[Nathan Zachary]

""We should not just try to import less oil," the former CIA director under former President Clinton told a Miami audience Sunday. "We should destroy oil as a strategic commodity"

Then tell your enviro wacko ninnies to stop interfering with development of our own resources, Alaska, shale, and development of resources of our eastern coasts, including the huge methane ice deposits that have the potential to supply all our gas needs for centuries to come.

As far as silly solar panels go, quit daydreaming. They just aren't viable, and most likely never will be. But you can go ahead and staple them all over the city if you want to, but I'm telling you now, they'll look like hell and bring about many an eyesore complaint. And there is that other problem with them. They don't last very long, about 5 years before they need replacing, and don't work at all when the sun doesn't shine, which is every evening, and when it's cloudy.

What else do you need to make solar panels more useable? Lots of lead acid batteries, which guess what? don't last forever either. We have a long ways to go to invent a more practical and environmentally friendly storage device for that electricity, and those environmental disasters they put under the hood of a prius isn't the answer either. The manufacture of each prius battery causes more environmental damage that running 10 Humvies for their entire life expectancy. If you don't think so just go look around the nickel mines in Ontario and Flin Flon in northern Manitoba, The processing plants in Germany where the nickel is processed, and the processing plant in Japan where they prius batteries are made from that material.

Some nuclear plants will really help while we develop our own oil and gas resources and other renewable biological industries which could help reduce the amount of oil we use.

[DaveTesla]

Lets see 200 million vehicles x 800+ pounds of toxic
nickel or lithium batteries to dispose of every 3 years =
160,000,000,000 pounds or 80,000,000 tonnes.

No problem /s.

[ARE SOLE]

They don't last very long, about 5 years before they need replacing

Then why do they routinely come with 25 year warrany I wonder?

Regards

[jonrick46]

You have nailed it! There is lots of Disney type Fantasy Land going on with these environ-weenies.

[Wonder Warthog]

"As far as silly solar panels go, quit daydreaming. They just aren't viable, and most likely never will be."

Wrong. Nanosolar is already starting production of non-silicon solar panels targeted at $1/watt installed cost and comparable efficiency to crystalline silicon cells. The reason for the low price is that they have overcome the difficulties to using what is essentially newspaper printing technology to produce a layered solar cell.

[Wonder Warthog]

“Lots of lead acid batteries, which guess what? don’t last forever either. We have a long ways to go to invent a more practical and environmentally friendly storage device for that electricity, and those environmental disasters they put under the hood of a prius isn’t the answer either.”

THE most efficient recycling loop in the industrialized world is the one for lead batteries. And I wouldn’t write off the old lead-cycle battery just yet.

http://rfdesign.com/military_defense_electronics/carbon-foam-lead-acid-batteries-0607/

http://rfdesign.com/mag/706RFDEF3.pdf