Establishing a carbon price in the U.S. system now, and tightening the system later could send a dangerously wrong signal to financial markets looking to invest in new energy technologies.
That's the whole idea. The purpose is the maintenance of the "Business As Usual" model, where energy and resources are commodities restricted to a highly centralised distribution system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable, centred around an economic system that is based on unending growth and continuous expansion - again, another system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable.
We are facing an immanent and catastrophic collapse of net petroleum availability over the next 10 - 15 years. The present economic downturn is simply allowing us to sustain a production plateau. The collapse of net petroleum is due to several forces, but two big ones are Energy Return On Energy Invested and The Export Land Model.
In a nutshell, with EROEI problems, the oil is harder and harder to get at requiring increasing amounts of oil to get at it. Eventually, the amount of energy (in either oil, or "barrels of oil equivalent" amounts of energy - "boe") required to get the oil out of te ground exceeds the amount of energy in the oil itself, at which point, you simply leave the oil in the ground.
The Export Land Model is a different issue, but similarly thorny, where nations that have oil develop their economy around oil and use more and more of it for their own needs, leaving less and less for export. As the oil production eventually decreases, the export of the oil collapses. Eventually the country becomes an oil importer. The poster child of this is Indonesia, but other nations are following a similar pattern.
The people running these systems have quarterly profit reports they need to answer to. Moving not just a particular country, but an entire civilisation away from a particular and extremely powerful energy source (petroleum) is a complex and difficult process that takes a minimum of twenty years to accomplish if one hopes to accomplish it without massive economic, social, and political turbulence and dislocation, according to the Hirsch Report, which says:
Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.
And while the data is still coming in, it appears very likely that we, right now, are at that peak, in the form of a plateau of production that precedes the ineluctable and permanent downturn in petroleum production.
The lifestyle of driving a gas burning car long distances to work at a job that has little social utility or value will, necessarily, come to an end, and society will have to trainsition into a more localised form. The global military machine will have to be dismantled so the resources that support it go into the survival of civilisation itself.
There is great social inertia to maintain the comfy Business As Usual approach, and a great deal of effort is being expended to derail the de-carbonisation of contemporary civilisation. Certain elites are deeply entrenched in the power system that is sustaining this particular configuration of industrialism, and is hell bent for leather to prevent any alternatives to civilisation from evolving (viz. Dick Cheney, the Chinese gov't, Putin, et al) and are dead set against encouraging it, as such would alter the power structure away from them.
This leads to several conclusions. One is War Socialism, where the world develops into a set of quasi-socialistic industrial state war machines that compete over the resources. This avenue leads towards great instability and possible nuclear war, resulting in something like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".
I agree. I was using the notion of the "iPhone" as more of a generic object. What I am describing could be built by Sony, Panasonic, Nokia, RIM, Palm, anyone.
I agree. And we're already mostly the way there. The iPhone is a computer, pure and simple. I has input, processing, ram, storage, etc. It has output. It's a computer. Now, if Apple just gave it some serious storage, boodles of RAM and a sufficient video for HDMI out, and put in 2 USB jacks, (one for external storage and the other for kbd/mouse) and sold it for $29.95 at WalMart - there is your computer of the future.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braunv
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count downv
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
OK - I see you're "new at this", so I'll change tone and put my "professor hat" on.
You wrote: Yes, the EROEI on oil has declined. That's because we are using so bloody much of it that the profit to be made on it is worth the effort to find more.
No, that is not true. EROEI on oil has declined because we have found all the easy oil. The only stuff left is underneath the ocean or in some frozen wasteland or is locked up in bitumen in weak sand formations. It takes enormous amounts of energy to build an ocean platform, or drill in the arctic, or wash and process tar sands. THAT is why the EROEI on oil is declining and declining rapidly. When it hit 1:1 we will simply stop mining it as a fuel, and only bother with it to make plastics and other materials.
I linked to that graph in point 3 because the article it is attached to talks about NET production of oil, and uses projected declines in EROEI as yet another attachment on production. I would recommend you read,the article as well. It's not that long - a few pages.
