Senator Obama, why are you opposed to restructuring Social Security into a system of private accounts, insured and invested very conservatively, so that people can actually own the retirement funds they produce,
'Very conservatively', like in the mortgage-backed securities that various pension funds did?
Please, pretending it is 1990, state exactly where funds should have been invested in that paid off, every year, for the past two decades, more than social security. (Or at least averaged more than social security and didn't have more than a 2% dip any specific year.)
Also note if you say 'government bonds' I will bitch-slap you. Government bonds pay more because they cost the government more. We could trivially get the same effect of a higher payout just by raising social security payouts. (And someone's going to have to explain to me how social security can't be afforded by the government, but massive government bonds can be.)
None of the countries with ICBMs are going to use them. The only countries with ICBMs are China and Russia. (And obviously the US.) They are not going to nuke us.
All missile defense systems do is screw up MAD, which is the reason they won't nuke us and the reason we won't nuke them. I know it sounds stupid, but we don't want to disable MAD, as that means they can disable MAD and we can't complain.
And, heck, they have a lot more excuse for missile defense than we do. They have to deal with North Korea possibly launching at them, for example. We don't.
We would be much better off spending that money protecting our ports from having nukes snuck through.
Are you finally going to eliminate the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard so we can eliminate inflation and have a vibrant healthy economy,
We wouldn't have an economy on the gold standard, you lunatic.
The M0 money supply, the amount of printed money that exists, is 750 billion. The price of gold is 600 dollars an ounce. Ergo, we'd need 1,250,000,000 ounces of gold to back our current supply.
Only ~5,056,000,000 ounces of gold have ever been mined, and only about a tenth of that is in bullion. Moveover, we're already holding 6% of that.
So, in other words, to back our economy in gold, we'd have to buy all existing gold bullion, and then track down and melt into bullion 40% of the gold in the entire world.
Of course, I can't expect logic from people who think that inflation is a bug, not a feature. FYI, the amount of money we have must at least match the size of the economy, and that means we have to increasing it ahead of the size of economy, and that means we're always going to overguess and get it slightly larger, or underguess and cap the economy for a bit.
This is a lot better than trying to fit the US economy inside of a few billion dollars.
God, you guys are desperately trying to pine this on the GSEs, aren't you?
First of all, Fannie and Freddie DON'T MAKE LOANS, you inbred hick. They buy conforming loans from banks and repackages them with a guarantee that they will pay off if the loan does not.
And, just as important, they DON'T BUY SUBPRIME LOANS. By definition. A subprime loan is one rated B, and prime loan is one rated A.
And the GSEs only bought prime loans. That is all they were allowed to buy, that is all they bought. They can only buy 'conforming' loans, and the major requirement for that is they 'prime'. (And there are some other rules which can make 'prime' loans be non-conforming, like it being too large, but nothing that could make a subprime be conforming.)
Moreover, we're having a crisis because the banks still own the subprime loans which they chopped up and put into 'securities' which they then promised to pay off, (And purchased insurance to pay off, which the insurance companies couldn't actually cover.).
That could hardly be true if Fannie and Freddie had purchased these loans from the banks, now could it? It would be Fannie and Freddie on the hook, and, in case you weren't paying attention, the Federal government already guaranteed to cover any shortfall they had.
I swear, all you morons are reading off the same talking points, one that forgot to mention what 'subprime' loans actually are or what Fannie and Freddie actually do.
Earmarking, despite everyone using it this way, does not mean 'spending inserted into unrelated bills'.
Earmarking is when the legislature get very explicit about funding. For example, instead of just allocating X billion for FBI counterterrorism, it allocates that, and it also goes ahead and allocates 40 million for an FBI counterterrorism building in Atlanta Georgia.
It can be in an unrelated bill, or it can be in the actual real budget.
When you hear 'earmark', think 'micromanage'. And it's usually, but not always, to micromanage the location to force spending of money somewhere.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it when it's something that would be needed anyway. If it's something the executive would build anyway, and you just made them do it at X instead of Y...well, someone had to pick the location, and doesn't really matter who.
