I hadn't heard about the Whole Foods initiative, but it is welcome news. I hope it goes well.
There's another effort by the actor Wendell Pierce along the same lines, called Sterling Farms which is up and running in New Orleans now, with plans to expand in other cities. I hope this goes well too. Every little bit helps.
Yeah, I should have said "stress" instead of damage. In moderation, the liver can handle the load without trouble. But drinking a 64oz Big Gulp every day could lead to problems.
I also switched to drinking water many years ago. I still drink fruit juice, but only in very small amounts. (I can make a 12oz bottle last a week.) I might say I have a semi-low-carb diet, if it weren't for all that beer.;-)
Maybe so, but that doesn't mean your weight loss will be 100% FAT loss. On the contrary, consuming less calories can also cause your body to store up MORE fat, to compensate for the food shortage. Numerous studies have shown this effect... you just end up with a smaller "fat" rat than the control subject.
Last spring, the convenience stores in my area started stocking fresh fruit, so I switched my habitual breakfast from coffee and a Snickers bar to coffee and a piece of fruit. Around the same time, I saw the video linked above, and started actively avoiding sugar whenever it's convenient. These are the ONLY changes I've made to my lifestyle, but since then I have lost about four inches off my waistline.
Sugar is toxic. Do yourself a favor and avoid it. (Did you know that a 12oz can of coke does as much liver damage as a 12oz can of beer?) And artificial sweeteners are even worse. They mess up your insulin response profile and impede the signals which tell your brain when you've had enough to eat. (If you have a diet coke with dinner, you'll likely eat more food.)
The BBC did a four-part series on the "weight loss industry" earlier this year. It does a pretty good job of exposing the hype and marketing BS behind our current situation. Worth a look.
I'll be surprised if there aren't tourists on the moon long before 2030. SpaceX's next-gen "man-rated" Dragon capsule will be flying in a couple of years, and the gap between that and a lunar landing/return capability is pretty well understood territory. It's not quite "off the shelf" yet, but there are plenty of folks working on the necessary technology. And if, in the meantime, they get their Grasshopper RLV into service, that will slash the cost dramatically.
Hell, Elon expects to have people on Mars before that. AFAIK he hasn't talked much about a moon trip, but others have. It's just a matter of time.
When your school system is dependent on LOCAL property taxes, a wage disparity can have a HUGE effect on democracy.
The voters are the ones who keep voting for status quo.
No, it's the Congress that keeps voting for the status quo, and they are handsomely paid by Wall Street lobbyists to do so. The voters are left wondering who or how they could vote in such a way as to make a difference, since the vaunted "two-party system" is so firmly entrenched... should I "waste" my vote on a 3rd-party candidate I actually believe in, or hope to actually "make a difference" by tipping the balance toward the lesser of two evils? With such a Hobson's choice, is it any wonder we rarely get above 55% participation in elections?
This.^ Methanol is the elephant in the room. It's frustrating the so few people seem aware of it. Last I checked (last year) the price of methanol was about $1.50/gal. With 80% the energy density of gasoline, that works out to about $1.80/gal equivalent cost. And it can be made from any biomass, not just sugars, so it doesn't compete with food crops.
Seriously, this is a no-brainer. We need to pass the Open Fuel Standard Act and break the monopoly of petroleum in transportation fuels.
Although I fully support and applaud this effort, this is not the only way to get the job done. Permaculture design can achieve similar results with much smaller inputs, as described in this video.
The most important concept of permaculture is water management. If you only get 8" of rain per year and it all comes within a 3-week window, you'd better have your land "sculpted" to optimize retention of water on the surface for as long as possible. Such improvements last for generations, and continually add fertility and biodiversity to the land.
If we seriously applied these principles worldwide, we could make the entire globe flood-proof and drought-proof in less than a decade. Seriously.
For example, check the before & after photos in Green Gold or in this TED Talk by Allan Savory. These amazing transformations happen in just a few years. Imagine what would be possible over the long term.
What? Although Uranium is fairly plentiful, the vast majority is U238, which is not fissile. The only Uranium we can reliably "burn" is U235, which is about as plentiful as Gold or Platinum. (That's why we "enrich" the stuff, to increase the portion of U235 over U238.) If we keep going at status quo, the current fleet of reactors will burn out the "usable" Uranium supply in a few decades.
