How about making our superabundant patrimony of carbon fuels available to all of us not just those that can afford the phony scarcity mark-up?

There is no evidence that carbon emissions pose any threat whatsoever.

Wind, solar, and even hydro destroy habitat and thus are ecologically inferior.

Man is on a path to transition from his technological version of nature’s crude technology to mimic the elegance of nature’s nanotechnology with his own interpretation.

Since government is far and above the greatest hindrance to technological progress, the best solution is to rid ourselves of government interference and bring about the change as fast as possible.

The sooner our era will be looked back upon like we look back upon the industrial revolution in England.

Electric cars are gay, and with gas now back to being under $2, there’s absolutely no case for them.

Internal combustion engines have 37 times the energy density of battery driven motors. This make electric cars unappealing to say the least.

Markets, markets, markets. You aren’t going to force this stuff. The stupidity and unworkability of the “green” movement is illustrated by just one instance of green inefficiency: The sale of all-electric cars in regions where the electricity generation is via coal, oil or natural gas fossil fuels. There is no judgment, no common sense. In the entire industry, no matter the sensibilities, sell the green crap technology under any circumstance.

Go green in this country all you want; you can’t impose this stuff on the third world, on China, on Korea, India and all the rest of them. The environmental movement is the darling of the Leftist Democrats who all live to impede business and the environment is just their excuse. Proof of that is the refusal of the Left to follow their own dogma in their personal lives. Private flights, big homes and the largess of the rich toward each other is the hallmark of the greedy left. Green is for the little people of course, NEVER for them. They’re happy to enrich their friends in the green industries if possible (The mafia-style bustout of Solyndra comes to mind), but not to impose green tech on themselves.

But until the rest of the world comes along, why should we, 5% of the world’s population, break ourselves to no practical global effect?

Ralph Nader has some good points, but as a former Canadian nuclear power-generating engineer, I believe nuclear is the most environmental safe option to generate power supply. It’s also the most economic option in the long run. If all the safety measures are put in practice, nuclear option is also most safe to the people working in the plant and the communities living around a nuclear plant.

Furthermore, nuclear power generation and making nuclear bombs are two different things. First is a country’s necessity for its industry – the later is to bully and exploit other countries’ national resources.

http://rehmat1.com/2010/08/22/will-iran-make-a-nuclear-bomb/

I happen to be sceptical about the warmists’ disaster scenarios because the many modellers the supposedly authoritative IPCC so heavily relies on have all failed to predict the pause or great decline in rate of global atmospheric warming since 1998 despite continued growth in CO2 emissions and because the models don’t retropredict huge global changes in temperatures in the last 7000 years or so. But if one wants CO2 emissions to come down as at least a precaution I challenge your view that the US with about 5 per cent of the world’s population shouldn’t take the lead or be an example to other countries.

The US is one of the highest emitter’s per capita – with the much less populous Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada e.g. – but it emits 17 per cent of total emissions (I’m not sure whether the figures include forest fires or only the immediately relevant burning of coal, gas, wood and oil for fuel). Only China exceeds that. India and Russia are at 5 per cent.

It surely follows that no country is likely to do anything unless the US takes a lead in argument and in practice, and that the US, with China which has only one third the per capita emissions but has many environmental reasons for actively pushing renewables, has unique capacity to nudge and bully the rest of the world into aiming high.

Because Australia which emits just a little more than 1 per cent of CO2 from fossil fuel burning can neither do nor say anything to affect its climatic or sea level fate I argue that we should adopt a strictly economic approach which is roughly to use our vast reserves of coal and gas to make ourselves rich enough to adapt and to help others (like Bangladeshis inundated by rising sea level) but that argument doesn’t work for the US which emits 17 times as much CO2 and has to lead if it is to save itself – assuming there really is a problem which doesn’t just derive from whatever natural causes ended the Little Ice Age.

BTW I would like to know why Ralph Nader appears to accept the apocalyptic view of AGW. Does he really accept the inconsistent and inadequate IPCC models as collectively telling us some accurate truth? If so why?

