And why is outsourcing happening? No, its not the labor expense in the USA, its the taxes in the USA. Near-40% corporate income tax makes it a good idea to do as little "corporate" in the USA as possible. Wanna fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. www.fairtax.org. That abolishes all Federal income tax, including individual, corporate, capital gains, inheritance, self employment, alternative minimum, gift, social security, medicare, etc. all of 'em, along with the IRS. Instead, things for sale, both goods and services are taxed.
Before you start thinking "regressive" (which it isn't, after you read and understand it), consider that the income taxes have social security and Medicare at 15.3%, plus 22% of the selling price, on average, of everything made in America is the result of income tax expense to the businesses that manufacture it, and you can see that the poor are getting hit with up to 37% income taxes, all tolled, while never having to file a tax return. The income tax is one of the most regressive taxes we have.
And, that is what is destroying America, high costs of manufacturing, not high labor costs. I say we zero the taxes, keep the high wages, and let people work themselves out of poverty and the need for Federal assistance to the poor.
Its NOT the expense of the workers, its our outrageous 40% corporate taxes that are driving our decline. About 22% of the price of everything American made is because of the influence of income taxes, both corporate and other such as personal taxes of the workers, making their services more expensive as well. 22% of a $40K SUV is $8,800. Contrast that with the fact that it takes 33 hours of labor to build the average car, and the car company quoted figure of $78 / hr / worker to cover wages, benefits, and retirement expenses means that only about $2500 of the car's expense is from labor. Not much compared to the tax bite.
If we zero our income taxes, and tax other things beside income, we can be back at the forefront of manufacturing, and therefore prosperity again.
It's happened more than once. As soon as I start getting paid for doing something, it ceases to be fun. Happened with electronics and kinda ruined part of my ham radio hobby - I don't enjoy tinkering any more. Same with software - used to love to write programs, bought PC's instead of Macs because of turbo-pascal, and then a few years into programming for $$$, the fun went away.
I think it comes from the idea that no matter what you do, you can no longer impress anyone (amaze your friends and neighbors, one of the chief reasons for doing anything...) because since you're a pro, they EXPECT you to be able to do that, and are... not amazed, shocked, awed, or anything else.
I think you're stuck with it being drudge stuff. I think your choices are either to endure it or move on into management. Or, you could change careers completely, but that'd probably be expensive.
I’ve suggested electrifying the roads and been told we don’t even have enough resources to manufacture enough wire to do that. Dunno, they might be right.
As for putting cars on railcars, I invented a rail switch that would allow a railcar with an automobile to be plucked from the center of a train at speed, without slowing the train. Talked to a lot of people that said it would be too expensive to build that infrastructure, and they’re probably right. What is railway, $10M / mi when you’re providing power to a railcar with electric motors to move itself? That’s probably the price out in the country, let alone ripping up cities. You have to build it new for several reasons, one of which is that most current railway isn’t good for 100+ mph.
I don’t think the unions have anything to do with people choosing trucks to ship things, trucks are just a lot faster, that’s all. There are rail unions, too.
I think it’s going to take a lot more than 3 or 4 large reactors to power the USA. Doing some math, the Chevy Volt goes 40 miles on 8 KwH. Cars alone travel nearly 2 trillion miles a year in the USA. That’s 2 X 10^12. Divide that by 40 and multiply that by 8 and you get 400 billion KwH, or 400 X 10^9 KwH. With 24 X 365 hours in the year, that’s 8760 hours, leaving 45,662,100 Kw generating capacity requirement, or 45,662.1 Megawatts. Some of the largest reactors in the world are around 1,300 megawatts. We’d need 35 of them to power Chevy Volt sized cars, probably twice that many to power average sized cars, double it to account for needing peak power when people are using their cars during certain times of the day rather than being evenly distributed over the 24 hours of a day and 7 days of the week, and then probably double it again to include the trucks. We’d probably need close to 300 new nuclear power plants to run all our transportation that moves on highways with electricity.
