If an economic powerhouse (heh) like the USA goes zero-emissions, it's likely the technology would be cheap enough for use in developing countries as well.
But they won't do it until they have to. In the mean time, the industrial countries (or their industries) have to pay for the new technology while being undercut in price (WTO) by industries based in countries which don't have to.
This could actually increase emissions, as producers shut down operations in industrial nations in order to move them to countries with unregulated emissions. You'd have to be an idiot, or a politician, to write a regime which allows such outcomes and call it an improvement.
Let me reverse the order of these two sentences to make my point:
A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.... The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable.
You confuse chaos with randomness. They are not the same; a chaotic system is contrained by a chaotic attractor, a multi-dimensional surface in the N-space of physically possible states on which the current state is found. You cannot predict whether it will rain or shine two weeks from today, but you can predict with very high reliability how much rain you'll get because we know the characteristics which are due to the attractor.
Which brings me to my next point: if you change the characteristics of the attractor, the behavior of the system can change radicaly in a very sudden fashion. I fear that this is what we are doing with climate change, and we may suffer huge damages from the results.
The only thing I am panicking over is will we be able to get the US administration to give a shit about the environment.
The rest of the world has ~20 times the population of the USA, and is trying to get what the USA has got. China is already using more coal every year than the USA (which burned about 22 quadrillion BTU worth in 2002) and has just passed Japan as the world's second-largest consumer of oil. It's not enough to give a shit about the environment; we have to make sure they give a shit too, or at least give a shit about what the industrialized world will do if they don't act like it.
This means China needs to radically boost its efficiency (not hard even with current technology), Indonesia has to prevent the drainage and burning of peat bogs, and all that. If things there continue as they have been going, the USA could cut emissions to zero and still not make things better.
This also means that the Kyoto system of quotas is fundamentally broken. It will not do to give each nation a quota; each emitter of CO2 and other climate-changing gases has to have an incentive to prevent those emissions, and the competitive advantage should go to those producers and nations which are doing it the best. This means something like a unified system of carbon taxes.
Loud pipes safe lives. The reason those pipes (on motor bikes) are so loud is often because the other drivers on the road might not see you (on your bike) but hopefully they will hear you and watch out to not hit you.
If you like the sound that much, put it inside the car. After all, not everyone likes what you like; why should everyone have to listen to your choice of noise?
(and for the record...my car sets off about as many car alarms in a parking lot as my bike...hehehe)
All the more reason to run your exhausts into the passenger compartment; it will solve two problems at once. (You can take that suggestion as seriously as you like.)
After reading a driver's review of the GM Impact (later renamed EV-1) in which the reviewer noted that the car was quiet enough to mow down birds in the road, I realized that some kind of noisemaker, directed forward, might well be necessary to give pedestrians and others adequate notice of such vehicle's approach.
Anyone driving a vehicle which is sufficiently loud (e.g. cycle with loud pipes) to prevent others from hearing the quieter vehicles should be subjected to immediate confiscation of their sonic assault weapon. This would have the worthwhile effect of turning the ex-driver into a pedestrian, so that they could appreciate the hazards of overly loud vehicles from the opposite perspective.
The point was more about the hazard from a spill from a vehicle.
Quickie estimate: Suppose you crash a car into a pond containing half a million gallons of water. The car has 600 pounds of lithium-ion batteries, and 100 pounds of lithium dissolves into the pond. This is 45 kg of lithium in ~2 million kg of water, or about 2.2 ppm. If you weigh 45 kg and you want to get the therapeutic dose of 14 mg/kg, you'd need to get 630 mg of lithium which would require drinking ~280,000 liters of water.
The diesel was originally conceived to run on coal dust. The Model T was originally supposed to run on ethanol.
Funny how naptha, a byproduct of the production of lamp oil from this crude petroleum oozing up in places like Pennsylvania and Texas, has changed things since its debut as cleaning fluid.
In the US, Kansas alone is prime for an install base of 121,900 MegaWatts, http://www.awea.org/projects/kansas.html !