I installed two modern solar panels on my diesel cruising boat two years ago. They charge my battery bank that runs all the lights, refrigerator, inverter, backup bilge pump etc. Their performance is remarkable. They were inexpensive (relative to the price ten years ago) and allow me to ignore my boat while it sits idle, knowing that it can take care of itself. When the engine is not running I am completely free from the Grid, meaning that I don’t need to hook up to electric power in a marina every night nor do I need to run a generator. This gives amazing peace of mind and freedom. If you installed the same in your small vacation cabin or atop your RV you could enjoy independence, silence and solitude. This is just a small example of how to move incrementally away from fossil fuels. Small wind-powered generators are even more productive.

Today, all of this is plug and play. Unlike the stuff we struggled with in the Whole Earth Catalogue days, manufacturers have simplified installation by designing regulators that can handle multiple inputs and so forth. Today’s industry-standardized wire connections are waterproof and so installation is literally a snap; benefits are immediate.

In Germany they are developing ultra-high energy efficient homes. In Florida, solar heats water on the roof.

Naysayers should stop wasting their time and energy erecting mental roadblocks. Instead of pointing out the limitations of alternative energy sources, they should put their talents towards utilizing what’s practical to optimize their lifestyle.

Battery technology has come a long way, but it has even farther to go before electric power for transportation is feasible at large scales. We will continue to need liquid fuels for a long time. The biotech guys may come up with an economic way to produce liquid fuels that are not fossil fuel based, but until they do we are tied to fossil fuels.

The greenhouse effect is real, but warming is not happening at the predicted rate because the alarmists had inserted all kinds of positive reinforcing mechanisms into their calculations that apparently do not exist – in fact there appear to be damping phenomena. We can live with the warming and adjust until alternative liquid fuels are developed.

The most likely future scenario remains that we will reduce the population by wars anyway. As in the years after the Black Death the survivors will have better lives.

Your power company is just like everybody else: They work for money. If windmills and solar panels made money, utilities would have installed them long ago without any coercion from the government.

Since windmills and solar panels lose money, lots of it, the price difference is made up by government subsidies, increased electric rates, foisting cheaper/shoddier service upon the public, and cheating utility stockholders by forcing them to compete against subsidized generators while also keeping them under the Depression-era legal duty to serve all customers.

The power industry is in the midst of a takeover by a consortium of Big Green, Big Government, and a few companies like GE and Siemens that are profiting from the forced sales of of solar panels, windmills, and transmission line equipment. If you think you will have affordable, reliable electric service at the end of this process, you are badly mistaken.

Note that gasoline prices will be lower for only a few more years. Most of the fracked oil and natgas comes from old depleted wells, and that cheap energy will run short once all are tapped out.

A key issue is the export of American and Australian coal. Why should we pay for higher cost renewable energy, yet export dirty coal to nations like China who then benefit from this cheaper energy while polluting the Earth? Ban coal exports and you cut emissions elsewhere. Save our non-renewable energy source for its citizens.

So far as reasonable renewable energy, hydro power is the best bet. The DOE determined that 1% of our nation’s energy could be generated by hydro-power just by updating the intake design and turbines of existing dams! We also have thousands of small dams that have no electrical turbines because no one lived nearby when they were built 100 years ago! So that water power just runs off the spillway!

Here are more practical ideas, from a recent blog post:

I read a lot about wind power while writing for Sanders Research and proposed three ideas to boost this industry. First, most of the cost of a wind farm is not the equipment. Land must be purchased and some locals oppose them since the turbines are noisy. Good road access is needed to move huge towers, turbines, and blades, and power lines must be built, which also require road access. However, governments own noisy highways with lots of idle land around them. These are often near power lines and have great road access. Governments can simply offer this land to wind power companies for free use, as we once did to encourage railroads to expand.

A similar idea would install wind turbines on big bridges along coastal highways. Most are in very windy locations and many are very long. The Chesapeake Bay bridge is 4.3 miles long! No towers are needed for the turbines! These may not be huge turbines, but attaching a series of wind turbines alongside big bridges is possible.

