Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

DES MOINES, Iowa (9/29/2022) -- In celebration of National Clean Energy Week, MidAmerican announced that its Wind PRIME project will be developed at no net cost to customers, continuing its tradition of providing clean energy and maintaining among the lowest electricity rates in the nation.

The project, proposed in January and currently pending approval at the Iowa Utilities Board, would result in significant benefits for MidAmerican’s customers, including:

Affordability – Wind PRIME will be delivered at no net cost to customers and has potential to provide an immediate decrease in bills
Clean energy – the project will allow MidAmerican to deliver renewable energy that exceeds 100% of its Iowa customers’ usage annually
Clean air – Wind PRIME is expected to result in an overall reduction of CO2 by approximately 75% from 2005 levels
Adding clean energy generation – especially at no net cost to customers – is a competitive advantage that no other rate-regulated utility can offer,” said Kathryn Kunert, vice president of economic connections and integration for MidAmerican Energy. “While every customer gets these benefits, we know how much our business community depends on our combination of affordability and verified green energy.” 

Through MidAmerican’s GreenAdvantage program, which applies to all MidAmerican electric customers in Iowa at no cost to them, the company enables every customer to claim a verified renewable energy amount, which in 2021, was 88.5%. With Wind PRIME, that will reach 100% on an annual basis.

“Nearly all members of the Iowa Business Energy Coalition have sustainability goals to decarbonize by the end of the decade to ensure continued success across all markets. Clean energy is a major component of achieving those goals and we appreciate MidAmerican’s focus on renewable energy,” Dustin Miller, IBEC’s Executive Director, said. “We will continue to work in partnership with our utilities on a variety of clean energy strategies for cost competitive energy for Iowa to ensure a bright economic future for our companies and the state.”

Wind PRIME also provides economic benefit to the state of Iowa. MidAmerican estimates that the Wind PRIME project will create more than 1,100 full-time jobs during the construction phase and another 125 full-time positions for ongoing operations and maintenance.

In addition, Wind PRIME will provide an average of $24 million-plus per year in local property tax payments on wind turbines and solar facilities, as well as more than $21 million in annual landowner easement payments.

A recently issued Goss and Associates report sponsored by the Iowa Conservative Energy Forum showed that renewable energy produces billions of dollars of economic impact for Iowa. Wind energy is an incredible resource in our state and with recent volatility in the gas market, our wind fleet continues to produce energy with zero fuel cost, keeping MidAmerican’s rates low and stable for customers.

Not much gets recycled unless source separated and delivered to the right place, other than aluminum and some glass.  We have two glass bins here and a large "recycle" dumpster into which residents throw bags of trash and mess.

We need an aluminum can bin.

You really need a clean melt for recycling to work very well, and you need the different plastic kinds separated.  A milk bottle is PE but the cap is PP, and they don't play well together, at least not for any decent application.  Then you have PS and polyurethanes and all that other mess.  Clean PE is nicely recycled.

You really need a clean melt for recycling to work very well, and you need the different plastic kinds separated.  A milk bottle is PE but the cap is PP, and they don't play well together, at least not for any decent application.  Then you have PS and polyurethanes and all that other mess.  Clean PE is nicely recycled.

In our area they throw everything together in residential Green Recycling marked containers.Evidently they sort at the centers

I'm sure some places are different, I've only seen two in operation.  They paid attention to aluminum and they did pull off some of the larger plastic items and some cardboard.  This is while back.  I was surprised how much of it is pure garbage, food waste, and whatnot in some bag, they don't open bags of anything.  They told us most of it goes to landfill.

Current climate policies don’t go far enough
Greenhouse gas emissions need to fall almost immediately to put the world on a path to limiting warming to around 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Under nations’ current policies, warming would rise by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Climate policy and warming projections display the likely range of potential outcomes.
Source: United Nations Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report 2022
Credit: Connie Hanzhang Jin/NPR

COP27 just started — here's what is at stake in the global climate negotiations : NPR
COP27 just started — here's what is at stake in the global climate negotiations : NPR


In short, the world is way off track from its goal of cutting the pollution that drives climate change. Collectively, nations have promised to cut their emissions by about 3% by 2030. But the science shows emissions need to fall dramatically faster – 45% by 2030. That's to limit warming to the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That's about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Most nations aren't even cutting emissions enough to meet the pledges they've already made. So today, the world is heading toward about 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100. While a handful of countries are expected to make new, more ambitious emissions pledges at these talks, the countries producing most of the climate pollution aren't expected to make dramatic cutbacks.
Two of the largest emitters, China and India, plan to increase emissions until 2030. They've argued that their growing economies need the support of fossil fuels, as other wealthier countries have historically done.