The problem is when it's something that the executive branch would, logically, decide not to do. Like the infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere', which no local Department of Transportation would build, and the Federal Highway Administration would not help with, unless ordered to do so.
But, anyway, back to the point, something like half of all earmarks are things that would be needed anyway, so in actuality 'getting rid' of them wouldn't even help as much as the trivial 2% people keep pointing out.
There are a lot more Americans in Chicago than in Iraq, too. More than one hundred times as much if you're including the suburbs, or just fifty times as much if you're not.
So being in Iraq is actually twenty-five to fifty times deadlier in than living in Chicago, you moron.
This is, of course, statistical stupid, because most, maybe up to 75%, of the troops in Iraq are not in danger. They are support troops, in the Green Zone, and some of the safest people in the world, being protected on military bases by people with weapons and feet of steel.
The other 25% though, the people actually walking the streets of Iraq, are one hundred to two hundred times as likely to die, at any given moment, as someone walking the streets of Chicago. They are, if you will, 'making up the difference'.
It's even worse when you realize they're wearing armor, so while you're comparing the 'deaths', what you should actually be comparing is the shootings. If the same amount of people actually got shot in the same way in both places, a lot more Chicagoans would die due to lack of body armor, but that doesn't make Chicago 'more dangerous', it makes failing to wear body armor 'more dangerous'.
Any case law made could get forwarded back to the legislature, with the request to actually include it in the law, or at least consider this specific boundary case and either include or exclude it, regardless of the way the ruling went.
Until then, for, say, a decade, the ruling stands as case law, but after that it's discarded.
Which, of course, doesn't mean it's valueless in a court of law. If the expired ruling was based on actual legal research and the issues are similar enough and the laws haven't changed, any lawyer could use it as starting point, but it would not automatically be assumed to be correct.
Unfortunately, there's really no method to implement 'expiring case law'. The inner workings of the court, at least in American, were magically inherited from the English, which means that almost none of them are defined by 'law' per se, except the few specifically laid out in amendments. (The most infamous example of this being the writ of habeas corpus, which, as has been pointed out, is not actually granted, listed, or defined anywhere at all.)
In other words, the use of case law is defined by case law, in an impossible-to-modify self-referential manner. And is outside the scope of legislatures. (OTOH, the 'forwarding border cases back to the legislature' could easily be done with legislation.)
What I've always said is that laws should be 'filtered'. Or, rather, hierarchical.
That we should actually organize, and require by law, all laws so that they are under specific subclasses of behavior.
I know the laws are organized this way generally, but in actual fact they fail at this at the highest level, where laws about one action are often in entire different multiple sections of code, and at the lowest levels, where rules are often just listed in some linear order one after another.
We should be able to go the table of contents in a legal book and be able to immediately learn of all the laws that apply to any specific action we wish to do, and just have to read, at most, a page of text.
And we should have a legal reassurance that no law can apply outside the specific plain-English scope it is listed in.
I.e, if the scope is motor vehicles, and I am not, in any way, dealing with a motor vehicle, it should be impossible for any law under that scope to apply to me, regardless of a law that includes, for example, bicycles in there.
Oh, and also, any exceptions to a law should be listed at the higher level. For example, if a large sections of the motor vehicle laws exempt farm vehicles crossing the road, then there should be, at the branch of that tree, that exemption actually placed there. Instead of, as is common, semi-randomly at the end.
The entire system is structured, right now, so that you literally have to know the entire code just in case some law might apply to what you doing. This is clearly incredibly stupid. Anyone should be able to look up the ten or fifteen laws that might apply to what they are doing, using a simple tree structure, and read just them, secure in the knowledge that no other law can apply to their actions.
Also, really, this is SanDisk doing this, who doesn't give a crap about music distribution models or anything. They just want to give people a reason to spend their 20 bucks on a SanDisk card instead of different brand, and considering they have to format the cards before selling them, it really doesn't cost to put random content on them.
