo at this stage a human being is a serious stretch of even the most generous definition of what makes a human. These embryos have only developed for a few days, to somewhere around 100 cells. They are not yet individuals. If you cut the embryo in half, you get twins; smash two together, and you get a chimera. Not a single organ has developed, not a drop of blood, not the heart, not a blood vessel, not a single brain cell. An embryo at this point is literally an undistinguished clump of two different kinds of cells. The essense of humanity and human life seems more to me than sets of chromosmes coming together.)

The iPS cell breakthrough this fall seemed to change the game. Simply by adding four genes, we could convert most any adult cell into something that resembled an embryonic stem cell. If we can turn skin cells or swabbed cheek cells into something like an embryonic stem cell, we no longer need to bother with destroying embryos. Right? Discussion of stem cell policy quietly dwindled. The president appeared to be a forward thinking visionary, saving thousands of embryos from doom in the name of science.

Well did he? No.

From a social conservative’s point of view, Bush’s policies were and are a total fiasco. Not a single embryo is saved from ultimate destruction, as the IVF industry remains without serious regulation. By delaying research, human health was harmed. An opportunity for a serious discussion and enduring compromise on both fertility treatments and stem cell research was bypassed for political expediency.

The moment was there, and we had some decent models to apply to this ethical quandary. Take the example of German IVF clinics, where the number of embryos generated and stored per couple is strictly regulated, vastly reducing the number of excess embryos to be eventually destroyed. A slightly more liberal position would be to absolutely prohibit the sale or purchase of human embryos, only allowing donation much like we do with solid organ donation today. Nor did we discuss why there is such a need for fertility treatments–environmental degredation and the costs of having a child delaying pregnancy.

Even from a scientist’s point of view, this was a total fiasco—far worse than an outright ban. At least with a complete ban, those with private funding sources, such as endowments, would not be at such an advantage. All efforts could focus on alternatives. Japan had a near total ban on embryonic stem cell research; iPS cells were developed in Japan.

Whatever you think of the status of an early embryo, the Bush policies were a disaster–achieving the neither the desires of the infirmed seeking therapy nor the social conservatives seeking protection of very early embryos. When considering the long lasting societal costs of demonizing scientists, medical research, patient advocates and rational discussion, the whole situation becomes  emblematic of the entire contemptible George W Bush presidency.

Ever since the start of the mortgage crisis–whose origins and effects can be revisited at this post, or on this podcast–I’ve been waiting for the great taxpayer-fueled bailout to begin.

The bailout of Bear Stearns was a mere appetizer to the cliff we’re falling over now:

Government efforts to support mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac drew a restrained response from investors today, with the stock prices of the two companies rising only modestly after last week’s steep collapse, but by midday investors turned to a new target of the credit crisis: banks.

To recap briefly:
1. The investment banks and mortgage markets were effectively deregulated through the 1990’s and 2000’s…

2. …allowing the creation of mortgage backed securities…

3. …that were increasingly backed by shoddier and shoddier mortgages…

4. …making what was once one of the most stable and socially productive investments both incredibly risky and socially catastrophic, with no way for investors really know if and when the transition happened…

5. …leaving the investment banks, mortgage companies, regular banks and even the government sponsored enterprises on the precipice of catastrophic failure in a way not seen since the Depression, when these institutions were last similarly deregulated.

Market theory would tell us the government should not intervene–these institutions should be allowed to fail, the unwise investments allowed to collapse and the money to be lost. At the last height of Laissez-faire economic policy, in the 1920’s, that was the plan. The institutions were allowed to collapse one-by-one, causing the Great Depression.

That didn’t work out so well. In the 1930’s, sifting through the rubble of the US economy, the next plan was regulation. If we think of modern financials as being like junk food–made of many ingredients, intrinsically difficult to discern–knowing the providence of the starting materials really matters. Many of the New Deal regulations did just that–demanding that companies report honestly and completely on their health, that mortgages be attached to information about the borrower indicating an ability to pay and so on.

By making information about investments as honest, comprehensive and accessible, through laws and oversight, investors could avoid the most questionable of financial junk food and thus get fat on the rest. If they did pour money into something obviously dubious, it was far easier to allow the market to do its job, and make the investments as valueless as they had appeared to be. You could easily tell it was crap before you put your money in. You lose it, it’s your loss.

These were the regulations written out of existence, or circumvented, in the years leading up to the present crisis.

Like with junk food, the companies and people doing the processing make most of the profit–making the producers (the investors) and the consumers (the borrowers) pay dearly for participation in the market–all while whining they cannot afford things like complete and honest information about what they are selling. Loan agents eventually stopped checking income, employment, the value of the property or the credit history of the borrower, because the mortgage companies stopped asking the loan agents to collect this information, because the investment banks buying up these loans stopped asking as well. The investors buying from the banks didn’t really care, as the bond agencies gave the blended investments the highest ratings. The rating agencies, increasingly deregulated, didn’t bother asking for this information either. Without it, it was impossible to predict how the loans would perform. They guessed. They were wrong.

