Hi John, > Unfortunately the "all-electric" economy is no better than an ICE economy.
Yes, but lets clarify that. In the USA this is unfortunately true NOW .... but not in countries like France, for instance, where "all-electric" means lean, green, and ecologically sound. And we can help to change that situation here for the benfit of the next generation. Are the French more intelligent than we? No... well maybe... but they were also "blessed" with having little oil. Yes, you heard me right, "blessed." This sad situation of a non-optimum electrical grid is true now in the USA only because we have lacked, in our society for the last 30 years, the political will-power to make the switch away from fossil fuels - which have always "seemed cheaper" than the alternatives. But who's zooming who? That so-called cost advantage is just "paper-shuffling" manipulation, as it turns out. Good economists (not on the petro-payroll) will tell you that even if solar-wind-nuclear seems to cost 4 time more at any given time, that advantage quickly evaporates over the years when the dollar becomes 6 times weaker because we sent so many greenbacks overseas to pay for what we should have been weaning ourselves off of. And that bit of paper trickery is never-ending. You can forget direct dollar-denominated cost comparisons as being meaningless. IF after the Arab Oil embargo in 1973 we had made the politically unpopular decision to slap an extra $20 barrel tax on imported oil, tripling the cost at the pump, and also given up the oil-depletion allowance give-aways to big-oil, and then used those tax proceeds to go 100% wind-solar-nuclear, mostly nuclear unfortunately, which is essentially what was done in parts or Europe... then we could have, like France has now, a largely nuclear "all-electric" (except for transportation fuels) economy which is economical, safe, far less polluting than natural gas even. They are perfectly poised to use this new technology. And yes, batteries can be recycled easily if they have been engineered for recycling from the start. Dropping imported oil is part of the every unpopular "least of evils" decision. And here we let the oil-establishment make that choice for us. But we could have done what France did, and we did not. That failure should teach us a lesson, in regards to the future situation, but it hasn't sunk in yet. Even if you have a Three Mile Island every twenty years or so, this is more than balanced by having avoided the adverse health effects of the tremendous amount of radiation which burning coal, oil and gas puts directly into the atmosphere. Idiots will tell you natural gas is as clean as it gets, but I can take my radiation monitor and actually measure radioactivity released in the exhaust of my gas-fired furnace (radon mostly). Multiply that small amount by several hundred million and that, my friend, is the real hazard of radiation, not the occassional Three Mile Island. > Until we start tapping less polluting sources of electric generation for the grid we are all just fooling ourselves. No one can disagree with that assessment. We should be funding alternative energy to the max, even if many of the ideas do not pan out. If we had invested, starting in 1989, half of what goes into the black-hole of hot-fusion, then problems would be likely be solved by now. > The end-to-end cleanest transportation technology available today > is high efficiency hybrid ICE/electric systems.... Only in the USA at this moment in time and only given that we do not have politically viable alternatives in the USA, now. Your pronouncement is unnecessarily focused on our past mistakes and not on our future choices to remedy them. Not to mention, you may have a bit of personally stake in ICE technology, but that may or may not affect your ability to look at the larger picture, because ICE technology itself is very adaptable. I suspect that you could convert your 2-cycle engine to run on ethanol or any ecologically sound liquid fuel in a matter of weeks. And yes, ethanol may or may not be part of a sound overall solution. There is considerable debate on whether there are efficient non-distillation methods to produce it at a net ecological advantage. But I am convinced that if enough smart people like yourself, would really say to themselves - is there any usable non-fossil fuel solution, then it would would happen a lot sooner than the oil industry's extensive propaganda machine wants us to believe. Jones
