At the very least it makes my insurance go up. If we continue down the path of socialized medicine, then I am forced to pay for their fat related illnesses.
You have just discovered one of the problems with socialzed medicine. In a free society, people need to be free to take risks with their body. For example, athletes and construction workers need to take risks while they do their jobs (some sports are more likely to hurt people than others) and construction is and always will be dangerous. In a socialized system, we subsidize all this, but don't keep the profits (the endorsements and buildings). Therefore we suffer.
That's without going into the environmental or social impacts of it, which are a bit more indirect but still noticeable.
The environmental impacts of obesity are a whole different ball game. Do fat people consume more food than normal people, all that much even? Fat people add weight to cars increasing their gas consumption even, if you want to get pedantic. I don't see the social impacts, other than that people dislike fat people.
I am a late teenaged person, I eat only fast and junk food, don't exercise, and drink at least 3 cans of regular soda a day. I am underweight, and have several friends with similar operating scenarios. Please explain.
That's because we are going for the real solution to obesity: just get over it. Stop caring about how other people live there lives. The reality is that people choose to be obese and don't care. So what gives you the right to intrude in to their lives and demand them not to be? The real obesity crisis is the laws and regulations that will be employed in an attempt to stop the obesity "crisis".
It gets even worse. How did they used to rate plug-in hybrids? It turns out they don't count electricity, so plug-ins with the right characteristics can get insane MPGs. The EPA driving cycle is less than 200 miles IIRC. To see why this is bad, let's say I get a huge truck (semi even) and fill it full of lead acid batteries. The batteries make it go for the full EPA course minus 1 mile. Then we turn on the truck's engine and get 4 MPG. Well, we used 1/4 gallon to go the last mile, and went 200 miles. The result? 800 MPG. Take that you Prius drivers! Its cleaner than a bicycle! Oh wait, it also used up 200 odd kWh of electricity, negating much of the advantage. This mistake lead to the Chevy Volt's rating of 230 MPG.
Now they rate em' on two fuel types, but it took complaining to get em' to change.
On the other hand, if you are posting as a teenager in your mom's basement, please just ignore this for another 5 or 10 years. Someday it will be important to you.
As a teenager living in his parent's house, I find the issue extremely important to me. The preservation of free society against incursion of moralism and safetism is one of the most important aspects of sustaining oneself. In fact, as a parent, it should be more important to you than it is to me, because your child's life depends on it. The ultimate progression of a non-free society (which these vans and your idea are) is the genocide and killing of the undesirables. Wether your non-free society is based on the worship of government, race, health, the environment, or the greater good over the rights of the individual, the ultimate result is the killing of the undesirables. Your idea might save 100 or 1000 children in the short run. However, it, combined with all the other ideas for protecting people will lead to a genocide killing millions, as well as the war to overthrow that genocidal government. The most dangerous people are those that seek to protect us.
On the linked article, I saw a lot of civil libertarians and privacy advocates dismissing the health concerns of these devices as secondary to privacy concerns. While this maybe true, this is a bad way to influence the average person. Instead, we should be promoting a massive campaign to state that X-Ray devices of all types cause cancer and other radiation related illnesses. Leave any strange population control or other conspiracies out of it (even if you have them). We just want to instil this belief as an undercurrent that goes throughout society. Just like the current smart meter scare. As technical people, when we instil fear about something, people will listen.
Yeah, I know. The first time I googled for aluminium fuel cell I got all these product results. I looked and thought "are their really aluminium-air fuel cells for sale!!!?!!?!?!?" but nope, just fuel tanks. New name needed.
Wiki says the highest capacity for a NiMH AA is 2.9 amp hours = 400 watt*hours / L. 500 watt*hours/L is what I get for LG Lithium-ion 18650 cells. A123 is 210 watt*hours/L. Do you got any NiMH above 2.9 amp hours for a AA?
Comparing the two does not make much sense, because gasoline is a fuel that comes out of the ground. Aluminium is made by electrolysing its oxide using hydroelectric dams. Hydrogen is made by heat natural gas with water and an catalyst (made of unobtainium, IIRC). What the overall energy cost is depends on the input energy - you can make hydrogen and hydrocarbons from any organic or hydrocarbon source. It tough to smelt aluminium with hydrocarbon fuels (in fact virtually impossible). It's possible to split water with electricity. If you heat hydrogen with carbon dioxide, you can make gas and diesel. It looks like you can get 70% electricity to hydrogen and 50% electricity to hydrocarbon efficiency. So, to simplify things, lets assume our input is electricity.
