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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (398317)	7/13/2008 3:30:28 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574888

Ted, I would rather we use natural gas solely for producing energy to light homes and businesses. No more oil and coal. Most generating plants already are equipped to convert to NG when the air is too smoggy to burn oil. As far as I can tell, there would be no need to make any huge financial outlays. I am not sure what I am missing but I suspect there is some reason why this isn't happening. He is looking at it from the point of view of trade balance and national security implications (of importing high percentage of energy). If alternative energy (wind in his case) replace some percentage of power generation, but if it just replaces coal, there is no gain. But if it replaces some natural gas used in power plants, and if natural gas replaces some of the oil used in transportation, there is a gain. I am somewhat sceptical of feasibility of this in individually owned passenger cars, but fleets of buses, trucks or even train engines would be better targets. Joe

To: tejek who wrote (398317)	7/13/2008 7:12:59 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574888

"More downsides.......its only a temporary fix." Most everything is a temporary fix. Battery technology has a long way to go before pure electrics are practical. Again, I am not saying it is the best technical solution. Far from it. But the politics could play strongly in its favor. Try to look at this from that point of view. It is simple to explain. It tackles several issues at once. Prototyping the systems needed are completely off the shelve and can be done in a matter of months. It doesn't take a huge capital outlay. And it could involve the whole country working together with visible and tangible near term progress. For me, the latter point is the one I see as worth the whole ball of wax. We haven't had a Big Project since the Moon Race. And NASA was so focused on not making mistakes, that they made the whole affair boring for all but the most dedicated space cadets. Even Apollo 13, which had all of the earmarks of high drama, was as boring as dishwater at the time unless you lived in the Houston area and had some insight into what was going on.