Egon
Epic Contributor
Very apt description.
Ethanol
- Thread starter AchingBack
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patrick_g
Elite Member
SkyPup said:
Just as funny as funny can get but way too close to reality for comfort.
Pat
Bedlam
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2005
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- 1,878
VERY WELL SAID......
charlz
Elite Member
Here is an article I read some years ago about oil being 'renewable'. Pretty interesting theory overall. Of course it doesn't mean that demand can't outstrip supply.
Wired 8.07: Fuel's Paradise
As for the biofuels causing mass starvation.... people have been starving for a long time and will continue to do so as long as outside forces (food aid) allow them to live above what the local land will support. Food is more expensive because oil is expensive.... making transportation and fertilizer prices go up thus increasing the cost of the crops. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. Biofuels is the new 'Big Oil Boogie Man' for the media to sensationalize.
Ethanol can also be produced from sugar beets, a big product here in my part of Idaho and likely could be grown in a large part of the U.S.. Unfortuately all the good farm land is going to houses. The limiting factor in biofuels is really water... we don't have the water to irrigate 500,000,000 acres of corn or whatever to make fuel.
Wired 8.07: Fuel's Paradise
As for the biofuels causing mass starvation.... people have been starving for a long time and will continue to do so as long as outside forces (food aid) allow them to live above what the local land will support. Food is more expensive because oil is expensive.... making transportation and fertilizer prices go up thus increasing the cost of the crops. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. Biofuels is the new 'Big Oil Boogie Man' for the media to sensationalize.
Ethanol can also be produced from sugar beets, a big product here in my part of Idaho and likely could be grown in a large part of the U.S.. Unfortuately all the good farm land is going to houses. The limiting factor in biofuels is really water... we don't have the water to irrigate 500,000,000 acres of corn or whatever to make fuel.
mike194
Silver Member
from my observations it seems to me that about 75% of americans could skip a few meals now and then .
em14
Platinum Member
SkyPup - While I may not completely agree with you on Governmentium being the total problem ... your description of "The New Element" is GREAT! ...I'm still laughing out loud ...
Leo
Leo
Big_Charlie
Bronze Member
I love the new element...very nice. I might have to copy that out and send it to some friends.
As for the oil problem, we don't actually get much oil from the mideast anymore. The greatest share of our imports come from Canada and Mexico with some from Venezeula (can you say Citgo?). The mideast exports more oil to Europe than to us. If we would fully exploit the fields in North Dakota, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast, Alaska, and the Arctic Ocean, we could not only be independent, we might be able to be an oil exporter instead. Beside crude oil supplies is the problem of refinery capacity. We are running above 100% capacity on our existing refineries, no new ones have been built in nearly 30 years thanks to the greenie weenies, the current ones are out of room to expand, and most are in hurricane vulnerable places like New Orleans and Houston. Refinery capacity has more to do with $4+ diesel than the price of oil. I suspect that it may fall a bit this summer once the demand for heating fuels is gone and they can dedicate more refinery space to diesel than to other fuel oils.
If we would start building nuclear plants again we could shed most to all of our oil needs for electricity. Nuclear need not be a radioactive waste problem either. When it was envisioned 50 years ago, the nuclear power cycle was supposed to include power plants that use the waste from primary plants to generate yet more power. The science didn't exist then to make it work, thus the onsite storage of radioactive waste at nuke plants, but it was expected to be ready by the 1980's or so. After 3-Mile Island, that research was all but stopped. It is now possible to build plants that use the expended fuel from primary plants, reprocessed into a more usable form, to produce yet more emissions free energy and end up with much cooler waste which doesn't have to be buried for the next 5000 years. But the nuclear fear mongers won't let this happen either.
So...here's the long and the short of it as I see it:
1) We're not allowed to drill for our own oil
2) We're not allowed to build more refineries to reduce the price of fuel at the pump
3) We're not allowed to increase our nuclear power capacity to reduce our reliance on oil for electricity
4) We're supposed to burn our food and animal feed crops for fuel in a very inefficient process and get taxed a few extra times to do it
5) The new CAFE standards that take effect in 2015 and 2020 will all but eliminate light trucks, SUV's, minivans, and large sedans from the market because physics dictates that there is a limited amount of energy available in gasoline (and even less in ethanol) to move a vehicle forward, and the new standards will be impossible to meet in these vehicles unless we figure out a way to create free energy from nothing (I vote for a small Star Trek-esq antimatter engine myself, or maybe the Zero Point Module from Stargate Atlantis).