We've got the following electricity in to electricity out efficiencies for some fuel cells and batteries.
Aluminium-air - 30%
Zinc-air - 54%
Hydrogen-air - 25%
Diesel generators (50% electricity->diesel) - 15%
Lithium-ion battery + charger - 86%
Lead-acid battery + charger - 65%
NiMH battery + charger - 65%
NiFe battery + charger - 65%
NiCd battery + charger - 84%
Four caveats:
1. If you a different source of energy, your efficiencies will be different. If your feedstock is organic or hydrocarbon, then you can make hydrogen and hydrocarbons really efficiently. If your feedstock is electricity (which most future feedstocks will be), then the batteries are the winners, followed by the metal air batteries.
2. The efficiency of both the fuel cells and the batteries is further complicated by the effect of usage scenarios.
3. The best hydride to store hydrogen is in the liquid carbon hydrides, like gasoline. It's the cheapest raw material (CO2 is free) and it's one of the most hydrogen rich materials
4. There is the issue of the size of the production equipment. Aluminium smelting is a big (yet surprisingly efficient) process. Your not going to do smelting in your house, at least not very efficiently. You can recharge a battery, however. You definitely can make hydrogen at home, efficiently with electricity. You might be able to make zinc efficiently at home (something I am experimenting with).
Hey, a Beryllium slurry stores way more energy than gasoline. Should we all drive cars powered by burning a beryllium slurry?
The best argument against hydrogen is aluminium. Aluminium stores energy slightly more efficiently, has no explosion hazards, has similar energy densities to gasoline, and is made on a large scale. The aluminium fuel cell is also 100 times cheaper than a hydrogen fuel cell. And that's with what? Probably less than a 1000th the money spent on the hydrogen boondogle.
But overall, I think electric will win out. Have you seen the new Sanyo Eneloop NiMH? 2 times the volumetric energy density of an A123 lithium-ion, if my math is correct.
We do know. All the technology is proven. The integration is not. We can expect 60 percent electricity to gasoline efficiency. The best way to store hydrogen is in the form of gasoline, which is 1.75 times richer in hydrogen by volume than liquid hydrogen. And that does not include the energy of the carbon.
we NEED nuclear, because there's no way solar/wind/geothermal can equate to even 25% of our current use, let alone what increased population will need
While I support nuclear energy, this is just wrong. The Earth is hit with over 175 petawatts of solar power. An American uses about 10 kW of power (two X over estimate with current solar plus current solar to gasoline). Total, 9 billion of them is 90 terawatts, or %0.05 of the solar influx.
Personally, if I were to undergo a fuel tank fire/explosion, I'd much rather have hydrogen in the tank.
Personally, I'd rather have a fuel tank full of aluminum. It stores 2.4 times as much energy as gasoline, and fuel cells to consume aluminium are 100 times cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells. 5 coke can sized-blocks of aluminum in a 100 percent efficient aluminium-air fuel cell can get you 250 miles in a Tesla. Most aluminum fuel cells are only 44 percent efficient, though.
This idea has an issue: purity. Lithium ion batteries require high purity, as far as I know, less than parts per million impurity content. With most lithium-ions, the case prevents the diffusion of crap (like water) into the battery. When the crud makes it through, the battery quits. With this system, there's no casing, and thus nothing to stop crap from getting in. I wonder how stable it will be with respect to soda spills, sweat, etc. on the clothing?
Also, how are you going to wire up the battery? What decides which is the anode and which is the cathode?
I thought I had already responded to this, but apparently it didn't get into Slashdot somehow...
That's been happening to me as well. Sometimes the post shows up just a bit later.
As for the example of public transit, the thing is that its benefits are larger than the mere cost of individual travel.
There's a big and critical difference between public transport and highways. Public transport does not pay for itself, and has no hope of doing so. Ticket sales for public transport are only %20 percent of public transport, while gas taxes pay for pay 80-90 percent of direct construction costs. This pays for the externalities of the automobile, not the externalities of the petrochemical engine, which is shared by both some transport, and most automobiles. You might also be interested in the paradoxes involved in transport efficiency.