The music industry just went along with it because, as you said, they are desperate to try to figure out some way to save their failing business model.
I've been buying SD-card based mp3 players from the start.
Sure, they cost a tiny bit more, but considering I've never had to replace them, and that I have three or four strewn around in various location and SD cards all over the place that I can swap in and out and easily write without having to locate the specific player beforehand and attach it to my computer, it's nothing but a win. (And I was smart enough to buy a laptop with an SD card reader.)
Granted, the SDHC thing, in theory, requires upgrades, but honestly I've found that I don't really want more than 2G of music at a time, and I can easily just make multiple cards. Heck, a few times I've been tempted to buy a few 256k cards and put individual albums on them. I try to collect them from people upgrading their camera's memory.
All told, I've probably spent 100 bucks on mp3 players and SD cards my entire life, and all those still function fine. (Except that SD card that went through the washing machine.) Meanwhile, I've watch people upgrade from 128 meg flash players to 1G ones to 4G ones.
I can walk into the store and buy another 2G card, or buy another 12 dollar player, and it works with all the stuff I have. No obsolescence, no thinking I should have waited until prices dropped, I honestly don't understand why people by fixed flash-based devices. Hard drive based players, okay, I see that, but why would you buy a device with non-swappable flash?
The only problem is that my cell phone takes microSD, so once or twice I've found myself in my car wishing I could play mp3s from my phone on the car mp3 player. I've solved that by getting a few more converters, but it's always a hassle to find them. I was tempted to switch entirely to microSD and leave a converter in each player, but I realized I'd lose all those cards. (I could, of course, treat each microSD cards as a single unit with its converter, but honestly my phone card has other crap on it also.)
Erm, while we're being technical, it might be worth pointing out that by definition you can fit an uncompressed CD on a 1GB SD card, as audio CDs can only contain, at most, 800 megs of data. (The normal 700 megs of data, plus 100 megs normally used for error correction.)
And it doesn't have anything to do with the type of recording either. You can play a mono recording through two speakers twice as loud without distortion as through one speaker.
Right, and it's worth pointing out that gasoline usage is non-linear with traffic.
At some point, traffic jams disappear, and with even less use we can turn some traffic lights into stop signs and undo some of the things that make traffic safer and smoother by slowing everyone down. (And stuff like dedicating a no-yield right-turn lane at multilane intersections that no longer need as many lanes.)
If we magically had 75% the traffic tomorrow, we'd only be using something like 65% of the gas. With 50% traffic, and some work, we'd only be using about 25%.
Meanwhile, it works the other way, too. Every 1% increase in traffic is probably something like 1.3% increase in gasoline usage, at least in near-capacity areas. (And almost all the country is near capacity.)
So while higher-MPG cars reduce gasoline usage, I'm suspecting we're at the point that reducing the sheer number of cars, period, is the best way to go. (Especially since cars take forever to swap out.)
What we should do is require car companies calculate MPGs with tires inflated to the 'average' amount.
Then they'd all have an incentive to have consumers drive with tires at the correct amount, if every MPG they manage to up the average is one MPG less they have to make their car get.
They'd soon have sensors on every tire. And while I doubt they'd provide tires that can maintain their own pressure anytime soon, that sounds complicated, you'd start seeing cars with air pumps built in.
I don't know what you mean by 'underground algae', algae cannot grow underground as it needs light, but that's my idea too...we grow algae up here, pump it down there along with the salt water we already pump into oil wells.
It works out nicely, because, like I said, we're already pumping salt water down most oil wells, so we can just grow it in that salt water.
Likewise, there are plenty of 'empty' oil wells that we can switch back on, pumping out the salt water and pumping back down the salt water+algae.
Forget about trying to capture it at coal plants, the problem is the net carbon.
It will die down there, and possibly rot, but that will take time. And as is pointed out, we're good at keeping natural gas down there, we can keep methane and other byproducts of rotting down there.
And, hilariously, this might end up making us more oil, eventually.