Even though only a small percentage of the borrowers failed to make their payments, without information to tell bad from the good investors became spooked. If the rating agencies couldn’t tell the value, how could an investor? The lenders rapidly pulled out of the market. First to fail were the investment banks, stuck with loans they could no longer sell to investors–even if the loans were good. Bear Stearns, such a bank, quickly grabbed a handout from you and I, the taxpayers. Next, the mortgage companies and their related banks start to wobble. Indymac just collapsed, and again the taxpayers are asked to reach into their wallets and pay off the FDIC guarantees.

Which brings us to the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. These are Government Sponsored Enterprises that were created to perform a basic and seemingly unavoidably safe and profitable task: Buy up high quality mortgage loans from banks and package them as securities that can be sold to investors at a profit. In essence, this is the honest version of what all the crooked private companies were doing–in which each loan is carefully vetted and matched to the borrowers ability to pay and the honest valuation of the property. These companies are of vast importance to the entire housing market, allowing banks to make far more mortgages than would be possible if each loan had to stay at the originating bank and not be resold. In the wake of the crooked mortgage-backed securities, investors have stopped buying the Freddie Mac and Fannie May mortgage-backed securities. With no investor money coming in, they can no longer buy up loans. In steps us again, the taxpayers. We’ve now committed our tax dollars to buy up mortgages–money we are ultimately borrowing from the Chinese.

These bailouts aren’t helping homeowners. The dishonest crooks–the loan agents, the investment banks, the rating agencies–are having their asses saved with our tax dollars. And, this is happening without any serious re-regulation, without a strong requirement for honesty and clarity on the financial industry’s part. From any perspective, this is the worst outcome, virtually guaranteeing another huge bailout in a few years. With no concequences, and so many of those well positioned getting filthy rich off the fiasco, why not do it again, and again, and again?

If we force those who demanded deregulation in the financial industry, who took advantage of the deregulation to dupe others, into an honest position, we’d let them all fail, dragging them out of their windows to the hard streets below, to live under overpasses and eat pet food like their parents and grandparents were forced to do during the last time they ran us all off the cliff. We’re too cowardly to do it and will likely pay an even harsher collective price thanks to this cowardice. We’re too frightened to let them fail, and suffer as well. I’m frightened of what the collapse will bring. Our political leadership, long greased with Wall Street money, won’t even demand rules that will truly complicate such thievery in the future. You should be furious.

Let’s look at the data, thanks to a recently published article in PLoS Medicine surveying drug usage worldwide. How do we rank, next to the decadent drug-tolerant nations of the world. Hell, let’s make it easy and compare ourselves to the Netherlands. With all we’ve spent and sacrificed, we’ll certainly beat the Dutch, with their hash-bar loving ways.

First the legal drugs:

Ah, we can clearly see the perfidious Dutch are approximately as drunk as we are–up there with such unsavories as the Ukrainians and Germans. We tried prohibition and gave up. See what it did?

At least we show some leadership on the whole tobacco issue. Nothing more American than a Southern farm pumping out the good leaf.

Now on to the illicit.

Ahem. Well, despite pot being illegal in the US, and defacto legalized in the Netherlands, we end up at least trying pot at twice the rate. Certainly our draconian drug policies should at least keep hard drugs away from good and decent Americans.

Ahem. The taste of hard-fought and sweet success.

Snark aside, I think this is a quite good survey. But, we should be cautious before drawing too many causal connections.

The methodology seems quite solid, with the same survey used in each country–keeping comparisons between countries meaningful. Even the structure of the interview was shared between nations. Bilingual supervisors of the study were used for every country that participated. This in contrast to many similar studies that merely aggregate many individual surveys specific to a given nation–surveys that can differ dramatically in the both the questions asked and how the questions were asked. I’d be more apt to believe the comparisons in this study than the prior.

By asking “have you ever used,” the stigma threshold is also probably reduced–leading to more accurate responses. This is mostly speculation on my part, so feel free to disagree. On the converse, the rates of regular drug usage are probably quite different from this most lenient standard.

So far as inferences, there certainly was no correlation between the severity of a country’s drug laws and rates of drug usage. If drug laws did work, we’d at least expect some negative corrolation; while this doesn’t prove drug law are ineffective, it doesn’t really support the notion at all.

Some of the rates went against my expectations–Don’t the French supposedly smoke like chimneys? Neat.

Congratulations on your last day at Microsoft and welcome to the world of biomedical research!

Everyone I know who endured a ‘billg’ review agrees—you’re apparently a bit of an ass. Quick to question and call bullshit, to point out errors or inconsistency, and to demand the best, willing to yell if yelling is needed.