It works like this: If you use 1 barrel of oil to drill out 4 barrels of oil, your NET oil return is 3 barrels. You could then extrapolate the EROEI (due to losses along the way) at somewhere very close to 1:1.
You wrote: Oil is not free energy either; it takes a lot of energy to make it.
And it is taking more and more. It used to be 100:1, now it is down to about 10:1. This is still, pound for pound, superior to ANY formulation of hydrogen, because of the simple physical fact that hydrogen takes more energy to produce than it gives in return.
This REMOVES hydrogen from the class of substances known as "FUEL". Fuel *brings* energy into a system. Oil is trapped solar energy from 100+ million years ago. Nuclear is trapped solar energy from a star that exploded billions of years ago, before our solar system was created. So, this "trapped" energy qualifies Thorium and Uranium as FUEL. This trapped energy value qualifies oil as FUEL. Hydrogen is not fuel. It is an energy carrier, and it is an extremely inferior carrier.
To use hydrogen as a fuel, you have to first mine a hydrogen rich resource (like oil or natgas) and then process it to remove the hydrogen from its chemical bonds. Due to the nature of hydrogen, it bonds rather well, especially with oxygen and carbon (typically as bicarbonate HCO3, or methane CH4, or water H2O or some variation on those three, or in the extended molecular chains of petroleum.) Water is not the tightest hydrogen compound, and it is one of the more common. However, it takes more energy to break the water bond and store the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen, even if you burn the hydrogen and recover 100% of its energy (which is impossible due to the second law of thermo). Also, note: breaking up natgas or petroleum into hydrogen produces (you guessed it...) CO2.
Now, a battery can be charged DIRECTLY from any number of sources, and the loss in charging and discharging is VASTLY smaller than the loss used in burning hydrogen. Let's take 1w worth of hydrogen. It will take several watts of energy to make, store, and transport the hydrogen. And when you burn the hydrogen, you have to go through the whole ugly process again.
With a battery, it will take MANY watts of energy to make the battery that expends the 1w of power, however, charging the battery can come from any number of sources. The number of cycles of recharge vary - from a relative few (hundreds) for NickelMetalHydrite to "arbitrarily many" with an ultracapacitor. And these batteries/capacitors/devices can be charged from anything that will spin the generator - solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, whatever. The amount of energy invested in them is high at first, but as they are repeatedly charged over time, their EROEI goes UP. Hydrogen remains the SAME - negative.
Your final few lines betray your fundamental position:
1. EROEI on Oil has been declining steadily. In the 1920s it was up around 100:1. In 1990 it was down to about 20:1. It is now down around 10:1 or less (deep sea oil has an especially nasty return). for starters, Read the article on Wikipedia I linked to, the one you so blithely ignored without any supporting FACTS.
2. EROEI on gas is also declining. In Canada, it is expected to hit 1:1 around 2014 (according to an article based on data from Jean Leherrere, an internationally renowned expert in oil and gas exploration. He was in charge of Total Canadaâ(TM)s exploration from 1966 to 1971. )
4. You wrote: . At the moment, that would have a really horrid energy return because of the current inefficiencies in solar panels. Wrong it would have a horrible energy return because it TAKES MORE ENERGY to make Hydrogen than you can get from burning Hydrogen. This is called Thermodynamics. It's like gravity, only far less forgiving.
5. Ultracapacitor technology from companies like eeStor are in the process of bringing a system that stores and expends electricity for a projected $40 per kW. The amount of energy that goes into building an ultracapacitor is high, but over a series of charges the EROEI goes into a high positive range. Even at 2:1 it would be vastly superior to hydrogen, which by definition can never be even 1:1.
So, Hydrogen has crappy EROEI, oil's EROEI is declining, and there are other superior technologies available. Then there are the manifest problems with Hydrogen itself, such as:
1. it hates being bottled. This is a well known problem - hydrogen atoms are the smallest and it is impossible to keep it bottled.
2. It hates bottles. This is also a well know fact - over time hydrogen embrittles the material that holds it.
3. It burns with an invisible flame, and it burns readily.
4. to keep it at a pressure where it has an energy density that is of value to humans, it has to be kept at an extremely low temperature, making it more dangerous, less amenable to maintained capture (bottled), and this intense refrigeration (a few degrees above zeroK) is extremely energy intensive, reducing its EROEI even farther.