We're talking about storing it pressurized underground. To continue your example, it does not take an amazing amount of pressure to dissolve CO2 into water...a cheapo plastic bottle can hold enough pressure to do so. I don't know what 'pressure' they're talking about, but seriously, you can create enough pressure by hand to dissolve CO2 in water.
I don't know how realistic the threat of it escaping into the water supply is. Or the threat of that then forming a high enough enough concentration of carbonic acid to actually harm people is. But acting like it can't form it at all is stupid.
And while we're at it, we must weight operating an automobile by gas vs. operating one by pushing it! Surely more of us could push our vehicles around when we aren't in a hurry!
News flash: Solar is the energy of the future. It is not the energy of now.
And some of the changes we have to do, like switching off gasoline for cars, are going to require more electricity.
I'm not a big fan of storing CO2 either, when it seems to make sense to store carbon instead.
Yes, biological carbon eventually decays and forms CO2, but there are a lot of forms resistant to it.
But, and this is a weird idea, what if we combined that with the idea of putting it in the ocean? What if we made, for example, grew a bunch of plants with it, and then simply stuck them underwater to rot? Such, they'd decay down there...but seems like it's be easier than trying to pump CO2 into the ocean.
Or, combine it with the article, and put them in water storage underground. Most oil wells already pump salt water down there, so you'd just need to 'pump' the plants down there. You'd obviously have to use algae or something, but it could work. Pump it down there and let it die from lack of sun.
It wouldn't even require much change of plans. Instead of storing compressed CO2, operate a CO2 greenhouse over a 'scummy swimming pool' (For lack of a better term) and keep scraping off the algae to pump down there. (In a high-enough CO2 environment, you'd have to do it pretty continuously.)
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Senator Obama, why are you opposed to restructuring Social Security into a system of private accounts, insured and invested very conservatively, so that people can actually own the retirement funds they produce,
'Very conservatively', like in the mortgage-backed securities that various pension funds did?
Please, pretending it is 1990, state exactly where funds should have been invested in that paid off, every year, for the past two decades, more than social security. (Or at least averaged more than social security and didn't have more than a 2% dip any specific year.)
Also note if you say 'government bonds' I will bitch-slap you. Government bonds pay more because they cost the government more. We could trivially get the same effect of a higher payout just by raising social security payouts. (And someone's going to have to explain to me how social security can't be afforded by the government, but massive government bonds can be.)
Missile defense systems are damn stupid.
None of the countries with ICBMs are going to use them. The only countries with ICBMs are China and Russia. (And obviously the US.) They are not going to nuke us.
All missile defense systems do is screw up MAD, which is the reason they won't nuke us and the reason we won't nuke them. I know it sounds stupid, but we don't want to disable MAD, as that means they can disable MAD and we can't complain.
And, heck, they have a lot more excuse for missile defense than we do. They have to deal with North Korea possibly launching at them, for example. We don't.
We would be much better off spending that money protecting our ports from having nukes snuck through.
Are you finally going to eliminate the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard so we can eliminate inflation and have a vibrant healthy economy,
We wouldn't have an economy on the gold standard, you lunatic.
The M0 money supply, the amount of printed money that exists, is 750 billion. The price of gold is 600 dollars an ounce. Ergo, we'd need 1,250,000,000 ounces of gold to back our current supply.
Only ~5,056,000,000 ounces of gold have ever been mined, and only about a tenth of that is in bullion. Moveover, we're already holding 6% of that.
So, in other words, to back our economy in gold, we'd have to buy all existing gold bullion, and then track down and melt into bullion 40% of the gold in the entire world.
Of course, I can't expect logic from people who think that inflation is a bug, not a feature. FYI, the amount of money we have must at least match the size of the economy, and that means we have to increasing it ahead of the size of economy, and that means we're always going to overguess and get it slightly larger, or underguess and cap the economy for a bit.
This is a lot better than trying to fit the US economy inside of a few billion dollars.
God, you guys are desperately trying to pine this on the GSEs, aren't you?