That would be "installed base", if that's what you meant (which you probably didn't). I bet you meant "potential nameplate capacity".
Total generation capacity in the USA in 2002 was a bit over 900 gigawatts. 122 GW is a lot more than Kansas could use, and much more than could be transmitted out of the state by conventional means. To make productive use of this much power you'd have to get fancy, such as by promoting an economy based on zinc-air or aluminum-air batteries and using excess wind to refine ZnO2 and Al2O3 back to metal during times of surplus. You could move bulk powdered or pelletized oxides and metal using tank cars or even pipelines.
I doubt that wood chips and straw will do that well with their waste.
If you've ever enjoyed eating certain mushrooms, you've benefitted from the waste of decaying straw.
The only twist in this cellulosic process is the source of the sugars (hydrolysis of cellulose rather than starch); the process from there on is the same story of fermentation and distillation. Fermentation is going to use the same old Saccharomyces regardless of the path, and as a byproduct you get... lots and lots of dead/dormant yeast.
Which is not to say that you need to get this fancy. I read about a USDA project in the 1960's which fed cattle on newsprint pellets enriched with urea (to give essential nitrogen to the cow's stomach flora), but doing the fermentation outside the cow to harvest the ethanol yourself still yields animal food.
Isn't that the same as solar cells, given that they require massive amounts of energy to make, output feeble amounts of energy on a per-cell basis (and at most 0.707 of that is harnessable as alternating current), and have a finite lifespan (primarily to cracking caused by heating/cooling cycles)?
What solar cells are those? The ones I'm familiar with pay back their invested energy in 2-4 years, and last 15-25 years at a minimum. They don't crack unless they are abused, such as by overheating with concentrated light.
Their output is also convertible to AC at 90+% efficiency, using modern inverters. Where'd you get this sqrt(.5) nonsense?
Actually, ethanol/methanol is a great step toward solar-powered cars; capture the solar energy with plants, store it as chemical energy, release it as heat energy within an internal combustion engine.
The problem is efficiency. There are many more losses with the conversion to plant matter and back, so you need a lot more capture area. As long as you're effectively getting it for free (as a byproduct of something you're growing anyway) you're fine, but if you have to pay for the acreage with the fuel production alone your costs just went through the roof. Speaking of roofs, the average house's roof can capture more than enough sunlight to power the average household's daily driving even if you're only using solar cells. If you assume 340 WH/mile and 20 miles/vehicle/day, you need 6.8 KWH/vehicle/day. If you get good sunlight for 6 hours/day, you need a bit over 1 KW(peak) of solar panels to supply this. At 10% efficiency this is only about 10-14 square meters of roof. Your typical ranch house has upwards of 100 square meters of roof.
Enthanol/methanol are a far better automotive fuel than electricity, so if this replaces the (misguided) efforts to produce electric cars, that would be excellent.
You're half right.
Ethanol and methanol have far higher energy density than the batteries required to use externally-supplied electricity in a vehicle; you can get many more miles of range into a liter of space with alcohol than batteries.
Batteries require no heat engine to convert their stored energy to a useful form (electricity can be converted to motion with efficiency well above 80%), and most useful batteries have a pretty high power density (W/kg) as well. Many electric cars are extremely quick.
The optimal solution for current (cheap) batteries is the plug-in hybrid; the batteries store power for short trips and surge acceleration, and the sustainer engine burns fuel for longer trips. The efficiency of such a vehicle can easily be twice that of a non-hybrid. I recall seeing a figure of 17% which works with other calculations I've done, but Chevron has published a figure claiming that the average is closer to 12%. That's probably where your Ram is hovering around.
If either lithium-ion cells or the recent NEC resin-based battery hit an inflection point in their production cost curve and start heading down, it won't be long before we see all-electric cars with 300+ mile ranges and sub-5-second 0-60 performance. This can already be done with laptop Li-ion cells, but the cost is about ten times too high for bulk production. I don't see anything which forces this to remain so.