I reiterate there will be no hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is a very poor and inferior choice for an energy carrier and a stupid choice for a fuel.
I have responded with more facts than your argument merits.
I do not do so to "make nice". The facts on hydrogen have been out for years, and as I noted, only "true believers" still buy into the mythology of the hydrogen economy.
Unfortunately, slashdot has a large number of such people (as evidenced by the score to my original post) and this is not to slashdot's advantage, much less civilisation itself.
The sooner we forget about hydrogen and get down to actual solutions, the better.
As I said - I'm good with industrialism, but I am NOT down with stupidity. The so-called hydrogen economy is a lie. It is not a solution except to the true believers. We need to make other arrangements, and money spent on hydrogen is money down a rat hole.
If it is online, it can be hacked and the data can be faked. Epic FAIL in the offing.
The problem of low voter turnout has to do with the nature of Canadian politics. The facts, for our dear American cousins south of the border who don't know what's going on with their single biggest trading partner:
It's a multiparty parliamentary system. There are two dominant parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, a very siginficant local collection of politics call the Bloc (from Quebec, and includes hardcore separatist groups), and a significant minority party, the lefty NDP. There is also a significant Green party presence, although they lost their seat last election.
The party in power is the conservative party. Whether your sentiments are conservative or not, (mine are not, but that's not relevant right here) doesn't change the fact that the leader, Stephen Harper, is an imbecile who has ineptly squandered every opportunity to get it right. I don't much care for the Conservative Party, but I feel really bad for them having such a dumb ass for a leader. It's kind of embarrassing. You have my sincere condolences.
The party in power (Conservative) is a Minority government, i.e., it rules without a majority in parliament.
The second party, the Liberal Party had an obtuse francophone for a leader, who lead the party to a completely uninspiring defeat at last election. His name was Dion, and he was a smart man with all the personality of a can of paint and all the media saavy of an average middle school student.
Harper, in a typical bullheaded move, pulled some shenanigans right after the election, and pissed off all the other parties, including the Bloc. So they agreed to form a coalition, which would have put Harper out on the street, and Dion (the man he just defeated) in as Prime Minister. This was obviously a very bad idea as the Conservatives hated Dion, and the Liberals weren't exactly effusive with praise. In fact, they were anxious to ditch his sorry ass ASAP. Rather than face an ignominious defeat at the hands of Dion, Harper drove his Waaaaahmbulance over to the governor General's office and weeped bitter tears to the Queen's representative, because, Canada is (in a few narrow ways) still a fucking colony and the Queen is technically the head of state. He begged her to prorogate parliament, and she rolled on it.
This left Canada without a functioning government at one of the most critical times in world history: the collapse of American Capitalism in winter 2008/9.
So, if something truly insane happened, there would be no deliberative body to make policy and pass law. A truly desperate and stupid move by Harper, who was already on the shitlist of the conservatives for failing to get a majority gov't, and on the permanent shitlist of all the other parties for, well, basically being a bit of a dick.
In the process, the Liberals booted Dion and replaced him with a man named Ignatieff. Ignatieff is very smart, fairly slick, and every bit of a dick that Harper is, it's just that he has a few (if poorly implemented and largely hidden) scruples.
Who represents the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc is only of consequence to the constituents, as none will be a majority party any time soon.
So, now we're looking at another election, and it will likely be the third in 4 or so years. And my guess is it will have the same results as before. None.
The only thing that is likely to happen is the Liberals will take over with a minority government, and thusly be every bit as effective at governing this nation of cats as Harper, i.e, not at all.
So, this online voting boondoggle is jsut te latest drama in this soap opera of Canadian Politics.
tune in next week when they decide to ban beer, but only between 2 AM and 6 AM. Or something equally retarded.
There's a site that uses Google search systems to find music on blogs called chewbone. It's been a great tool for me. I have a few thousand vinyl records I've collected since the early 70s, and a lot of it is really obscure weird shit that never made CD, and I'll be damned if I'm going to piss several thousand hours away digitising it. A few here and there, sure. But not the bulk. So, it's much easier to search and find other people who have done a few and uploaded them. Saves tons of time and effort.