I agree with pretty much everything you said up until the stuff about solar.
The problem with this idea is that the power companies and the rooftop solar companies are not the same company. The power companies are utilities. The solar companies are home improvement companies. The issue with solar power is that many people (I know a few) are happy to invest a great deal of money in solar power. The problem is that solar is uneconomical. This is changing, due to the decreasing price of raw materials, the increasing price of fossil fuels, and technical improvements.
Now, the utilities, public/private transport companies, are all special cases. My belief is that when a service requires an infrastructure that goes everywhere, it needs to be a public enterprise. Also, if the government is the sole consumer of a product, it needs to be a public enterprise. This is because in order for the market to do its magic, it needs a lot of buyers and sellers. If there are only a few, there is opportunity for price gouging without bound. This happens in the case of both transit, and blackwater. Both cases were a disaster. Another problem is when businesses successfully stack the government to reduce their liability. This happened in Gulf Spill. Imagine if BP had to pay the whole cost of the spill, instead of the 500 million that they are capped to.
I think you'll find plenty of europeans especially british died
179 brits died. 4400 americans died. Britain (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), spent 7 billion pounds = 12 billion dollars. America spent 3 trillion. The rest of the world lost 139 people. However the point of my post is that if you accept the following:
1. People should have to pay high gas taxes to offset the negative externalities of oil
2. The Iraq war is the a negative externalities of oil
3. People pay gas taxes for oil
Then: some of those taxes should be an aid package to the united states, britian, and everywhere else that fought the war
If you don't like one of those points, then my argument falls apart, and I'm okay with that.
Bush's middle eastern revenge tour of iraq and afghanistan
This whole thing was an utter disaster. I wish it never was fought.
go fuck yourself you out of touch insular prick.
I'm sorry about the insular nature of my post. I'm sick of Europeans saying "imperalist america" and reaping the benefits. I'm tired of being told to destroy my country with high gas taxes. I'm tired of my countrypeople doing the dirty work and getting yelled at for it.
Really, the earth can sustain 16 billion Americans. Lets start with energy. 175 petawatts of solar full blast. 16 billion Americans need 1000 times less. And that is with incredible technical inefficiencies. Engines wasting 80 percent of their fuel and the like. Now on to water. We have an unlimited amount of water on earth because it is all recycled instantly. But, it is dirty, and must be cleaned. If there was no fresh water in the USA, we'd need only a %30 percent electricity generation increase to desalinate the whole replacement. Now, we can start talking about oil, and the non-fossil fuel uses of fossil fuels. But using electricity, we can run the process backwards and convert CO2 and water into oil, gas, and coal, as well as other chemicals - this is proven technology. All that's left is metals. We can go through each metal and talk about when it will run out and all if you really want. And remember, that was solar - which you'll say is "unproven". Nuclear is proven, but environmentalists have stopped it. If they would reconsider their positions, we could get rid of this "climate crisis".
In reality, we are heading towards a very pleasant form for population control. A consumerist peace, as I call it, in which the nations of the world develop, and use more resources, not less. The result is that because of the high quality of life (and this is proven), the people have less children. What this means is that the population will stop growing. This is already starting in India, where they are now down to 2.45 births per woman. In addition, these consumerist nations won't fight each other, because they'll all be watching TV and driving SUVs instead of fighting over food or whether Jesus or Allah is god.
Actually the opposite can be true - if something is truly intelligent and prudent, it can be difficult for private companies to make money on it.
Often times, we learn that the things that are "intelligent and prudent" but difficult to make money on, were not. They were either stupid or people quickly found a way to make money on them. For example, I've heard it said that permaculture or organic farming is impossible to make money on and that a capitalist could never do it. Well, capitalists found out it was possible to sell the food and people would pay for the difference in manufacturing costs. So now we have lots of organic food for sale. Even at Walmart, I believe. That's because the market is a democracy and capitalists listen to the will of the people. If some entrenched interest decides it does not want to do something, then someone else will. And that entrenched interest may fade away - we don't really talk about the East India Company today, do we? Nope. Gone, and some might say good riddance. The problems are when an entrenched interest uses either monopoly tactics or government regulation ("regulatory capture") to block upstarts. The other problem is when moralists dislike the will of the people try to change the system to prevent people from getting what they want. So I'm a pro-free market, pro-small business, pro-worker, pro-environment capitalist.