I have two big worries with electric cars. The biggest being the batteries - by necessity, the greater the energy density of the battery, the nastier the chemicals inside it have to be. Weird things happen to cars - accidents, ditched in lakes, etc. - so it doesn't seem like a good idea to be carrying around hazmats which make gasoline look benign.
Lithium is not exactly a toxic substance; for some people, it's medicine. The electrolyte of NEC's proton polymer bat
There is a claim of only 140-150 sec of impulse for pure H2O2 here, so it shouldn't be hard to get 50% greater impulse by adding a fuel to consume the oxygen and increase the exhaust velocity. All things being equal, the flight time of a rocket belt is equivalent to the length of time it can hold its weight up against gravity (assuming you land at zero speed and have negligible drag effects) and is thus proportional to the specific impulse of the propellant.
Adding fuel also increases the exhaust temperature, and if you're already in danger of cooking your legs with superheated steam this could be a problem. The system might require modifications to keep the pilot cool.
Propellants containing N2O4 or N2H4 are right out; you'd presumably like to survive an impact which bends the plumbing, assuming that you live long enough to get the thing fuelled up and launched in the first place. Both substances are extremely poisonous.
To really get long flight times you have to increase the performance well above what rocket propulsion can give you. You can go from rocket to venturi-assisted rocket, to rocket-driven turbofan, to straight turbofan, to helicopter. Each one represents an increase in lift*time per unit fuel, by moving more mass (in this case, air) at a lower velocity and thus decreasing the energy (proportional to v^2) per unit momentum (proportional to v). However, by the time you do this you're not really a "rocket man" any more, you're something else.
Electrical Engineering is still taught to American students, sometimes even by American TAs and professors.
As for the claim in the grandparent, American physics students would know there was a conservation-law violation by halfway through first semester. Knowing that the permanent magnets would have to be degaussed to supply net energy to the output (a loss of integral over v of (B^2.dv)) is something that's taught in second semester (and tested on the AP exam if you take it in high school). Knowing exactly how such measurement errors can occur is slightly more advanced, but you'd get it in any electrical-power engineering course.
It's not violating any laws of thermodynamics, it's violating the law of conservation of energy.
Of course, if he really DID have a mechanism that caused such a violation he'd do well to patent it; the money for the Nobel Prize for physics is chump change compared to what such an invention is worth. On the other hand, a good scam artist can separate people from their money even if the invention is a complete hoax.
(If you're looking to document the damage caused by scientific illiteracy, the people fleeced by this bozo will be good case studies.)
I could probably make a device that could take 16 watts in and generate 300 volt-amperes (AC) out - but the volt-amperes would be almost 90 degrees out of phase, and the power factor would be less than 5%. The real power out of the device would be substantially less than 16 watts. There is no way in physics to have more than 1 watt out per watt in, "magical magnets" or no. If the device was extracting energy from the magnets, they would be depleted and the device would run down after a while. That's 2nd semester physics, basic E&M.
Either the proponents of this device are complete incompetents, or they are complete frauds. I'm inclined to believe the latter, as incompetents tend not to have the sales skills evident in the article
I disagree that private citizen are interested in the health of the forest. Some are, but a large number have been swayed by activists into supporting a position that isn't for the health of the forest.
And a large number have been swayed by propaganda into supporting a position which is only good for the industry, and only the industry's short-term interests at that. This says nothing about the merits of the strongest cases on either side.
Loggers are private citizens too. As are the people who buy the products built with lumber cut from forests. Both have an equal share of rights to these trees.
If they can't or won't out-bid the people who wish the trees to remain uncut, they obviously don't care enough.
Besides, if the price of old-growth timber goes up enough, it creates a business opportunity for the guy who processes scrub timber into laminated beams and other things made from small trees; small trees can be grown on a much shorter cycle, requiring less land to be disturbed. It might shift some of the demand from pine 2x4's to steel for inside walls, from oak and maple to bamboo for flooring. The need will be satisfied regardless, and we'll still have those trees that, were they cut, we could not see the likes of again for three generations.
