Posted on 07/08/2009 5:07:23 PM PDT by WhiteCastle
Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
They’re not just coming to this conclusion, are they? Seriously.
Someone in Washington finally figured out how to do a material and energy balance.
Lo and behole! It’s not nice to try to fool Mother Thermodynamics.
here’s a novel thought.
Get our own oil and gas from our own backyard.
foreign oil problem now solved.
In the meantime we research and look at different energy in not a speedy way and we will get it right
Gosh, I hate to show my ignorance but I have to ask what the hell’s wrong with nuclear? Other than the waste problem it seems to be a whole lot better for environment than anything that has to deal with byproducts that clog the air. I’m serious. How have the environmentalist been able to stymie nuclear production of electricity for so long? Seems to me like the answer, for now anyway, is electric cars with the electricity being provided by nuclear energy.
OK, go ahead and fire away. I know I’m missing something. Can it really be simply the power of the environmental lobby?
The combination of that EESTOR super capacitor and electricity generated by modern nuke plants sounds awfully good to me.
Yep, those “non-polluting electric car” hucksters show their ignorance or delilberate deception by saying there is no pollution, just plug it into the nearest electrical outlet. So where does the power come from? coal, natural gas, atomic energy...all BAD BAD power sources.
Unbelievable! I’ve been banging this drum for more than a year. At least it didn’t take a $20M “gummint study” to figure it out.
Your not missing anything.
Nuclear is the way to go, and a good portion of the world’s Uranium is located in Colorado, of all places.
Guess what? The government and environmentalists won’t let them mine it. True story.
Instead, you guessed it, we IMPORT IT.
You can add hydro-electric to your "bad" list. It has been dead to the envirowhackos for years and in their eyes as evil as nuke.
At least we own the coal—if we’ve got the will to use it.
You see, yesterday the worry was “emissions”.
But modern power plants emit almost nothing.
So they’ve moved the goal post, created a fake problem that you can’t solve. You’ve lost the game the moment you agree to play.
The answer is “all of the above”. There is an enormous amount of oil offshore California (where it just seeps up through the ocean floor whether you drill for it or not) and offshore Alaska. There is an enormous amount of oil shale that we’ve placed off limits... again, placing limits on ourselves when we didn’t need to. There is an enormous amount of coal that can be converted to diesel if we just want to. There is enough, in other words, that we could easily replace the amounts we get from the middle east. If we just want to.
And we can build nukes to power electric cars. Lithium may be the cats meow today, but we’ll find something else the week after. The point is, don’t wring our hands, do it.
The only thing that is a waste of time is what they seem to be pushing, which is solar and wind. Both of these have their place as a niche source, but neither is of any use beyond that. They take up enormous amounts of land. Power you could produce on 40 acres with a natgas plant requires 4000 acres using photovoltaic panels. Even a solar thermal plant is wasteful of land, and none of them produce after the sun goes down. Dang.
All of these things are possible, and all of them are under attack the moment you decide to do them, including solar and wind power. The environmentalists hate them too (and in that case, I agree with them). The greens only favor wind and solar if you’re building a natgas plant; the moment you try to build a solar or wind plant they come out of the woodwork to stop you there too. They are children, the rank and file, and OPEC hacks, the leadership. They’ll tie you in knots if you try to make them happy; they will never be happy so you have to defeat them.
Overall system efficiency has to be calculated. Coal fired turbines are more efficient than Otto engines, and electric power is pure work, while most electric motors meet or beat 90% efficiency. Weighing against that is transmission losses.
A nuke plant emits zero emissions. Its still bad, if you listen to the crazy people.
We’ve place our own uranium off limits, but thats solveable too. You just have to have the political will to fight that battle and win it. We were once the largest producer of uranium in the world. We could be again if we defeat the crazy people.
These "wind farms" are real eyesores that do little to solve the energy problems. Just a big money deal for the enviroloony wackos.
If we're going to have these goofy electric cars, we better get busy building nuclear power plants.
Electric Cars? — Nuke the B*st*rds.
THere was just a story yesterday saying that under North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana there is a 500 billion barrel reserve of sweet light crude oil. If it never replensihed itself (which oil underground does, btw) we’d have about 2000 years worth of oil.
To put the size of this in perspective, this reserve is estimated to be 8 times the Saudi oil fields.
We need to crush the ecolib terrorists in our country. they don’t want us energy independent. Andthey don’t want us using this oil.
Of course they hate us using any kind of energy. They hate wind because it kills birds and its ugly. Nuclear has no emissions but we’re all going to die via the CHina Syndrome. (Forget much of europe is nuclear, France is 80% nuclear power.) Coal plants in the US are very clean burning but that just encourages people to use more energy so that’s no good. Natural gas, it’s explosive but they like it that it’s expensive. Then oil. The most evil thing mother earth ever made and man refined.
The econuts need to be brushed aside for national security and cheap abundent energy needs of citizens and businesses make life here affordable and prosperous.
Yeah, and it’s not just the eyesore aspect, there’s weird whooshing sounds if you live near them, very irritating. Some folks that lived closer to them have sold out (before the housing market tanked) because they could not sleep.
There were some ear pressure phenomena associated with those wonderful ECO-friendly machines that, connected together have a HUGE footprint not counting the maintenance, buried lines, grid integration, the list is l-o-o-o-n-n-g. But oh well, who cares, they look so NEAT!
You haven’t lived until you’ve driven through that massive “wind farm” near Sweetwater, Texas. What were those morons thinking when they allowed that to happen? All those windmills should be packed up and shipped to T-Bone Pickings. That is some seriously sick stuff.
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