well.. I guess Obama is the only candidate really looking at alternative energy. McCain seems to only support nuclear energy as an alternate energy source.
If Obama is elected, do you really think the government will look into alternative energy, or do you think this is just a campaign thing?
In regard to the second link above about fast tracking to alternative fuels...
10 years IS a fast track, considering ALL THE INFRASTRUCTURE and BUSINESS CHANGES THAT WILL BE REQUIRED.
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It is ccrazy to think this can be done in 2 or 3 years. If you look at the www.pickensplan.org you will start to understand the immensity of it all.
so ten years in my opinion is a fast track and the opinion of the above link is quite slanted.
There ain't nobody anywhere who could possibly physically do it faster
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I don't think it is slanted. I think they are referring to the implications of the ad. People looking at the ad aren't going to be thinking.. fasttrack = 10 years. I think it implies that Obama will get this on board within his next term (4 years) if he is elected.
I agree with you, though, that it is going to take time. And that is what bothers me when I hear people say "We don't have time to do this, we need to do something now". The problem is, they've been saying this for the last ... 30 years? When is it going to be time to do this? I think now, when everyone is focused on the problem is the time. I think this whole energy crisis might be a blessing in disguise if it gets more research directed towards alternate energy sources.
I agree with you, though, that it is going to take time. And that is what bothers me when I hear people say "We don't have time to do this, we need to do something now". The problem is, they've been saying this for the last ... 30 years? When is it going to be time to do this? I think now, when everyone is focused on the problem is the time. I think this whole energy crisis might be a blessing in disguise if it gets more research directed towards alternate energy sources.
I�m in general agreement with all of that. We should have started looking for alternative energy years a go as it would have been a good way to maintain our independence. Also we should not be excluding any one type of energy or just promote one type of alternative energy. We need to look at the whole range of alternative energy sources even the so called science fictions ones like zero point energy or over unity. That is of course assuming our black government programs have not already developed them and are not telling us about it.
The idea that we should not bother to develop new oil fields �or whatever� because it will take too long to get them on line is ludicrous. How long did it take to develop the atom bomb? How long did it take to develop the Alaskan pipe line? However the current attitude seems to be that if it might take too long and might be too difficult to do we shouldn�t do it, which of course then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
I would not exclude the possibility that there could be people who are working to collapse of our economy and the country as we know it so that they can create their New World Order, with them in control of course. This is not quite as absurd as some might believe. The great depression was caused by the FRB. However we, at least for the moment, still have the power to take back control of our government. But for that to happen we need to throw off the media programming of arguing which of these two losers would make a better president. Instead we should be asking why it is that, out of the millions of people in the country, that these two are supposedly the best candidates for the job.
Prior to his rise to stardom Obama was a virtual unknown here in Illinois, with the possible exception of a shady real estate deal or two.
McCain aside from being a prisoner-of-war, what has he really done as senator to make him worthy?
Meanwhile the media skillfully keeps the majority of the sheeple blissfully occupied arguing who is better tweedledee or tweedledum cause in that way the asking of really serious questions is kept to a minimum. Which means for the �powers-that-be� no one is going to upset their apple cart and the status quo will remain regardless which party wins.
An article about Ray Kurzweil and solar energy. He sees it competing in 5 years and supplying all of the world's needs in 20 years.
"We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy," he said. "It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years."
An article about Ray Kurzweil and solar energy. He sees it competing in 5 years and supplying all of the world's needs in 20 years.
It is competing already. I have some friends in California that own a solar manufacturing plant. They are doing tremendously well. They create solar roof products for big box stores and industries. I mean, their business is exploding! absolutely going nuts... and soon they will be going public and I plan on buying stock.
madscientist writes
"Meanwhile the media skillfully keeps the majority of the sheeple blissfully occupied arguing who is better tweedledee or tweedledum cause in that way the asking of really serious questions is kept to a minimum. Which means for the “powers-that-be” no one is going to upset their apple cart and the status quo will remain regardless which party wins."
I fully agree with you. The media is controlled by others and CNN and MSNBC and FOX all work to spin a web of deception to keep everyone off track. None of them tell the truth, none of them reveal the reality we are facing yet I believe that they fully know it due to the little leaks they sometimes slip out, then suddenly disappear from view. We, the people have not been in control of the country (USA)for a very long time and which ever party wins will be ruled by the shadow government and it seems to me that we are heading to a one world government no matter what, enslaved to the power masters, loosing jurisdiction of our own back yards and WTO and NAFTA have everything to do with it yet it is just the tip of the iceburg. Its like a freight train coming down the tracks and its almost arrived.
Last edited by Arrowwind09; 09-11-2008 at 04:36 AM.
There are several problems with these new wind and solar technologies which dont get discussed much but need answering.