You might want to learn about why this happened. Ironically, it was because of anti-trust regulations that this happened. You see, you can't own the utilities (I.E., electric generators), and electric trains at the same time. What does this mean? You have two choices. Sell the trains, or sell the generators. And guess what, the utility companies wanted to be utilities, not train operators. So they went for the electric generators. Then, the public found that rail was too expensive. So the businesses collapsed. If public transport was cheaper or more useful to the public, it would have survived. The only way to have public transport is to take from non-riders (like me), to pay out big subsidies. When I drive my car, I pay gas taxes that fund road construction. Public transport relies on subsidies. Why is this? Because it sucks. It uses too many resources to achieve the same goal as a bunch of private cars. You might be interested to look up the real efficiency of public transport, and learn why it is often an unitelligent thing to do.
And also we don't have mass-produced solar power - no one's figured out yet how to put a meter on the Sun.
I can categorically state that this is false. Everyone's already figured out how to meter the sun. Sell the solar arrays. Sell the electricity. It's simple, capitalistic, and makes a lot of sense. The problem is not the laws of man but the laws of physics. If you pick up a rock (coal), throw it into a steam turbine, and light it, that's easier than setting up an array of mirrors to heat up water to turn the turbine. It just is. It uses less iron, less copper, less aluminium, etc. So what does that mean? Back in the older days when iron, etc. was more expensive (natural resource prices fall down over time), it's gotten cheaper to have big arrays of mirrors to point at the boilers. And, because of the increasing price of fossil coal, it's become more expensive to burn it. As a result, we are now right on the edge of solar power being economical. Think about the cost of computers. Think about how to design something to track the sun with 1880's technology. You couldn't, unless you had people adjusting the thing constantly. No one could use the electricity, because they'd be too busy adjusting the solar array to use it.
WTF? Please ignore this post and pay attention to this one. Slashdot did not show my post and I thought it had not made it through. The content of the posts is basically the same.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very least it makes my insurance go up. If we continue down the path of socialized medicine, then I am forced to pay for their fat related illnesses.
You have just discovered one of the problems with socialzed medicine. In a free society, people need to be free to take risks with their body. For example, athletes and construction workers need to take risks while they do their jobs (some sports are more likely to hurt people than others) and construction is and always will be dangerous. In a socialized system, we subsidize all this, but don't keep the profits (the endorsements and buildings). Therefore we suffer.
That's without going into the environmental or social impacts of it, which are a bit more indirect but still noticeable.
The environmental impacts of obesity are a whole different ball game. Do fat people consume more food than normal people, all that much even? Fat people add weight to cars increasing their gas consumption even, if you want to get pedantic. I don't see the social impacts, other than that people dislike fat people.
I am a late teenaged person, I eat only fast and junk food, don't exercise, and drink at least 3 cans of regular soda a day. I am underweight, and have several friends with similar operating scenarios. Please explain.
That's because we are going for the real solution to obesity: just get over it. Stop caring about how other people live there lives. The reality is that people choose to be obese and don't care. So what gives you the right to intrude in to their lives and demand them not to be? The real obesity crisis is the laws and regulations that will be employed in an attempt to stop the obesity "crisis".
Peak lithium is a Li!
This study takes in to account all those factors and says you're wrong.
It gets even worse. How did they used to rate plug-in hybrids? It turns out they don't count electricity, so plug-ins with the right characteristics can get insane MPGs. The EPA driving cycle is less than 200 miles IIRC. To see why this is bad, let's say I get a huge truck (semi even) and fill it full of lead acid batteries. The batteries make it go for the full EPA course minus 1 mile. Then we turn on the truck's engine and get 4 MPG. Well, we used 1/4 gallon to go the last mile, and went 200 miles. The result? 800 MPG. Take that you Prius drivers! Its cleaner than a bicycle! Oh wait, it also used up 200 odd kWh of electricity, negating much of the advantage. This mistake lead to the Chevy Volt's rating of 230 MPG.
Now they rate em' on two fuel types, but it took complaining to get em' to change.
Could you please point me to the documents used to create that graph? I checked wiki, and could not find it in the links.
On the other hand, if you are posting as a teenager in your mom's basement, please just ignore this for another 5 or 10 years. Someday it will be important to you.