The big "revolution" in the next few years will be the transition from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel reactors. Liquid fuels can be reprocessed on-the-fly but solid fuels cannot. This is a HUGE advantage, because it allows us to burn the fuel completely with very little waste. Whereas the current LWR uses only 0.5% of the energy in the fuel rods, leaving hundreds of tons of long-term waste to deal with.
Ditto! Liquid metal (aka: molten salt) batteries are NOT about thermal storage, they are for storing electricity. You (the GP) are thinking of the molten salt systems used in concentrating solar-thermal power plants (aka: solar tower). Check dmbasso's link (above) for more info on liquid-metal battery tech.
Dr. Sadoway has been working with Khosla Ventures the last few years, commercializing this stuff. They expect to begin beta-test field trials with customers next spring, and hope to be in full production by the end of 2014. Khosla is also backing a compressed air solution that uses a sort of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression (solving an old bugbear of compressed air, the loss of energy to heat).
In short, there are robust, inexpensive storage solutions in the pipeline. (And not a moment too soon.) This will radically alter the "landscape" of renewable energy. When you can couple dirt-cheap solar PV with dirt-cheap storage, you have a recipe for rapid transition.
There's a variant of no-till called pasture cropping which solves some of those issues by combining livestock with row crops. The field is grazed down once, then again a few days later, before the grass has recovered. This double-punch puts the grass in a semi-dormant state, so you can plant directly into the sod. As your row crops sprout, they'll have head start on the pasture plants, eventually shading them out. (They'll still keep growing, just very slowly.) After harvest, you can graze again or mow for hay, and the pasture will recover normally.
As for livestock, robots wouldn't be my first choice either. FTFA:
A livestock paddock, for example, may look uniform, but under the grass there’s a great deal of variability of soil and conditions. Levels of potassium, sulfur, and acidity can be very different even within a single square meter. The main reason is that livestock don’t pee or poop in anything like a uniform pattern
A simple solution to this is raising complementary species in managed intensive rotational grazing as described by "Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan in this video (10min). In a nutshell: the pasture is divided into paddocks which are grazed intensively for a day or two, then rested for a few weeks. The trick is to bring poultry into the same paddock a few days after the ruminants. Chickens (for example) will go after the cow patties and kick them apart to get at the maggots inside, and in doing so, they spread the manure very effectively while also keeping the fly population down. There's no need for an expensive robot to do this job when you can have another livestock species (ie: another revenue stream) do it for free.
LFTR is a variation of the MSR Experiment that ORNL ran in the 60s. The MSR ran smoothly for years and was found to be quite reliable. Most of the issues you raise were addressed in that work.
having a liquid serve as both fuel and coolant doesn't sound like that great an idea
It's actually a good idea, for many reasons. The ability to reprocess the fuel "on the fly" while the reactor is online is a huge one. It allows for near-100% fuel consumption and extraction of valuable isotopes. In an emergency, it allows you to rapidly move the fuel to a special tank designed to prevent reactivity and to passively cool the decay heat.
graphite moderator has a nasty habit of burning in an accident
It would take a core breach to get air in contact with the graphite. In that case, I guess you could flood the core with a heavier-than-air noble gas to snuff out any flames. Most of the discussion about graphite concerns other issues, like expansion, brittleness, and the reactivity feedback you noted. They would probably end up replacing the moderators on a 2~4 year cycle.
the fluorides being suggested are significantly toxic
A lot of industrial chemicals and processes are hazardous. OTOH FLiBe has the advantage of being a solid at room temperature. In a worst-case scenario (say a tomahawk missile strike) where the fuel salt gets blown out into the environment, it would be much easier to clean up, as it would solidify and fall to the ground. It's radiation signature and "unnatural" color would make it easy to find.
I'd much rather have the coolant and moderator be the same thing, so that if you lose your coolant you're also losing the ability the sustain the fuel reaction
I'd rather have the coolant and the fuel be the same: if you lose your coolant you're also losing the fuel (and the moderator too, if you think about it).
Bottom line: MSR is a technology that has worked in the past. I see no reason to doubt we can get it to work again, and much better this time with all the knowledge gained in the meantime. Are there challenges? Yes, of course. But these strike me more as engineering problems than showstoppers.
Blah blah blah... another smartass AC spouts fact-free insults in lieu of a cogent argument.
LWRs are fine for submarines, but they were never intended for civilian use. Alvin Weinberg (the guy who held most of the patents for LWR technology) saw them merely as a stepping stone to safer MSR designs, and was fired from his job as Director of ORNL for strongly advocating MSR research instead of the Fast Breeder program favored by the Nixon administration.
