And yet, there are those who still aren’t satisfied over it.

Which was entirely appropriate at the time, as many sectors of the economy had virtually stopped in the wake in the 9/11 attacks. I suppose it would have been better for him to have said nothing, and watched the economy slide into a depression?

carlosnegros: First, we must sacrifice some of our own money, in the form of taxes, to pay for the collective need for good public transportation.

We already do that – part of the money raised by federal motor fuels taxes is diverted from from roads and bridges to pay for mass transit and other “demonstration projects” (i.e, bike paths).

Also, many states have taxes that are funneled to mass transit. In Pennsylvania, for example, a portion of the statewide sales tax is used for mass transit projects.

carlosnegros: Second, we must sacrifice some dividends from our Exxon-Mobil stock, and create a national oil company to drill, refine and distribute oil domestically.

Why bother, when we have privately owned oil companies that can do the same thing? The Mexican oil companies are nationalized, and their production levels aren’t that great, primarily because they can’t raise sufficient funds to modernize their facilities and raise output.

carlosnegros: Otherwise, any additional oil taken from public lands will only land on the global market and be snapped up by India and China.

The only reason an oil is “snapped up” by India or China, as opposed to the U.S., is because they are willing to pay more for it. Do you really believe that a government-controlled entity is going to turn down the opportunity to make more money selling oil to those nations, if they are willing to pay more than U.S. customers are?

ttacgreg: Today, “free market” is code for letting the Natan and Society be literally governed by “free market” forces.

I’ll take that any day over taxpayer funded boondoggles and professional busybodies saying that I need to “sacrifice,” which is a code-word for the busybody class taxing particular behaviors that they don’t like.

ttacgreg: That, friends is formula for not legally codified rights, no blind justice, and basically rule of plutocray.

Funny, codified rights and impartial justice first gained real traction in the societies that relied most heavily on the free market to govern their economic system – first Great Britain, then the U.S.

So there goes that argument.

Also, capitalism is good at TEARING DOWN the plutocracy and entrenched oligopolies (of which the Big Three is a prime example), which is why, when you discover who is really against the free market, it is usually entrenched business interests, “activists” who dislike change, entrenched labor unions and government-funded groups dependent on tax dollars.

It isn’t the people who actually go out and risk their money to start a business.

The simple fact is that, once one stops listening to the Chicken Littles and presidential candidates trying to get elected by telling everyone that they will do everything from reduce gas prices to eliminate erectile dysfunction, one discovers that people (i.e, the free market) are adjusting on their own. Driving is down, mass transit use is up, and the market is moving toward smaller, more efficient vehicles. Higher oil prices are making alternative energy sources feasible.

Sounds as though the free market is working to me…

@GS650G Re: Not paying dues

Didn’t earlier generations fight in wars so their offspring could have a better life and not have to sacrifice everything just to survive?”

Each generation pays it forward to the next. I don’t think earlier generations thought they were ending sacrifice or struggle at all, they were playing the hand they were dealt. The problem today is people are not even willing to ante up enough or deal.

We honor those sacrifices with our own.

So is driving a car. In fact, I’d be surprised if the death toll due to all mining/processing world-wide came close to the 40,000 that are killed on the roads in the USA every single year.

Of course, we need decent electric or fuel cell cars to take advantage of that. Meanwhile, new cars could be far more efficient than they are.

If as a country we get on this now, there will be far less sacrifice later on. Israel is pushing electric cars, and plans to set up fuel stations that will enable people to switch battery packs in minutes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/03/AR2008070303250_2.html

The more quickly, and intelligently we act to address the problem, the less sacrifice will be necessary. Furthermore, the first country to produce a lot of wind and solar is going to have a big advantage in the global market. This is why Germany, most of which is further north than any part of the lower 48, is working hard to develop a solar industry.

As for me, I’m still accelerating hard and driving where and when I want. But I spent 5 Gs to insulate my roof, and I’m worried about our nation.

True, but my comment was based on another poster’s remark that emissions from nuclear power is zero. That is not correct. Without the burning of fossil fuel you could not mine, transport, and enrich the uranium fuel. So total emissions relative to the amount of energy produced is small but not zero. Also, like to admit it or not, the mining process is messy and polluting. There is no free lunch. Spent fuel that is presently stored on-site requires being immersed in chilled water, and that cooling comes with an energy penalty, too. Of course, total energy out is much greater than what is input from traditional sources.

I have no choice but to accept that nuclear energy is the short term fix for our immediate energy needs, certainly as far as stationary sources go. If a country chooses to go that route, they have to commit to the full program which will need to address the mining, enrichment, storage, disposal and use of breeders as a means creating a complete energy package. And in today’s environment, acts of terrorism against any nuclear facility must be considered.

I did not believe in global warming, but I do not want to be wrong. I often think the majority of persons are wrong about many things. Maybe they are wrong about global warming, but perhaps they are correct. So what if I’m wrong? I’m ok with being wrong, but I wanna do what is right to some extent. I’ll see what I can do. Not a sacrifice, a new worthwhile better investment. One which faith and god have a lot to do with, IMO, and Karma. Oh and it will probably hurt to let go of things important.