As for the power source, it’d be better to build solar power stations. They can be built with molten salt as a storage medium so that they work at night and during the day, solving the storage problem. The big poblem with that would be that our solar resources are mostly in the southwest, so we would need very high voltage DC power distribution to get it around the USA, and a whale of a lot of copper even then. How to build power lines at millions of volts so that the current required is small and therefore the I*R loss is small? Plus of course there are the NIMBYs to fight to build the power wires. Or, killing 2 birds with one stone, get this:
to work, capture the elemental carbon in the atmosphere, and truck / rail it to ordinary coal-fired power plants around the country, and make the power plants squeaky clean in emissions, while all you need to do is haul more carbon out of the atmosphere than you burn in the power plants to solve the CO2 in the atmosphere “problem” if you believe in that. If you don’t, it still shouldn’t hurt anything to do it.
Funny you mention the military spending as a subsidy for oil, when it is the lack of committment to drilling in this country that makes it necessary to look overseas for our oil. Were we to exploit all our oil, everywhere there is a drop of it under an American flag, we wouldn't have to do that. And, there would be NO military subsidy necessary and there would be NO petroleum subsidy necessary.
Highways are the business of the public monies, as are schools (although some argue that the latter should not be, but I disagree.) What we do NOT need is Federal money in the schools. The more we spend in the DOE, the worse the kids do. Its time to shut down the DOE and let the local and state school boards have at it, and build a better mousetrap. My generation was educated that way, which is why we have roads built buy engineers educated that way, and had a manned moon program built by engineers that were educated that way. Some things become counterproductive when the Feds get involved, and education is one of them.
I think that the highways could do without Fed money, too, but that would be harder than education. Either way, we have to stop the spending.
Yep, natural gas is a fossil fuel, but emits far less than other fossil fuels. Its the best we can do. We CANNOT aboandon fossil fuel unless we want to allow nuclear, can pay for nuclear, and get cars to run on electricity. There's no reason to build that sort of capacity until we get the cars running on electric, either, and nobody's invented the practical magic battery yet.
Want to do something? Think geo-engineering. I've already posted this link once:
Perfect that, and then solve the next problem of where you're going to stack all that elemental carbon you suck out of the atmosphere. But that would solve the problem, and yield a new, inexhaustible fuel source that could be transported easier than building electric lines that envirowackos oppose at every turn, we'd just truck it to electrical power stations and use it in place of coal, and that would result in no pollution EXCEPT CO2, and so all we have to do is haul CO2 out of the atmosphere faster than we burn it, and of course find someplace to stack it. Energy problem solved, pollution problem solved. But the AGW worshippers don't seem interested in anything that is not hideously expensive and would bankrupt the gov't. It is still to be suspected that all the AGW people really want is to sabotage the "evil" western gov'ts, and I've already taken an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign AND DOMESTIC, and will continue to do so until I die. I see that the AGW worshippers as enemies of this country.
You're another one that wants to plan everyone else's life, and have people living low. Kindly go to hell. I've worked for this, I am entitled to it, and will defend it with any and all means available to me. I don't need any envirowacko busybody trying to make my life less than what it is now. Ideally, life should be getting better for everyone, not worse, simply due to the technology, but other things are sabotaging that, mainly regulations promulgated by people like you, as well as tax policy that is a result of political corruption.
>Expand the petroleum infrastructure: In the US (and Europe) car ownership per capita peaked in 2004. Absolute car numbers have been in decline since 2008 in the US. Not only can you move away from the car, its already happening.
Yes, you need to expand the petroleum infrastructure because you have to transport petroleum from new locations and process different types of it. The oil sands of Canada and the new Bakkan oil need to be transported, and processed. The refineries, which are too expensive and too regulated to build new ones (well, almost - they're building a new one near Bakkan, but the envirowackos are attempting to hold it up as long as they can, which is what I'm talkiing about) so you have to build a pipeline from Canada to near New Orleans, where refineries can be expanded to handle the new source.
