Anyone else catch Brian Schweitzer on 60 Minutes

[bklyncowgirl]

What did you think?

Here's my take.

He's obviously a smart guy and is also very conscious of projecting that cowboy image. Unlike Bush, however, he seems to be the real article, very much at home with horses and cattle.

I don't think his synfuel idea is the answer for the long haul. What it could do is buy us time until we can get solar, hydrogen and other promising non-poluting technologies on line.

As far as his political future goes, I can't see him running for president in 08. The guy is a newly minted governor and while he's certainly appealing, he's just a little too green for my taste.

His dog Jaq, looks like a well trained herd dog turned celebrity canine companion and is just as cute as can be. I must admit, of course, I am partial to border collies. On the other hand border collies are extremely intelligent and notoriously sensitive dogs. The fact that he has one that is so well trained and adapted says alot for the man.

[Ksec]

1. Tug, my border collie is sitting right next to me.

Hes awesome. Smart as a whip and just a good all around dog. Hes almost 6 yrs old now. I also have a Yellow Lab , Cody, which is telling me its time for his nightly walk. Both good dogs.

[bklyncowgirl]

5. I've had two border collies--or BC mixes--no papers

My current dog Bucky is a classic looking border collie except for his head which looks like a spaniel's. He also has freckled paws. Great dog, very smart. He's also gay. He'd love your lab, seriously, if there are any labs around I have to take him out of the dog park, it's embarrasing--not to mention potentially life threatening if the lab is bigger and stronger.

[cali]

6. I've got to brag on my dog, Tucker, here too

She's a mutt,part border collie, incredibly smart, 19 years old and she still runs and frolics like a dog a third her age.

Oh yeah, I saw the Guv. Likeable guy, but definitely wouldn't be my choice for pres.

[Poiuyt]

10. My cat ignores me

Unless it's feeding time

[Warpy]

2. The party needs to take a page from his playbook

Drop the nuances. Speak to plain folks in plain English and give them hope for a better economic future once the thieves and lunatics are swept out of office.

Schweitzer knew how to get elected in a heavily GOP state. The party power brokers had better swallow their pride and listen if they want to get elected to anything. Or they can resign themselves to irrelevance and the compensation of more reckless tax cuts to rich men.

[Stephanie]

3. Barney hates George Bush

Have you ever seen that Barbara Walters where he keeps calling the dog and the dog keeps running off in the other direction? Smart Barney. Brave and good dog!

[bklyncowgirl]

4. Cowboy author Will James said he'd never gone wrong by judging a man

by the horse he rode. I'd say it goes for dogs as well.

[Strelnikov_]

7. Agree That Coal Gas/Liquids Should Be A Short-Term Mitigation

strategy for domestic liquid fuels and gas energy depletion, and to help eliminate the need for foreign sources of energy.

Thing is, we need to kick the fossil fuel habit yesterday. They may sequester some of the process CO2, but every gallon of fuels burnt in a vehicle is going into the atmosphere.

Hotter, Faster, Worser
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0222-27.htm

. . .

First, there hasn’t been any real uncertainty in the scientific community for more than a decade. An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on global warming.

But the second reason is that the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.

. . .

The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover. It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event. At a recent meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences in St. Louis, James Zachos, foremost expert on the PETM reported that greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the atmosphere at thirty times the speed with which they did during the PETM.

. . .

Our children may forgive us the debts we’re passing on to them, they may forgive us if terrorism persists, they may forgive us for waging war instead of pursuing peace, they may even forgive us for squandering the opportunity to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. But they will spit on our bones and curse our names if we pass on a world that is barely habitable when it was in our power to prevent it. And they will be right to do so.


Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb

http://www.energybulletin.net/3647.html

. . .

Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

. . .

The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years. The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.

More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.

. . .

The cause of all this havoc? In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an area rich in these unstable clathrates.

[Kansas Wyatt]

8. The only opposition he had, was people wanting to go with bio-diesel.

Which, if their concerns were absolutely mandated, without exception, as he said (returning the strip mines back to their original condition), then it still would be a drop in the bucket for the United States to invest in both his coal diesel and bio-diesel at the same time. If both were continued and invested in, rather than trying to recover 'our oil under their sand' in the Middle East, the U.S. would be that much further ahead in reducing the amount of foreign oil coming into the country.

The trick will be keeping the Oil Companies & the Middle East Dynasties from dropping the price of oil to undercut the feasibility of doing this, just to jack the price back up as these plans are eliminated.

