Mike Carrell wrote:
OK guys, it's 'they should have' all over again and ignoring the responsibilities of CEOs of energy comapnies. I might be wrong, but I believe Shell is deeply into PV systems and regrds itself as an energy company, not an "oil" company. I have heard second and third hand similar sentiments attributed to other oil CEOs.
So have I. But when you look at the amounts they spend on R&D, and scale of their commitment, you see this is mostly window dressing and public relations blather. They are not taking serious, large scale steps, and -- equally important -- they are not lobbying Congress to give them a tax break to build things like wind-turbine based hydrogen fuel systems. Instead, they are asking for massive tax breaks to drill for more oil and to distort the market in favor of waste and pollution. And of course Congress has given them all they ask for, on a silver platter.
The fossil fuel companies should be building the equivalent of 4 or 5 nuclear power plants per year. powered by wind. (Or powered by uranium, for that matter.) That would make a substantial impact by the end of the decade. In 10 or 20 years it would eliminate oil imports. If they had started 20 years ago, and at the same time the auto companies had building millions of hybrid cars, the U.S. would be exporting oil today. We would be a member of OPEC, and we would only have one quarrel in the Middle East. We would be demanding that Saudi Arabia cut production and stop undermining our profits.
These are not technological fantasies. They were described by mainstream sources such as the Scientific American back in the 1970s and 80s. Hybrid cars were invented and patented in 1906, for crying out loud. The solutions to the energy crisis have been sitting on the shelf, untouched, for most of the 20th century.
Jed has been fuming about the slow progress of CF for a decade or so now, but you don't hasten crops by pulling on the shoots.
Oh come now, Mike. Every CF researcher I know has dozens of experiments he is yearning to try. Those people could use hundreds of grad students and millions of dollars in funding, and if they had been given what they need ten years ago, by now we probably would have prototype CF automobiles. The difficulties have been exaggerated.
There is no technical substitute for oil now or in the near future, and it goes well beyond transportation.
I disagree completely! There have been technical substitutes available off the shelf since 1906. Of course we cannot eliminate oil overnight, but we sure could drastically cut consumption overnight -- I mean literally, within 24 hours -- and we could eliminate the problem completely in 10 or at most 20 years. The automobile fleet is replaced every 5 to 10 years. (Only a handful of cars last longer than 10 years.) If the U.S. was serious about the war in Iraq, and this so-called war on terror, we would take drastic steps such as:
1. Impose an emergency wartime tax of $2 per gallon to pay for the war. If consumption does not fall by at least 20%, impose rationing.
2. Impose a draft, and send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan. If we do not do this, we will lose both wars for sure, so we might as well bring all the troops home now. We are losing in slow motion now.
3. Ban the production of SUVs immediately. Ban the use of SUVs in urban areas except by authorized people who have a good reason to drive such vehicles, such as carpenters hauling ladders, lumber or heavy equipment.
4. Ban the production of conventional non-hybrid automobile engines starting in three years, and trucks starting in 5 years. All vehicles must be hybrid or pure electric.
5. Within 10 years, build enough wind power to supply all of the synthetic fuel or electricity needed for our automobiles and trucks. As I have shown here before, this is not as much energy as you might think. Conventional transportation technology is grotesquely wasteful and inefficient, so any replacement will use only half or one-third as much raw energy.
A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, the White House made a few phone calls and *completely closed down all U.S. civilian automobile production for the duration of the war.* Think about that. They did not negotiate, or set up a schedule. They called the presidents of Ford, GM and Chrysler and told them to close their production lines immediately, and not to assemble a single car without government authorization, and to close all showrooms the next morning, and not to sell a single automobile to any civilian or corporation, period. That is the kind of thing you must do to win a war. Half measures do not work. It is a moral abomination for U.S. civilians and political leaders to stand around doing nothing to win the war, while thousands of our soldiers are killed and wounded, and thousands of Iraqi people killed by terrorists. We must take steps to root out the basic causes of the war, which are oil, oil money, and Mideast politics.
Such radical steps may seem like an impossible fantasy now, but so did airplanes crashing into buildings before 9/11. If terrorists attack with a stolen nuclear weapon, the steps I listed above will not seem radical. On the contrary they will seem too little and too late. Or, if serious global warming sets in, people 100 years from now will say we should have done all of this and more.
Freeman Dyson said: "The accepted wisdom says that, no matter what we decide to do about economic problems, we cannot expect to see any substantial results [for 15 years]. The accepted wisdom is no doubt correct, if we continue to play the game by the rules of today. But anyone who lived through World War II knows that the rules can be changed very fast when the necessity arises." The question boils down to this: Is this "war on terror" really a war, or is it just a charade in which we kill and main ~30,000 lower income Americans from small towns, and then surrender to the Taliban and al Qaeda and pretend it never happened?
- Jed