And, we should expand refining AND drilling in THIS country as a security measure. What if we produced all our own oil? We could do it - we HAVE more oil than the Saudis, when you consider the shale, and were we to achieve energy independece, we could tell the middle east crybabies to go stuff it. I'd be for that.
>Plan for it. Zone so that town and city centers are dense enough to undo the need for most car journeys. This has been happening in (parts of ) Europe for decades now.
NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!!! Plan your own life, leave mine alone. If I want to live 20 miles out of town, that is my business and you have no business making it more difficult or expensive. Crowding causes stress and breeds crime. We have enough of both already. Crowding is "living low", and this SHOULD be the land of plenty, and would be if we did taxes right, but that is a whole 'nother country of discussion.
And living in crowded cities in hi-rise apt's is living low. I'm a Ham radio operator with a tower in the yard with a 4-element 20 meter beam on top of it. You CAN'T do that in an apartment. Others build race cars in their garages or store boats on their property. If you just want to rattle around your apartment and amuse yourself with your computer, have at it, but not everyone wants to live like you.
>Do public investment for the trains. Train systems pay off over decades, which is far too long for private investment, but not a problem for public investment. Countries become rich over centuries of infrastructure buildup.
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!! Haven't you been paying attention? We are BROKE! We have to stop the spending now. We have to do things that are CHEAPER, not find new ways for the gov't to go broke more quickly. We need to balance the budget. If its REALLY a good idea, it will attract enough ridership to be profitable. IF it doesn't, then we don't need it. And, people don't want to ride trains, or they'd be doing it.
Coal companies aren't going to lose profits, they're going to raise prices until the people, the poorer ones, can't heat and cool their homes. Such a pleasant eventuality makes me glad I'm not there. The rest of everyone else will have their standard of living impacted by the skyrocketing electric prices until they get to the point that it makes sense to build a billion windmills to generate expensive electricity. Welcome to a future of universal poverty.
You can spend all you want on geothermal, solar, and wind, but the day is soon coming when these sources will have to produce totally without gov't subsidies, since the gov't is running out of money to do that. I believe that ALL subsidies of ANY sort will soon be withdrawn by the US gov't as we try to balance the budget, which will absolutely have to be done if the US is to avoid going bankrupt. No subsidies to farms, petroleum companies, wind and solar and geothermal companies, individual homeowners that want install geothermal heating / cooling, etc. Gov't money for most things is going to be GONE, going mostly into medicare, medicaid, and social security, unless we indeed fail to repeal Obamacare, which will suck up more money than exists in the USA if we don't get it repealed.
I didn't miss the stories, just the cars. That is, there are none that will do what my Subaru WRX will do. Until there are, I'm not buying any, at least not as a "primary" car. I need something that will go 300 miles and "refuel" in about 3 minutes. I'm driving to Las Vegas from Virginia in March, and there are no electric cars that will do that in the timeframe my WRX will. The Chevy Volt will do it, but not on electricity.
We need to keep and even expand our petroleum infrastructure until there _is_ such an electric car. Otherwise, we just sabotage our economy by making oil too expensive.
Trains are fine, but they aren't cars, we drive cars, and its too expensive to erect catenary overhead wires for the distances our trains would be traversing, if indeed we could get ridership to pay for them which is highly unlikely. Europe has population density to support trains, but we don't.
I've seen the lab announcements, the supposed "breakthrus" in battery tech, but the stuff is still not on the market. I think its still 10 - 20 years away from being found in an electric car that we can recharge in 3 - 5 minutes, or replace spent batteries with charged batteries in that timeframe, so that we can take it cross country and make decent time. I mean, I'm driving to Las Vegas from Virginia in March, and wouldn't buy an electric car that wouldn't be able to do the same thing. So, I have to be able to go about 300 miles and recharge or replace the battery in about 3 minutes. Yes, that's not going to happen any time soon, even with a battery breakthru, 'cuz getting that kind of electrical power to "refueling" stations would involve a serious electrical power construction project. And, certain "green" approaches like wind and solar would still probably make that too expensive.