No offense, but I'll give his opinion more weight than the drive-by trollings of some random dude on the internet.
If you're going to "do" nuclear, at least do it in a sensible way. IE: Do NOT use solid-fuel LWR technology, that is just f**king stupid. If you use a liquid coolant that naturally turns to a gas at BELOW the working temperature of your reactor, you have a stupid f**king design. An "average" LWR has to operate at 100+ atmospheres of pressure, just to keep the coolant (water) in liquid phase. This invites a host of engineering challenges that would be completely unnecessary with a design (such as LFTR) that operates at ambient pressure.
Unfortunately, the energy "marketplace" is dominated by big-capital players who are quite happy to suckle at the government teat to cover their outrageous overhead. Sadly, this is one area where "capitalism" has failed, big-time.
The Chinese one has a similar/opposite sort of problem: The same word can be written in traditional or simplified script, in either of two main encoding schemes on the local computer (Big5 and GB, respectively) while unicode is often used for internet (there are others too). I assume unicode is used for the TLD, but I wonder how the simplified/traditional problem gets handled. I would assume it defaults to simplified, but I'm curious how those with traditional systems are supposed to interface with it.
I can appreciate the "get off my lawn" sentiment as much as the next guy, but honestly I don't feel the/. experience has degraded that much since the old days. Is it different now from when I joined 15 years ago? Yeah, sure. But so am I. So's the world.... So what?
The thing I find consistent about/. and which keeps me coming back here is that I know I'll (almost) always find something interesting here, often something very interesting and/or enlightening. Sure, I may occasionally bitch and moan about the dupes and the mods, etc., but when I see a story that looks interesting and has a "healthy" discussion going, I'm pretty confident that reading that discussion will give me some new insights or information that I hadn't heard of before. Offhand, I can't think of many other "popular" websites I could say the same about.
It doesn't say that in the article. That's the point. The parent is saying the article is wrong because the thing does release some carbon into the air, and he bases this claim on the fact that he has done hands-on research with this very product. IANA chemical engineer, but I know enough about wood combustion to suspect he's right about this. It doesn't mean the apparatus is useless, it just means the person who wrote the article didn't do his/her homework well enough. (Yeah, I know... that never happens when journalism meets science...;-)
It's nice to see this old tech getting a revival. It certainly has a role to play in our future energy needs. But it's a stretch to claim it will contribute substantially to carbon sequestration. It's a step in the right direction, certainly, but not likely to make much of an impact on CO2 levels anytime soon. If anything can save us, the best candidate is reversing desertification through managed intensive rotational grazing and permaculture.
I was wondering about that, thanks for clearing it up. But even if it's not as "carbon negative" as claimed, it's still a very useful technology with a large niche to fill, especially in the developing world. I'm curious though how it compares to methanol fermentation in terms of conversion efficiency. Both are fairly low-tech solutions, suitable for DIY in 3rd-world areas, and both can drive existing gasoline engines with minor modifications. But methanol can use a somewhat wider range of feedstocks, and has the advantage of being a liquid, which is a better fit with existing infrastructure.
There was a really good idea a few years back which unfortunately never got through Congress to become law. It was the Open Fuel Standard Act which would have required all cars sold in the USA to be able to run on any mix of fuels, including methanol (phased in over several years). Unlike ethanol, methanol can be made from almost any form of biomass, so it doesn't "compete" with food crops. Ultimately, this would break the monopoly of petroleum in transportation fuels, allowing true independence from "foreign" energy.
anyone who thinks that either party is for the "common guy," they are delusional. Simply delusional.
No, of course, they are both "owned" by their corporate masters (including unions, PACs, et.al.) and differ only in the flavor and consistency of their BS. It's been building a long time, but the 2010 Citizens United SCOTUS decision was a major tipping point -- over the proverbial cliff.
Since this results from a Supreme Court decision, the only way to fix is with a constitutional amendment. If you would like to change it, check out MoveToAmend.org and Wolf-PAC.com. Sign and propagate the petitions. Get active. Contact your representatives at all levels.
The 26th Amendment was proposed and ratified in just over 100 days, back in 1971. This can be done.
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I hadn't heard about the Whole Foods initiative, but it is welcome news. I hope it goes well.
There's another effort by the actor Wendell Pierce along the same lines, called Sterling Farms which is up and running in New Orleans now, with plans to expand in other cities. I hope this goes well too. Every little bit helps.