Which forests are you talking about? Are you talking about abandoned farmland in Vermont, the high-altitude areas across California to Flagstaff and Show Low in Arizona, or old-growth rainforest in Alaska? They're different, you know.
Even if the forests need management, it's far from obvious that clearcutting is therefore good for the forest. The species evolved in an environment where each generation of trees spouted and grew in the decay or ashes of the generation before. Timbering removes most of the wood for forest products and shreds the rest so that it decays almost immediately, releasing its nutrients before growing trees can recapture them. This can cause the nutrients to be washed into streams and lost to the land.
Getting back to the topic of the article, the administration wants to auction off certain things but won't accept results beyond their narrow preconceptions; whether pollution rights or timber, nobody's allowed to buy them to preserve the forest or the air. In this way, the desire of people to use market forces to get the air cleaned up faster or preserve old-growth trees is denied by political hacks more interested in profits for their patrons, profits which might be lost if they don't get what they lobbied for at the price they expect. They want the market restricted to people who will do exactly what they would do, and nobody else. This is neither market-oriented nor democratic.
If it was a contract to cut then the conservationists had no right to tie that land up forever.
If the land was cut, it wouldn't have trees ready for harvest for 20-40 years. That's hardly "forever", and why shouldn't the conservationists be able to e.g. market the recreation rights to the forested land instead of the timber?
Presumably it was a contract to cut and that means the proper land owner was selling rights to his land but not selling the land itself.
This is National Forest. The owners are the citizens of the United States of America, not the current occupants of 536 seats in Washington.
Also, one can assume that the rightful owner of that land generates income from selling those rights. Why do you want to deny that person income?
The conservationists were willing to pay MORE to leave the trees than the timber companies were willing to pay to cut them. As a taxpayer, I think that the government's refusal to accept any outcome that didn't result in profits for some favored constituent's sawmill is odious. If the American public is willing to pay more for timber products so that old-growth can stand and we make our buildings out of composite I-beams with aspen chipboard webs and 2x2 pine caps, I think this is a great thing, it is the market in action.
Of course this interpretation has nothing to do with liberal or conservitive thinking...
Ignorance has its victims everywhere and in all political camps. Did you have no concept that this issue even existed or any of its specifics? If so, if you look in the mirror you'll see one.
Conservationists have already tried to shield old-growth forest by buying the timber rights. IIRC, they were told by the Interior department that they could not do this; their purchase was a contract to cut, and if they refused to do so the timber would be re-sold to someone else.
It's perverted for someone (like the Reagan and Bush administrations) to claim to support markets on one hand and the work to defeat them when they don't yield the result that they've pre-ordained.
We still need launch capacity no matter where we go.
It actually requires more delta-V to soft-land on the Moon than it does to aerobrake and land on Mars. This requires a different (bigger) launch capacity, under conditions where you also need to carry supplies which a Martian expedition can produce locally. If the goal is to go to Mars, the development of these additional capabilities is an expensive diversion.
We still need the ability to handle surviving in a can for a time.
Skylab, Salyut, Mir, ISS. What the Moon costs us is the ability to use artificial gravity to reduce muscular and skeletal deterioration. Again, an expensive diversion.
We still need the ability to build a shelter in a foreign world with little resources.
The character of those resources is extremely different between the two worlds. The Moon's resources are heavily depleted in volatiles and relatively un-differentiated, with lots of native (reduced) metal in the regolith; Mars' include an atmosphere full of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, heavily oxidized materials and differentiated mineral deposits including hematite. The experience gained on one isn't transferrable to the other.
Perhaps more importantly, Luna could be used to test automated systems that will help us on mars.
You can test software in your backyard on Earth. What you really need testing for is hardware, and the hardware designs necessary for conditions of hard vacuum and a 28-day sol are very different from airborne dust and a sub-25-hour sol.