First of all, Fannie and Freddie DON'T MAKE LOANS, you inbred hick. They buy conforming loans from banks and repackages them with a guarantee that they will pay off if the loan does not.
And, just as important, they DON'T BUY SUBPRIME LOANS. By definition. A subprime loan is one rated B, and prime loan is one rated A.
And the GSEs only bought prime loans. That is all they were allowed to buy, that is all they bought. They can only buy 'conforming' loans, and the major requirement for that is they 'prime'. (And there are some other rules which can make 'prime' loans be non-conforming, like it being too large, but nothing that could make a subprime be conforming.)
Moreover, we're having a crisis because the banks still own the subprime loans which they chopped up and put into 'securities' which they then promised to pay off, (And purchased insurance to pay off, which the insurance companies couldn't actually cover.).
That could hardly be true if Fannie and Freddie had purchased these loans from the banks, now could it? It would be Fannie and Freddie on the hook, and, in case you weren't paying attention, the Federal government already guaranteed to cover any shortfall they had.
I swear, all you morons are reading off the same talking points, one that forgot to mention what 'subprime' loans actually are or what Fannie and Freddie actually do.
Earmarking, despite everyone using it this way, does not mean 'spending inserted into unrelated bills'.
Earmarking is when the legislature get very explicit about funding. For example, instead of just allocating X billion for FBI counterterrorism, it allocates that, and it also goes ahead and allocates 40 million for an FBI counterterrorism building in Atlanta Georgia.
It can be in an unrelated bill, or it can be in the actual real budget.
When you hear 'earmark', think 'micromanage'. And it's usually, but not always, to micromanage the location to force spending of money somewhere.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it when it's something that would be needed anyway. If it's something the executive would build anyway, and you just made them do it at X instead of Y...well, someone had to pick the location, and doesn't really matter who.
The problem is when it's something that the executive branch would, logically, decide not to do. Like the infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere', which no local Department of Transportation would build, and the Federal Highway Administration would not help with, unless ordered to do so.
But, anyway, back to the point, something like half of all earmarks are things that would be needed anyway, so in actuality 'getting rid' of them wouldn't even help as much as the trivial 2% people keep pointing out.
There are a lot more Americans in Chicago than in Iraq, too. More than one hundred times as much if you're including the suburbs, or just fifty times as much if you're not.
So being in Iraq is actually twenty-five to fifty times deadlier in than living in Chicago, you moron.
This is, of course, statistical stupid, because most, maybe up to 75%, of the troops in Iraq are not in danger. They are support troops, in the Green Zone, and some of the safest people in the world, being protected on military bases by people with weapons and feet of steel.
The other 25% though, the people actually walking the streets of Iraq, are one hundred to two hundred times as likely to die, at any given moment, as someone walking the streets of Chicago. They are, if you will, 'making up the difference'.
It's even worse when you realize they're wearing armor, so while you're comparing the 'deaths', what you should actually be comparing is the shootings. If the same amount of people actually got shot in the same way in both places, a lot more Chicagoans would die due to lack of body armor, but that doesn't make Chicago 'more dangerous', it makes failing to wear body armor 'more dangerous'.
You could put an expiration date on case law.
Any case law made could get forwarded back to the legislature, with the request to actually include it in the law, or at least consider this specific boundary case and either include or exclude it, regardless of the way the ruling went.
Until then, for, say, a decade, the ruling stands as case law, but after that it's discarded.
Which, of course, doesn't mean it's valueless in a court of law. If the expired ruling was based on actual legal research and the issues are similar enough and the laws haven't changed, any lawyer could use it as starting point, but it would not automatically be assumed to be correct.
Unfortunately, there's really no method to implement 'expiring case law'. The inner workings of the court, at least in American, were magically inherited from the English, which means that almost none of them are defined by 'law' per se, except the few specifically laid out in amendments. (The most infamous example of this being the writ of habeas corpus, which, as has been pointed out, is not actually granted, listed, or defined anywhere at all.)