The third issue is the power grid monopoly. Whenever wind farms are proposed, they demand billions of dollars to upgrade their grid to move this power to big cities. The biggest proposal calls for routing wind power generated electricity from the windy Dakotas to the Chicago area, though some 30% of power would be lost during transmission. This occurs because it takes power to push power along power lines. However, I discovered that most electrical power in North Dakota is generated by coal plants! I noted there was no need for expensive and inefficient new power grids to move wind power hundreds of miles when cities in the Dakotas can use this power. This may require federal legislation to force local utilities to buy wind power. There is a lot of “good ole boy” cronyism where utilities kill proposals by refusing to buy wind and solar power since that upsets their long-time friends in the coal and natgas industries. 

I think it’s worth noting that Mr. Nader’s energy “expert” has spent his entire life managing government utilities. It’s easy to propose “if I were emperor of the world” solutions for any problem; particularly if your internal reality testing software has developed without considering the economic and engineering realities that private businesses deal with every day.

Horsefeathers.

Everybody knows that industry benefits from entrenchment, economy of scale and mass production of standardized parts. Today, if you started from scratch you would as plausibly argue that it wouldn’t be cost efficient to start up electric power producing companies that depended upon coal or gas with their concomitant rail and pipeline infrastructure; people like you would be pointing to the existing infrastructure for burning wood while citing charcoal makers as evidence of economic efficiency.

All the reasons you cite for green inefficiency and cost liability would be offset if green enjoyed the same benefits of entrenchment that any current industry does. Government of forward-looking peoples has always provided incentives for progress in the form of research grants, land grants, tax abatement etc.

“As a former Canadian nuclear-power generating engineer”

You sound like a Muslim-Canadian Homer Simpson!

Concur with some, reject out of hand with others, Wizz. By all means, where it makes sense use green. Where it makes someone feel good, be green

out of their OWN pocket.

But I’m not hanging $20,000 dollars worth of panels on my Boston-region roof that will be at 40% of original capacity in 10 years and never pay for themselves. I embrace LED lighting, I use natural gas for my heat. My car is a 4-cylinder Subaru. I’ve done what I can do. My goal now is for the energy that I DO use be cheap. We’re a service economy. Why a country so rich with oil and the rest forced for a decade, their service workers to pay 4.00/gallon for gasoline to get to their 8/10 dollar an hour jobs is beyond comprehension. And all to pursue the “green” initiative. All over Europe, the aged choose between their food, their drugs, the heat for their homes for the green agenda. Reprehensible. And the politicians and wealthy carbon traders fly LearJet and live on monstrous estates. Well, I call bullshit.

My local power is Natural gas, it makes no sense to buy all-electric cars where I am because of the sheer inefficiency of line-losses transporting fossil-fuel generated power to my home to charge car batteries. This being the Liberal Northeast, I’m sure lots of folks do just that without regard to the generation issues and I’m also sure there are salesmen encouraging this anti-green activity. I have associates that manage an office park in Gloucester with 2.5 MW windmill-generators and between the maintenance and original installation 4 years back, they’re still 5 years off from break-even even with no catastrophic failures. Perhaps the Northeast is lousy territory? Ya think?

The South? Do it, pave the landscape with solar generators, there, it makes sense, I guess. But given that Nuclear is dead, given that you don’t know how much our forest fires put out in terms of carbon, just for starters, why should anyone care? Seriously. And when you confess you don’t really understand any of the consequences or whether there even ARE any consequences of adding carbon to the atmosphere of this carbon-recycling planet we call Earth, why should I care? And to be fair, the “Just In Case” modelers of the Green Agenda can go straight to Hell when it comes to their lavish living going on and on while the little people freeze and starve on the landscape under which are teeming reserves of energy. I’ve been listening the the “Peak Oil” folks for 50 years now, they lied or they didn’t know. Same for the Green/Global Warming liars. And the Just In Case Movement is just another offshoot. The world is cooling, not warming and I have no desire to take from mine and give to theirs.

When the pushers of Green are living the same austere energy budget as the little folks, we can talk. Until then, Drill, Baby, Drill!

Especially when most of the electricity in this country is generated with fossil fuels making them even more inefficient given the power transmission losses over the grid. Electric cars should not even be sold where the power charging those cars is not nuclear. They make no sense where the electricity is fossil-generated.

Yes, and we have been at it with Green-Tech for decades with still no yield. Green is a giant bailing operation with juicy corruptions built-in, like Solyndra, among many others.