The problem is, chewbone is regularly slammed by Google for his efforts. Bunch of assholes, IMHO. (chewbone - if you're reading this - hat's off, dude. Thanks!)
It seems the world's electrical needs are a bit larger. And with the immanent collapse of net oil production, We're going to have to treble that capacity in the next 15 years. Per the first link, at 200MW per satellite, we'll need 82,995 satellites to MATCH present electrical production capacity. And treble that number to match future capacity and the downturn in watts per capita from the loss of oil, making it more like 248,985 of these things buzzing overhead to deal with future electrical needs.
So, let's say (obviously) we're not going to use energy sats for all of our electrical needs. Let's say only 10% of our needs. That's still about 8,300 200MW satellites. What part of "not going to happen" do these people not understand?
Even if the WORLD cut it's electrical needs in HALF, that's still 4,140 200 MW satellites.
Game Over. Thanks for playing.
It's not all "doom and gloom". It's not the "end of the world". It's just that for the first time, we really can see it from where we stand, and it's not that far away or that hard to get to. It's going to take a boat load of work and enormous sacrifice to get humanity through the 21st century. And 200 MW energy sats are NOT the solution.
We're going to have to make "other arrangements" for civilisation to continue. And they don't include Xbox, SUVs, McMansions, weekend vacations Tahiti, and WalMart.
We need electric cars, and they will only "happen" with economies of scale. This money will get the ball rolling and hopefully a viable electric vehicle will result. We need them. NOW. Not 10 years from now. NOW.
Now, if eeStor's ultracapacitors can ramp up, we might actually have a private transportation sector in 10 years.
Yes, that is true, and my wife had pneumonia last year, and was hospitalised for almost a week. Without National Health, we would have been bankrupted. So, if I have to pay $14 for a crappy bottle of Gallo or $25 for a 750 of Smirnoff, fine. I can live with that, because I don't know how I would live without my wife.
Slashdot Mirror
this is more in ref to a conversation we had last week about hydrogen vs ultracapacitors. I found an article you might find interesting.
HERE.
cheers!
RS
At the beginning of 2008 Pininfarina and Bolloré set up a 50-50 joint venture with the goal of designing, developing, manufacturing and distributing an electric car with revolutionary technical features and formal qualities. The company considers the BLUECAR, to be not a mere concept car but a forerunner of the vehicle which will go into production in Italy at Pininfarina starting from 2010. Production on a commercial scale will take place between 2011 and 2017, with the forecasted output by 2015 being about 60,000 units.
Link to Story.
RS
That's the whole idea. The purpose is the maintenance of the "Business As Usual" model, where energy and resources are commodities restricted to a highly centralised distribution system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable, centred around an economic system that is based on unending growth and continuous expansion - again, another system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable.
We are facing an immanent and catastrophic collapse of net petroleum availability over the next 10 - 15 years. The present economic downturn is simply allowing us to sustain a production plateau. The collapse of net petroleum is due to several forces, but two big ones are Energy Return On Energy Invested and The Export Land Model.
In a nutshell, with EROEI problems, the oil is harder and harder to get at requiring increasing amounts of oil to get at it. Eventually, the amount of energy (in either oil, or "barrels of oil equivalent" amounts of energy - "boe") required to get the oil out of te ground exceeds the amount of energy in the oil itself, at which point, you simply leave the oil in the ground.
The Export Land Model is a different issue, but similarly thorny, where nations that have oil develop their economy around oil and use more and more of it for their own needs, leaving less and less for export. As the oil production eventually decreases, the export of the oil collapses. Eventually the country becomes an oil importer. The poster child of this is Indonesia, but other nations are following a similar pattern.
The people running these systems have quarterly profit reports they need to answer to. Moving not just a particular country, but an entire civilisation away from a particular and extremely powerful energy source (petroleum) is a complex and difficult process that takes a minimum of twenty years to accomplish if one hopes to accomplish it without massive economic, social, and political turbulence and dislocation, according to the Hirsch Report, which says:
Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.
