You’re just a realist! Your ideology is blinding you from seeing the truth. You realists should just go back to your caves. Nobody likes you so you must be wrong!

Hehe, seriously though, you nailed it.

97escort,

Let’s assume that we are at peak oil. What course do the peak oil folks then recommend? I say use the oil to make multipliers like solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Build the infrastructure while we still have oil. I don’t see Gore’s proposal getting us anywhere. Begging people to conform just doesn’t work, and he knows it.

The important concept is that we can no longer expand, let alone maintain, current consumption patterns as oil production gradually declines year after year in the face of rising world demand due to ever increasing population.

Some changes have to be made or they will be forced by the Peak Oil situation.

Ignoring Peak Oil or refusing to appreciate it’s implications are not options.

My gosh, you’ve accidentally revealed the solution: turn the moon into a gigantic storage battery! Just haul the needed lead and acid to the moon, inject it into the core, and use radio waves to beam the resulting electrical energy back to Earth. (Use a secure frequency to prevent other nations from stealing electricity, unless it turns out to be “too cheap to meter.”)

For those who want to get real about alternative energy sources, Stephen Den Beste’s old posts are good, concise analyses. But even he couldn’t get the truly devout to put aside the religion:

http://chizumatic.mee.nu/ghosts_of_my_past

One supposes not nearly as useless as the previous reasons, like 9/11, followed by WMDs, ad nauseum.

Of course “smack in the middle of the ME oil fields” IS the crux of the matter, since we wouldn’t be be there otherwise (e.g. see Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Tibet etc.).

“A safe and secure Iraq… as the card ad says… PRICELESS.”

I hope so too. Let us know when it happens.

I saw an engineer’s assessment of this very situation a few years ago, have been trying to find it again with no luck. He basically said that there was no practical way that solar and wind would ever be more than a fraction of our energy use, ever. There’s not enough land here to make it work, the technology is not advanced enough and may never be. And, as we saw in Mass. the enviros in the guise of prominent families and legislators (coughKennedycough) and other assorted tree huggers, save the whalers and NIMBYs will tie it all up in court so bad that there will be no incentive to get a fraction of the small fraction that is possible up and connected to the grid. Oil, Coal and Nuclear is the only way to get what we need in the abundance that we need.

The waste issue for nuclear is yet to be resolved, so relying only on that wouldn’t work even if the political consensus was there.

Only in the mind of above mentined enviro knuckle-heads. Safe and secure storage has been resolved, but nothing is good enough for said knuckle-heads.

The moon-battery on this issue is legion! No wonder we are still wondering in desert of this problem!

No it isn’t. Problem is that it is short a few zeros. At $20,000 a copy, it would only buy about 10 million new cars. Even in this stinky year the OEMs will sell 15 million units.

Unless you don’t think that freeing 25-30 Million souls from the clutches of a murdering madman and his insane sons, smack in the middle of the ME oil fields is useless… I certainly don’t. All you lefty bastards will thank the day we spent that money there now than having to do it later to secure the entire ME. And you know and I know that we will not be entirely weaned off of oil within our lifetimes, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. A safe and secure Iraq… as the card ad says… PRICELESS.

Maybe because no one solution is going to solve the problem? Including using all the ideological hot air that’s being generated in this thread:-)

The waste issue for nuclear is yet to be resolved, so relying only on that wouldn’t work even if the political consensus was there.

Here is the rub with ole T. Boone’s plan, and Al’s.

Solar is manufactured using lot’s of energy. Wind turbines are manufactured using lots of energy, out of petroleum byproducts and usually transported halfway across the planet to be inistalled. Nuclear similarly takes lots of petro to be built.

All of these are currently less efficient in the medium to long run than petro and coal.

If you want to use them, you REALLY need to drill more. Then figure out a way to incentivise them like pollution tax schemes. That way you keep energy cost at current levels for petro while providing increased demand to make the future energy sources and while providing the incentive to use those sources.

I haven’t heard any well thought out solution that doesn’t take these facts into account.

I would also like to see the math on how much land we would need to use solar and wind to generate the amount of energy we use during the day that is above the rate we use at night (at present tech or likely near future tech, not Al’s dream tech).

Lastly, couldn’t you use solar most of the night if you put a mirror out in space?

“The US has been worshiping at the Market God since Reagan, and by and large it has given us a horrible hangover. Imagine if we had staid on a mission to replace foreign oil like Carter started when the US imported less than a quarter of it’s oil needs. Now, the import number is up at around 70% of US demand.”