Our real way to beat the supposed problem, which I'm still not convinced is a problem, would be geo-engineering, which, unlike clensing the atmosphere of CO2, is doable both financially and practically. And at least one geo-engineering approach DOES clense the atmosphere:
but you don't hear about that, either. The "worshippers" don't seem to want any geo-engineering solution, which makes the rest of us non-worshippers suspect that they are not sincere in their goals, and that they have hidden goals. Not all of them, but the leadership, the drum-beaters that I suspect have as a goal of bringing "the west" down in financial ruin. Its hard to conclude anything else when the worshippers are only interested in the most expensive solution, and just a few years ago were talking of spending $50T over the next 40 years to achieve it. Yeah, that was a global figure, but you know who would end up footing most of that bill... the USA, that's who. China / India won't even agree to cooperate, let alone do what the Europeans did - sign a treaty like Kyoto and then fail to live up to it. China / India won't even go thru the motions.
So, anyway, since we all know that its going to take 20 - 30 - 40 years to replace the petroleum infrastructure with something clean, how about stopping the opposition to petroleum, so we can have a chance at prosperity again, and with that prosperity use a portion of it for the research to either solve the problem, or show once and for all that it is not really a problem?
I anxiously await the magic battery, but these global warming religeon people want to stop using fossil fuels right now. That's my point.
I say we work like crazy to invent the magic battery. After that, the CO2 emissions will take care of themselves, with the help of clean-burning natural gas. That'll be the best we can do until someone really does a credible cold fusion.
Nobody is screwed if the global warming fraudsters are ignored and we use geo-engineering to attack the problem. That is, as soon as we can actually measure a problem...
Show me nuclear, wind, hamsters,. etc. that will power a car down the road...
Everything Is Too Expensive
on
The F-35 Story
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· Score: 0
Until we do something to revitalize our industrial base and get people working and paying taxes from GOOD paying jobs and not burger flipping jobs, everything is going to be too expensive. The F-22, the F-35, etc. have been and are about to be canceled due to the realities of our economic situation.
I believe that the answer is here: www.fairtax.org. Completely untaxing US industry I believe will supercharge our economy, and get us out of this bad economic situation virtually overnight. Read it. Understand it and you'll demand it.
Why study science / engineering with the US economy being exported overseas? All we are going to have left is MBA's in hi-rise buildings directing the work of the work-for-peanuts engineers in India and China. The degree to have is business, not engineering / science. This situation will continue until it becomes profitable to manufacture in the USA again, which will not happen as long as we have income taxes. We cannot absorb income tax expense to industry while supporting the highest wage scale on the planet. Keep the high wage scale, dump the income taxes. How to dump the income taxes? Pass the Fair Tax, a consumption tax. www.fairtax.org. Read all about it. It is the ONLY thing that will save our industry from gutting and our middle class from being moved to extreme poverty.
How would you like to ignore the situation, then, and have them show up tomorrow with 2 tons of anthrax spores that the spread upon the wind of the east coast population density, and kill 500,000? It could happen. We have to neutralize this threat.
Its not nonsense. In addition to the people that contract cancer from the high altitude radiation, you then get to add the 6 to 100 more people that get it from the scanners. Plus, those TSA people that OPERATE the scanners are REALLY getting zapped, and have been getting cancer far above the average because of them. The X-ray machines should be outlawed. I'll drive wherever I want to go until then.
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And why is outsourcing happening? No, its not the labor expense in the USA, its the taxes in the USA. Near-40% corporate income tax makes it a good idea to do as little "corporate" in the USA as possible. Wanna fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. www.fairtax.org. That abolishes all Federal income tax, including individual, corporate, capital gains, inheritance, self employment, alternative minimum, gift, social security, medicare, etc. all of 'em, along with the IRS. Instead, things for sale, both goods and services are taxed.