And while the data is still coming in, it appears very likely that we, right now, are at that peak, in the form of a plateau of production that precedes the ineluctable and permanent downturn in petroleum production.
The lifestyle of driving a gas burning car long distances to work at a job that has little social utility or value will, necessarily, come to an end, and society will have to trainsition into a more localised form. The global military machine will have to be dismantled so the resources that support it go into the survival of civilisation itself.
There is great social inertia to maintain the comfy Business As Usual approach, and a great deal of effort is being expended to derail the de-carbonisation of contemporary civilisation. Certain elites are deeply entrenched in the power system that is sustaining this particular configuration of industrialism, and is hell bent for leather to prevent any alternatives to civilisation from evolving (viz. Dick Cheney, the Chinese gov't, Putin, et al) and are dead set against encouraging it, as such would alter the power structure away from them.
This leads to several conclusions. One is War Socialism, where the world develops into a set of quasi-socialistic industrial state war machines that compete over the resources. This avenue leads towards great instability and possible nuclear war, resulting in something like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".
RS
What's pathetic about this idea is how it could be circumvented, cheaply and easily.
RS
RS
Wernher von Braun
by Tom Lehrer
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braunv
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count downv Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
You wrote:
Yes, the EROEI on oil has declined. That's because we are using so bloody much of it that the profit to be made on it is worth the effort to find more.
No, that is not true. EROEI on oil has declined because we have found all the easy oil. The only stuff left is underneath the ocean or in some frozen wasteland or is locked up in bitumen in weak sand formations. It takes enormous amounts of energy to build an ocean platform, or drill in the arctic, or wash and process tar sands. THAT is why the EROEI on oil is declining and declining rapidly. When it hit 1:1 we will simply stop mining it as a fuel, and only bother with it to make plastics and other materials.
I linked to that graph in point 3 because the article it is attached to talks about NET production of oil, and uses projected declines in EROEI as yet another attachment on production. I would recommend you read ,the article as well. It's not that long - a few pages.
It works like this: If you use 1 barrel of oil to drill out 4 barrels of oil, your NET oil return is 3 barrels. You could then extrapolate the EROEI (due to losses along the way) at somewhere very close to 1:1.
You wrote: Oil is not free energy either; it takes a lot of energy to make it.
And it is taking more and more. It used to be 100:1, now it is down to about 10:1. This is still, pound for pound, superior to ANY formulation of hydrogen, because of the simple physical fact that hydrogen takes more energy to produce than it gives in return.
This REMOVES hydrogen from the class of substances known as "FUEL". Fuel *brings* energy into a system. Oil is trapped solar energy from 100+ million years ago. Nuclear is trapped solar energy from a star that exploded billions of years ago, before our solar system was created. So, this "trapped" energy qualifies Thorium and Uranium as FUEL. This trapped energy value qualifies oil as FUEL. Hydrogen is not fuel. It is an energy carrier, and it is an extremely inferior carrier.
To use hydrogen as a fuel, you have to first mine a hydrogen rich resource (like oil or natgas) and then process it to remove the hydrogen from its chemical bonds. Due to the nature of hydrogen, it bonds rather well, especially with oxygen and carbon (typically as bicarbonate HCO3, or methane CH4, or water H2O or some variation on those three, or in the extended molecular chains of petroleum.) Water is not the tightest hydrogen compound, and it is one of the more common. However, it takes more energy to break the water bond and store the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen, even if you burn the hydrogen and recover 100% of its energy (which is impossible due to the second law of thermo). Also, note: breaking up natgas or petroleum into hydrogen produces (you guessed it...) CO2.
Now, a battery can be charged DIRECTLY from any number of sources, and the loss in charging and discharging is VASTLY smaller than the loss used in burning hydrogen. Let's take 1w worth of hydrogen. It will take several watts of energy to make, store, and transport the hydrogen. And when you burn the hydrogen, you have to go through the whole ugly process again.
