“Energy Shortage” is the wrong term
Our problem is not AVAILABLE energy per se. We face a lack of USABLE energy.
As Prometheus points out in an SF thread, hydrogen technology is not a means of producing power, but of packaging it.
As just one example we have an almost unlimited supply of potential hydroelectric power, which is a form of solar power, available. But it hard to put a waterfall in your gas tank.
There is an almost unlimited amount of heat energy two miles beneath your feet and that is peanuts compared to what is further down. But the Planet Earth will not fit into your air conditioner.
Our challenge is to get the energy that is available into our cars and homes. Peak Oil makes sense because we will not be allowed to.
We face a difficulty which, on the technical side, isn’t that different from the ones white technology has routinely dealt with. It reminds me of the attempts at powered flight around 1900. The gas engine had given us the power, we had to ADAPT it.
The Wright Brothers did that in the Kill Devil Hills, not at Kitty Hawk, in December of 1903. But they did not face the problem then that they would now.
First they would have needed a permit to use the Kill Devil sand dunes. The police might not have allowed them to risk their lives that way. Jane Fonda and a guy with a guitar would have demonstrated against their putting that ugly, smelly thing in the air and scaring the birds.
What is creepy is that this is NOT an exaggeration. In fact, these would be just the beginning of their problems.
Let’s get real, gang:
All energy production and use involves risk. The minute anyone tries to do anything, the activists come out, as nuclear energy shows.
We have an army of vested interests any serious technology will have to fight. We have another army of Mommy Professor Activists whose full time job is to protest ANYTHING. We have another army among our three million lawyers — oddly enough, about the same number we have in our prisons — looking for anything to make a lawsuit out of.
What we face is not a shortage of energy, but a glut of Mommy Professor’s kids.
#1 by BoardAd on 03/18/2008 - 1:31 pm
well this may not be a solution, as much as it is a stop gap untill something replaces oil, but I think we are forgeting about gasification. It’s a technology that predates gasoline and uses the existing internal combustion engine. It can be used as a gas or liquified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator
Smaller charcoal based units are used on cars.
This is also FEMA’s solution to another oil embargo like the 70’s, germany’s and our solution in WW2, and was a secondary fuel source fo zeppelins.
#2 by Dave on 03/18/2008 - 2:05 pm
I dare anyone out there to find a judge that actually has a work ethic sufficient to permit him to genuinely examine evidence. Judges really do sit on their can and make it up as they go. Most of them don’t even make a show of even glancing at the evidence.
I have now told you what every experienced lawyer knows.
That is why they avoid courts like the plague and why litigators are just plain whack jobs. (The fact that litigators are insane persons is a secret the legal profession fails to disclose to the public.)
But let us go easy on lawyers, in distinction to judges. The average lawyer out there is lucky if he can pay the rent, and it gets very tiresome stealing the little money your average claimant has as these people have yet to learn that the court systems, or “bypass systems” such as arbitrators and mediators, are absolute failures and cannot be trusted even for the most elementary matters.
That’s why the legal staff in your run of the mill law firms wander about in dazes and babble to themselves.
As law school wannabes they were never informed of the truth in time to learn that getting a leather sleeping couch, and an office that will actually fit one, and being able to shut the door knowing that your partners will be afraid to open it, is out of the question.
The “eco-bar” is a subset of the “family offices” of wealthy families. There is no real money in it except that you get to acquire a wealthy patron, Jane Fonda types, who depend on you to educate local planning commissions on the advantages of rigging zoning ordinates guaranteed to impoverish shoreland, wetland and timberland owners who were stupid enough to buy without paying for expensive assessments in advance of their purchase decision.
That is why I love these NY City Jew “commercial finance” type lawyers whose forte is making money in business, as opposed to “law”, and whose expertise is in ripping off insurance companies (and/or their clients) and in telling judges what it would be impossible for a judge to know.
That is the kind of lawyers Warren Buffet has on his team and why Warren Buffet loves the insurance business as a vehicle for ripping off legitimate commerce in general.
The secret is that these lawyers don’t know “the law”. They just make sure that whatever they do know, no judge knows also.
That way they get to instruct the judge in “the law” (absolving the judge from having to do any work himself) and also get to create a lot of “new law” that is highly advantageous to themselves, their clients, and their business partners.
All this eventually leaks into to Congress, which is not interested in doing any real work either.
That is how we got to this situation where there are 10 million Americans who are enslaved to preposterous mortgage and credit card contracts and a banking system that is bankrupt.
Our Jewish friends, having very successfully embezzled global banking system and insurance company assets, took their winnings and purchased gold while it was cheap and are now selling it into a panic and flipping the proceeds into government bonds. In a little while, as soon as the bond market has topped, they will cash out and buy real estate at distressed prices.
Hey, what do you want? Jew lawyers sell a quality product and the market for new taxicab franchisees has been plumbed! And you try to find a sucker dumb enough to put up money for a restaurant and a club.
Despite what you may think, nigger sports multi-millionaires are in short supply.
#3 by Bob on 03/18/2008 - 2:10 pm
“That is why they avoid courts like the plague and why litigators are just plain whack jobs.”
Have you noticed how the big litigators are like professional wrestlers? Each one of them alweays wears his patented costume suit or hat or has a pair of glasses always perched on top of his head or some other costume.
#4 by BoardAd on 03/19/2008 - 10:31 pm
I just learned that gasification IS the first step in coal cracking according to the Fischer-Tropsch process.