Before you start thinking "regressive" (which it isn't, after you read and understand it), consider that the income taxes have social security and Medicare at 15.3%, plus 22% of the selling price, on average, of everything made in America is the result of income tax expense to the businesses that manufacture it, and you can see that the poor are getting hit with up to 37% income taxes, all tolled, while never having to file a tax return. The income tax is one of the most regressive taxes we have.
And, that is what is destroying America, high costs of manufacturing, not high labor costs. I say we zero the taxes, keep the high wages, and let people work themselves out of poverty and the need for Federal assistance to the poor.
Its NOT the expense of the workers, its our outrageous 40% corporate taxes that are driving our decline. About 22% of the price of everything American made is because of the influence of income taxes, both corporate and other such as personal taxes of the workers, making their services more expensive as well. 22% of a $40K SUV is $8,800. Contrast that with the fact that it takes 33 hours of labor to build the average car, and the car company quoted figure of $78 / hr / worker to cover wages, benefits, and retirement expenses means that only about $2500 of the car's expense is from labor. Not much compared to the tax bite.
If we zero our income taxes, and tax other things beside income, we can be back at the forefront of manufacturing, and therefore prosperity again.
Oil shale out west, in the Colorado and Wyoming areas, has 3X the proven reserves of the Saudis.
It's happened more than once. As soon as I start getting paid for doing something, it ceases to be fun. Happened with electronics and kinda ruined part of my ham radio hobby - I don't enjoy tinkering any more. Same with software - used to love to write programs, bought PC's instead of Macs because of turbo-pascal, and then a few years into programming for $$$, the fun went away.
I think it comes from the idea that no matter what you do, you can no longer impress anyone (amaze your friends and neighbors, one of the chief reasons for doing anything...) because since you're a pro, they EXPECT you to be able to do that, and are... not amazed, shocked, awed, or anything else.
I think you're stuck with it being drudge stuff. I think your choices are either to endure it or move on into management. Or, you could change careers completely, but that'd probably be expensive.
I’ve suggested electrifying the roads and been told we don’t even have enough resources to manufacture enough wire to do that. Dunno, they might be right.
As for putting cars on railcars, I invented a rail switch that would allow a railcar with an automobile to be plucked from the center of a train at speed, without slowing the train. Talked to a lot of people that said it would be too expensive to build that infrastructure, and they’re probably right. What is railway, $10M / mi when you’re providing power to a railcar with electric motors to move itself? That’s probably the price out in the country, let alone ripping up cities. You have to build it new for several reasons, one of which is that most current railway isn’t good for 100+ mph.
I don’t think the unions have anything to do with people choosing trucks to ship things, trucks are just a lot faster, that’s all. There are rail unions, too.
I think it’s going to take a lot more than 3 or 4 large reactors to power the USA. Doing some math, the Chevy Volt goes 40 miles on 8 KwH. Cars alone travel nearly 2 trillion miles a year in the USA. That’s 2 X 10^12. Divide that by 40 and multiply that by 8 and you get 400 billion KwH, or 400 X 10^9 KwH. With 24 X 365 hours in the year, that’s 8760 hours, leaving 45,662,100 Kw generating capacity requirement, or 45,662.1 Megawatts. Some of the largest reactors in the world are around 1,300 megawatts. We’d need 35 of them to power Chevy Volt sized cars, probably twice that many to power average sized cars, double it to account for needing peak power when people are using their cars during certain times of the day rather than being evenly distributed over the 24 hours of a day and 7 days of the week, and then probably double it again to include the trucks. We’d probably need close to 300 new nuclear power plants to run all our transportation that moves on highways with electricity.