With a battery, it will take MANY watts of energy to make the battery that expends the 1w of power, however, charging the battery can come from any number of sources. The number of cycles of recharge vary - from a relative few (hundreds) for NickelMetalHydrite to "arbitrarily many" with an ultracapacitor. And these batteries/capacitors/devices can be charged from anything that will spin the generator - solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, whatever. The amount of energy invested in them is high at first, but as they are repeatedly charged over time, their EROEI goes UP. Hydrogen remains the SAME - negative.
Your final few lines betray your fundamental position:
But for vehicles, sooner
1. EROEI on Oil has been declining steadily. In the 1920s it was up around 100:1. In 1990 it was down to about 20:1. It is now down around 10:1 or less (deep sea oil has an especially nasty return). for starters, Read the article on Wikipedia I linked to, the one you so blithely ignored without any supporting FACTS.
2. EROEI on gas is also declining. In Canada, it is expected to hit 1:1 around 2014 (according to an article based on data from Jean Leherrere, an internationally renowned expert in oil and gas exploration. He was in charge of Total Canadaâ(TM)s exploration from 1966 to 1971. )
3. You write: But we know that the EROEI for oil is going to go up, and possibly soon. and the fact is, no We Don't. In fact we know just the opposite is in effect. A recent chart based on recent data shows a dramatic collapse in EROEI of oil in the 2010 - 2020 range.
4. You wrote: . At the moment, that would have a really horrid energy return because of the current inefficiencies in solar panels. Wrong it would have a horrible energy return because it TAKES MORE ENERGY to make Hydrogen than you can get from burning Hydrogen. This is called Thermodynamics. It's like gravity, only far less forgiving.
5. Ultracapacitor technology from companies like eeStor are in the process of bringing a system that stores and expends electricity for a projected $40 per kW. The amount of energy that goes into building an ultracapacitor is high, but over a series of charges the EROEI goes into a high positive range. Even at 2:1 it would be vastly superior to hydrogen, which by definition can never be even 1:1.
So, Hydrogen has crappy EROEI, oil's EROEI is declining, and there are other superior technologies available. Then there are the manifest problems with Hydrogen itself, such as:
1. it hates being bottled. This is a well known problem - hydrogen atoms are the smallest and it is impossible to keep it bottled.
2. It hates bottles. This is also a well know fact - over time hydrogen embrittles the material that holds it.
3. It burns with an invisible flame, and it burns readily.
4. to keep it at a pressure where it has an energy density that is of value to humans, it has to be kept at an extremely low temperature, making it more dangerous, less amenable to maintained capture (bottled), and this intense refrigeration (a few degrees above zeroK) is extremely energy intensive, reducing its EROEI even farther.
I reiterate there will be no hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is a very poor and inferior choice for an energy carrier and a stupid choice for a fuel.
I have responded with more facts than your argument merits.
I do not do so to "make nice". The facts on hydrogen have been out for years, and as I noted, only "true believers" still buy into the mythology of the hydrogen economy.
Unfortunately, slashdot has a large number of such people (as evidenced by the score to my original post) and this is not to slashdot's advantage, much less civilisation itself.
If you want a primer on what is going on, go here and watch all the videos.
RS
Like anyone, I want to see society continue as long as possible, but I have no illusions: the Hydrogen Economy is bullshit.
Why? An abbreviation: EROEI.
The sooner we forget about hydrogen and get down to actual solutions, the better.
As I said - I'm good with industrialism, but I am NOT down with stupidity. The so-called hydrogen economy is a lie. It is not a solution except to the true believers. We need to make other arrangements, and money spent on hydrogen is money down a rat hole.
RS
The problem of low voter turnout has to do with the nature of Canadian politics. The facts, for our dear American cousins south of the border who don't know what's going on with their single biggest trading partner:
It's a multiparty parliamentary system. There are two dominant parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, a very siginficant local collection of politics call the Bloc (from Quebec, and includes hardcore separatist groups), and a significant minority party, the lefty NDP. There is also a significant Green party presence, although they lost their seat last election.
The party in power is the conservative party. Whether your sentiments are conservative or not, (mine are not, but that's not relevant right here) doesn't change the fact that the leader, Stephen Harper, is an imbecile who has ineptly squandered every opportunity to get it right. I don't much care for the Conservative Party, but I feel really bad for them having such a dumb ass for a leader. It's kind of embarrassing. You have my sincere condolences.