Even the simplest math seems beyond these people…There isn’t enough usable sunlight or wind to power a large State without fossil fuel backup, let alone a country of 350 million people. Furthermore, they apparently haven’t heard of transmission and electric grid losses…

You’re right Ariel Sharon. How is your card game with Herzl in Hell?

http://rehmat1.com/2009/01/04/israel-occupation-based-on-myths/

I started reading this with interest, but had to stop reading at “addressing the dangers of climate change”.

The scientists have identified the challenge. The government is milking for all it can get for campaign contributors. What’s needed is some engineering input.

The better source for electricity would be thorium breeder reactor that avoids the long lasting nuclear waste and runaway threat of uranium water cooled reactors that were selected because the military wanted bomb-making materials. The better molten salt type was running in prototype form but was vetoed by the military. Gas cooled thorium reactors were commercial but had teething problems –not dangerous but costly. If prescient of the warming situation it wouldn’t have been converted to a conventional coal fired plant.

Also, while working out and ramping up the energy solutions, a bit of terra engineering is indicated. Specifically, the convection flow of the atmosphere and oceans need to be maintained by adjusting the albedo at the poles to reestablish the convection flow driving force.
‘
I won’t get into bioengineering to increase ocean PH and sink CO2 . Regular engineering is scary enough to the government loan harvesters.

That’s a good one, Homer.

D’oh!

Indeed. Paving the entire country with solar panels and windmills would not be enough. And because you can’t cheaply store electricity you will have huge variations in production.

Ralph Nader, forever a purveyor of complaints without offering feasible solutions. Appeal to authority works neither in debate of in real life.

Problem solved – simply demand a 3% yearly reduction on GHG emissions and we’ll be at zero within 35 years. Sheer brilliance, that. Wonder why no one thought of it before? Probably for the same reason cars haven’t achieved 100 MPG despite decades of increased CAFE standards. The lack of numeracy is breath taking.

Battery efficiency would need to improve at least 200-fold in order to handle commercial deliveries. To adequately covert automobiles will *only* require a three or four-fold improvement. As others have said before, but bears repeating, wind/solar will never be consistent enough for this need – large scale nuclear is a must if fossil fuels are to be eliminated.

Let us not forget that more than 1/3 of US green house gas emissions comes from livestock – no meat for you!

The US consumes about 4,000 TWh of electricity each year. The total generation potential from renewable energy sources is over 100 times as much at about 480000 TWh by one estimate.

Source: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf

Can you do simple math?

Batteries is not the only technology available. Have you heard of fuel cells? They are coming sooner than you think. But we have three decades to figure all the details out.

Toyota Mirai

As another data point, I have driven ~23000 miles on a GM Volt burning 55 gallons of gas. Sure, my commute is exactly at the limit of the Volt range. It won’t work for everyone but we can do a lot to get started.

Fuel cells “burn” hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn’t come from hydrogen wells but by hydrolysis using electricity from the usual source. Same deal with your GM Volt. Where does the recharge electricity come from?

Great marketing but not much actual help.

Nader and his advisor dismiss nuclear power out of hand. I can only say, what idiots!

If you don’t like the current types of nukes (the Gen 4 plants are really pretty good, much safer than earlier designs) then look at molten salt reactors, especially the thorium powered reactors. If you are really a Nader-ite, you could opt for the MSR that runs with an external source of neutrons, thus the reactor itself is never “critical” (self-sustaining). The alternative is thousands of photo-electric farms, black plates all over the countryside…very ugly, and the land is out of production for both wildlife and farm/forest. Or you could have big ol’ wind turbines everywhere. Not nice, either. There’s no practical storage at this time, and not even on the practical horizon. Oh, sure, there’s pumped storage. But that’s not nice either!

MSRs produce electricity cheaper than coal and are intrinsically safe. And power production at nodes rather than distributed through an area makes a much more efficient grid, and allows better management of the grid…in the end more reliable and cheaper power, with less impact.

Nader doesn’t know about the black swan tech on the horizon, either. How about low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the follow-on to Cold Fusion. It’s real, and it will be here soon enough.

And if these guys are really concerned about environmental matters they will agitate to stop all immigration. The US is not better off at 350 million than we were at 200 million, and we are screwed at 500 million. This is well known, and it’s a foreseeable situation. Should we allow ourselves to become Nigeria or Brazil or …dare I say it…Mexico? Where’s the benefit environmentally? Where’s the benefit to society? Say, who the hell does benefit?

