While stating that fossil fuels get a bigger share of the subsidies the article fails to mention a single example. Why don't they give examples? My guess is that almost all of what they are calling subsidies are investment tax credit type subsidies that any business gets. Given that oil and gas are much larger industries, and have much higher capital expenditures, they get more money. What these people really want is to penalize fossil fuels and give subsidies to other forms of energy.
Ethanol gets a 50 cent a gallon subsidy, which is huge, the government mandates that it be put into gasoline, and yet ethanol plants go broke. There is no cheap and reliable alternative to fossil fuels. If people want clean energy they better be prepared to pay dearly for it.
If this article said phasing out gasoline but keeping diesel powered cars I could believe it. Biofuels can't do it and the only way electricity makes sense is if it is nuclear.
Everybody needs to take a tour of a large refinery and look at the huge storage tanks of crude oil that get processed in just a few days and then ponder the number of refineries there are in this world to realize how difficult it will be to replace gasoline and diesel. I bet we are still using gasoline in 2050 if not much later.
I just installed Ubuntu on an old box and I have been impressed by how easy it is to use versus Linux a few years ago. From what I could tell Automatix did not screw anything up. My biggest hassle was trying to get a Wifi card to work. All my hardware was recognized and worked out of the box except this card and it was a real hassle to get it working.
Other than hardware not being recognized during the installations I don't see any big obstacles from non technical people using it. The Synaptic Package Manager makes installation of other software easy. I expect to have some learning curve switching to a new operating system. It is not like Windows installations always go smoothly. On my first XP install I had to unplug all of the USB devices and plug them in one at time to get them to work properly.
Slashdot Mirror
While stating that fossil fuels get a bigger share of the subsidies the article fails to mention a single example. Why don't they give examples? My guess is that almost all of what they are calling subsidies are investment tax credit type subsidies that any business gets. Given that oil and gas are much larger industries, and have much higher capital expenditures, they get more money. What these people really want is to penalize fossil fuels and give subsidies to other forms of energy. Ethanol gets a 50 cent a gallon subsidy, which is huge, the government mandates that it be put into gasoline, and yet ethanol plants go broke. There is no cheap and reliable alternative to fossil fuels. If people want clean energy they better be prepared to pay dearly for it.
If this article said phasing out gasoline but keeping diesel powered cars I could believe it. Biofuels can't do it and the only way electricity makes sense is if it is nuclear. Everybody needs to take a tour of a large refinery and look at the huge storage tanks of crude oil that get processed in just a few days and then ponder the number of refineries there are in this world to realize how difficult it will be to replace gasoline and diesel. I bet we are still using gasoline in 2050 if not much later.
I just installed Ubuntu on an old box and I have been impressed by how easy it is to use versus Linux a few years ago. From what I could tell Automatix did not screw anything up. My biggest hassle was trying to get a Wifi card to work. All my hardware was recognized and worked out of the box except this card and it was a real hassle to get it working. Other than hardware not being recognized during the installations I don't see any big obstacles from non technical people using it. The Synaptic Package Manager makes installation of other software easy. I expect to have some learning curve switching to a new operating system. It is not like Windows installations always go smoothly. On my first XP install I had to unplug all of the USB devices and plug them in one at time to get them to work properly.