The party in power (Conservative) is a Minority government, i.e., it rules without a majority in parliament.
The second party, the Liberal Party had an obtuse francophone for a leader, who lead the party to a completely uninspiring defeat at last election. His name was Dion, and he was a smart man with all the personality of a can of paint and all the media saavy of an average middle school student.
Harper, in a typical bullheaded move, pulled some shenanigans right after the election, and pissed off all the other parties, including the Bloc. So they agreed to form a coalition, which would have put Harper out on the street, and Dion (the man he just defeated) in as Prime Minister. This was obviously a very bad idea as the Conservatives hated Dion, and the Liberals weren't exactly effusive with praise. In fact, they were anxious to ditch his sorry ass ASAP. Rather than face an ignominious defeat at the hands of Dion, Harper drove his Waaaaahmbulance over to the governor General's office and weeped bitter tears to the Queen's representative, because, Canada is (in a few narrow ways) still a fucking colony and the Queen is technically the head of state. He begged her to prorogate parliament, and she rolled on it.
This left Canada without a functioning government at one of the most critical times in world history: the collapse of American Capitalism in winter 2008/9.
So, if something truly insane happened, there would be no deliberative body to make policy and pass law. A truly desperate and stupid move by Harper, who was already on the shitlist of the conservatives for failing to get a majority gov't, and on the permanent shitlist of all the other parties for, well, basically being a bit of a dick.
In the process, the Liberals booted Dion and replaced him with a man named Ignatieff. Ignatieff is very smart, fairly slick, and every bit of a dick that Harper is, it's just that he has a few (if poorly implemented and largely hidden) scruples.
Who represents the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc is only of consequence to the constituents, as none will be a majority party any time soon.
So, now we're looking at another election, and it will likely be the third in 4 or so years. And my guess is it will have the same results as before. None.
The only thing that is likely to happen is the Liberals will take over with a minority government, and thusly be every bit as effective at governing this nation of cats as Harper, i.e, not at all.
So, this online voting boondoggle is jsut te latest drama in this soap opera of Canadian Politics.
tune in next week when they decide to ban beer, but only between 2 AM and 6 AM. Or something equally retarded.
RS
RS
The problem is, chewbone is regularly slammed by Google for his efforts. Bunch of assholes, IMHO. (chewbone - if you're reading this - hat's off, dude. Thanks!)
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I would humbly suggest it is a skillset we LEARN, and learn it quickly and well.
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People don't understand how dependent on oil wind energy is. I know it sounds contradictory, but it's a fact.
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So, let's say (obviously) we're not going to use energy sats for all of our electrical needs. Let's say only 10% of our needs. That's still about 8,300 200MW satellites. What part of "not going to happen" do these people not understand?
Even if the WORLD cut it's electrical needs in HALF, that's still 4,140 200 MW satellites.
Game Over. Thanks for playing.
It's not all "doom and gloom". It's not the "end of the world". It's just that for the first time, we really can see it from where we stand, and it's not that far away or that hard to get to. It's going to take a boat load of work and enormous sacrifice to get humanity through the 21st century. And 200 MW energy sats are NOT the solution.
We're going to have to make "other arrangements" for civilisation to continue. And they don't include Xbox, SUVs, McMansions, weekend vacations Tahiti, and WalMart.
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CA not a pro-business state for Automobile manufacture? Really?
Kindly tell that to TOYOTA who have a HUGE manufacturing plant in Fremont where all the Corollas are built.
There are plenty of extremely profitable automotive plants in california.
So, kindly blow it out your ass you trolling moron.
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Now, if eeStor's ultracapacitors can ramp up, we might actually have a private transportation sector in 10 years.
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how will we paint the machines?
how will be mine the materials that go into these things?
how will we make the fiberglas?
without oil?
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Kodachrome was like smoking pot.
Fuji is like doing acid.
Agfa is like a rainy day...
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go there, get laid off, and then I can't wait until YOU'RE sick and have no insurance.
Assholes like you make me despair for the human race. The proof of your patheticness is that you write as an Anonymous Coward.
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