Some Advice for the President-Elect

I recently took the opportunity to share my thoughts with the Obama-Biden Transition Team on the topics of energy and the environment. (You can do so also, here.)  

For what it is worth, here's my two cents:

1. I would be cautious about taking oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to affect prices. Your instincts on this were correct during the primary campaign. Not putting more oil in during price spikes is one thing, but actually drawing on the reserve to lower prices is another. I would only do it if prices reached a catastrophically high level, higher than anything we have seen yet. The day may come when we will need the reserve for its intended purpose. It's our rainy day fund.  

2. I would also be cautious about pinning too much hope on so-called "clean coal." I would rather see the Obama-Biden administration explore established technologies such as pebble-bed reactor technology or that discussed in this article , I am not excited about increasing our reliance on nuclear power, but if we want to keep the lights on and mitigate global warming, it has to be in the mix. The technology discussed in the above article has been around for decades with an established safety record.  

3. As oil becomes more expensive (and it will again, soon), so will natural gas, as consumers of oil seek to replace it with gas. I believe you should add to your energy mix increased reliance upon geothermal energy, especially for heating newly constructed commercial and government buildings. This will help mitigate demand for natural gas used for heating.  

4. Finally, trust your instincts on conservation, and don't stop fighting for your plan in this regard. America should have listened to President Carter 30 years ago, and should have stopped listening to Dick Cheney 8 years ago. The cheapest energy resource is the energy we haven't used.

Do you have some advice for President-Elect Obama? They want to hear from you, too.

Planets, Planets Everywhere

In addition to Fomalhaut b, researchers this week unveiled infrared photographs of a multi-planet system orbiting the star HR 8799.

New Scientist reports:

The planetary trio orbits the star HR 8799, which sits 130 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. The most distant planet in the group is roughly 7 times the mass of Jupiter and sits 68 astronomical units away from its host star (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and Sun).

Two larger planets, each estimated to weigh 10 Jupiters, orbit closer in - at 24 and 38 AU away from the star. A disc of dusty debris, similar to the solar system's icy Kuiper belt, surrounds the entire system.

Like other photographed planetary candidates, HR 8799's three planets weigh close to 13 Jupiters, a mass thought to separate planets from failed stars called brown dwarfs.

Fomalhaut b

As a kid, Fomalhaut was one of my favorite stars, glowing eerily in the southern sky every Autumn, a lonely precursor to the coming Winter.  This week, of course, scientists announced they had used the Hubble Space Telescope to take the first visible-light photograph of a celestial body certain to be an extrasolar planet.

According to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Fomalhaut (sounds like "foam-a-lot") is a bright, young, star, a short 25 light-years from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. In this sharp composite from the Hubble Space Telescope, Fomalhaut's surrounding ring of dusty debris is imaged in detail, with overwhelming glare from the star masked by an occulting disk in the camera's coronagraph. Astronomers now identify, the tiny point of light in the small box at the right as a planet about 3 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting 10.7 billion miles from the star (almost 14 times the Sun-Jupiter distance). Designated Fomalhaut b, the massive planet probably shapes and maintains the ring's relatively sharp inner edge, while the ring itself is likely a larger, younger analog of our own Kuiper Belt - the solar system's outer reservoir of icy bodies. The Hubble data represent the first visible-light image of a planet circling another star.

About My Absence

Quite frankly, I needed a vacation after my vacation.  Upon returning from France in early October after being away for three weeks and, among other things, attending and blogging about the first ever SETI symposium at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, I found my life to be generally behind schedule.  Work, mail, the yard, the house.  Everything.

I am caught up now.