Yeah, I should have said "stress" instead of damage. In moderation, the liver can handle the load without trouble. But drinking a 64oz Big Gulp every day could lead to problems.
I also switched to drinking water many years ago. I still drink fruit juice, but only in very small amounts. (I can make a 12oz bottle last a week.) I might say I have a semi-low-carb diet, if it weren't for all that beer. ;-)
if you eat less, you will lose weight.
Maybe so, but that doesn't mean your weight loss will be 100% FAT loss. On the contrary, consuming less calories can also cause your body to store up MORE fat, to compensate for the food shortage. Numerous studies have shown this effect... you just end up with a smaller "fat" rat than the control subject.
Another factor that often gets overlooked in this debate is the role of sugar in our diet. (Here's a written summary of the video.)
Last spring, the convenience stores in my area started stocking fresh fruit, so I switched my habitual breakfast from coffee and a Snickers bar to coffee and a piece of fruit. Around the same time, I saw the video linked above, and started actively avoiding sugar whenever it's convenient. These are the ONLY changes I've made to my lifestyle, but since then I have lost about four inches off my waistline.
Sugar is toxic. Do yourself a favor and avoid it. (Did you know that a 12oz can of coke does as much liver damage as a 12oz can of beer?) And artificial sweeteners are even worse. They mess up your insulin response profile and impede the signals which tell your brain when you've had enough to eat. (If you have a diet coke with dinner, you'll likely eat more food.)
The BBC did a four-part series on the "weight loss industry" earlier this year. It does a pretty good job of exposing the hype and marketing BS behind our current situation. Worth a look.
Pow! Zoom! Straight to the moon!
I'll be surprised if there aren't tourists on the moon long before 2030. SpaceX's next-gen "man-rated" Dragon capsule will be flying in a couple of years, and the gap between that and a lunar landing/return capability is pretty well understood territory. It's not quite "off the shelf" yet, but there are plenty of folks working on the necessary technology. And if, in the meantime, they get their Grasshopper RLV into service, that will slash the cost dramatically.
Hell, Elon expects to have people on Mars before that. AFAIK he hasn't talked much about a moon trip, but others have. It's just a matter of time.
When your school system is dependent on LOCAL property taxes, a wage disparity can have a HUGE effect on democracy.
The voters are the ones who keep voting for status quo.
No, it's the Congress that keeps voting for the status quo, and they are handsomely paid by Wall Street lobbyists to do so. The voters are left wondering who or how they could vote in such a way as to make a difference, since the vaunted "two-party system" is so firmly entrenched... should I "waste" my vote on a 3rd-party candidate I actually believe in, or hope to actually "make a difference" by tipping the balance toward the lesser of two evils? With such a Hobson's choice, is it any wonder we rarely get above 55% participation in elections?
This.^ Methanol is the elephant in the room. It's frustrating the so few people seem aware of it. Last I checked (last year) the price of methanol was about $1.50/gal. With 80% the energy density of gasoline, that works out to about $1.80/gal equivalent cost. And it can be made from any biomass, not just sugars, so it doesn't compete with food crops.
Seriously, this is a no-brainer. We need to pass the Open Fuel Standard Act and break the monopoly of petroleum in transportation fuels.
Thanks!
At what percentage of C would a 100TeV proton be traveling?
Although I fully support and applaud this effort, this is not the only way to get the job done. Permaculture design can achieve similar results with much smaller inputs, as described in this video.
The most important concept of permaculture is water management. If you only get 8" of rain per year and it all comes within a 3-week window, you'd better have your land "sculpted" to optimize retention of water on the surface for as long as possible. Such improvements last for generations, and continually add fertility and biodiversity to the land.
If we seriously applied these principles worldwide, we could make the entire globe flood-proof and drought-proof in less than a decade. Seriously.
For example, check the before & after photos in Green Gold or in this TED Talk by Allan Savory. These amazing transformations happen in just a few years. Imagine what would be possible over the long term.
the known Uranium supplies are plentiful
What? Although Uranium is fairly plentiful, the vast majority is U238, which is not fissile. The only Uranium we can reliably "burn" is U235, which is about as plentiful as Gold or Platinum. (That's why we "enrich" the stuff, to increase the portion of U235 over U238.) If we keep going at status quo, the current fleet of reactors will burn out the "usable" Uranium supply in a few decades.
The big "revolution" in the next few years will be the transition from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel reactors. Liquid fuels can be reprocessed on-the-fly but solid fuels cannot. This is a HUGE advantage, because it allows us to burn the fuel completely with very little waste. Whereas the current LWR uses only 0.5% of the energy in the fuel rods, leaving hundreds of tons of long-term waste to deal with.