In other words, the use of case law is defined by case law, in an impossible-to-modify self-referential manner. And is outside the scope of legislatures. (OTOH, the 'forwarding border cases back to the legislature' could easily be done with legislation.)
What I've always said is that laws should be 'filtered'. Or, rather, hierarchical.
That we should actually organize, and require by law, all laws so that they are under specific subclasses of behavior.
I know the laws are organized this way generally, but in actual fact they fail at this at the highest level, where laws about one action are often in entire different multiple sections of code, and at the lowest levels, where rules are often just listed in some linear order one after another.
We should be able to go the table of contents in a legal book and be able to immediately learn of all the laws that apply to any specific action we wish to do, and just have to read, at most, a page of text.
And we should have a legal reassurance that no law can apply outside the specific plain-English scope it is listed in.
I.e, if the scope is motor vehicles, and I am not, in any way, dealing with a motor vehicle, it should be impossible for any law under that scope to apply to me, regardless of a law that includes, for example, bicycles in there.
Oh, and also, any exceptions to a law should be listed at the higher level. For example, if a large sections of the motor vehicle laws exempt farm vehicles crossing the road, then there should be, at the branch of that tree, that exemption actually placed there. Instead of, as is common, semi-randomly at the end.
The entire system is structured, right now, so that you literally have to know the entire code just in case some law might apply to what you doing. This is clearly incredibly stupid. Anyone should be able to look up the ten or fifteen laws that might apply to what they are doing, using a simple tree structure, and read just them, secure in the knowledge that no other law can apply to their actions.
You mean like the PDF at the bottom?
Also, really, this is SanDisk doing this, who doesn't give a crap about music distribution models or anything. They just want to give people a reason to spend their 20 bucks on a SanDisk card instead of different brand, and considering they have to format the cards before selling them, it really doesn't cost to put random content on them.
The music industry just went along with it because, as you said, they are desperate to try to figure out some way to save their failing business model.
I'm not actually entirely sure you can buy them without converters. I've never managed to see one.
Yeah! The other day, I bought a car radio, and was disappointed it wouldn't play on my iPod either!
I've been buying SD-card based mp3 players from the start.
Sure, they cost a tiny bit more, but considering I've never had to replace them, and that I have three or four strewn around in various location and SD cards all over the place that I can swap in and out and easily write without having to locate the specific player beforehand and attach it to my computer, it's nothing but a win. (And I was smart enough to buy a laptop with an SD card reader.)
Granted, the SDHC thing, in theory, requires upgrades, but honestly I've found that I don't really want more than 2G of music at a time, and I can easily just make multiple cards. Heck, a few times I've been tempted to buy a few 256k cards and put individual albums on them. I try to collect them from people upgrading their camera's memory.
All told, I've probably spent 100 bucks on mp3 players and SD cards my entire life, and all those still function fine. (Except that SD card that went through the washing machine.) Meanwhile, I've watch people upgrade from 128 meg flash players to 1G ones to 4G ones.
I can walk into the store and buy another 2G card, or buy another 12 dollar player, and it works with all the stuff I have. No obsolescence, no thinking I should have waited until prices dropped, I honestly don't understand why people by fixed flash-based devices. Hard drive based players, okay, I see that, but why would you buy a device with non-swappable flash?
The only problem is that my cell phone takes microSD, so once or twice I've found myself in my car wishing I could play mp3s from my phone on the car mp3 player. I've solved that by getting a few more converters, but it's always a hassle to find them. I was tempted to switch entirely to microSD and leave a converter in each player, but I realized I'd lose all those cards. (I could, of course, treat each microSD cards as a single unit with its converter, but honestly my phone card has other crap on it also.)
Erm, while we're being technical, it might be worth pointing out that by definition you can fit an uncompressed CD on a 1GB SD card, as audio CDs can only contain, at most, 800 megs of data. (The normal 700 megs of data, plus 100 megs normally used for error correction.)
And it doesn't have anything to do with the type of recording either. You can play a mono recording through two speakers twice as loud without distortion as through one speaker.
