Another way to beat Al Qaeda, energy independence

As I understand it, Natural gas can power cars and can be stored in gas stations as they currently exist with replacement of their storage and dispensing equipment. Any car on the road right now that runs on gas can be converted to NG for about $5000 and, if manufactured for that purpose in quantity, the cost and performance is about equal. We have a bunch of natural Gas in the USA.

And Honda will sell you the Civic which runs on it. Natural gas is easy, and you are right, we have a bunch of it.

code1211 said:
Because the economy is in the dumper, energy use is down. We need to assure that it stays down while we are transitioning into our own energy sources and then just keep reducing the imports to nothing.

Works for me. The daughter and I are debating which is best for the planet, a full EV like the Leaf, or a Volt. American suburbia is perfect for these kinds of vehicles.
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education. If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs. And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education. If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs. And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".

Here we have it again, the robot rd speaking as if it's only the GOP who is corrupt.

Can you really be this weak minded, or is someone paying you to come across as such a dumb shit? Let me tell you something, if you really want to discuss the sheoplized game of Republicans vs. Democrats, anyone who is educated most likely has a mortgage payment. So with that being said, anyone with half a brain would never become a Democrat once they have a home and a family to support. Course all that is bullshit anyway.

Hey dummy? Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives? Try and figure it out with your so-called red diaper doper baby education bro. You're a robot rd. You think that you can blow foam out of your mouth about the GOP while pretending that the other equally corrupt party that you bow down to isn't one of the same. People like you are nothing more than useful tools. :eusa_shhh: ~BH
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education.

Take Joe Average. Force him to take math classes. He/she fails. Because of funding? No. Because some people just aren't predisposed to math.

rdean said:
If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs.

People are not necessarily any more predisposed to learning science than they are math.

rdean said:
And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".

Depends on the degree and where you got it from I suppose. An MIT engineering major is certainly worth far more than an art history major from a no name vo-ag state school.
 
The world is ahead of the US on alternate energy sources.

Maybe a little. But who cares? Oil and natural gas and coal are plentiful, it isn't like any transition needs to happen tomorrow, or even this decade. Economics will iron it out over the next half century, and this is a good thing. Humans don't like quick change, it makes them uncomfortable.
Yes, economics will iron it out, but it's not going to take half a century. If gas prices behave over the next 10 years the way they have in the past 10 years, by 2020 we are going to be looking at gas prices ranging from 8 to 12 dollars a gallon. There will be huge a demand for electric cars, solar cells, and wind farms. Unfortunately that demand is not going to be met by America.

Looking forward, the technology developments in alternative energy are going to make oil as a fuel about as practical as cow chips.
 
The world is ahead of the US on alternate energy sources.

Maybe a little. But who cares? Economics will iron it out over the next half century, and this is a good thing. Humans don't like quick change, it makes them uncomfortable.
Yes, economics will iron it out, but it's not going to take half a century.

Cool. Then let it happen sooner.

Flopper said:
If gas prices behave over the next 10 years the way they have in the past 10 years, by 2020 we are going to be looking at gas prices ranging from 8 to 12 dollars a gallon. There will be huge a demand for electric cars, solar cells, and wind farms. Unfortunately that demand is not going to be met by America.

Bummer. Our demand for good ICE cars certainly wasn't met by America so why sweat the demand being met by somewhere else? Globalization means that the price will be lower because of it, which is good.

Flopper said:
Looking forward, the technology developments in alternative energy are going to make oil as a fuel about as practical as cow chips.

It will still be practical, it's great stuff for railroads, heavy equipment, transoceanic shipping, etc etc. But it just sucks at personal transport.
 
If the GOAL was energy independence, why didn't we start that process way back in the early 70's when Jimmy Carter was warning us about this problem?

The reason that we have not weaned ourselves off dependence on hydrocarbon based energy and we are not evolving toward energy independence is because our masters are not yet ready to give up that gravy train.

Any of you who truly think this is entirely on the Rs or the Ds is missing the bigger picture.

There is no viable alternative to oil. Even Nuclear only address electricity. Even if magically we suddenly had a viable alternative to gas for transport ( or diesel ) it would take a massive investment of money labor and time to create the infrastructure to provide the fuel points for the new source.

Yes, absolutely true.

The migration from hydrocarbon based energy to alternate means of both producing energy and using that energy too, is going to take a long time.

All the more reason my post made sense.
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education. If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs. And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".

Here we have it again, the robot rd speaking as if it's only the GOP who is corrupt.