The Mars Society is testing out mission concepts by mucking around in deserts, in Nevada and up above the Arctic circle. Going to the moon would not help. While it might be worthwhile in its own right, it is not a stepping stone and should not be represented as such.
Also, laptop batteries have multiple cells. Perhaps they could be charged in series in an ordering such that adjacent batteries were not recharged in direct sequence, spreading the 'hot spots' out over time.
That's counter-productive. Assuming a reasonably constant charging resistance (as opposed to a fixed conversion loss of a chemical reaction), your power loss in the battery is I^2*R, and the total heat dumped into the battery during the charging cycle is I^2*R*(Q/I) = QIR (where Q is the total charge the battery takes, in coulombs or ampere-seconds).
The total heat lost to resistance is proportional to the charging current, so you would be better off using the same power to charge your entire battery string at a lower current than to charge cells individually at higher current. The higher voltage probably makes it easier to make a high-efficiency charger also.
On another note, I can't help but notice that this is another development from NEC, which developed the proton-polymer battery. I have heard nothing about the proton-polymer battery since the press release some years ago, and maybe this is why: the resin technology is better suited for typical uses.
Induction motors are one good example. An induction motor's speed is determined mostly by the drive frequency, not the applied voltage. Lowering the voltage can affect the slip between the rotor and the stator field, which in turn affects things like the magnetizing current draw. If the voltage drops too low the stator field cannot transmit enough torque to keep the slip below the torque peak, and the motor stalls; a stalled motor has no cooling unless it has an external cooling mechanism, so it can overheat easily and destroy itself. Thermal cutouts are supposed to prevent this, but wiring stands up best if it is not subjected to overheat stress.
To really reduce power demand you'd have to cut both the voltage and the frequency, but that would have all kinds of nasty effects on things which depend on a consistent frequency - like standard electric clocks. You also lose the ability to connect to other grids. Needless to say, this is not a popular method of dealing with the issue.
It's the Supreme Court of the United States, which refused to rein in the blatant abuses of the patent/copyright clauses of the Constitution. As it stands, "promoting the progress of the useful arts" is the same as "granting a stream of monopoly rents to people and organizations with skilled legal teams and good lobbyists."
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This could actually increase emissions, as producers shut down operations in industrial nations in order to move them to countries with unregulated emissions. You'd have to be an idiot, or a politician, to write a regime which allows such outcomes and call it an improvement.
Which brings me to my next point: if you change the characteristics of the attractor, the behavior of the system can change radicaly in a very sudden fashion. I fear that this is what we are doing with climate change, and we may suffer huge damages from the results.
This means China needs to radically boost its efficiency (not hard even with current technology), Indonesia has to prevent the drainage and burning of peat bogs, and all that. If things there continue as they have been going, the USA could cut emissions to zero and still not make things better.
This also means that the Kyoto system of quotas is fundamentally broken. It will not do to give each nation a quota; each emitter of CO2 and other climate-changing gases has to have an incentive to prevent those emissions, and the competitive advantage should go to those producers and nations which are doing it the best. This means something like a unified system of carbon taxes.
To put it briefly, loud pipes do not save lives. It is a myth. Mostly, they just piss people off.
Loud pipes can kill you; "excessive noise may be fatiguing to riders, making them less able to enjoy riding and less able to exercise good riding skills." My major complaint is that they aren't dangerous enough to either refute the myth or get rid of the obnoxious assholes who believe it (or act as if they do) fast enough to make the roads quiet enough to live by.
Anyone driving a vehicle which is sufficiently loud (e.g. cycle with loud pipes) to prevent others from hearing the quieter vehicles should be subjected to immediate confiscation of their sonic assault weapon. This would have the worthwhile effect of turning the ex-driver into a pedestrian, so that they could appreciate the hazards of overly loud vehicles from the opposite perspective.
The technology is here, the only problem is cost.
That would be 280 liters, not 280,000 liters - still more water than you can drink in a week.
