1. There is no such thing as renewable energy. Energy used is energy expended forever.We don’t renew sunlight or wind every morning. Every morning we use sunlight that was not generated yesterday, nor wind that blew yesterday.
2. For the forseeable future, ie, decades, the predominant energy used in the United States will be coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas. Solar, wind, biofuel, fuel cells will be only a very small fraction of the energy pie. We have enough oil, coal, and natural gas to last us 150-300 years into the future at current usage rates. Compare this to the peak oil and natural gas scares of 1975 and 1980, when all that was predicted was doomsday for both those fuels. We are finding more today than ever.
3. For the longer term future, the dominant energies in America are natural gas and nuclear. Oil and coal will be minor players, but not for another 40-50 years.
Nuclear will be small scale, linked plants—scalable in nature, most likely thorium plants so no meltdown is possible. These plants will serve 25,000 homes or so, and be linked in series if necessary for larger areas. Natural gas will be used in converting vehicle and trucks, and for heating for more homes. Natural gas will also be used for electical generation instead of coal in more and more applications.
Nuclear has no carbon emissions and natural gas very little compared to alternative carbon based fuels, therefore green energy and global warming fanatics’ heads will explode with increasing regularity as this is realized.
The biggest polluters of the air, the coal burning plants in China and India, are never addressed by the watermelon heads, in their global warming claculations. It is just the evil United States and Europe that must cut back emissions or the Earth will die. The present generation of greenheads will long be dead before this Earth “dies”.
4. The energy outlook for America has never looked brighter. We can become self sufficient if we expend the will to do so. We have not done so yet solely because of the US government since 1974—almost 40 years. We will be able to export energy and energy products(ie oil, lubricants and refined gasoline)and generate tremendous amounts of capital for our nation.
5. The whole electric car thing is a flash in the pan. While the hybrid technologies of the Toyota Prius type cars can be useful and make some economic sense, plug in electric vehicles will always suffer range limitations, and for now, they are essentially high priced coal powered cars that make no economic sense, taking about 29 years to break even on the additional costs over gasoline powered vehicles. In 1918, a Detroit Electric could get you about 40 miles on its battery. Today, the Chevy Volt, over 90 years later ,gets you about——40 miles in range before it switches over to gas. Dual fuel cars—natural gas and gasoline—will start appearing on the market in the 2013 model year. Plug in electric cars will become items of puzzlement in museums in the future as in “what were we they thinking?”
6. The amount of money the Obama Administration wasted on “green energy” is criminal, and it was deliberately directed to political operatives as slush funds, knowing full well these companies could never be economically “sustainable”. It was failure by a design with the sole purpose of providing a cover for the transfer of OUR money to certain individuals. The truth of all this will surface someday.
7. Your part this year in providing energy for your future is to engage people when they talk nonsense about energy and global warming, in order to stop the development of nuclear natural gas, oil and coal. Let the greenies go find an island somewhere and practice safe energy. In a few years they will be extinct. In the meantime we will be leading productive and comfortable lives thanks to our developed and abundant energy supplies.
Dang exit82, you covered all the bases and summed it up nicely.
Great post/ well said.
It has always been a created crisis to drive a political and economic model.
The amount of money the Obama Administration wasted on “green energy” is criminal,
Indeed any amount by any administration should be considered picking life’s winners and losers and ought to be worth of criminal prosecution.
High time for concentration on all things related to spending, before we go over the cliff, and the word renewable gets an entirely new definition unrelated to energy sources.