Can you really be this weak minded, or is someone paying you to come across as such a dumb shit? Let me tell you something, if you really want to discuss the sheoplized game of Republicans vs. Democrats, anyone who is educated most likely has a mortgage payment. So with that being said, anyone with half a brain would never become a Democrat once they have a home and a family to support. Course all that is bullshit anyway.

Hey dummy? Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives? Try and figure it out with your so-called red diaper doper baby education bro. You're a robot rd. You think that you can blow foam out of your mouth about the GOP while pretending that the other equally corrupt party that you bow down to isn't one of the same. People like you are nothing more than useful tools. :eusa_shhh: ~BH

Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives?

If that were even true, I would say, "Because they are now millionaires and Republicans only care about the rich"?

Was that the right answer?
 
If the GOAL was energy independence, why didn't we start that process way back in the early 70's when Jimmy Carter was warning us about this problem?

The reason that we have not weaned ourselves off dependence on hydrocarbon based energy and we are not evolving toward energy independence is because our masters are not yet ready to give up that gravy train.

Any of you who truly think this is entirely on the Rs or the Ds is missing the bigger picture.

There is no viable alternative to oil. Even Nuclear only address electricity. Even if magically we suddenly had a viable alternative to gas for transport ( or diesel ) it would take a massive investment of money labor and time to create the infrastructure to provide the fuel points for the new source.

Yes, absolutely true.

The migration from hydrocarbon based energy to alternate means of both producing energy and using that energy too, is going to take a long time.

All the more reason my post made sense.
I agree it will take years but with each new breakthrough in alternative energy and each rise in gas prices, the economic pressure for cheaper and cleaner energy will increase. Unless current trends reverse which seems very unlikely, most of our energy is going to come from alternative sources in this century. I think we will be producing oil for hundreds of years. It just won't be a primary source of energy.
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education. If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs. And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".

Here we have it again, the robot rd speaking as if it's only the GOP who is corrupt.

Can you really be this weak minded, or is someone paying you to come across as such a dumb shit? Let me tell you something, if you really want to discuss the sheoplized game of Republicans vs. Democrats, anyone who is educated most likely has a mortgage payment. So with that being said, anyone with half a brain would never become a Democrat once they have a home and a family to support. Course all that is bullshit anyway.

Hey dummy? Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives? Try and figure it out with your so-called red diaper doper baby education bro. You're a robot rd. You think that you can blow foam out of your mouth about the GOP while pretending that the other equally corrupt party that you bow down to isn't one of the same. People like you are nothing more than useful tools. :eusa_shhh: ~BH

Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives?

If that were even true, I would say, "Because they are now millionaires and Republicans only care about the rich"?

Was that the right answer?

The first part. Then all of a sudden paying more in taxes doesn't sound so nice. Neither party gives a damn about the poor. ~BH
 
For the US to become "energy independent", it's going to take more scientists and engineers. Republicans are working to slash funding for education. If people learn science, it takes away their "mystical" beliefs. And worse, the more education someone has, the more likely they vote Democrat. They basically want a nation of stupid Republicans. After all, "Education is just a piece of paper".

Here we have it again, the robot rd speaking as if it's only the GOP who is corrupt.

Can you really be this weak minded, or is someone paying you to come across as such a dumb shit? Let me tell you something, if you really want to discuss the sheoplized game of Republicans vs. Democrats, anyone who is educated most likely has a mortgage payment. So with that being said, anyone with half a brain would never become a Democrat once they have a home and a family to support. Course all that is bullshit anyway.

Hey dummy? Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives? Try and figure it out with your so-called red diaper doper baby education bro. You're a robot rd. You think that you can blow foam out of your mouth about the GOP while pretending that the other equally corrupt party that you bow down to isn't one of the same. People like you are nothing more than useful tools. :eusa_shhh: ~BH

Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives?

If that were even true, I would say, "Because they are now millionaires and Republicans only care about the rich"?

Was that the right answer?

Ah.. the seed... IS... sown...:eusa_whistle:
 
Virtually all the alternative energy sources can be exploited by small and medium sized companies. Unlike oil, which requires huge refineries, the intitial investment for wind, solar, and geothermal is within the scope of small localized companies.

And if we were to have EVs with good range, we who are home owners could not only power our homes, but also our vehicles with solar. This is why there is presently so much denigration of solar at the very time that the cost is dropping below $1 a watt to produce the panels.

The last thing that the Conservatives want to see is the American Citizen become independent of the multi-national corperations.

Coming from USMB's greatest producer of Hot Air...
 
Last edited:
The world is ahead of the US on alternate energy sources.