The point was more about the hazard from a spill from a vehicle.
Quickie estimate: Suppose you crash a car into a pond containing half a million gallons of water. The car has 600 pounds of lithium-ion batteries, and 100 pounds of lithium dissolves into the pond. This is 45 kg of lithium in ~2 million kg of water, or about 2.2 ppm. If you weigh 45 kg and you want to get the therapeutic dose of 14 mg/kg, you'd need to get 630 mg of lithium which would require drinking ~280,000 liters of water.
The stuff is safe enough to use in cars, QED.
Funny how naptha, a byproduct of the production of lamp oil from this crude petroleum oozing up in places like Pennsylvania and Texas, has changed things since its debut as cleaning fluid.
Total generation capacity in the USA in 2002 was a bit over 900 gigawatts. 122 GW is a lot more than Kansas could use, and much more than could be transmitted out of the state by conventional means. To make productive use of this much power you'd have to get fancy, such as by promoting an economy based on zinc-air or aluminum-air batteries and using excess wind to refine ZnO2 and Al2O3 back to metal during times of surplus. You could move bulk powdered or pelletized oxides and metal using tank cars or even pipelines.
The only twist in this cellulosic process is the source of the sugars (hydrolysis of cellulose rather than starch); the process from there on is the same story of fermentation and distillation. Fermentation is going to use the same old Saccharomyces regardless of the path, and as a byproduct you get... lots and lots of dead/dormant yeast.
Which is not to say that you need to get this fancy. I read about a USDA project in the 1960's which fed cattle on newsprint pellets enriched with urea (to give essential nitrogen to the cow's stomach flora), but doing the fermentation outside the cow to harvest the ethanol yourself still yields animal food.
What solar cells are those? The ones I'm familiar with pay back their invested energy in 2-4 years, and last 15-25 years at a minimum. They don't crack unless they are abused, such as by overheating with concentrated light.
Their output is also convertible to AC at 90+% efficiency, using modern inverters. Where'd you get this sqrt(.5) nonsense?
The problem is efficiency. There are many more losses with the conversion to plant matter and back, so you need a lot more capture area. As long as you're effectively getting it for free (as a byproduct of something you're growing anyway) you're fine, but if you have to pay for the acreage with the fuel production alone your costs just went through the roof. Speaking of roofs, the average house's roof can capture more than enough sunlight to power the average household's daily driving even if you're only using solar cells. If you assume 340 WH/mile and 20 miles/vehicle/day, you need 6.8 KWH/vehicle/day. If you get good sunlight for 6 hours/day, you need a bit over 1 KW(peak) of solar panels to supply this. At 10% efficiency this is only about 10-14 square meters of roof. Your typical ranch house has upwards of 100 square meters of roof.
You're half right.
The optimal solution for current (cheap) batteries is the plug-in hybrid; the batteries store power for short trips and surge acceleration, and the sustainer engine burns fuel for longer trips. The efficiency of such a vehicle can easily be twice that of a non-hybrid. I recall seeing a figure of 17% which works with other calculations I've done, but Chevron has published a figure claiming that the average is closer to 12%. That's probably where your Ram is hovering around.
If either lithium-ion cells or the recent NEC resin-based battery hit an inflection point in their production cost curve and start heading down, it won't be long before we see all-electric cars with 300+ mile ranges and sub-5-second 0-60 performance. This can already be done with laptop Li-ion cells, but the cost is about ten times too high for bulk production. I don't see anything which forces this to remain so.
Lithium is not exactly a toxic substance; for some people, it's medicine. The electrolyte of NEC's proton polymer bat
Adding fuel also increases the exhaust temperature, and if you're already in danger of cooking your legs with superheated steam this could be a problem. The system might require modifications to keep the pilot cool.
Propellants containing N2O4 or N2H4 are right out; you'd presumably like to survive an impact which bends the plumbing, assuming that you live long enough to get the thing fuelled up and launched in the first place. Both substances are extremely poisonous.