As a teenager living in his parent's house, I find the issue extremely important to me. The preservation of free society against incursion of moralism and safetism is one of the most important aspects of sustaining oneself. In fact, as a parent, it should be more important to you than it is to me, because your child's life depends on it. The ultimate progression of a non-free society (which these vans and your idea are) is the genocide and killing of the undesirables. Wether your non-free society is based on the worship of government, race, health, the environment, or the greater good over the rights of the individual, the ultimate result is the killing of the undesirables. Your idea might save 100 or 1000 children in the short run. However, it, combined with all the other ideas for protecting people will lead to a genocide killing millions, as well as the war to overthrow that genocidal government. The most dangerous people are those that seek to protect us.
Please make flying cars and teleporters. I'll take %1. Thanks.
That's true. I was very angry and did not think through the consequences of this idea.
On the linked article, I saw a lot of civil libertarians and privacy advocates dismissing the health concerns of these devices as secondary to privacy concerns. While this maybe true, this is a bad way to influence the average person. Instead, we should be promoting a massive campaign to state that X-Ray devices of all types cause cancer and other radiation related illnesses. Leave any strange population control or other conspiracies out of it (even if you have them). We just want to instil this belief as an undercurrent that goes throughout society. Just like the current smart meter scare. As technical people, when we instil fear about something, people will listen.
Yeah, I know. The first time I googled for aluminium fuel cell I got all these product results. I looked and thought "are their really aluminium-air fuel cells for sale!!!?!!?!?!?" but nope, just fuel tanks. New name needed.
Wiki says the highest capacity for a NiMH AA is 2.9 amp hours = 400 watt*hours / L. 500 watt*hours/L is what I get for LG Lithium-ion 18650 cells. A123 is 210 watt*hours/L. Do you got any NiMH above 2.9 amp hours for a AA?
Comparing the two does not make much sense, because gasoline is a fuel that comes out of the ground. Aluminium is made by electrolysing its oxide using hydroelectric dams. Hydrogen is made by heat natural gas with water and an catalyst (made of unobtainium, IIRC). What the overall energy cost is depends on the input energy - you can make hydrogen and hydrocarbons from any organic or hydrocarbon source. It tough to smelt aluminium with hydrocarbon fuels (in fact virtually impossible). It's possible to split water with electricity. If you heat hydrogen with carbon dioxide, you can make gas and diesel. It looks like you can get 70% electricity to hydrogen and 50% electricity to hydrocarbon efficiency. So, to simplify things, lets assume our input is electricity.
We've got the following electricity in to electricity out efficiencies for some fuel cells and batteries.
Aluminium-air - 30%
Zinc-air - 54%
Hydrogen-air - 25%
Diesel generators (50% electricity->diesel) - 15%
Lithium-ion battery + charger - 86%
Lead-acid battery + charger - 65%
NiMH battery + charger - 65%
NiFe battery + charger - 65%
NiCd battery + charger - 84%
Four caveats:
1. If you a different source of energy, your efficiencies will be different. If your feedstock is organic or hydrocarbon, then you can make hydrogen and hydrocarbons really efficiently. If your feedstock is electricity (which most future feedstocks will be), then the batteries are the winners, followed by the metal air batteries.
2. The efficiency of both the fuel cells and the batteries is further complicated by the effect of usage scenarios.
3. The best hydride to store hydrogen is in the liquid carbon hydrides, like gasoline. It's the cheapest raw material (CO2 is free) and it's one of the most hydrogen rich materials
4. There is the issue of the size of the production equipment. Aluminium smelting is a big (yet surprisingly efficient) process. Your not going to do smelting in your house, at least not very efficiently. You can recharge a battery, however. You definitely can make hydrogen at home, efficiently with electricity. You might be able to make zinc efficiently at home (something I am experimenting with).
Hey, a Beryllium slurry stores way more energy than gasoline. Should we all drive cars powered by burning a beryllium slurry?
The best argument against hydrogen is aluminium. Aluminium stores energy slightly more efficiently, has no explosion hazards, has similar energy densities to gasoline, and is made on a large scale. The aluminium fuel cell is also 100 times cheaper than a hydrogen fuel cell. And that's with what? Probably less than a 1000th the money spent on the hydrogen boondogle.
