On Sunday 26 November 2006 08:14, Nick Palmer wrote:
> Kyle, I've got no problem with fuel from oil shale as long as extraction
> and use
> 1) does not cause undue damage to the natural species ecologies of the
> areas 2) does not damage areas of great natural beauty
> 3 does not delay the introduction of non carbon based energy sources
> 4) does not delay the point at which the escalating price of oil will
> render even the currently marginal renewable technologies economical to
> use.
>
> If US oil shale stocks caused the US to stop messing with other people's
> (oil rich) countries as much that would be great, however as a "get out of
> jail free" card to escape the coming decline of economically and
> environmentally extractable oil, they won't help the world too much. From
> Wikipedia (kerogen is the "oil" in the oilshale):- "Therefore, worldwide
> there are approximately 620 billion barrels of known recoverable kerogen.
> This compares with known worldwide petroleum reserves of 1200 billion
> barrels (Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2006)."
>
> Off Topic follows
>
> Standing Bear wrote:-
>
> <<Many of these are sincere wackos, but many others have an ulterior motive
> for being obstructionists and economic saboteurs. For instance if one
> wanted
> to destabilize or harm a nation for any reason, this kind of activity would
> be
> one of the most efficient means possible to cause maximum misery to the
> target population. Those who went along with them for any reason would be
> the usefull fools that inhabit most any bandwagon. Also, luddites probably
> will be also found in the pay of major energy producer industries not
> benefited by this process>>
>
> Have we fallen into a vortex and gone back to the 1950's? Is Standing
> Bear's real name McCarthy? Seriously, S.B., I've been in the environmental
> movement since the late sixties. Guessing about what you mean, I can say I
> have never experienced, nor ever heard of anybody else experiencing, nor
> seen any evidence whatsoever of this cold war paranoiac "sleeper agent" and
> espionage centred view of the world actually having much, if any, basis in
> reality in the environmental arena. Most of the real hardcore supporters
> that I ever saw were little old ladies and gentlemen concerned about the
> world their grandchildren would inherit (they leave us money in their
> wills) and that proportion of youth who are not yet corrupted by money and
> power and excess possessions. It's true that environmentalism attracts
> people of a liberal social justice type (pinks to reds) but it equally
> attracts highly conservative "blues" - the balance is actually pretty even.
> This is because the basic ideas are just good common sense. Both political
> ends of the spectrum have some good things going for them, it's just that
> the presence of the other is disruptive. Neither would be pleasant if
> allowed free rein without the other to counter balance it. The blue end
> would be nature "red in tooth and claw" with "devil take the hindmost" as
> the motto with success only available to a few, and misery to the rest -
> the red end would be total bureaucratic control of the human spirit and
> lack of freedom. Neither is sustainable in the long run because both would
> ruin the environmental life support systems that life relies on. I know
> this looks like a superficially trivial point, but a nice mix of red, green
> and blue creates balanced white light!
>
> Environmentalists have been warning about climate change at least
> since the 70's and yet it is only in the last few months that the dam of
> obstructionism and environmental policy sabotage has been breached and
> sense is now starting to appear in the international arena. Earth could
> have had three decades less of global warming gases injected into the
> atmosphere if the world had listened to us and not the siren voices who
> used all their huge wealth and intellectual brilliance and rhetoric to
> blind people (useful fools) to the simple truth. The truth is S.B., it is
> people like you, accusing us of ulterior motives, who actually demonstrate
> that it is they who are the real threat to truth and sense. By projecting
> onto us what your "side" evidently sees as acceptable (i.e. pay offs and
> tied sponsorship and black propaganda) you therefore rant and scream and
> hold us up as an enemy without realising who the real enemies are. It is
> you who are the "sincere wacko" and the "useful fool".