Excellent! We need an ass working in public health right now–right here in the United States. Peter J. Hotez makes the case in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases:

In 1962, an estimated 40 million Americans lived in poverty, almost one-quarter of the US population. Today, the poverty rate in the US is roughly half of what it was when The Other America was first published, however, the total number of people living in poverty remains about the same. We now recognize that this group of 36.5 million impoverished Americans is at higher risk for heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases compared to the rest of the US population. However, it is not well known that just as the poorest people in the low-income countries of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America have the highest rates of the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), there is evidence to suggest that large numbers of the poorest Americans living in the US also suffer from some of these unique infections.

Like what? Hookworm–causing malnutrition and severe anemia–is assumed to be eliminated in the South. Why assumed? We stopped looking for it in 1970. The last study completed showed the disease still exists. Why stop looking? “…because they only occur among impoverished people and mostly underrepresented minorities, I believe that there has been a lack of political will to study the problem, so that these diseases of poverty have been allowed to simply remain neglected,” notes Dr. Hotez.

Another?

Imagine this Toxocariasis worm slowly chewing its way through your body–migrating through your skin, causing horrible itching, through your lungs, causing horrible asthma, and even across your eye.

We know that playgrounds in poor cities are full of toxocariasis eggs. In Bridgeport and New Haven Connecticut around 10% of children have evidence of current or past infection with these guys. Ten percent!

Another? Cysticercosis tapeworms are surprisingly common, particularly among Hispanics.

This tapeworm, in the process of smashing the brain, can cause seizures; in certain Los Angeles hospitals about 10% of seizures are caused by cysticercosis.

I’ll let Dr. Hotez finish up for me:

We need to begin erasing these horrific health disparities by stepping up measures to conduct active and national-scale surveillance for soil-transmitted helminth infections, especially toxocariasis, as well as cysticercosis and congenital toxoplasmosis. In addition, based on data suggesting that the NTDs cutaneous leishmaniasis, ratborne leptospirosis and hantavirus infection, dengue fever, brucellosis, tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium bovis, trichomoniasis, and louse-borne trench fever are emerging among the poor in the US, it is imperative that we address these conditions as well…

The fact that reliable numbers on the actual prevalence of the NTDs are simply not available is reflective of their neglected status, and their disproportionate impact on minorities and poor people. There is an urgent need to support studies that (1) assess the disease burden resulting from the NTDs in the United States and (2) identify the minority populations at greatest risk, and then to (3) identify simple and cost-effective public health solutions. Accordingly, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases is pleased to consider and review articles on this vitally important topic. There are no excuses for allowing such glaring health disparities to persist in one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

We don’t like hard realities in the United States. We don’t like thinking of ourselves as in the same category as the poorest nations on the planet. When it comes to horrific diseases, the poor in the United States might be as burdened as the poorest around the world. Human beings with these diseases cannot study, cannot develop fully, cannot reach their full potential. To not even bother looking, to willfully ignore the problem is deeply immoral.

We need an ass to stand up and demand we find out the true extent of this problem, demand we accept reality so that we can start to fix it. BillG, you are just than man for the job. Have at it!

With Sincerity,
Jonathan Golob

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Enjoying your recently expanded rights under the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution? Wait, let me adjust that quote above to reflect the Roberts-court interpretation:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Ahh, with those pesky commas out of the way, we can finally get down to business and discuss the meaning of your new rights–the only rights we’re likely to see expanded in our lifetimes.

If you get a firearm:

1. You have a reasonable chance of shooting yourself:
Between June 1, 1992, to May 31, 1994 about 34,485 accidentally injured themselves non-fatally with a firearm. This averages out to about 18,000 non-fatal injuries a year.

2. If you manage to not shoot yourself, you have a reasonable chance of harming yourself with the gun anyways:
Not counting those who shot themselves, about sixteen-thousand people injury themselves with firearms each year in the United States sufficiently to require a visit to the emergency room. Usually these injuries were the result of the routine handling of firearms, with 43% from recoil.

3. About half of children unintentionally shot–don’t worry, the majority of children intentionally shot are minorities–are shot in their own homes, with their parents own gun. Another 40% are shot in the house of a friend or relative. To those of you working through the math, 90% of children injured by firearms are injured by a parent, relative or friend’s gun.

4. Somewhere between 2% and 12% of children live in a home with a firearm.
Four practices, in combination, can dramatically reduce the risk of these children injuring themselves with the household’s firearm:
1. Store the gun unloaded.
2. Store the gun away from the ammo.
3. Lock up the firearm.
4. Lock up the ammo.

5. Programs that teach children gun safety–like the NRA Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program–do not decrease the chance that young children will handle or attempt to fire a handgun they stumble upon.

Have fun! Try to not to blast away too many of your children, your neighbors or yourself–even if is your Constitutional right.