Coyote Crossing

Ocotillo shadow lengthening in afternoon. West of the Black HIlls in Imperial County.

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It took for freaking ever to load this site yesterday, and I apologize for any frustration. The culprit was the little banner script from Hello Bar I’d set up to promote Desert Biodiversity, which ground the whole site to a halt when PZ kindly linked me and sent a few hundred visitors an hour this way.

My apologies for any frustration you may have felt in trying to get this site to load, but at least as a result we all know now that I’m a dilettante poseur.

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Received this morning after financial stress made for a sleepless night, and 2) after having the conversation linked to in the tweet here.

Okay, so maybe that’s implied comment.

The email:

Subject: Need free copies of Walking With Zeke ASAP please
Date: February 25, 2012 3:18:25 AM PST
To: [Email Redacted]
Return-Path: [Email Redacted]
Delivered-To: coyotecrossing@faultline.org
[Received headers Redacted for my privacy]
Message-Id:

Those of you who've argued with other environmentalists about the wisdom of destroying old-growth desert for 20 years of electricity production will know that there are certain arguments that come up with depressing regularity. It can be deadeningly repetitive, and that gets old after a while. But now, in the best tradition of overused Internet tropes, you can at least play Bingo as you educate.

And if you see some of your own favorite arguments on this Bingo card, please note the wise words of Kate Harding, who said:

When a Bingo card exists, it's not for shutting down discussion. It's for avoiding rehash of discussion that already happened. You're late.

23 comments on "Desert Solar Bingo"

1) When he was clean his forehead always smelled like corn chips. So did the pads of his feet.

2) He hated any sharp cracking sound. This limited our use of the fireplace we had for four years in Richmond. Our next-door neighbor there had a pool table in his garage, and when he used it Zeke would shivver in the corner. At the previous place, in downtown Oakland, when people brought out their fireworks (and worse) on July 4, he’d hide in the bathtub.

3) I took him hiking once in the Marin Headlands and he almost ate a Mission Blue butterfly, which is critically endangered.

4) He needed to watch the road when I drove. On very long trips of more than a couple hours he’d eventually settle down in the back and snooze, but every time I’d use the turn signal he’d jump up again. He was never one of those dogs who loved to hang his head out the car window: he needed to watch straight ahead to see where we were going.

5) One day, offleash in Sunol Regional Park, he saw a ground squirrel a hundred yards away and covered that distance in about six seconds. He wasn’t even slowed down by the barbed wire fence between them, though he did yelp fairly loud as he passed through it. I never found any evidence of barbedwire-related cuts or bruises, but he only needed to learn that lesson once.

6) Also in Sunol: when he was about one year old we did a long hike off-trail down a canyon that in one spot was choked with poison oak, which he crashed right through. Past the poison oak there was a deep pool, and I pushed him into it to try to get at least a little of the oil off him. It may or may not have made a difference: neither of us got a rash. But it was a number of years before he ever got between me and a pool of water after that.

7) He didn’t swim. He liked to wade, and he liked to lie down in water, but he never wanted to get in water more than about a foot deep.

8) I came home from a week in the desert once and he wouldn’t let me in the house before he had thoroughly licked every square millimeter of my face. I don’t know whether that was reunion joy, or hygiene, or my campfire/salt-flavored skin. Probably some of each.

9) He was scared of some inanimate things, but he assumed almost every living thing he ever met would be his friend. (Exceptions included squirrels, which were for chasing, and rats and mice, which were for killing unless they were family members.) He loved horses and cats and dogs and coyotes and (often) small children, and he greeted strangers with joy all but once. On the two or three occasions when he met a dog who turned out to be unfriendly, he bore a heartrending expression of deep disappointment for an hour after.

10) A body memory: I can still feel his chest leaning against mine as he stood on the driver’s seat of my truck, peering out the window at whoever I was talking to: cops, drive-thru people, rangers at National PArk entrance kiosks, toll-takers, and various other people. It’s almost as if he’s only been gone a few minutes.

11 comments on "10 random things I remember"

Okay, so maybe that’s a little over the top.

2 comments on "Rejected Susan G. Komen Promotional Copy"

In October I posted a complaint about really bad science reporting that was based on a newspaper’s coverage of some egregiously wrong claims about molten salt thermal storage.

Those claims were made by the couple behind “FriedCranes.org,” and consisted of allegations that sodium and potassium nitrate, commonly known as saltpeter and Chilean saltpeter and proposed as media for thermal storage in concentrating solar facilities, are dangerous high explosives.