>
> Nick Palmer
All that text....musta hit a nerve! Never seen anything but colors of
reds and blues. Somebody reads too many editorials. The real world
contains more than little old ladies in tennis shoes. Know nothing of Nick's
experiences, but have personally seen Iranian and other middle eastern
and/or yet other nationalities not American 'agents' for lack of a better term
working politically motivated pressure groups of all kinds on California
campuses in the seventies when anything went and usually did. One could spot
them from far away. Usually they wore European style pants with narrow belts
when most Americans wore bell bottoms with wide belts; usually sported a
certain type of tinted sunglasses with a variable tint that were expensive
and most of the rest of us did not wear. These same blokes would show up not
only at environmental meetings, but also at antiwar meetings. Such took
place all over campuses at random times and really were an unavoidable part
of the campus landscape on California State University grounds during
this period. These above mentioned folks would not 'lead' the meetings, but
would never be far from the leaders. They were also part of 'Anti-Shah'
demonstrations that, oddly enough, were also plentiful at my school despite
being thousands of miles from the action. I might also add that these folks
never seemed to want for money; were uniformly men even though the
active participants in the groups they attached themselves to sometimes were
majority female; and often these folks were never found in any real class
even though they seemed to spend the entire day on campus. No one that I
knew ever saw them in class either, and I knew many people. In addition, most
of the statements that came from these groups contained the typical words and
phrases that were the same across many campuses and matched the same
words coming out of the leadership organs of foreign countries that opposed
us at that time. Hardly any of the followers of the environmental groups that
I talked to could hold an intellectual discussion about the relative merits of
what his or her organization claimed to support; and in truth most appeared
mesmerized by the rampant fear mongering of the time.
Typical was the fear of nuclear power, raw and unreasoning. Nuclear waste
was portrayed as uniformly bad, uniformly long lived, and uniformly
umbiquitious. The rhetoric was, to quote the above writer, truly McCarthyan
and truly alarmist with no real facts. Questioners were snapped at, brushed
off or sometimes physically attacked. Went to a physicist on campus and
asked about the waste notion with a constructive idea of my own. If this
waste was even remotely as bad as it was painted, then it should in itself
be capable of producing energy for the good of man. It was here that my
eyes were opened. The good prof noted my concern but informed me that
over ninety five percent of all nuke waste were items like used gloves and
shirts, tools, etd. He said the average half life of the contamination on
these common items was around fifteen seconds or less, and that the only
reason that they were considered nuke waste at all was because the law
said 'any quantity more than zero' and not 'any reasonably hazardous
quantity'. He said that my secondary recovery idea, though admirable, would
not be practical. From that day to this that through my engineering career,
I have had to see what is real. Our need for energy independance is real.
Our de-industrialization due to our failed free trade policies and our lack
of purpose in energy production is manifest in lost jobs. What jobs are left
are being snapped up by an invading army of illegal aliens that our goverment
now seems to want to accept as citizens. In my own town, a road project that
was sold to the voters as an improvement to the community and a source of
jobs to local contractors, is being instead build by illegal foreigners and by
elderly social security pensioners who will work for substandard pay. The
community is recieving value recieved for value paid. The compaction of
the roadway is suspect, the curbing has more waves than a windy lake,
and the paving has repeatedly failed strength tests. Yet all of this is
accepted by a crooked administration that has had its friends personally
profit from this enterprise. And this is only a small town. We can listen
to the misguided among us, or we can wake up. We need energy.
The process in Israel can help us, if so we need to license it and use it.
The internal combustion engine is producing smog. Worse the fresh
air Otto cycly that it uses is only twenty percent efficient. Or less. To
use Nuclear power to generate hydrogen for fuel cell electric cars would
be a far better and less polluting solution.. We raise the temperature of
this planet a few more degrees and the methane clathrate cascade will
damage our race severely. It is already probably happening. Some divers
in the arctic were recently mysteriousely sucked under the ice and the
handlers were unable to pull them up. "It was like they free fall dropped
for five hundred feet!". This would be so if they were dropped into what
was a reduced density foam of methane and water. Nothing was said
about this or about the presence of a smell that methane certainly would
have.
An interim solution would be the oil shale one. Crack the product of
the shale to lightweight aliphatic hydrocarbons to use, again in electric
cars powered by fuel cells...again a large gain in efficiency. This act alone
will save up to eighty percent of gasoline consumption in that fraction of
our vehicle use that is personal or job related.
By the way. The loose slinging about of 'McCarthyism was a typical
response to any opposition to certain groups. Most of the members
of those groups did not know who that charlatan was or what he
represented. They only knew the term was an epithet like the other
less socially acceptable ones they used every day. If that is the way
of the future and our present, then it will have to be faced. It will
be the jobless and the dispossessed who will do the facing of these
mindless elitists in the age of the new bolshevistic upheavals to come.
At sixty one, my age of 'activism' is probably long past.
Read a little further back in your histories sports fans. The dispossessed
and the sold out can be a potent political force. Once organized. And
the organization can proceed shockingly fast. And they will not be polite.
The time is not 1954 all over again! It is 1917!
Standing Bear
And that is a shame what happened to arable land in the deserts
near El Paso. I was stationed there as an airman and know.