They are at a relatively early stage of development and as such they are not all that efficient. It may be fine to think you are getting free hot water with your solar panel on the roof of your house or a wind turbine that provides lighting, but this a far cry from spending billions of dollars on a mad rush to get these vast acres of solar panels and wind farms up and running for the main electricity grid, when we later find out that we have created a Ford Edsel energy model,when if we had waited longer to develop a more efficient solar panel(its only on average about 20% at the moment) we could have saved billions of dollars in having less solar equipment for the same money.
Wind turbines are not all that efficient either, about 18%,and the wind is variable, even offshore so you can never be sure exactly how much power you are going to get from them. This means that there has to be conventional thermal power station backup capacity for this eventuallity which tends to increase the real cost of wind generation.
There is another long term problem with investing in the large capital cost for wind turbines. If you are a believer in global warming (which most people who are promoting a rapid expansion in solar and wind are) then there is the question of what effect GW will have on wind speeds and possible changes in locations of maximum speeds in the future as GW increases. These factors are critical to wind generation, and dont appear to have been thought about much, but could well leave wind farms in windless deserts.
The danger is a too rapid expansion of renewable energy generation with the technology in its infancy could well leave the US vulnerable.
These questions are critical and deserve answering before commiting vast sums of taxpayers money .
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008
Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about "global warming", I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates.
Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.
After years when America was vilified for not taking "global warming' seriously, it was a shock to find how "environmentalism" is now threatening to transform what is still the largest and richest economy in the world.
Both candidates favour a version of the proposed "cap and trade" scheme to slash US greenhouse gas emissions to 63 per cent below 2005 levels, at an estimated cost by 2030 of more than $600 billion a year - representing a cumulative loss to the US economy, within 22 years, of $4.8 trillion.
Although America is still dependent on coal for around half its electricity, with reserves estimated as likely to last 200 years, state after state is proposing to ban new coal-fired power stations.
Environmental groups, with powerful political support, are now lobbying equally fiercely against natural gas or any new nuclear power plants.
Most dramatic of all are the implications of a Supreme Court judgment in the case of Massachussets v the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which ruled by a single vote that the EPA must treat any greenhouse gases as "pollution", to be regulated under America's Clean Air Act.
The EPA is thus mandated to impose drastic new limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from pretty well any source, not just industry and transport but schools, hospitals, even lawn mowers.
The implications are so immense for almost every sector of the US economy that government departments -commerce, agriculture, energy and others - have been queuing up to protest, arguing that the effects of such regulation would be so damaging that it should be regarded as unthinkable.
But politicians of both parties, led by the two men vying for the presidency, are so carried away in the rush to appear "green" that it seems there is no longer any national voice powerful enough to question the sanity of such measures.
All the fashionable talk is of how fossil-fuels must be replaced by massively subsidised sources of "renewable" energy, such as vast arrays of solar panels, even though a recent study showed that a kilowatt hour of solar-generated electricity costs between 25 and 30 cents, compared with 6 cents for power generated from coal and 9 cents for that produced by natural gas.
What is terrifying is the extent to which America's leading politicians seem oblivious to the economic realities of what they are proposing. The readiness of Messrs McCain and Obama to posture in front of pictures of virtually useless wind turbines symbolises that attitude perfectly.
Here, in the EU we are only too sadly familiar with politicians floating off into cloudcuckooland over our future energy policy, with the virtual certainty that before many years this may leave us with a colossal shortfall in our electricity supplies.
But "the lights going out all over Europe" is one thing: if they go out in the richest economy in the world - while China cheerfully continues to build one new coal-fired power station a week - we may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen.
I may be wrong about this but it is my understanding that the major hindrence to the use of solar energy at the present time is the lack of an efficient battery to store the energy produced.
Yes, batteries are a big problem. In the past 60 years that I am aware of
there has been only a small improvement over the basic lead/acid cell.
It is an unfortunate fact that the basic commodity named 'crude oil' is
a fantastic energy dense material that is used for thousands of products.
Nothing seems to begin to match its benefits. The idea of riding ourselves
of its use within 10 years is absurd and na�ve.
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Absurd and na�ve? No way! At least not if one happens to be an absurd and na�ve politician.
However for anyone what�s willing to consider a different view point to our oil problem rather then just going with the conventional flow, and are also willing to watch a rather long movie/lecture, they can slip over to this site. The lecturer provides a unique perspective on our oil problem.
The point is made that contrary to popular wisdom we have more oil then we know what to do with. However we have been lead to believe that there is a shortage so as to maintain the high price of oil. Of course the oil companies which in effect are a monopoly (no surprise there) naturally don�t have a problem with this. However the real problem appears to be that because the value of the dollar is tied the value of oil if we were told that we do in fact have all the oil we need this would cause a major meltdown and destruction of our economy AND the worlds economy. So we�re trapped with high oil prices.
Mad Scientist.. your opinion on the energy plans
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