I countered this claim with references to the reasonably well established fact that neither substance is explosive or even flammable, which is easily confirmed with a moment’s research. And I said, in segueing to the real purpose of my post which was a criticism of the Pahrump newspaper that covered the allegations seriously,

So a couple of enviros get their science badly wrong. It happens far more frequently than I am comfortable with — you can google “chemtrails” for jaw-dropping examples of same. The friedcranes folks seem to be nice enough people, though clearly just a bit too non-discerning in their choice of trusted sources of information.

This morning I received a piece of email from the Fried Cranes people, and based on that message I am afraid I have to make a formal correction of my earlier post. They don’t seem to be nice people after all.  In fact, based on the last paragraph of the email, I’d have to amend that to something along the lines of “vicious, petty little asswipes.”

Dear Mr. Clark:[sic]

Your arrogant comments about “scientific illiteracy” in a recent blog exposed considerable illiteracy of your own. Apparently the Federal Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation are equally illiterate. We refer you to our illiterate editorial of January 23, 2012 where we cited their regulations pertaining to potassium and sodium nitrates:

http://www.friedcranes.org/comments/accessible/editorial_jan_23_12.html

Apparently Timothy McVeigh was equally “illiterate” when he detonated 2-1/2 tons of ammonium nitrate in Oklahoma City and a Norwegian farmer named Anders Breivik was also “illiterate” when he made this “perfectly safe” fertilizer go “boom” in the capitol city of Oslo just last summer.

It would be appropriate for you to acquaint yourself with all the facts before engaging in the name calling and demonization that are so prevalent from our esteemed administration these days.

Noteworthy is the fact that SolarReserve® is rapidly creating liability layers for themselves as a result of our concerns. The Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada is now owned by an affiliate limited liability company named TonopahSolar®, LLC. Most multinational corporations form subsidiaries, not affiliates. Then the operation and management was further delegated to PIC Group, Inc. out of Marietta, Georgia. Similarly, SolarReserve® has formed an affiliate named SaguacheSolar, LLC, a Delaware corporation registered here in Colorado to own their proposed project here.

When you have published as many books as we have, we will then graciously bow very low and accede to your elite judgements about our intelligence and capabilities. How’s that first book of yours coming, by the way?

John and Erika Keyes
Editors
http://www.friedcranes.org/comments/index.html

I’d have consigned the email to the bitbucket if not for the really nasty swipe at the end there. If it was intended to get a rise out of me, it worked. So a few notes:

For those of you whose eyes glazed over in high school chemistry, it may be helpful for me to point out that comparing sodium and potassium nitrate to the highly explosive ammonium nitrate is roughly equivalent to comparing water and lye. Both water and lye consist of the highly corrosive hydroxyl ion bonded to something else, just as the saltpeters and ammonium nitrate consist of nitrate ions bonded to something else. Thus the Keyes’ reference to Timothy McVeigh is approximately as relevant as mentioning Drano in a discussion of drinking water.

The reference to the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation involves a limitation on how much saltpeter you can carry on a passenger or cargo aircraft or by passenger rail. Turns out you can legally carry only five kilograms of saltpeter in your luggage on a domestic flight. [See edit, below.] Only 5kg! It must really be dangerous stuff! Five kilograms is a hair over 11 pounds, or about 176.4 ounces. That same body of regulations, incidentally restricts air passengers to carrying no more than 3 ounces of any personal care product. I’ll do the math for you: the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation apparently consider Johnson’s Baby Shampoo to be 60 times more dangerous than sodium or potassium nitrate!

!!!1!

[Edited to add: It’s worse than I’d imagined. That 5kg figure applies to mixed sodium and potassium nitrates. Either one on its own? The limit’s 25 kg, ir around 55 lb. Which means that shampoo is actually 300 times more dangerous. Or something.]

As for the whole issue of “liability layers,”  one need only point to the prevalence of the practice in other parts of the solar industry not using “highly explosive” saltpeter. NextEra Solar formed the corporate facade “Genesis Solar” to build the Genesis Solar project in California. Solar Millennium, builder of the mothballed Blythe Solar project, formed the shell Solar Trust of America. Stirling Energy and Tessera Solar were both part of an Irish firm named NTR. And so forth. Though it may be far more gratifying to imagine the corporate shell game as a response to one’s heroic expose of its Insanely! Dangerous! Molten Saltpeter!, it turns out to be pretty much standard operating procedure.

Finally: that first book of mine, published four years ago, is available at the link in the sidebar. It may not be as impressive as, say, this marvel of American literature, but I’m kind of proud of it nonetheless. Though perhaps the Keyes were referring to my book on Joshua trees, on which I’ve indeed been working for a frustratingly long time. What can I say? Research and factchecking take time compared to just making shit up on the fly.

11 comments on "On “exploding saltpeter”: a correction"