How long have steam plants generated electricity? Since the late 1800's. And they're still building them.
How long have nuclear plants generated electricity? Since the 1950's. And they're still building them.
How long have solar and wind plants generated electricity? Since the 1980's. And they're still building them, but steam and nuclear had a head-start by quite a bit. If more people invest in companies that build solar panels and wind generators, their percentage will increase. This sh*t don't happen in a day. AND, the yearly cost of operating a solar plant or wind plant is laughable (in a good way) compared to operating a coal plant, and especially a nuclear plant.
That only applies to batteries that take a long time to recharge, such as lead-acid. Supercapacitors can charge in less time than it took me to type this. If you Wiki batteries, you'll find a lot of different kinds of batteries you never even knew about, like molten sodium.
I agree, I love driving. I own 3 vehicles, only one of which is a commuter car that I drive 55 miles a day, 5 days a week, for work alone. The other one is a truck I rarely use but I'm glad I have it when I need it, and the other is a '67 Ford Galaxie 500 with a 390 4-barrel, which, to you non-motorheads, is the equivalent of a Suburban in mileage. I don't drive that one either, it's still a work in progress.
I think people just need cheap electric cars, or very efficient hybrids. They can still keep their other ones. Lots of people own more than one car. However, there's one car they use the majority of the time, and if that car could get 100 MPG, the average mileage across all of their cars in a given period of time would still be incredibly high. When my Galaxie's done, I intend on driving it about a thousand miles a year, all between May and September. Big whoop, when I accumulate 36,000/yr. on my Contour. It's how I can have my cake and eat it too.
There've been some very interesting points coming up with burnable fuel, but there's been a lot of points missed as well.
Biodiesel: Beyond however much CO2 it takes in or puts out, it only works well in moderate or tropical climates. Not only is a diesel engine difficult to start in the winter because batteries don't operate efficiently in the cold, diesel fuel has a tendency to 'gell', or solidify. I haven't had enough experience with biodiesel to know how it reacts to the cold, but here in Minnesota, there was talk about it 5 years ago and nobody's heard about it since. My guess is that it gells at a much warmer temperature than fossil diesel due to the lack of sulphur, or the abundance of wax, or both.
Ethanol - Corn: Beyond it cutting into corn as a food source, corn is grown from the ground, out in the open, and requires that ever-dependable stoic force, NATURE. Yeah, right. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hail... all of these things destroy corn crops, all of them are not preventable by man. Also, I'd be interested in knowing about the studies that measure the amount of corn that can be grown on the land in a year... they need to cut it in half or a third, because you can't grow corn on the same ground year after year after year, regardless of how much fertilizer you add, unless you're in the blessed state of Iowa. Not rotating your crops is a great way to turn your land useless in a hurry. One year of corn, one year of hay, plow under the hay in the fall of the year, and you can plant corn again. That's a two-year process. Corn is a commodity, it's futures traded just like oil. Increase the use of corn and the price goes up, and it's measured by the bushel, not by the barrel, otherwise identical to other commodities. I hate to see the day that the price of corn overruns the price of oil just because we can grow it and the Middle East can't. People will be getting the popcorn out of the cupboards and bringing it in, just like the copper prices cause people to steal copper from empty houses and construction sites.
Ethanol - Switchgrass: There is no infrastructure in place for this, and establishing that infrastructure takes lots of time and lots of money. How are you going to measure it, by weight or by volume? Again, switchgrass is dependent on Dependable Nature, and the same shortfalls that apply to corn, apply to switchgrass.
Personally, I think we should be building a shitload of windmills and solar panels. Convert everything possible to electricity and run our lives from that. The infrastructure is there and we know how to harness it. It's almost free for the taking. The wind's always blowing somewhere, and the sun's always shining somewhere. Add geothermal to that mix and you could have a nuclear winter and still be making electricity.
As a side note, internal-combustion engines are only 40% efficient at best, regardless of what you run them on. There's a ton of heat that comes out the exhaust, out the radiator, out the crankcase (convection)... As humans go, we sure as hell know how to make heat, we just don't know how to harness it. Been that way since the caveman built a fire and warmed himself by it. 90+% of a campfire's fuel heats the air around the campfire, and does very little to heat you or anything else. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Because when it's internal to the footprint of the building, a straight ramp could only be as long as the building, so the higher you went, the steeper you'd have to make it.
With a spiral ramp, you can keep the ramp's slope the same for however tall you want to make it.
No, I didn't RTFA (although I've seen enough excerpts in people's posts), BUT doesn't the poll question ask about evolution theory being accepted "... in the scientific community"?
The poll doesn't say anything about what you believe about evolution theory, it asks what you think scientists think about evolution theory, and whether the theory of evolution is well supported by scientists. It would be pretty judgmental to think that all Americans are part of the scientific community.