May I suggest widening your sources of information? Dependence on big media can make one depressed. Even the AP is stuck on the “everything spinning out of control” theme. During some recent travel I was involuntarily exposed to hours of political commentary on CNN and MSNBC. My goodness, they’ve gotten about as unhinged as nut cases like Michael Savage. (Unless it’s just an act to draw a crowd). Not that such rants are new; we once had Father Coughlin and Huey Long to stir folks up. In time they were replaced by other false prophets, and so will the current Chicken Littles.

Chemical and mechanical separation activities are based on reactions that occur in the O(eV) range.

Binding energy, however, is released at the O(millions of eV) range.

Conclusion: the energy inputs must be negligible compared to the outputs. The 500 tonnes of uranium that were just delivered to Ontario … if we removed the uranium equivalent of the energy used to get it there, you’d probably pull out mere kilograms.

“Perhaps if we committed to breeder reactors we could change the energy calculus, but there is no support for such reactors in the United States.”

I sometimes get the impression all the anti-nuclear people stopped reading somewhere in 1972 or so.

Too many people are paranoid about terrorists swiping the plutonium.

Then you design fuel cycles that produce intermediate products that are so dangerous it would be impractical to steal them:

“Because the fuel contains significant levels of transuranics with high spontaneous fission rates, it is not possible to produce nuclear weapons using IFR fuel without centrifugal separation. This is more difficult than enrichment of natural uranium due to the smaller atomic mass difference between Pu-239 and Pu-240 as compared to U-235 vs U-238, and is rendered even more difficult by the high radioactivity of the fuel.” (see IFR link, given above).

In other words, the terrorists would be better off building their own weapons reactors. Which (1) isn’t going to happen any time soon, (2) even if they did, there isn’t anything you can do to stop them in as much as your commercial power reactor designs are concerned.

I believe the disposal issues will be the limiting factor.

Again, this is a fuel cycle issue. Yes indeed, if you build your reactors around a military fuel cycle, you’ll have lots of “waste”, and it will be terribly radioactive for a very long time.

The solution is ’simple’, so to speak: don’t do that. Choose a fuel cycle where the final waste stream is only radioactive for a few centuries: the problem is effectively solved. (again, see IFR link, above.)

But it needs to be mentioned, repeatedly it seems, that the amount of waste that comes out of the current PWR reactor set is microscopic in the grand scheme of things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

“In 1997, in the 20 countries which account for most of the world’s nuclear power generation, spent fuel storage capacity at the reactors was 148,000 tonnes, with 59% of this utilized.”

“AFRS capacity in 1997 was 78,000 tonnes, with 44% utilized, and annual additions of about 12,000 tonnes.”

and so forth. Let’s call it a million tonnes world-wide. At the absurdly low density of 1 tonne per cubic meter (i.e., water), this entire waste load would fit in a cube 100 meters on a side.

As a comparison, the planet currently burns something like 6000 million tonnes of coal every year. Plug that into you calculator and hit cube-root — and note it is an annual figure.

What we need is a breakthrough in material science so we can create fusion reactors.

The prospect here is truly bleak. The neutron flux alone will brutalize any containment vessel we come up with. The embrittled radioactive slag that comes out of those reactors won’t even be useful in a fission reactor as fuel.

But as you say, maybe someone will announce a miracle tomorrow…

With that said, I’m more partial to the saying, “Get down off the cross….we need the wood!”…to burn for fuel? =)

As someone who did study history, it came off as a kind of generational myopia; the same kind that seems to afflict every generation once they reach this point in their lives: that things were once “better” and have gone to hell since, that the current generation is somehow lacking in ingenuity, drive or moral fibre, and that we need to return to some kind of ideals of the past and/or make some kind of sacrifice. It’s rather asinine to suggest that this generation doesn’t have to face some kind of adversity, or that there’s a lack of a defining moment. Sure, we don’t have a moonshot; we don’t have any number of negative aspects of the moonshot era, either. Personally, I think the development of the Internet and cellular phone are fantastic hallmarks of this particular era, tantamount to the moonshot, but I also don’t know if we’ve really the historical perspective to weigh in on them (or the moonshot, the industrial revolution, etc) definitively. I’m not quite sure if we’ve quite sorted the Enlightenment yet.

I feel it shows an ignorance of the depth of history: it’s not just dates and wars and kings (or their respective Manhattan projects, Great Walls, Pyramids, etc), it’s the human experience, and that experience hasn’t really changed that much, and certainly not quickly enough to justify DeLorenzo’s take.

And yes, there’s a particularly dirty breed of politician in office, but this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon–there’s been dirty politics since some clever cavemen rigged King of the Bean. And yes, there’s a CYA attitude in modern corporations, but this isn’t exactly new, either: there’ve been cronies and yes men for as long as there have been rich people to sponge off of. Remember the term Machiavellian? Guess how long ago Machiavelli lived, that should give some kind of starting point.