Really? It’s given us a hangover? It seems that the horrible ‘Market God’ is starting to work, as our demand for oil has slackened given the insanely high price. Further, it has curtailed the sales of SUVs and trucks, so it seems to be doing its job (a job which years of CAFE regulations failed to do). So we now import 70 percent of our oil. Let’s think, how can we change this? Oh yes, either reduce our demand or increase our domestic supply. The evil market is taking care of the first part, and wants to take care of the second part; unfortunately, the ‘Government God’ won’t let it drill! Boy, that evil market, what an entity! Al Gore wants renewable energy, and I’d love to see it too. I’m convinced that we will…when it’s economically viable! As a great first step, market forces (oh, there they are again! Tricky buggers…) have driven hybrid demand through the roof. Curse you, Market God!

And I love-LOVE the implications of your juxtaposition of Reagan and Carter. Boy, things sure were great under the Carter administration. Let’s abandon all of these silly conveniences…all we really need is a closet full of sweaters and a garage fully of bicycles.

Government fiat is supposed to replace market forces.

And to think he was almost president. Thank God for hanging chads.

Thank God for Supreme Court fiat. Imagine if Gore were president, we might’ve had to endure competent leadership.

So we know about the potential costs of the “green challenge.” Beyond the almost quaint concern of how getting off the dino juice will affect one’s “wallet” (apparently some haven’t noticed how gas prices are currently affecting their wallet) What are the costs of not doing anything? How does that affect one’s wallet in the long-term? For the myopic and ideologically blinkered, that question probably doesn’t mean a whole lot, but for anyone with a shred of insight and objectivity, it’s a question we should be (and thankfully, are) seriously discussing.

Whatever else you can say about Al Gore, he’s definitely succeeded in getting climate change front-and-center, for better or for worse.

Problem is, Al Gore is a hypocrite. When he says reduce consumption, he means for everyone but him. This guy has a serious credibility problem.

Kind of like Obama saying he wants thermostats set at 78 degrees, but I’m sure his will stay at a nice comfy 72 during those hot Chicago Summers.

Wrong, it would be wholly and completely IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish what Gore wants in 10 years. It cannot be done. You cannot rebuild the entire US electrical infrastructure, serving 330 million people (pop. in 10 years) across a whole continent — using only solar and wind, since Gore refuses nukes and hydro is tapped out — in 10 years, that’s totally absurd.

This little project is many orders of magnitude greater than sending rockets to the moon or cranking out liberty ships and fighter aircraft in WWII. There is not enough time, money, capital, or human resources to even think about that time frame.

You could not even TRAIN enough people to BEGIN the necessary infrastructure building in 10 years, even assuming suppliers could give you enough wind turbines and solar equipment — which they absolutely could not do under any circumstance.

Moreover, even if you accomplished a miracle by doing this in, say, THIRTY years, it’s insufficient because you need other generation sources to augment wind and solar when the sun and wind are not cooperating.

BTW — I say this as someone who’s got a skunkworks project of my own to get into wind power.

Fair enough, but I challenge you to build, approve and have even one nuclear plant online within the next ten years:) And if you do have the nuclear power plants constructed, why do you need solar or wind?

Ah, but look who we got instead!

The US has been worshiping at the Market God since Reagan, and by and large it has given us a horrible hangover. Imagine if we had staid on a mission to replace foreign oil like Carter started when the US imported less than a quarter of it’s oil needs. Now, the import number is up at around 70% of US demand.

Remember all that talk about persistence and long term views visa-vis the GM/Toyota battle? It isn’t just US executives who have a head-in-the-sand get-me-through-the-month outlook.

Bunkie has a pretty good handle on it. The platinum question is a valid one. Also, the prize system works well, it’s been proven several times. The tax thing will likey end up being a great outlet for legislative graft, but it may work anyway. There will just be a significant loss of funds to the friends and families of those in power. Nothing new there.

I also think we need to drill, drill, drill, and research, research, research, and not forget about either one when oil drops back to $100 a barrel. I won’t hold my breath or even cross my fingers though.

Lastly, we can probably save the world if we can get guys like Ash78 to settle for a single little speaker. After all, it’s anybody really “needs”. (just kidding Ash, and yes, I am going to flog this equine long after it dies because no one seems to learn).