Furthermore, a molten-salt reactor can be configured to use spent nuclear fuel as a fuel source.
Ditto! Liquid metal (aka: molten salt) batteries are NOT about thermal storage, they are for storing electricity. You (the GP) are thinking of the molten salt systems used in concentrating solar-thermal power plants (aka: solar tower). Check dmbasso's link (above) for more info on liquid-metal battery tech.
Dr. Sadoway has been working with Khosla Ventures the last few years, commercializing this stuff. They expect to begin beta-test field trials with customers next spring, and hope to be in full production by the end of 2014. Khosla is also backing a compressed air solution that uses a sort of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression (solving an old bugbear of compressed air, the loss of energy to heat).
In short, there are robust, inexpensive storage solutions in the pipeline. (And not a moment too soon.) This will radically alter the "landscape" of renewable energy. When you can couple dirt-cheap solar PV with dirt-cheap storage, you have a recipe for rapid transition.
Simple solution: Just say, "My username is _____, I'm just posting as AC to preserve mod points."
There's a variant of no-till called pasture cropping which solves some of those issues by combining livestock with row crops. The field is grazed down once, then again a few days later, before the grass has recovered. This double-punch puts the grass in a semi-dormant state, so you can plant directly into the sod. As your row crops sprout, they'll have head start on the pasture plants, eventually shading them out. (They'll still keep growing, just very slowly.) After harvest, you can graze again or mow for hay, and the pasture will recover normally.
As for livestock, robots wouldn't be my first choice either. FTFA:
A livestock paddock, for example, may look uniform, but under the grass there’s a great deal of variability of soil and conditions. Levels of potassium, sulfur, and acidity can be very different even within a single square meter. The main reason is that livestock don’t pee or poop in anything like a uniform pattern
A simple solution to this is raising complementary species in managed intensive rotational grazing as described by "Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan in this video (10min). In a nutshell: the pasture is divided into paddocks which are grazed intensively for a day or two, then rested for a few weeks. The trick is to bring poultry into the same paddock a few days after the ruminants. Chickens (for example) will go after the cow patties and kick them apart to get at the maggots inside, and in doing so, they spread the manure very effectively while also keeping the fly population down. There's no need for an expensive robot to do this job when you can have another livestock species (ie: another revenue stream) do it for free.
but it is still experimental
LFTR is a variation of the MSR Experiment that ORNL ran in the 60s. The MSR ran smoothly for years and was found to be quite reliable. Most of the issues you raise were addressed in that work.
having a liquid serve as both fuel and coolant doesn't sound like that great an idea
It's actually a good idea, for many reasons. The ability to reprocess the fuel "on the fly" while the reactor is online is a huge one. It allows for near-100% fuel consumption and extraction of valuable isotopes. In an emergency, it allows you to rapidly move the fuel to a special tank designed to prevent reactivity and to passively cool the decay heat.
graphite moderator has a nasty habit of burning in an accident
It would take a core breach to get air in contact with the graphite. In that case, I guess you could flood the core with a heavier-than-air noble gas to snuff out any flames. Most of the discussion about graphite concerns other issues, like expansion, brittleness, and the reactivity feedback you noted. They would probably end up replacing the moderators on a 2~4 year cycle.
the fluorides being suggested are significantly toxic
A lot of industrial chemicals and processes are hazardous. OTOH FLiBe has the advantage of being a solid at room temperature. In a worst-case scenario (say a tomahawk missile strike) where the fuel salt gets blown out into the environment, it would be much easier to clean up, as it would solidify and fall to the ground. It's radiation signature and "unnatural" color would make it easy to find.
I'd much rather have the coolant and moderator be the same thing, so that if you lose your coolant you're also losing the ability the sustain the fuel reaction
I'd rather have the coolant and the fuel be the same: if you lose your coolant you're also losing the fuel (and the moderator too, if you think about it).
Bottom line: MSR is a technology that has worked in the past. I see no reason to doubt we can get it to work again, and much better this time with all the knowledge gained in the meantime. Are there challenges? Yes, of course. But these strike me more as engineering problems than showstoppers.
Blah blah blah... another smartass AC spouts fact-free insults in lieu of a cogent argument.
LWRs are fine for submarines, but they were never intended for civilian use. Alvin Weinberg (the guy who held most of the patents for LWR technology) saw them merely as a stepping stone to safer MSR designs, and was fired from his job as Director of ORNL for strongly advocating MSR research instead of the Fast Breeder program favored by the Nixon administration.
