The stubbornness of humans and science is confounding. Take todays insane fealty to battery powered vehicles. The list of production problems and availability is well known. Rare metals needed means massive new strip mining. China controlling a plethora of those rare earth metals. Nobody wants to recycle those batteries. It is expensive,…
The stubbornness of humans and science is confounding. Take todays insane fealty to battery powered vehicles. The list of production problems and availability is well known. Rare metals needed means massive new strip mining. China controlling a plethora of those rare earth metals. Nobody wants to recycle those batteries. It is expensive, hard and unclean. With the Avg. price of an EV at $62,000 most people cannot afford to buy or lease. When the lease ends, who is going to buy a used one that may need battery replacement. Winter weather degrades efficiency. Who is going to pay for chargers at 100 unit apartment buildings? You going to have wires laying on ground from each apartment? CA told EV owners not charge their vehicles during peak hours. It will take years to switch over to alll EV’s of our 275 million registered transportation fleet. Fuel Cells are better tech, you could use existing infrastructure. Why don’t we? Because the activist nuts that have taken over the Democrat Party hate anything to do with the oil and gas industry. We could have switched our transportation fleet to natural gas decades ago. Reduced CO2 by 30%. But Nooooo. It supported the oil and gas industry. It is the same thinking that got us the worst environmental program that costs us billions. Ethanol. It is a horrible idea, terrible for the planet, makes too much CO2....and makes midwest farmers millionaires. It is as stupid as is the shockingly dumb cabal that runs Alz. funding.
Ethanol funding also increases food prices by quite a bit. Livestock and poultry owners have to compete with the federal government to buy feed. That has to all get passed through to the consumer.
Amen, Earl. About the ethanol mafia, the first President to try to stop it? Richard Nixon. Fifty years ago. And every President since has taken a swing against it. Now we have more levers to move ever more corn-licker into cars.
I spent time in multiple gov't research bureaucracies to the point I could predict the conclusions of almost every review panel. The whole process is absurd. In one inventive program NIH gave up trying to discriminate between the good and bad: grants were awarded randomly. Didn't seem to make a great difference such is the power of the prevailing "truths" and enduring status.
Thank you for your comment. I think we all remember the Shrimp on the treadmill video emblematic of waste, fraud or abuse. At some point priorities will have to be considered.
Sadly I sit back and wonder is this the end of beginning of the American Empire or the beginning of the end. Looming Medicare funding shortfall isn’t enough to get our politicians to discuss a compromise. 3rd rail stuff I suppose. All it means is structural deficits, bigger debt. Apparently the idea of flushing a trillion dollars down the toilet in interest on the debt means nothing to some portion of our political class.
They seemingly hate good ideas. It’s Harry Reid all over again. Every single nuclear rod used is still at the plants. He closed Yucca mountain, a place where we could protect and keep and eye on them, get them away from the plants...Zombie plants that are now closed with nuclear material laying around. Dumb
Especially when the older plants are based on 1950s technology and we have next gen nuclear plants that could safely produce abundant and clean electricity along with natural gas fired units. Sadly, we live in an idiocracy.
The stubbornness of humans and science is confounding. Take todays insane fealty to battery powered vehicles. The list of production problems and availability is well known. Rare metals needed means massive new strip mining. China controlling a plethora of those rare earth metals. Nobody wants to recycle those batteries. It is expensive, hard and unclean. With the Avg. price of an EV at $62,000 most people cannot afford to buy or lease. When the lease ends, who is going to buy a used one that may need battery replacement. Winter weather degrades efficiency. Who is going to pay for chargers at 100 unit apartment buildings? You going to have wires laying on ground from each apartment? CA told EV owners not charge their vehicles during peak hours. It will take years to switch over to alll EV’s of our 275 million registered transportation fleet. Fuel Cells are better tech, you could use existing infrastructure. Why don’t we? Because the activist nuts that have taken over the Democrat Party hate anything to do with the oil and gas industry. We could have switched our transportation fleet to natural gas decades ago. Reduced CO2 by 30%. But Nooooo. It supported the oil and gas industry. It is the same thinking that got us the worst environmental program that costs us billions. Ethanol. It is a horrible idea, terrible for the planet, makes too much CO2....and makes midwest farmers millionaires. It is as stupid as is the shockingly dumb cabal that runs Alz. funding.
Ethanol funding also increases food prices by quite a bit. Livestock and poultry owners have to compete with the federal government to buy feed. That has to all get passed through to the consumer.
Amen, Earl. About the ethanol mafia, the first President to try to stop it? Richard Nixon. Fifty years ago. And every President since has taken a swing against it. Now we have more levers to move ever more corn-licker into cars.
I spent time in multiple gov't research bureaucracies to the point I could predict the conclusions of almost every review panel. The whole process is absurd. In one inventive program NIH gave up trying to discriminate between the good and bad: grants were awarded randomly. Didn't seem to make a great difference such is the power of the prevailing "truths" and enduring status.
Thank you for your comment. I think we all remember the Shrimp on the treadmill video emblematic of waste, fraud or abuse. At some point priorities will have to be considered.
Sadly I sit back and wonder is this the end of beginning of the American Empire or the beginning of the end. Looming Medicare funding shortfall isn’t enough to get our politicians to discuss a compromise. 3rd rail stuff I suppose. All it means is structural deficits, bigger debt. Apparently the idea of flushing a trillion dollars down the toilet in interest on the debt means nothing to some portion of our political class.
Or we could’ve built out nuclear after the example of 1979.
Politics seems to just ruin good ideas on purpose.
They seemingly hate good ideas. It’s Harry Reid all over again. Every single nuclear rod used is still at the plants. He closed Yucca mountain, a place where we could protect and keep and eye on them, get them away from the plants...Zombie plants that are now closed with nuclear material laying around. Dumb
Especially when the older plants are based on 1950s technology and we have next gen nuclear plants that could safely produce abundant and clean electricity along with natural gas fired units. Sadly, we live in an idiocracy.
Indeed