But overall, I think electric will win out. Have you seen the new Sanyo Eneloop NiMH? 2 times the volumetric energy density of an A123 lithium-ion, if my math is correct.
We do know. All the technology is proven. The integration is not. We can expect 60 percent electricity to gasoline efficiency. The best way to store hydrogen is in the form of gasoline, which is 1.75 times richer in hydrogen by volume than liquid hydrogen. And that does not include the energy of the carbon.
we NEED nuclear, because there's no way solar/wind/geothermal can equate to even 25% of our current use, let alone what increased population will need
While I support nuclear energy, this is just wrong. The Earth is hit with over 175 petawatts of solar power. An American uses about 10 kW of power (two X over estimate with current solar plus current solar to gasoline). Total, 9 billion of them is 90 terawatts, or %0.05 of the solar influx.
Personally, if I were to undergo a fuel tank fire/explosion, I'd much rather have hydrogen in the tank.
Personally, I'd rather have a fuel tank full of aluminum. It stores 2.4 times as much energy as gasoline, and fuel cells to consume aluminium are 100 times cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells. 5 coke can sized-blocks of aluminum in a 100 percent efficient aluminium-air fuel cell can get you 250 miles in a Tesla. Most aluminum fuel cells are only 44 percent efficient, though.
This idea has an issue: purity. Lithium ion batteries require high purity, as far as I know, less than parts per million impurity content. With most lithium-ions, the case prevents the diffusion of crap (like water) into the battery. When the crud makes it through, the battery quits. With this system, there's no casing, and thus nothing to stop crap from getting in. I wonder how stable it will be with respect to soda spills, sweat, etc. on the clothing?
Also, how are you going to wire up the battery? What decides which is the anode and which is the cathode?
Simple. Use it for nuclear power. :-p.
I thought I had already responded to this, but apparently it didn't get into Slashdot somehow...
That's been happening to me as well. Sometimes the post shows up just a bit later.
As for the example of public transit, the thing is that its benefits are larger than the mere cost of individual travel.
There's a big and critical difference between public transport and highways. Public transport does not pay for itself, and has no hope of doing so. Ticket sales for public transport are only %20 percent of public transport, while gas taxes pay for pay 80-90 percent of direct construction costs. This pays for the externalities of the automobile, not the externalities of the petrochemical engine, which is shared by both some transport, and most automobiles. You might also be interested in the paradoxes involved in transport efficiency.
I agree with pretty much everything you said up until the stuff about solar.
The problem with this idea is that the power companies and the rooftop solar companies are not the same company. The power companies are utilities. The solar companies are home improvement companies. The issue with solar power is that many people (I know a few) are happy to invest a great deal of money in solar power. The problem is that solar is uneconomical. This is changing, due to the decreasing price of raw materials, the increasing price of fossil fuels, and technical improvements.
Now, the utilities, public/private transport companies, are all special cases. My belief is that when a service requires an infrastructure that goes everywhere, it needs to be a public enterprise. Also, if the government is the sole consumer of a product, it needs to be a public enterprise. This is because in order for the market to do its magic, it needs a lot of buyers and sellers. If there are only a few, there is opportunity for price gouging without bound. This happens in the case of both transit, and blackwater. Both cases were a disaster. Another problem is when businesses successfully stack the government to reduce their liability. This happened in Gulf Spill. Imagine if BP had to pay the whole cost of the spill, instead of the 500 million that they are capped to.
I think you'll find plenty of europeans especially british died
179 brits died. 4400 americans died. Britain (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), spent 7 billion pounds = 12 billion dollars. America spent 3 trillion. The rest of the world lost 139 people. However the point of my post is that if you accept the following:
1. People should have to pay high gas taxes to offset the negative externalities of oil
2. The Iraq war is the a negative externalities of oil
3. People pay gas taxes for oil
Then: some of those taxes should be an aid package to the united states, britian, and everywhere else that fought the war
If you don't like one of those points, then my argument falls apart, and I'm okay with that.
Bush's middle eastern revenge tour of iraq and afghanistan
This whole thing was an utter disaster. I wish it never was fought.
go fuck yourself you out of touch insular prick.
I'm sorry about the insular nature of my post. I'm sick of Europeans saying "imperalist america" and reaping the benefits. I'm tired of being told to destroy my country with high gas taxes. I'm tired of my countrypeople doing the dirty work and getting yelled at for it.