[soapbox]
If this continues, the rising price of food, fuel, electricity, basic transportation vehicles (the average price of a new car is currently $25k and rising), and every other commodity you can think of will either doom our economy to a new great depression or it will wake up enough Americans to demand, with their votes, their dollars, and possibly their guns, a wholesale return to a free market economy without intervention from the elements Governmentium and Administratium. It is our reliance on those two elements that has landed us in the current position we're in. Should we continue down the path toward Marxist socialism that Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and to a lesser degree John McCain would have us march, we are doomed to fail for socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried and millions upon millions of people have been murdered by those governments or died premature deaths as a result.
[/soapbox]
As for the oil problem, we don't actually get much oil from the mideast anymore. The greatest share of our imports come from Canada and Mexico with some from Venezeula (can you say Citgo?). The mideast exports more oil to Europe than to us. If we would fully exploit the fields in North Dakota, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast, Alaska, and the Arctic Ocean, we could not only be independent, we might be able to be an oil exporter instead. Beside crude oil supplies is the problem of refinery capacity. We are running above 100% capacity on our existing refineries, no new ones have been built in nearly 30 years thanks to the greenie weenies, the current ones are out of room to expand, and most are in hurricane vulnerable places like New Orleans and Houston. Refinery capacity has more to do with $4+ diesel than the price of oil. I suspect that it may fall a bit this summer once the demand for heating fuels is gone and they can dedicate more refinery space to diesel than to other fuel oils.
If we would start building nuclear plants again we could shed most to all of our oil needs for electricity. Nuclear need not be a radioactive waste problem either. When it was envisioned 50 years ago, the nuclear power cycle was supposed to include power plants that use the waste from primary plants to generate yet more power. The science didn't exist then to make it work, thus the onsite storage of radioactive waste at nuke plants, but it was expected to be ready by the 1980's or so. After 3-Mile Island, that research was all but stopped. It is now possible to build plants that use the expended fuel from primary plants, reprocessed into a more usable form, to produce yet more emissions free energy and end up with much cooler waste which doesn't have to be buried for the next 5000 years. But the nuclear fear mongers won't let this happen either.
So...here's the long and the short of it as I see it:
1) We're not allowed to drill for our own oil
2) We're not allowed to build more refineries to reduce the price of fuel at the pump
3) We're not allowed to increase our nuclear power capacity to reduce our reliance on oil for electricity
4) We're supposed to burn our food and animal feed crops for fuel in a very inefficient process and get taxed a few extra times to do it
5) The new CAFE standards that take effect in 2015 and 2020 will all but eliminate light trucks, SUV's, minivans, and large sedans from the market because physics dictates that there is a limited amount of energy available in gasoline (and even less in ethanol) to move a vehicle forward, and the new standards will be impossible to meet in these vehicles unless we figure out a way to create free energy from nothing (I vote for a small Star Trek-esq antimatter engine myself, or maybe the Zero Point Module from Stargate Atlantis).
[soapbox]
If this continues, the rising price of food, fuel, electricity, basic transportation vehicles (the average price of a new car is currently $25k and rising), and every other commodity you can think of will either doom our economy to a new great depression or it will wake up enough Americans to demand, with their votes, their dollars, and possibly their guns, a wholesale return to a free market economy without intervention from the elements Governmentium and Administratium. It is our reliance on those two elements that has landed us in the current position we're in. Should we continue down the path toward Marxist socialism that Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and to a lesser degree John McCain would have us march, we are doomed to fail for socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried and millions upon millions of people have been murdered by those governments or died premature deaths as a result.
[/soapbox]
charlz
Elite Member
Big_Charlie said:
I am not an expert on nuclear power but I believe the science has been there all along. The 'problem' is after you go through 3 or so types of reactors you end up with a small amount of 'weapons grade' plutonium. Since we are busy trying to stop everyone else in the world from making plutonium it would be a political nightmare to be making it ourselves...
MikePA
Super Moderator
TBNTOSIgnoritosis - A condition characterized by the inability to keep politics out of threads.
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