Really? Then why is the British government informing its citizens that they will have to go for periods with no electricity? They have invested very heavily in wind energy to the tune of billions of pounds and they can't meet energy needs. That is being ahead of the US?

I think you need to have your head examined if you believe that.

Here is another interesting missive about the poor performance of wind power.

"Guest post by the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Consider the Oldbury wind turbine, which WattsUpWithThat.com reveals was installed a couple of years ago at a primary school in the Midlands at a cost of £5000 sterling plus Vicious Additional Taxation at 17.5% (US $9694 in all).

In the first full year of the Oldbury White Elephant’s 20-year life it generated a gratifying 209 kilowatt-hours of electricity – enough to power a single 100-Watt reading-lamp for less than three months. The rest of the year you’ll have to find something else to do in bed.

Gross revenue for the year, at 11p (18 cents) a kilowatt-hour, was, um, almost £23 ($40). Assuming that there are no costs of finance, insurance or maintenance, and after subtracting 20 years’ revenue at last year’s rate, the net unamortized capital cost is £5,415.20 ($8,900).

Even this figure understates the true cost. The UK has hidden much of the cost of its climate measures behind a calculatedly complex web of levies, taxes, charges, and subsidies, and – above all – behind a furtive near-doubling of the true cost of electricity to pay vast subsidies (“yacht money”, as we landowners call it) to anyone connected with windmills. The website of the King Canute Department amusingly calls this obscurantist mish-mash “transparency”.

How much “global warming” will Jumbo the Albino forestall? While it is in operation, it will generate 209,000/365/24 or almost 24 Watt-hours per hour on average: just about enough to drive an electric toothbrush.



Mean UK electricity consumption, according to the Ministry of Transparency, is 43.2 GW. Electricity contributes one-third of UK carbon emissions, and the UK contributes 1.5% of world emissions. So the proportion p of global carbon dioxide emissions that the Worthless Windmill will forestall is 24 / 43,200,000,000 / 3 x 0.015, or 2.76 x 10–12, or, as Admiral Hill-Norton used to call it, “two-thirds of three-fifths of b*gger all”. Skip the next few paragraphs if mathematics makes your head hurt.

Today’s CO2 concentration is 390 parts per million by volume (less than 0.04%, though most people think it’s more like 20-30%). Instead of the 438 ppmv CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for 2030 on its A2 scenario, thanks to the Wonder Whirligig it will be 438 – p(438 – 390), or seven-eighths of a Hill-Norton below 438 ppmv.

IPeCaC, the UN’s climate panel says 8 Watts (no relation) per square meter of radiative forcing from CO2 and other bad things (p. 803 of its 2007 climate assessment) will cause 3.4 Celsius of “global warming” (p. 13, table SPM.3) from 2000-2100 (progress from 2000-2010: 0.0 Celsius).

That gives the “centennial-scale transient climate-sensitivity parameter”, which is 3.4/8 or 0.425 C/W/m2. Multiply this by 5.35, the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation, to give the “centennial-scale transient global-warming coefficient” n = 2.274 C°. We don’t need to worry about warming beyond 2100 because, according to Solomon et al. (2009) it will take 1000-3000 years to come through, far too slow to cause unavoidable harm.

Multiply the logarithm of any proportionate change in CO2 concentration by the global-warming coefficient n and you get a central estimate of the warming that will occur (or be prevented) between now and 2100.

The Sandwell Sparrow-Slicer will only run for 20 years, not 100, so our value for n is going to be too big, overstating the warming the thing will actually forestall. But it’s Be-Nice-To-Bedwetters Week, so we’ll use the centennial-scale value for n anyway.

Let’s do it: 2.274 ln[438/(smidgen x tad <438)] is – well, put it this way, even my 12-digit-readout scientific calculator couldn’t do it, so I turned to Microsoft Excess. According to Bill Gates, the warming the Birmingham Bat-Batterer will forestall over the next 20 years will be rather less than 0.0000000000007 Celsius.

As the shopping channels say, “But wait! There’s more!!!” Well, there could hardly be less. How much would it cost, I wondered, to forestall 1 Celsius degree of warming, if all measures to make “global warming” go away were as hilariously cost-ineffective as this silly windmill?

You get the “mitigation cost-effectiveness” by dividing the total warming forestalled by the total lifetime cost of the project. And the answer? Well, it’s a very affordable £8 quadrillion ($13 quadrillion) per Celsius degree of warming forestalled. Remember, this is an underestimate, because our method tends to overstate the warming forestalled.