Really, the earth can sustain 16 billion Americans. Lets start with energy. 175 petawatts of solar full blast. 16 billion Americans need 1000 times less. And that is with incredible technical inefficiencies. Engines wasting 80 percent of their fuel and the like. Now on to water. We have an unlimited amount of water on earth because it is all recycled instantly. But, it is dirty, and must be cleaned. If there was no fresh water in the USA, we'd need only a %30 percent electricity generation increase to desalinate the whole replacement. Now, we can start talking about oil, and the non-fossil fuel uses of fossil fuels. But using electricity, we can run the process backwards and convert CO2 and water into oil, gas, and coal, as well as other chemicals - this is proven technology. All that's left is metals. We can go through each metal and talk about when it will run out and all if you really want. And remember, that was solar - which you'll say is "unproven". Nuclear is proven, but environmentalists have stopped it. If they would reconsider their positions, we could get rid of this "climate crisis".
In reality, we are heading towards a very pleasant form for population control. A consumerist peace, as I call it, in which the nations of the world develop, and use more resources, not less. The result is that because of the high quality of life (and this is proven), the people have less children. What this means is that the population will stop growing. This is already starting in India, where they are now down to 2.45 births per woman. In addition, these consumerist nations won't fight each other, because they'll all be watching TV and driving SUVs instead of fighting over food or whether Jesus or Allah is god.
Actually the opposite can be true - if something is truly intelligent and prudent, it can be difficult for private companies to make money on it.
Often times, we learn that the things that are "intelligent and prudent" but difficult to make money on, were not. They were either stupid or people quickly found a way to make money on them. For example, I've heard it said that permaculture or organic farming is impossible to make money on and that a capitalist could never do it. Well, capitalists found out it was possible to sell the food and people would pay for the difference in manufacturing costs. So now we have lots of organic food for sale. Even at Walmart, I believe. That's because the market is a democracy and capitalists listen to the will of the people. If some entrenched interest decides it does not want to do something, then someone else will. And that entrenched interest may fade away - we don't really talk about the East India Company today, do we? Nope. Gone, and some might say good riddance. The problems are when an entrenched interest uses either monopoly tactics or government regulation ("regulatory capture") to block upstarts. The other problem is when moralists dislike the will of the people try to change the system to prevent people from getting what they want. So I'm a pro-free market, pro-small business, pro-worker, pro-environment capitalist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
You might want to learn about why this happened. Ironically, it was because of anti-trust regulations that this happened. You see, you can't own the utilities (I.E., electric generators), and electric trains at the same time. What does this mean? You have two choices. Sell the trains, or sell the generators. And guess what, the utility companies wanted to be utilities, not train operators. So they went for the electric generators. Then, the public found that rail was too expensive. So the businesses collapsed. If public transport was cheaper or more useful to the public, it would have survived. The only way to have public transport is to take from non-riders (like me), to pay out big subsidies. When I drive my car, I pay gas taxes that fund road construction. Public transport relies on subsidies. Why is this? Because it sucks. It uses too many resources to achieve the same goal as a bunch of private cars. You might be interested to look up the real efficiency of public transport, and learn why it is often an unitelligent thing to do.
And also we don't have mass-produced solar power - no one's figured out yet how to put a meter on the Sun.
I can categorically state that this is false. Everyone's already figured out how to meter the sun. Sell the solar arrays. Sell the electricity. It's simple, capitalistic, and makes a lot of sense. The problem is not the laws of man but the laws of physics. If you pick up a rock (coal), throw it into a steam turbine, and light it, that's easier than setting up an array of mirrors to heat up water to turn the turbine. It just is. It uses less iron, less copper, less aluminium, etc. So what does that mean? Back in the older days when iron, etc. was more expensive (natural resource prices fall down over time), it's gotten cheaper to have big arrays of mirrors to point at the boilers. And, because of the increasing price of fossil coal, it's become more expensive to burn it. As a result, we are now right on the edge of solar power being economical. Think about the cost of computers. Think about how to design something to track the sun with 1880's technology. You couldn't, unless you had people adjusting the thing constantly. No one could use the electricity, because they'd be too busy adjusting the solar array to use it.
WTF? Please ignore this post and pay attention to this one. Slashdot did not show my post and I thought it had not made it through. The content of the posts is basically the same.