No offense, but I'll give his opinion more weight than the drive-by trollings of some random dude on the internet.
If you're going to "do" nuclear, at least do it in a sensible way. IE: Do NOT use solid-fuel LWR technology, that is just f**king stupid. If you use a liquid coolant that naturally turns to a gas at BELOW the working temperature of your reactor, you have a stupid f**king design. An "average" LWR has to operate at 100+ atmospheres of pressure, just to keep the coolant (water) in liquid phase. This invites a host of engineering challenges that would be completely unnecessary with a design (such as LFTR) that operates at ambient pressure.
Unfortunately, the energy "marketplace" is dominated by big-capital players who are quite happy to suckle at the government teat to cover their outrageous overhead. Sadly, this is one area where "capitalism" has failed, big-time.
Wow, glad I checked back here. Thanks for the info.
The Chinese one has a similar/opposite sort of problem: The same word can be written in traditional or simplified script, in either of two main encoding schemes on the local computer (Big5 and GB, respectively) while unicode is often used for internet (there are others too). I assume unicode is used for the TLD, but I wonder how the simplified/traditional problem gets handled. I would assume it defaults to simplified, but I'm curious how those with traditional systems are supposed to interface with it.
I can appreciate the "get off my lawn" sentiment as much as the next guy, but honestly I don't feel the /. experience has degraded that much since the old days. Is it different now from when I joined 15 years ago? Yeah, sure. But so am I. So's the world.... So what?
The thing I find consistent about /. and which keeps me coming back here is that I know I'll (almost) always find something interesting here, often something very interesting and/or enlightening. Sure, I may occasionally bitch and moan about the dupes and the mods, etc., but when I see a story that looks interesting and has a "healthy" discussion going, I'm pretty confident that reading that discussion will give me some new insights or information that I hadn't heard of before. Offhand, I can't think of many other "popular" websites I could say the same about.
It doesn't say that in the article. That's the point. The parent is saying the article is wrong because the thing does release some carbon into the air, and he bases this claim on the fact that he has done hands-on research with this very product. IANA chemical engineer, but I know enough about wood combustion to suspect he's right about this. It doesn't mean the apparatus is useless, it just means the person who wrote the article didn't do his/her homework well enough. (Yeah, I know... that never happens when journalism meets science...;-)
It's nice to see this old tech getting a revival. It certainly has a role to play in our future energy needs. But it's a stretch to claim it will contribute substantially to carbon sequestration. It's a step in the right direction, certainly, but not likely to make much of an impact on CO2 levels anytime soon. If anything can save us, the best candidate is reversing desertification through managed intensive rotational grazing and permaculture.
I was wondering about that, thanks for clearing it up. But even if it's not as "carbon negative" as claimed, it's still a very useful technology with a large niche to fill, especially in the developing world. I'm curious though how it compares to methanol fermentation in terms of conversion efficiency. Both are fairly low-tech solutions, suitable for DIY in 3rd-world areas, and both can drive existing gasoline engines with minor modifications. But methanol can use a somewhat wider range of feedstocks, and has the advantage of being a liquid, which is a better fit with existing infrastructure.
There was a really good idea a few years back which unfortunately never got through Congress to become law. It was the Open Fuel Standard Act which would have required all cars sold in the USA to be able to run on any mix of fuels, including methanol (phased in over several years). Unlike ethanol, methanol can be made from almost any form of biomass, so it doesn't "compete" with food crops. Ultimately, this would break the monopoly of petroleum in transportation fuels, allowing true independence from "foreign" energy.
Yes. I also wonder about the "in Saturn" vs. "on Saturn" phrasing. With a gas giant, where do you draw the line between "in" and "on"??
anyone who thinks that either party is for the "common guy," they are delusional. Simply delusional.
No, of course, they are both "owned" by their corporate masters (including unions, PACs, et.al.) and differ only in the flavor and consistency of their BS. It's been building a long time, but the 2010 Citizens United SCOTUS decision was a major tipping point -- over the proverbial cliff.
Since this results from a Supreme Court decision, the only way to fix is with a constitutional amendment. If you would like to change it, check out MoveToAmend.org and Wolf-PAC.com. Sign and propagate the petitions. Get active. Contact your representatives at all levels.
The 26th Amendment was proposed and ratified in just over 100 days, back in 1971. This can be done.