To really get long flight times you have to increase the performance well above what rocket propulsion can give you. You can go from rocket to venturi-assisted rocket, to rocket-driven turbofan, to straight turbofan, to helicopter. Each one represents an increase in lift*time per unit fuel, by moving more mass (in this case, air) at a lower velocity and thus decreasing the energy (proportional to v^2) per unit momentum (proportional to v). However, by the time you do this you're not really a "rocket man" any more, you're something else.
As for the claim in the grandparent, American physics students would know there was a conservation-law violation by halfway through first semester. Knowing that the permanent magnets would have to be degaussed to supply net energy to the output (a loss of integral over v of (B^2.dv)) is something that's taught in second semester (and tested on the AP exam if you take it in high school). Knowing exactly how such measurement errors can occur is slightly more advanced, but you'd get it in any electrical-power engineering course.
Of course, if he really DID have a mechanism that caused such a violation he'd do well to patent it; the money for the Nobel Prize for physics is chump change compared to what such an invention is worth. On the other hand, a good scam artist can separate people from their money even if the invention is a complete hoax.
(If you're looking to document the damage caused by scientific illiteracy, the people fleeced by this bozo will be good case studies.)
Either the proponents of this device are complete incompetents, or they are complete frauds. I'm inclined to believe the latter, as incompetents tend not to have the sales skills evident in the article
Besides, if the price of old-growth timber goes up enough, it creates a business opportunity for the guy who processes scrub timber into laminated beams and other things made from small trees; small trees can be grown on a much shorter cycle, requiring less land to be disturbed. It might shift some of the demand from pine 2x4's to steel for inside walls, from oak and maple to bamboo for flooring. The need will be satisfied regardless, and we'll still have those trees that, were they cut, we could not see the likes of again for three generations.
Even if the forests need management, it's far from obvious that clearcutting is therefore good for the forest. The species evolved in an environment where each generation of trees spouted and grew in the decay or ashes of the generation before. Timbering removes most of the wood for forest products and shreds the rest so that it decays almost immediately, releasing its nutrients before growing trees can recapture them. This can cause the nutrients to be washed into streams and lost to the land.
Getting back to the topic of the article, the administration wants to auction off certain things but won't accept results beyond their narrow preconceptions; whether pollution rights or timber, nobody's allowed to buy them to preserve the forest or the air. In this way, the desire of people to use market forces to get the air cleaned up faster or preserve old-growth trees is denied by political hacks more interested in profits for their patrons, profits which might be lost if they don't get what they lobbied for at the price they expect. They want the market restricted to people who will do exactly what they would do, and nobody else. This is neither market-oriented nor democratic.
It's perverted for someone (like the Reagan and Bush administrations) to claim to support markets on one hand and the work to defeat them when they don't yield the result that they've pre-ordained.
The Mars Society is testing out mission concepts by mucking around in deserts, in Nevada and up above the Arctic circle. Going to the moon would not help. While it might be worthwhile in its own right, it is not a stepping stone and should not be represented as such.
The total heat lost to resistance is proportional to the charging current, so you would be better off using the same power to charge your entire battery string at a lower current than to charge cells individually at higher current. The higher voltage probably makes it easier to make a high-efficiency charger also.
On another note, I can't help but notice that this is another development from NEC, which developed the proton-polymer battery. I have heard nothing about the proton-polymer battery since the press release some years ago, and maybe this is why: the resin technology is better suited for typical uses.
To really reduce power demand you'd have to cut both the voltage and the frequency, but that would have all kinds of nasty effects on things which depend on a consistent frequency - like standard electric clocks. You also lose the ability to connect to other grids. Needless to say, this is not a popular method of dealing with the issue.
It's the Supreme Court of the United States, which refused to rein in the blatant abuses of the patent/copyright clauses of the Constitution. As it stands, "promoting the progress of the useful arts" is the same as "granting a stream of monopoly rents to people and organizations with skilled legal teams and good lobbyists."