Neither Windows 98, or the actual OS everyone was using in 1998, Windows 95, could play MP3s without downloading additional codecs and tools.
Right, and it's worth pointing out that gasoline usage is non-linear with traffic.
At some point, traffic jams disappear, and with even less use we can turn some traffic lights into stop signs and undo some of the things that make traffic safer and smoother by slowing everyone down. (And stuff like dedicating a no-yield right-turn lane at multilane intersections that no longer need as many lanes.)
If we magically had 75% the traffic tomorrow, we'd only be using something like 65% of the gas. With 50% traffic, and some work, we'd only be using about 25%.
Meanwhile, it works the other way, too. Every 1% increase in traffic is probably something like 1.3% increase in gasoline usage, at least in near-capacity areas. (And almost all the country is near capacity.)
So while higher-MPG cars reduce gasoline usage, I'm suspecting we're at the point that reducing the sheer number of cars, period, is the best way to go. (Especially since cars take forever to swap out.)
What we should do is require car companies calculate MPGs with tires inflated to the 'average' amount.
Then they'd all have an incentive to have consumers drive with tires at the correct amount, if every MPG they manage to up the average is one MPG less they have to make their car get.
They'd soon have sensors on every tire. And while I doubt they'd provide tires that can maintain their own pressure anytime soon, that sounds complicated, you'd start seeing cars with air pumps built in.
I don't know what you mean by 'underground algae', algae cannot grow underground as it needs light, but that's my idea too...we grow algae up here, pump it down there along with the salt water we already pump into oil wells.
It works out nicely, because, like I said, we're already pumping salt water down most oil wells, so we can just grow it in that salt water.
Likewise, there are plenty of 'empty' oil wells that we can switch back on, pumping out the salt water and pumping back down the salt water+algae.
Forget about trying to capture it at coal plants, the problem is the net carbon.
It will die down there, and possibly rot, but that will take time. And as is pointed out, we're good at keeping natural gas down there, we can keep methane and other byproducts of rotting down there.
And, hilariously, this might end up making us more oil, eventually.
Hello, McFly?
We're talking about storing it pressurized underground. To continue your example, it does not take an amazing amount of pressure to dissolve CO2 into water...a cheapo plastic bottle can hold enough pressure to do so. I don't know what 'pressure' they're talking about, but seriously, you can create enough pressure by hand to dissolve CO2 in water.
I don't know how realistic the threat of it escaping into the water supply is. Or the threat of that then forming a high enough enough concentration of carbonic acid to actually harm people is. But acting like it can't form it at all is stupid.
And then they rot, or get eaten in other ways, and the carbon gets turned into CO2.
Dude, you're insane. We cannot run out of oxygen. The entire surface of the planet is composed of silicon dioxide.
And while we're at it, we must weight operating an automobile by gas vs. operating one by pushing it! Surely more of us could push our vehicles around when we aren't in a hurry!
News flash: Solar is the energy of the future. It is not the energy of now.
And some of the changes we have to do, like switching off gasoline for cars, are going to require more electricity.
I'm not a big fan of storing CO2 either, when it seems to make sense to store carbon instead.
Yes, biological carbon eventually decays and forms CO2, but there are a lot of forms resistant to it.
But, and this is a weird idea, what if we combined that with the idea of putting it in the ocean? What if we made, for example, grew a bunch of plants with it, and then simply stuck them underwater to rot? Such, they'd decay down there...but seems like it's be easier than trying to pump CO2 into the ocean.
Or, combine it with the article, and put them in water storage underground. Most oil wells already pump salt water down there, so you'd just need to 'pump' the plants down there. You'd obviously have to use algae or something, but it could work. Pump it down there and let it die from lack of sun.
It wouldn't even require much change of plans. Instead of storing compressed CO2, operate a CO2 greenhouse over a 'scummy swimming pool' (For lack of a better term) and keep scraping off the algae to pump down there. (In a high-enough CO2 environment, you'd have to do it pretty continuously.)
That's funny, the Windows system I had in 1998 couldn't play MP3s.