Agreed and especially this point. “Especially when most of the electricity in this country is generated with fossil fuels making them even more inefficient given the power transmission losses over the grid. ”

Battery technology will probably close the gap.

I agree.

Very true. And hydrolysis takes a lot of energy.

What I meant to say was….Battery technology will probably never close the gap.

If Cold Fusion were actually real, taking care of 500 million people in the US would be trivial. All kinds of fantastic sci-fi things like ocean and space colonies would be feasible with Cold Fusion. Of course Cold Fusion isn’t real at this point, and there’s nothing to indicate that it’s just around the corner.

Just look to Ontario to see the fruits of the green energy economy.

The largest sub-national debt on Earth. Bigger than California’s, and half as big as the entire national debt of Canada.

Unreliable, uneconomic renewably generated power given first access to the grid, at least when anything is actually being generated. Much less expensive gas and nuclear generation forced to idle while the renewables are producing.

Excess renewably generated energy being sold at loss to northern US states at below market prices just to dump excess capacity.

Feed in tariffs (giveaways) to solar and wind power generators of up to 3X the going rate for the power supplied, to encourage the installation of solar and wind generating capacity (i.e. farmers fields full of solar panels each generating more profit for the landowners than useful amounts of energy).

Rate hikes that have doubled the cost of electricity over the past 10 years. Rate hikes for the foreseeable future. Naturally, many of us also have an little extra tacked onto our bill to help the poor folks who are hard up and can’t afford the new rates, so a bit of double screwing for good measure.

Provincial ombudsman stating Ontarians have spent an excess $37 billion on electricity costs in that same time.

The non-existence of the promised new green economy with thousands of jobs to replace the thousands of manufacturing jobs lost partly due to soaring power prices making Ontario a poor bet to start or maintain any type of manufacturing operation.

Friends of the former premier who brought this fiasco down on our heads making out to the tune of millions of dollars in green energy contracts.

And on and on and on…

http://business.financialpost.com/tag/ontarios-power-trip

Pages upon pages of green energy lunacy.

You know what is funny? The engine efficiency goes up with engine scale. Burning gas to power thousands of cars in an electric plant creates roughly twice the usable energy compared to burning it in a tiny car engine. A car engine is on average about 20% efficient (they peak at around 37%, but only at one particular RPM). A gas turbine power plant can reach 60% efficiency, and since it only runs at that RPM, can maintain it. Coal plants are closer to around 50% efficient. Transmission losses are typically around 7%, but that’s 7% of the power that leaves a plant…so take off about 3.5%. Electrical motors are very efficient. Greater than 90% at the needed power levels for a car (including batteries). So, you are better off driving an electric car, especially in states with some carbon-free electricity generation. Even in areas with lots of coal you are doing about the same as gas cars even taking the extra energy used for making the batteries, etc.

Hydrolysis is not the most efficient form to generate H2. Most H2 is actually produced from fossil fuels today. But the scale argument will still apply. It is a lot easier to capture CO2 from one central plant rather than millions of car tailpipes.

Longer term, wind and solar generation have zero fuel cost, i.e., it doesn’t cost anything to produce excess energy even when it is not needed. At that time, hydrogen becomes yet another storage medium for renewable energy.

The point is you can deliver great cars with either batteries or fuel cells today. It is really fun to step on the “gas” pedal of the Volt when the light changes and leave in the dust all the ICE cars (including hybrids such as Prius that don’t use the electric engine as the primary engine). With all the torque, it drives more as a motorbike than a car, at least below 40 mph. And this with a puny 100 KWh engine. Try driving a Tesla with a 300 KWh engine and you will be dreaming of electric cars.

“If Cold Fusion were actually real, taking care of 500 million people in the US would be trivial. All kinds of fantastic sci-fi things like ocean and space colonies would be feasible with Cold Fusion. Of course Cold Fusion isn’t real at this point, and there’s nothing to indicate that it’s just around the corner.”