And that’s before we politicians ask any questions about whether IPeCaC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are wanton, flagrant exaggerations [cries of “No!” “Shame!” “Resign!” “I beg to move that the Noble Lord be no longer heard!” “What did I do with my expenses claim form?”].

Suppose it was just as cost-ineffective to make “global warming” from other causes go away as it is to make “global warming” from CO2 go away. In that event, assuming – as the World Bank does – that global annual GDP is £36.5 trillion ($60 trillion), what percentage of this century’s global output of all that we make and do and sell would be gobbled up in climate mitigation? The answer is an entirely reasonable 736%, or, to put it another way, 736 years’-worth of worldwide income.

This is an inhumanly large sum. So how much would each of the seven billion people on the planet have to cough up over the next century to forestall the 3.4 C global warming that IPeCaC hopes will happen by 2100? It will cost each of us more than £3.8 million ($6.3 milllion), and that’s probably a large underestimate. I’m going to have to sell the Lear ad go commercial. No – wait – what did I do with that glossy brochure about how many tens of millions I could make from the 30 250ft windmills I could put on the South Beat? Ah, here it is, under my expenses claim form.

“The Noble Lord,” the Canutists might say, “is deliberately taking a small, absurd and untypical example. Shame! Resign! Expenses!” etc. So here are the equivalent figures for the £60m ($100 million) annual 20-year subsidy to the world’s largest wind-farm, the Thanet Wind Array off the Kent Coast – that’s £1.2 billion ($2 billion) for just one wind-farm. KaChing! I think I’ll have another Lear. And a yacht, and a Lambo, and a bimbo.

The “global warming” that the Thanet wind-farm will forestall in its 20-year lifetime is 0.000002 Celsius, or two millionths of a degree, or 1/25,000 of the minimum global temperature change that modern methods can detect. The mitigation cost-effectiveness, per Celsius degree of warming forestalled, is £578 trillion ($954 trillion), or almost 6000 times the entire 296 years’-worth of UK peacetime and wartime national debt as it stood when Margaret Thatcher took office. That’s more than 1.7 million years’ British national debt, just to prevent 1 degree of warming.

Making IPeCaC’s predicted 3.4 C° of 21st-century warming go away, if all measures were as cost-ineffective as Thanet, would take more than half of the world’s gross domestic product this century, at a cost of more than £280,000 ($463,000) from every man, woman and child on the planet.

“The Noble Lord is still cherry-picking. Resign! Moat! Duck-island!” etc. So look at it this way. All of Scotland’s wind farms, which can in theory generate 10% of Britain’s electricity (actual output in that cold December when we needed them most: 0.0%), will forestall just 0.00002 degrees of warming in their 20-year lifetime – about the same as all of China’s windmills.

So there you have it. After the biggest and most expensive propaganda campaign in human history, leading to the biggest tax increase in human history, trying to stop “global warming” that isn’t happening anyway and won’t happen at anything like the predicted rate is the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money in human history, bar none – and that’s saying something.

The thing about gesture politics is that the politicians (that’s us) get to make the gestures and the proles (that’ll be you) get to get the bill. I think I’ll have another moat. Torquil, don’t you dare put that expenses claim form on the fire. Think of the carbon footprint!"


Why windmills won
 
Here we have it again, the robot rd speaking as if it's only the GOP who is corrupt.

Can you really be this weak minded, or is someone paying you to come across as such a dumb shit? Let me tell you something, if you really want to discuss the sheoplized game of Republicans vs. Democrats, anyone who is educated most likely has a mortgage payment. So with that being said, anyone with half a brain would never become a Democrat once they have a home and a family to support. Course all that is bullshit anyway.

Hey dummy? Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives? Try and figure it out with your so-called red diaper doper baby education bro. You're a robot rd. You think that you can blow foam out of your mouth about the GOP while pretending that the other equally corrupt party that you bow down to isn't one of the same. People like you are nothing more than useful tools. :eusa_shhh: ~BH

Why have so many prior poor blacks who are in the NFL, now Conservatives?

If that were even true, I would say, "Because they are now millionaires and Republicans only care about the rich"?

Was that the right answer?

Ah.. the seed... IS... sown...:eusa_whistle:

Republican Athletes: List of Famous Conservative Athletes, Photos

There aren't that many professional athletes listed as conservatives. Not a lot of actors. Or scientists. Or college professors. Or singers. In fact, it takes a lot of hard work to rise to the top in any field. For the most part, Republicans just don't work that hard and they aren't very creative.

I'm not saying there isn't a "few". Even 6% of scientists are Republican, so that proves there ARE a few.
 

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