As for the power source, it’d be better to build solar power stations. They can be built with molten salt as a storage medium so that they work at night and during the day, solving the storage problem. The big poblem with that would be that our solar resources are mostly in the southwest, so we would need very high voltage DC power distribution to get it around the USA, and a whale of a lot of copper even then. How to build power lines at millions of volts so that the current required is small and therefore the I*R loss is small? Plus of course there are the NIMBYs to fight to build the power wires. Or, killing 2 birds with one stone, get this:
http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html
to work, capture the elemental carbon in the atmosphere, and truck / rail it to ordinary coal-fired power plants around the country, and make the power plants squeaky clean in emissions, while all you need to do is haul more carbon out of the atmosphere than you burn in the power plants to solve the CO2 in the atmosphere “problem” if you believe in that. If you don’t, it still shouldn’t hurt anything to do it.
Its 5800 miles, Eintstein.
WRX is ALREADY one of the best-crashing cars on the road.
And I am really, really hoping for the magic battery. That will solve TONS of problems.
Funny you mention the military spending as a subsidy for oil, when it is the lack of committment to drilling in this country that makes it necessary to look overseas for our oil. Were we to exploit all our oil, everywhere there is a drop of it under an American flag, we wouldn't have to do that. And, there would be NO military subsidy necessary and there would be NO petroleum subsidy necessary.
Highways are the business of the public monies, as are schools (although some argue that the latter should not be, but I disagree.) What we do NOT need is Federal money in the schools. The more we spend in the DOE, the worse the kids do. Its time to shut down the DOE and let the local and state school boards have at it, and build a better mousetrap. My generation was educated that way, which is why we have roads built buy engineers educated that way, and had a manned moon program built by engineers that were educated that way. Some things become counterproductive when the Feds get involved, and education is one of them.
I think that the highways could do without Fed money, too, but that would be harder than education. Either way, we have to stop the spending.
Yep, natural gas is a fossil fuel, but emits far less than other fossil fuels. Its the best we can do. We CANNOT aboandon fossil fuel unless we want to allow nuclear, can pay for nuclear, and get cars to run on electricity. There's no reason to build that sort of capacity until we get the cars running on electric, either, and nobody's invented the practical magic battery yet.
Want to do something? Think geo-engineering. I've already posted this link once:
http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html
Perfect that, and then solve the next problem of where you're going to stack all that elemental carbon you suck out of the atmosphere. But that would solve the problem, and yield a new, inexhaustible fuel source that could be transported easier than building electric lines that envirowackos oppose at every turn, we'd just truck it to electrical power stations and use it in place of coal, and that would result in no pollution EXCEPT CO2, and so all we have to do is haul CO2 out of the atmosphere faster than we burn it, and of course find someplace to stack it. Energy problem solved, pollution problem solved. But the AGW worshippers don't seem interested in anything that is not hideously expensive and would bankrupt the gov't. It is still to be suspected that all the AGW people really want is to sabotage the "evil" western gov'ts, and I've already taken an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign AND DOMESTIC, and will continue to do so until I die. I see that the AGW worshippers as enemies of this country.
You're another one that wants to plan everyone else's life, and have people living low. Kindly go to hell. I've worked for this, I am entitled to it, and will defend it with any and all means available to me. I don't need any envirowacko busybody trying to make my life less than what it is now. Ideally, life should be getting better for everyone, not worse, simply due to the technology, but other things are sabotaging that, mainly regulations promulgated by people like you, as well as tax policy that is a result of political corruption.
>Expand the petroleum infrastructure: In the US (and Europe) car ownership per capita peaked in 2004. Absolute car numbers have been in decline since 2008 in the US. Not only can you move away from the car, its already happening.
Yes, you need to expand the petroleum infrastructure because you have to transport petroleum from new locations and process different types of it. The oil sands of Canada and the new Bakkan oil need to be transported, and processed. The refineries, which are too expensive and too regulated to build new ones (well, almost - they're building a new one near Bakkan, but the envirowackos are attempting to hold it up as long as they can, which is what I'm talkiing about) so you have to build a pipeline from Canada to near New Orleans, where refineries can be expanded to handle the new source.
