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No, it's usually when someone like this comes along. Your basic unstoppable force of nature.

I notice you did not comment on my limited resources refutation.

I didn't because that applies to virtually everything whether "green"or not. We haven't gotten to the point where we can get more energy out of hydrogen than what is put into making it.

I thought your characterization of NIMBYs had some merit.

Ted Kennedy who I had mentioned before was one of the NIMBYs who opposed an offshore wind farm in Cape Cod.

photocells: a more sophisticated approach as to how we make our living is that we increase the energy density in the productive process.

I don't know for fact but I think concentrated solar power has a higher efficiency than PVs. It also doesn't need as much rare earth metals I read in a science article. PVs can be used in smaller areas though.

I oppose general power supplies from solar power. Too low density to be really helpful for our continued existence.

Do you know more about solar power than those who write for SciAm? A Solar Grand Plan estimates solar power can "supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." In the article Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity? it is claimed solar can provide all of California's and Texas' electricity. It goes on: "The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles," O'Donnell says. "Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough."

Now on to sanity. suppose we had a nuclear spasm.
would you classify that as sane? If not, why not? If not sane, how do classify the people who advocated this?
How do you classify the people whose policies led to this?

Sane? I don't consider nuclear power sane. As for those whose policies favored nuclear power, ump. Ike, Dwight D Eisenhower, favored policies friendly to nuclear power. He also warned about the military industrial complex, yet he made them powerful, with his push against democracy in Viet Nam. Yes he opposed democracy in Viet Nam. By 1954-55 the French and North and South Vietnam came to an agreement whereby the people in Viet Nam would vote for reunification. Ike sent then Colonel Edward Lansdale to South Vietnam to arm and train Vietnamese who opposed reunification. If it hadn't been for that military contractors may never have gotten so big. They had a new war, the Vietnam War.

Falcon

I know you have an ax to grind with nuclear power for some reason - but calling it "dirty" compared to it's alternatives is just silly and you should know better.

BS! Nuclear power is dirtier than either solar or wind. With both there is no waste to be stored. And there is no processing or reprocessing of fuel. The sun or wind is the fuel.

Does it create some potentially hazardous materials that have to be dealt with? Yes
Are they in reality THAT HARD to deal with? No

Yes it is hard to deal with. Even the French, who have gone further with reprocessing nuclear waste has problems doing it. "France is aggravating both problems: spent fuel and separated plutonium stocks." "Reprocessing [pdf] and MOX fuel use are uneconomical and will remain so for the foreseeable future;"

"Nuclear France - The Myths Uncovered"
"France gets nearly 80% of its electricity from its 58 reactors. However, such a heavy reliance on nuclear power brings with it many major, unsolved problems, most especially that of radioactive waste. Despite assertions to the contrary, the French nuclear story is far from a gleaming example of nuclear success. The example, set by the French nuclear infrastructure - and best exemplified by its giant nuclear corporation, Areva, is not to be emulated."

Are they really that bad for the environment? Not really

If you believe that you haven't seen the effects of uranium mining. "The Effects of Uranium Mining are Disastrous."

biggest problem with dealing with nuclear byproducts is NIMBY.

The biggest problem with wind is NIMBYism. The government's National Renewable Energy Lab has produced an atlas of wind potential through the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to power the continental US. Which I might add that Texas Oil Man T Boone Pickens is pushing with his Pickens Plan. But that's not all. The Pacific Northwest has a lot as well. If you draw a line south from there to Southern CA then turn east to Texas, you'll see more potential. Now go east, the Appalachians is a good location for wind as well. The mountains up the east coast have good locations. Offshore from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod there's another line of good cites.

Oh, I think it's rather telling that so called environmentalist activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr is one of those NIMBYs fighting wind farms in Cape Cod, from that first link on Nimbys.

Commodity traders CANNOT affect long term oil prices if there is no problems with supply.

And prehaps we wouldn't have to WORRY so much about future supplies if we were less dependent on getting oil tanked over from other countries when we've got plenty to drill right here. Other courtries are exploring off-shore drilling because of rising prices. Remember that WE are not the sole consumers here--there's a lot of emerging nations that will consume more and more. So even though we are cutting back they are not.

If Republicans were serious about an energy policy of the country, they would first mandate that ALL new pipelines between urban centers be able to carry both natural gas and hydrogen. And then they would fix the fiscal budgetary issues and start to invest in translating this economy from carbon to hydrogen. That's what they are there for - *strategic* planning, not reactionary shit they dreamed up because they are up for election in few months.

And if Democrats were serious they would quit the NIMBY attitude regarding drilling, nuclear energy and even wind power. They tie our hands and every turn and then complain there's no alternative energy being worked on.

Regardless of the truth or falsehood of global warming, or the anthropogenic component thereof, one thing is certain:

It has become a hobby horse ridden by assorted hard-Left statists anxious to make a grab for power and revenue that has been denied to them at the ballot box for many years.

They speak of carbon taxes, but there seems precious little concern about the "carbon" part and plenty of hand-rubbing over the "tax" part.

Unless and until private jets are confiscated from limousine liberals like Laurie David, and Barbara Streisand is driven out of her 20,000 square foot mansion with 10 separate HVAC systems, and the Kennedys are told to go fuck themselves as a thousand windmills are erected in their private yacht harbor, I'm going to assume they don't really believe what they are preaching. I think they see this as an opportunity to ram collectivist squalor down the throats of us peons, while they continue to enjoy every luxury that free-market capitalism can provide to a tiny elite.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Scientific "consensus" is not proof, especially when most of the "scientists" are not climatologists at all, but left-wing professors of social sciences and epidemiology and the like.

We know that natural processes alone can explain far greater variations in temperature than even the worst predictions of the alarmists. Palm trees once grew at the North Pole, and ice once lay a mile deep over Yosemite Valley and Chicago, before cavemen tamed fire. I'm not ready to dismantle Western civilization and hand it over to the proven failures who have given the world the likes of Zimbabwe and Cuba, without a lot better proof than mere statistical noise. The so-called "precautionary principle" is the the most ridiculous crock of shit that the human mind has ever produced, and that's saying something.

-ccm

Symmetry is most definitely not sufficient.

Europeans in the US will be subject to new laws that will be signed by their president in the next couple of days:

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/TastyP olitics/2006/09/29/title_171

If I were European, I'd be rather happy about the talks breakdown given the above.

Given the world of choices in where to work or fly... Legally speaking, this is no less risky than travelling to any tin-pot dictatorship.

-b

These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project has produced much grumbling: "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..." This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.

The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.

Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).

Tidal power seems attractive, but there are only about 20 good sites worldwide.

The Athabasca Oil Sands projects are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.

The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.

Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.