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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (4206)	1/13/2009 2:59:18 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

What distresses me is this country just pissing away it's valuable carbon based fuel stock out the tailpipe or up the smokestack. Once it's gone.. it's gone! Well, I really don't see any value to carbon based fossil fuels if we can achieve an alternative fuel technology that is CHEAPER than FFs. Thus, I don't think it will be much of a loss. So it seems silly to assign a value to a commodity that you're trying to render irrelevant (and I would be happy to see this). Let me say this... Americans love their cars, especially ones that are fast, and/or tough (racing and outdoors sports/hunting being the operative terms). So if the auto industry can create an electric drive that is more reliable (they can and have done so), with the ability to permit people to transition effortlessly from FF to hybrid or pure electric, you're going to see that transition naturally occur with little resistance. I'm leaving out biofuels just because they are so inefficient Yeah.. I guess that would be seriously inconvenient to your dysfunctional logic. I don't perceive them as "inefficient" but merely in their infancy regarding R&D and working out the engineering for the best efficiency. There's NOTHING more efficient than growing algae which, as the simplest of flora, converts non-edible nutrients into useful products via a chemical reaction with natural sunlight and water if you can do it on a large enough scale with minimal operational and maintenance requirements. Algae based bio-fuels could be grown in urban environments, using dilapidated building unfit for human habitation, but still structurally sound enough for industrial use. Sunlight can be "piped" down to each and every floor using either mirrors, or fiber-optic strands and since algae absorbs 3x's it's weight in CO2, it certainly would go far towards cleaning up city air. this game will not last too much longer and we had better get serious and start to work on other ideas to generate electricity. Well.. we can get a bunch of people, like yourself, to run in squirrel wheels hooked up to generators... ;0) You know we have the means to produce huge quantities of electricity using nuclear and NG, both of which would create baseload capacity which could be augmented by solar and wind, but you just don't seem to want to hear that solution. And apparently no one in the regulatory agencies want to hear that it's wiser to have a few designs that are mass-producible (pebble beds come to mind) and more readily maintained and repaired. And if you think there isn't an economic cost that will be repeated every 10-20 years regarding solar and wind, you'll fooling yourself. The installation costs for all of this will likely be repeated each and every 20 years as windmills are overhaulted and solar cells swapped out, or replaced due to weathering effects over that time period. So yeah.. you have a bunch of dysfunctional and illogical arguments, but I think we can both agree that we look forward to the day when we have a more inexpensive source of energy.. (maybe Fusion?). Hawk