And, we should expand refining AND drilling in THIS country as a security measure. What if we produced all our own oil? We could do it - we HAVE more oil than the Saudis, when you consider the shale, and were we to achieve energy independece, we could tell the middle east crybabies to go stuff it. I'd be for that.
>Plan for it. Zone so that town and city centers are dense enough to undo the need for most car journeys. This has been happening in (parts of ) Europe for decades now.
NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!!! Plan your own life, leave mine alone. If I want to live 20 miles out of town, that is my business and you have no business making it more difficult or expensive. Crowding causes stress and breeds crime. We have enough of both already. Crowding is "living low", and this SHOULD be the land of plenty, and would be if we did taxes right, but that is a whole 'nother country of discussion.
And living in crowded cities in hi-rise apt's is living low. I'm a Ham radio operator with a tower in the yard with a 4-element 20 meter beam on top of it. You CAN'T do that in an apartment. Others build race cars in their garages or store boats on their property. If you just want to rattle around your apartment and amuse yourself with your computer, have at it, but not everyone wants to live like you.
>Do public investment for the trains. Train systems pay off over decades, which is far too long for private investment, but not a problem for public investment. Countries become rich over centuries of infrastructure buildup.
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!! Haven't you been paying attention? We are BROKE! We have to stop the spending now. We have to do things that are CHEAPER, not find new ways for the gov't to go broke more quickly. We need to balance the budget. If its REALLY a good idea, it will attract enough ridership to be profitable. IF it doesn't, then we don't need it. And, people don't want to ride trains, or they'd be doing it.
Coal companies aren't going to lose profits, they're going to raise prices until the people, the poorer ones, can't heat and cool their homes. Such a pleasant eventuality makes me glad I'm not there. The rest of everyone else will have their standard of living impacted by the skyrocketing electric prices until they get to the point that it makes sense to build a billion windmills to generate expensive electricity. Welcome to a future of universal poverty.
You can spend all you want on geothermal, solar, and wind, but the day is soon coming when these sources will have to produce totally without gov't subsidies, since the gov't is running out of money to do that. I believe that ALL subsidies of ANY sort will soon be withdrawn by the US gov't as we try to balance the budget, which will absolutely have to be done if the US is to avoid going bankrupt. No subsidies to farms, petroleum companies, wind and solar and geothermal companies, individual homeowners that want install geothermal heating / cooling, etc. Gov't money for most things is going to be GONE, going mostly into medicare, medicaid, and social security, unless we indeed fail to repeal Obamacare, which will suck up more money than exists in the USA if we don't get it repealed.
I didn't miss the stories, just the cars. That is, there are none that will do what my Subaru WRX will do. Until there are, I'm not buying any, at least not as a "primary" car. I need something that will go 300 miles and "refuel" in about 3 minutes. I'm driving to Las Vegas from Virginia in March, and there are no electric cars that will do that in the timeframe my WRX will. The Chevy Volt will do it, but not on electricity.
We need to keep and even expand our petroleum infrastructure until there _is_ such an electric car. Otherwise, we just sabotage our economy by making oil too expensive.
Trains are fine, but they aren't cars, we drive cars, and its too expensive to erect catenary overhead wires for the distances our trains would be traversing, if indeed we could get ridership to pay for them which is highly unlikely. Europe has population density to support trains, but we don't.
I've seen the lab announcements, the supposed "breakthrus" in battery tech, but the stuff is still not on the market. I think its still 10 - 20 years away from being found in an electric car that we can recharge in 3 - 5 minutes, or replace spent batteries with charged batteries in that timeframe, so that we can take it cross country and make decent time. I mean, I'm driving to Las Vegas from Virginia in March, and wouldn't buy an electric car that wouldn't be able to do the same thing. So, I have to be able to go about 300 miles and recharge or replace the battery in about 3 minutes. Yes, that's not going to happen any time soon, even with a battery breakthru, 'cuz getting that kind of electrical power to "refueling" stations would involve a serious electrical power construction project. And, certain "green" approaches like wind and solar would still probably make that too expensive.