Quite. Straley must be a Larouchie. StaLyn has been touting all this stuff for decades, even published a magazine called Fusion. Best of all, he insists we need more people – an earth population of 13 billion – to support the coming technological society. Talk about nuts, guess he hasn’t heard about robots, or unemployment. Meanwhile, Fusion’s been coming ’round the same corner since 1980.

Good points. But at best carbon is not removed from the atmosphere. There are power sources that do not add carbon and mechanisms (solar powered) that actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. There are also means that can alleviate the diminishing atmospheric and oceanic convection flows.

I believe in addressing the causes rather than just the symptoms. For instance, gas fired boilers are merely less bad but still not adequate to remove maybe 150 years of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.

Unless someone invents a super capacitor (note: i did NOT say ‘battery’) that delivers the same energy density as a tank of gasoline, electric cars will never be cost effective.

The reliance on batteries which are resource intensive (there isn’t enough lithium on the planet that can be mined to make all the necessary batteries), cannot be instantly charged, and have internal resistance (heat.. which is why lithium batteries sometimes burst into flames) is the electric car’s Achilles Heal.

Maybe I’m the only one but I’m for solar panels, molten salt reactors and electric cars. After all solar panels allow you to not be dependent on large government controlled entities. Same with electric cars.

The energy future looks great. There’s people working on molten salt reactors, four or five very good small fusion reactors, we have lots of oil and Cold Fusion (LENR) you can actually buy a power plant now that turns nickel powder into copper. It does work. No one knows how and it’s a bit spotty but cold fusion does work. The fossil fuel industry hopes you never hear about as it will ruin them.

Large windmills are useless though. Small ones are great.

I have the greatest respect for Ralph Nader, I voted for him twice and do not regret it (McCain = Obama, etc. So what?). However, here he indulges in wishful politically correct thinking.

Should we start to be concerned about trashing the planet? Yes. I keep my own house in order – why do we think the world will clean itself for us?

The problem is that conservation is not something where you can just say ‘solar good hydrocarbons bad’. You have to sweat the details. If solar energy uses more energy building and maintaining the panels and storing the energy for off-peak hours, then it is not a solution – chanting ‘solar good’ won’t fix that. Ditto if solar etc. are so expensive that we simply don’t have the spare capital to make the needed investments in time.

The bottom line is that there is no proposed plan that will make any difference with the ongoing third-world population explosion. If Nader refuses to address the brute fact of demographics, and how an exponentially growing population can and does and always has absorbed all resources, stripping the planet bare even as most as crushed into poverty – if he surrenders to mindless political correctness, then he is not helping. He’s just adding noise.

>> backup bilge pump

your ==backup== defense against flooding/sinking, depends upon your electric-power-plant being non-casualtied?!?

some of us crazy guys have a hand-powered pump in that billet. Whale company makes excellent hand-powered bilge pumps, shipmate.

OK then sterilize muslims & blacks. Everyone else is already at or below replacement.

Hello, Anon…

Here’s the syllabus for the 2015 MIT short course on Low Energy Nuke Rx (LENR). You can call it Cold Fusion if you like.

Cold Fusion 101 at MIT for 2015
December 5, 2014 Ruby Carat 4 Comments
[Translate]

The Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments course will run again on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over the IAP winter break Tuesday through Friday Jan. 20-23, 2015.

Professor Peter Hagelstein of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy, Inc., will present the course with topics such as:

Excess power production in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment;
lack of confirmation in early negative experiments;
theoretical problems and Huizenga’s three miracles;
physical chemistry of PdD;
electrochemistry of PdD;
loading requirements on excess power production;
the nuclear ash problem and He-4 observations;
approaches to theory;
screening in PdD;
PdD as an energetic particle detector;
constraints on the alpha energy from experiment;
overview of theoretical approaches;
coherent energy exchange between mismatched quantum systems;
coherent x-rays in the Karabut experiment and interpretation;
excess power in the NiH system;
Piantelli experiment;
prospects for a new small scale clean nuclear energy technology.

The material presented is different each day. Mid-day sessions are scheduled, with the room location to be announced.

Jan/20 Tue 10:30AM-02:30PM TBD
Jan/21 Wed 10:30AM-02:30PM TBD
Jan/22 Thu 10:30AM-02:30PM TBD
Jan/23 Fri 10:30AM-02:30PM TBD