It's a poor poll, no matter which way you slice it. However, it looks bad when nobody actually reads the question and instead rant and rave about how Americans don't believe in evolution, and we're all going to hell, and our children are going to grow up stupid...
Slashdot Mirror
How long have nuclear plants generated electricity? Since the 1950's. And they're still building them.
How long have solar and wind plants generated electricity? Since the 1980's. And they're still building them, but steam and nuclear had a head-start by quite a bit. If more people invest in companies that build solar panels and wind generators, their percentage will increase. This sh*t don't happen in a day. AND, the yearly cost of operating a solar plant or wind plant is laughable (in a good way) compared to operating a coal plant, and especially a nuclear plant.
That only applies to batteries that take a long time to recharge, such as lead-acid. Supercapacitors can charge in less time than it took me to type this. If you Wiki batteries, you'll find a lot of different kinds of batteries you never even knew about, like molten sodium.
I think people just need cheap electric cars, or very efficient hybrids. They can still keep their other ones. Lots of people own more than one car. However, there's one car they use the majority of the time, and if that car could get 100 MPG, the average mileage across all of their cars in a given period of time would still be incredibly high. When my Galaxie's done, I intend on driving it about a thousand miles a year, all between May and September. Big whoop, when I accumulate 36,000/yr. on my Contour. It's how I can have my cake and eat it too.
Biodiesel: Beyond however much CO2 it takes in or puts out, it only works well in moderate or tropical climates. Not only is a diesel engine difficult to start in the winter because batteries don't operate efficiently in the cold, diesel fuel has a tendency to 'gell', or solidify. I haven't had enough experience with biodiesel to know how it reacts to the cold, but here in Minnesota, there was talk about it 5 years ago and nobody's heard about it since. My guess is that it gells at a much warmer temperature than fossil diesel due to the lack of sulphur, or the abundance of wax, or both.
Ethanol - Corn: Beyond it cutting into corn as a food source, corn is grown from the ground, out in the open, and requires that ever-dependable stoic force, NATURE. Yeah, right. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hail... all of these things destroy corn crops, all of them are not preventable by man. Also, I'd be interested in knowing about the studies that measure the amount of corn that can be grown on the land in a year... they need to cut it in half or a third, because you can't grow corn on the same ground year after year after year, regardless of how much fertilizer you add, unless you're in the blessed state of Iowa. Not rotating your crops is a great way to turn your land useless in a hurry. One year of corn, one year of hay, plow under the hay in the fall of the year, and you can plant corn again. That's a two-year process. Corn is a commodity, it's futures traded just like oil. Increase the use of corn and the price goes up, and it's measured by the bushel, not by the barrel, otherwise identical to other commodities. I hate to see the day that the price of corn overruns the price of oil just because we can grow it and the Middle East can't. People will be getting the popcorn out of the cupboards and bringing it in, just like the copper prices cause people to steal copper from empty houses and construction sites.
Ethanol - Switchgrass: There is no infrastructure in place for this, and establishing that infrastructure takes lots of time and lots of money. How are you going to measure it, by weight or by volume? Again, switchgrass is dependent on Dependable Nature, and the same shortfalls that apply to corn, apply to switchgrass.
Personally, I think we should be building a shitload of windmills and solar panels. Convert everything possible to electricity and run our lives from that. The infrastructure is there and we know how to harness it. It's almost free for the taking. The wind's always blowing somewhere, and the sun's always shining somewhere. Add geothermal to that mix and you could have a nuclear winter and still be making electricity.
As a side note, internal-combustion engines are only 40% efficient at best, regardless of what you run them on. There's a ton of heat that comes out the exhaust, out the radiator, out the crankcase (convection)... As humans go, we sure as hell know how to make heat, we just don't know how to harness it. Been that way since the caveman built a fire and warmed himself by it. 90+% of a campfire's fuel heats the air around the campfire, and does very little to heat you or anything else. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Because when it's internal to the footprint of the building, a straight ramp could only be as long as the building, so the higher you went, the steeper you'd have to make it. With a spiral ramp, you can keep the ramp's slope the same for however tall you want to make it.
No, I didn't RTFA (although I've seen enough excerpts in people's posts), BUT doesn't the poll question ask about evolution theory being accepted "... in the scientific community"? The poll doesn't say anything about what you believe about evolution theory, it asks what you think scientists think about evolution theory, and whether the theory of evolution is well supported by scientists. It would be pretty judgmental to think that all Americans are part of the scientific community. It's a poor poll, no matter which way you slice it. However, it looks bad when nobody actually reads the question and instead rant and rave about how Americans don't believe in evolution, and we're all going to hell, and our children are going to grow up stupid...