At least he wants to invest in America and it's people, rather than crawl in bed with Big Oil and Foreign Royalty to play a shell game on the American people to enrich himself, family, cronies, Big Oil, and Foreign Royalty.

[dsc]

9. They can't cut prices enough

China and India are fueling a huge demand that has prices on an upward spiral that has no real ability to reverse.

[havocmom]

11. He says synfuel is not the forever solution. It will help while ideas

are developed for other solutions. He also is a motivating factor in large wind turbines for power generation. I have seen the parts for dozens of the giant windmills go by my house on the highway. Things are happening which could make energy production cleaner and more reliable.

Two things we have lots up up here: high quality coal very close to the surface and lots of wind!

Oh, that old battle ax nay sayer... she doesn't have any coal on the ground she owns. She is bound & determined if she can't benefit from something, nobody is gonna benefit from it!. She is a short sighted, egocentric biddy who can't get it through her head the numbers aren't there for biomass over coal in this area. Takes water to grow enough crop to produce the mass in biomass. Eastern Montana is a desert. She has her knickers in a twist that others stand to make a little nest egg cushion she won't share.

You may not have noticed the part about Schweitzer having worked in Arabia. He is a very smart and pragmatic scientist/problem solver. The time he spent in that part of the world left him very aware of the wisdom of NOT depending on the rulers for that which keeps American commerce greased. He knows that the more dependent a people are on other nations, the less free they are.

He is the real deal. If it weren't for the fact that we need to repair damage from 16 years of GOP corporate lapdogs running Montana into the ground, I would say Jag for First Dog! But, we need him here for some time to help lead us out of the mess Racicot and Martz let their masters make of the place.

Oh, and I have been to Colstrip. Saw the huge pits and all that with my own eyes. Also saw the reclaimed areas where the coal had been removed and the land restored. It is pretty damned impressive.

Opponents use the Berkley Pit in Butte as an example of the ugly scars left of mining. Well, that was a very old mine, of a different sort all together and the US government failed to force proper clean up. Things have changed. Berkley Pit was copper and silver and mines in those areas were started so long ago William Randolph Hearst's dad was involved. Like I said, things change!

Have seen the Thunder Basin area of WY, where there are massive coal extraction areas. One can barely see anything but the tall elevators that put coal on trains. The mines are well sheltered and the restored land is beautiful. I wanted to see things which would make my tree huggin soul cringe and give me fodder for rants against the extraction industry for years. Guess what, seeing the place left me a supporter of the new methods.

Sure, we need to get away from fossil fuels altogether, but it will take time and we need to keep tractors and trucks running in the meantime so you all can find the shelves at your grocery stores stocked. The synfuel program can be working very soon and see us through until better solutions are developed and implemented.

That is what Schweitzer is offering. A bridge to the future and better solutions. A bridge which bypasses the bank accounts of oil tyrants!

[5X]

12. I was not at all impressed...

his fake, constant smile. His calling Chavez and anyone from
a 'stan' country, what did he say, pigs and dictators?

He lost me right then.

[Rose Siding]

13. Time has an article about synfuel: How lobbyists are pulling off a synfuel

Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006
A Magic Way To Make Billions
How lobbyists are pulling off a synfuel scheme with help from key lawmakers--and you'll pay
By DONALD L. BARLETT AND JAMES B. STEELE

snip>
Buried in the huge budget-reconciliation bill, on which House and Senate conferees are putting the final touches right now, are a few paragraphs that accomplish an extraordinary feat. They roll back the price of a barrel of crude oil to what it sold for two years ago. They create this pretend price for the benefit of a small group of the politically well connected. You still won't be able to buy gasoline for $1.73 per gal. as you did then, instead of today's $2.28. You still won't be able to buy home heating oil for $1.60 per gal., in place of today's $2.39. But a select group of investors and companies will walk away with billions of dollars in tax subsidies, not from oil but from the marketing of a dubious concoction of synthetic fuel produced from coal and dependent on government tax credits tied to the price of oil.

From 2003 through 2005, TIME estimates, the synfuel industry raked in $9 billion in tax credits. That means the lucky few collectively cut their tax bills by that amount, which would be enough to cover a year's worth of federal taxes for 20 million Americans who make less than $20,000 a year and pay income taxes. How important is the tax credit to synfuel producers? In its latest annual report, Headwaters Inc., a Utah-based purveyor of synfuel processes and substances, says flatly, "Headwaters does not believe that production of synthetic fuel will be profitable absent the tax credits."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1167729,00.html