ksiyoto

Friend of mine worked as a "bug trainer" for a company that did bioremediation. They would go to a site, dig up the soil, take it back to the lab, and look for bacteria eating the contaminant. Isolate the bacteria, multiply it at the lab, and take it back and inject it at the site, wait a year or two. They could find a bacteria breaking down pretty much any contaminant in any soil pH.

I hiked the John Muir Trail. If I ever see a Clif bar again in my life, I'm going to upchuck.

There's a TV tower in Eau Claire, WI that's been monitored for 35 years. Kills 3,200 per year.

I prefer the sign I saw in a bicycle shop: "the customer is always right up until the point they become unreasonable."

I scanned through the parts that are of interest to me, and I have a couple of comments:

1. You talk about the use of liquid hydrogen generated by renewables. I don't think the liquid hydrogen is really viable compared to compressed hydrogen (~7,500-10,000 psi) because the energy it takes to cool down the hydrogen to make it a liquid is just not worth the result. I would suggest that you support the creation of a network of compressed hydrogen fueling stations within X miles of a Y% of drivers. I read that GM estimated the cost of building such a network would only be around $12-15 billion maybe a decade ago.

2. The plan seems to be short on practical methods to get there. For example, I would suggest including a plan that says no new fossil fuel power plants can be constructed in a transmission region until the manure from 75% of the cows in the region is being utilized for manure to methane power generation. Two for one benefits - reduce fossil fuel consumption (most likely coal) for electrical generation, reduce again for hot water heating in dairies,and reduce methane emission from manure lagoons. As for the practicalities - utilities don't like to give up control of generation so they have thrown all sorts of obstacles in the way of manure to methane generation. I did a back of the envelope calculation that here in Wisconsin we could generate around 7% of our residential electricity needs through manure-methane generation from our cows, or about 2-3% of our total electrical needs. In terms of practicalities for manure-methane generation, feed-in tariffs would help, but as I understand it, these systems are economic for farms of 500 cows or more due to the high up-front engineering cost of these systems. If standardized plans could be developed and packaged, then we could make it economical for sub-500 cow operations.

3. I talked to my local electric co-op about what sort of per kwh return I would get for installing solar panels. They would only pay back the price they pay to an IOU for their electricity - something like 4 cents per kwh. Of course solar power is much more valuable power since it generally replaces very high cost peaking power. So requiring utilities to pay for solar at something approaching its true value would probably help that sector along.

4. Vehicles of the future are probably going to be battery electric for a 40 mile range (covers most daily driving, most efficient use of the available lithium instead of creating battery vehicles with a range of 200 miles that rarely go beyond 40 miles between charges) and then either CNG of hydrogen fueled hybrids.

5. The plan should be more specific on practicalities that demonstrate how much is costs (or saves) per ton of CO2. For example - what would the cost be for electrifying the 50,000 miles of most heavily used freight rail lines? The McKinsey chart shows the savings/cost of various tactics, something like this needs to be emphasized.