Our real way to beat the supposed problem, which I'm still not convinced is a problem, would be geo-engineering, which, unlike clensing the atmosphere of CO2, is doable both financially and practically. And at least one geo-engineering approach DOES clense the atmosphere:
http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html
but you don't hear about that, either. The "worshippers" don't seem to want any geo-engineering solution, which makes the rest of us non-worshippers suspect that they are not sincere in their goals, and that they have hidden goals. Not all of them, but the leadership, the drum-beaters that I suspect have as a goal of bringing "the west" down in financial ruin. Its hard to conclude anything else when the worshippers are only interested in the most expensive solution, and just a few years ago were talking of spending $50T over the next 40 years to achieve it. Yeah, that was a global figure, but you know who would end up footing most of that bill... the USA, that's who. China / India won't even agree to cooperate, let alone do what the Europeans did - sign a treaty like Kyoto and then fail to live up to it. China / India won't even go thru the motions.
So, anyway, since we all know that its going to take 20 - 30 - 40 years to replace the petroleum infrastructure with something clean, how about stopping the opposition to petroleum, so we can have a chance at prosperity again, and with that prosperity use a portion of it for the research to either solve the problem, or show once and for all that it is not really a problem?
I anxiously await the magic battery, but these global warming religeon people want to stop using fossil fuels right now. That's my point.
I say we work like crazy to invent the magic battery. After that, the CO2 emissions will take care of themselves, with the help of clean-burning natural gas. That'll be the best we can do until someone really does a credible cold fusion.
An even easier solution: To open door, insert key and turn. Try and hack that...
Nobody is screwed if the global warming fraudsters are ignored and we use geo-engineering to attack the problem. That is, as soon as we can actually measure a problem...
No, there's one more thing beside storage. It is making cars run on it.
Show me nuclear, wind, hamsters,. etc. that will power a car down the road...
Until we do something to revitalize our industrial base and get people working and paying taxes from GOOD paying jobs and not burger flipping jobs, everything is going to be too expensive. The F-22, the F-35, etc. have been and are about to be canceled due to the realities of our economic situation.
I believe that the answer is here: www.fairtax.org. Completely untaxing US industry I believe will supercharge our economy, and get us out of this bad economic situation virtually overnight. Read it. Understand it and you'll demand it.
Why study science / engineering with the US economy being exported overseas? All we are going to have left is MBA's in hi-rise buildings directing the work of the work-for-peanuts engineers in India and China. The degree to have is business, not engineering / science. This situation will continue until it becomes profitable to manufacture in the USA again, which will not happen as long as we have income taxes. We cannot absorb income tax expense to industry while supporting the highest wage scale on the planet. Keep the high wage scale, dump the income taxes. How to dump the income taxes? Pass the Fair Tax, a consumption tax. www.fairtax.org. Read all about it. It is the ONLY thing that will save our industry from gutting and our middle class from being moved to extreme poverty.
Poor people skills? There's a cure for that. Its called "The Dale Carnegie Course." Take it. You'll be amazed.
How would you like to ignore the situation, then, and have them show up tomorrow with 2 tons of anthrax spores that the spread upon the wind of the east coast population density, and kill 500,000? It could happen. We have to neutralize this threat.
Its not nonsense. In addition to the people that contract cancer from the high altitude radiation, you then get to add the 6 to 100 more people that get it from the scanners. Plus, those TSA people that OPERATE the scanners are REALLY getting zapped, and have been getting cancer far above the average because of them. The X-ray machines should be outlawed. I'll drive wherever I want to go until then.