Posted on 10/30/2006 7:55:28 AM PST by mathprof
Cheers fit for a revival meeting swept a hotel ballroom as 1,800 entrepreneurs and experts watched a PowerPoint presentation of the most promising technologies for limiting global warming: solar power, wind, ethanol and other farmed fuels, energy-efficient buildings and fuel-sipping cars.
“Houston,” Charles F. Kutscher, chairman of the Solar 2006 conference, concluded in a twist on the line from Apollo 13, “we have a solution.”
Hold the applause. For all the enthusiasm about alternatives to coal and oil, the challenge of limiting emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat, will be immense in a world likely to add 2.5 billion people by midcentury, a host of other experts say. Moreover, most of those people will live in countries like China and India, which are just beginning to enjoy an electrified, air-conditioned mobile society.
The challenge is all the more daunting because research into energy technologies by both government and industry has not been rising, but rather falling.[snip]
President Bush has sought an increase to $4.2 billion for 2007, but that would still be a small fraction of what most climate and energy experts say would be needed.
Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, has nearly quadrupled, to $28 billion annually, since 1979. Military research has increased 260 percent, and at more than $75 billion a year is 20 times the amount spent on energy research.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
As with most faux-religions in the end it is about money.
"Race" to insanity. I never thought I would see a larger self-delusion than the Salem Witch Trials, but this is exponentially larger. It is simply astounding.
No mention of the n-word?
No, it is about establishing precedents to usher in a global Socialist government.
What budgets?? All money "directed" at Global Warming is just political money. Assuming that so-called greenhouse gas emissions are really causing a problem, it will be solved by Corporate America, not by governments.
Too simple. If global warming were really the issue, it could be eliminated quite easily, with almost no sacrifice to our way of life, with plug-in hybrid cars and nuclear power providing the electricity. But then, most of the nuclear power builders are Republicans and the federal funding wouldn't go to the doped-out, birkenstock-wearing, granola crunching morons who think solar and/or wind power is the answer.
Today the brits issued a report stating that global warming will cost trillions and trillions of dollars or some such thing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If every coastal city in the world must be rebuilt in the next 100 years, think of the economic boom that will be created. Huge opportunities will emerge for the resourceful and industrious among us.
Gobal warming is a myth. We may be in a warming cycle right now, but the fact is that wev'e gone through warming and cooling cycles for as long as mankind has been here at least.
The medieval warming period was apparently warmer than today, and it was followed by a drastic cooling in the Renaissance.
Don't confuse the New Hippies with facts.
It is probably possible to build a vehicle that could get 100 miles per gallon of gasoline (or gasoline-gallon equivalent). A gallon of gasoline contains about 114,100 British Thermal Units of energy, and of this, perhaps 25-30% actually get to the wheels to drive the vehicle down the road. The rest is simply blown out the exhaust, or is transferred from the engine to the cooling system and cooled by the radiator, or simply lost through friction losses (including braking). A well-designed Diesel power unit is slightly better, returning some 35% of the BTUs in a gallon of fuel (Diesel fuel has higher energy density, about 138,700 BTUs per gallon), as useful energy supplied to power the vehicle down the road. But again, the same problems with heat losses through the radiator, the exhaust, and friction.
Engineers have been working on these problems for over a century now, and some very ingenious solutions have been worked out, but all with certain compromises.
Can we convert an even GREATER proportion of the energy in a gallon of fuel ro useful energy to propel ourselves down the road? Probably not with current designs of the internal combustion engine.
Is anybody out there rethinking the means of converting heat energy to propelling a vehicle? Electric motors are remarkable efficient in converting an electric current to linear or rotational motion, but what is the cheapest and most efficient method of generating an electric current?
So why are we not using drive systems with individual drive motors on each wheel, with a central power unit and on-board electric generation plant? That would seem much more efficient than the present cumbersome system of shafts, multiple gear ratio changes, and differential shaft speeds, with power disengagement coupling.
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