A week and a half ago I sat in on the first Carbon Management Caucus meeting of the 81st Legislature and listened to a professor from Penn State tell legislators, their staffers, and a few intrepid members of the general public that “we need coal, coal isn’t going anywhere, in China they’re using tons and tons of coal and opening a new plant every week, why should we drop coal if China isn’t, coal coal coal” … you get the picture. I paraphrase, of course. But essentially, a new twist on the China cop-out.
Yes, China uses lots of coal. LOTS. And China’s strategic decision to go crazy on coal plants has done much for rural electrification and providing electricity to populations that have never had it before. But China’s commitment to coal is also slowly killing its people, and they’re aware of it.
Every 30 seconds a baby is born with physical defects in China, partly due to the country’s deteriorating environment, state media said, citing a senior family planning official.
The figure, reported by the China Daily in its weekend edition, adds up to almost 1.1 million in a year, or about seven percent of all births in the world’s most populous nation.
Let me add emphasis to the fact that this information was coming from China’s state media (let me repeat, China’s STATE MEDIA, as in, the official government-sanctioned voice approved by the ruling commmunist party). I find this particularly shocking because it is very likely that, from such a highly regulated source, even this jaw-dropping figure is under-reported.
The article continues,
North China’s coal-rich Shanxi province, a major source of toxic emissions from large-scale chemical industries, has recorded the highest rate of birth defects, the China Daily said in its weekend edition.
“The problem of birth defects is related to environmental pollution, especially in eight main coal zones,” said An Huanxiao, the director of Shanxi provincial family planning agency, according to the paper.
Pan Jianping, a professor of the Women and Child Health Research Office under Xi’an Jiaotong University, warned that the increasing rate of birth defects among Chinese infants would soon become a social problem.
So there you go. Let’s quit coal — do it for the babies.
Austin has long been a hub of the semiconductor industry because a generation ago, state legislators passed a package of incentives to lure silicon chip manufacturers to Texas. This created a high tech boom that has enriched Texans for over 20 years. But now thousands of those jobs are disappearing. The technologies involved to manufacture semiconductor chips and solar installations are very close, and business leaders believe that the semiconductor industry can actually be repurposed to produce solar. At the very least, the skill sets involved in one translate seamlessly into the other, so that individuals who lost semiconductor jobs are the perfect candidates for new solar jobs.
Hey Look! A press release from SEED Coalition and Public Citizen:
Senator Fraser was the first legislator to speak, proclaiming that this would be Texas’ solar session. Chairman of the Business and Commerce Committee, Fraser is well positioned to be an effective solar champion. As such, Fraser was particularly proud to forecast a sunny session for solar power. He joked that there are so many solar bills being filed this session, they are going to have to lay them all out at once and have a “solar day” where they can pick out the best bills and key components of each (this is the second time I’ve heard him say this though, so he may be serious. If so, you better bet I’ll be there with bells on!)
Senator Van de Putte was then called up to champion CPS Energy’s new distributed energy commitment and her own solar in schools bill, 
The promise by Obama to overturn Bush administration policies on energy is already being fulfilled. Today the Obama administration said it will cancel oil drilling leases on more than 100,000 acres in Utah and return $6 million in bids including those of activist Tim DeChristopher, 
I’m embarrassed.
We held a press conference yesterday in San Antonio at the Pearl Brewery, which is currently being renovated and, upon its completion, will have the largest solar array panel in the state of Texas. Installed by Austin’s own Meridian Solar, the new system is expected to generate 25% of the energy needs for the new building, which will hold condos, an Aveda hair salon, and an art gallery.
What we have developed now is far from the sea of reflective solar panels in that unforgettable scene from Gattaca. New technology consists of a flexible sheet-like material that can simply be laid on top of already existing structures, such as the roofs of buildings. This particular type of solar technology is a branch of material called Photovoltaics (“PV”) that was actually first used to power satellites back in the 1950’s. The thin-film PV works the same way to convert energy derived from light into electricity, is only a few millionths of a meter thick, and now can be readily and easily installed onto almost any building.
This week t