Do we need to make sacrifices? Yup. Have we? Sure. Were they as deep as, say, what the civilian population of Europe had to make in the first half of the 20th Century? Not in North America, no, but there’s a big ol’ world out there, and there are whole economic and social cycles in play here that will takes decades, if not centuries, to play out and understand. To imply that the North American Baby Boomers and their immediate predecessors somehow a better class of human being really sticks in my craw.

Gods did not walk the Earth in 1962.

If only this was true. Uranium, as it is found in nature, is mostly U238 and is unable to support fission in typical commercial reactors. In order to be useful as a nuclear fuel it needs to be enriched to U235, a process that requires significant energy to be used. Further, the actual mining, transport, and disposal, oops, I mean on-site storage requires a significant energy investment as well. All of this energy is usually from coal burning power plants. Perhaps if we committed to breeder reactors we could change the energy calculus, but there is no support for such reactors in the United States. Too many people are paranoid about terrorists swiping the plutonium. Just like Doc Brown did to fuel the reactor in the Delorean. While nuclear is going to continue to be a part of our short term energy issues, I believe the disposal issues will be the limiting factor.

What we need is a breakthrough in material science so we can create fusion reactors. That is where the real answer lies. I don’t think I will be around to see it but this power source would render the question about sacrifice moot.

TTAC Greg you bring up some very interesting points. We must have “mixed” capitalism where the market has some checks and balances to prevent many of the problems you describe. The key, of course, is how to administer such control and how much control. Occasionally the control and its unintended consequences can be as damaging as the total hands off approach would have been in the first place. But the historical record is clear. Without some form of check/balance, the top .5% will trample whatever is in their way. As history has shown, the “common” people and the environment will take it on the chin while the fat cats laugh all the way to the bank.

It seems that the collective mood this in this country focuses on “me, me, me”, and to hell with the consequences. Everyone is busy buying new toys and wasting resources because that’s what the media tells us is the thing to do… it will make us happy. However, as http://www.thestoryofstuff.com states, you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet. Whatever happened to a sense of community, the notion of thrift, a hunger for knowledge, and personal integrity. If we think the mortgage meltdown was bad just wait until the credit card crisis begins.

The youth of today is educated under the notion that “no child left behind” is better, but nobody gets ahead either. We are raising a generation that thinks everything gets handed to them, and they are to be rewarded for the most menial tasks. As a result, not only do they have no book smarts, but also they are terrible at life. They don’t know how to balance a checkbook, work a clothes washer, or use proper English.

Lastly, we need to bring back the family dynamic. Let’s have dinner at the table again, not drive-thru from McDonalds. No more zoning out in front of the TV watching trashy reality shows.

I’m not perfect, and I don’t claim to be, but a lot of people need to raise their personal standards fast.

I’m not sure if I answered the question properly, but rant over.

I would institute and ever incrementally increasing tax on non-renewable energy sources and methods, and plow those tax dollars right back into tax credits for renewable energy sources and methods. A predictably set pace of this taxation and accreditation would allow businesses and society to adjust, plan ahead, go forth in confidence that the rug would not be pulled out from underneath them.

If we humans think there should be humans here in the future (umm – - isn’t that why we raise families?), then ultimately, the harvesting of solar, wind and other renewables to produce hydrogen or biogenerated petroleum, is the obvious sustainable biosphere friendly answer.

I am convinced that in the long run we can have our cake and eat it too, of we don’t wait to long to start in that direction.
I am convinced we are capable of doing this in the long run. We need to adjust our culture and its definitions of what is desireable and what is happiness, what defines a person’s sense of worth and success. Right now there is a planetary worship of the wealthy lifestyle. This is a problem, because based on money,industry and materialism, the wealthier someone is, the more damage they are doing to biological health of our planet. Getting the human population down to less than a billion would be a hugely beneficial thing too.
I am definetly culpable, even with my small home, driving the smallest cars, practising lots of little conservation measures recycling as best I can, and living frugally on less than $30,000 a year. Certainly in the context of the current ecology-toxic industrial culture, I, as one individual, am inflicting far greater damage to the biosphere than probably 90% of the world’s humans. It is easy to lose perspective here in a non-third world country. Relative to the vast majority of people alive today, I am rich!

I do rationalize this by saying it is the society I live in, I can take it only so far personally, but I am a member of a system than needs to change as well. I do stay politically attentive and active, make donations to organizations I believe may encourage our society to move in the direction of sustainability.

Clearly the humanity is, at this time, collectively proceeding in a direction that is unstainable. Take today’s trends, and project then out in to the future. We will either manage our challenges, and control our destiny, or we will blindly, greedily, carelessly push the limits until we hit the wall and crash in disaster, probably famine ans warfare.

Wake up people! How much CO2 and other artificially generated gasses can we dump in the atmosphere? How many multiple billions of humans can live here at one time? How long before non-renewable resources are gone? What happens when there is no more farmland to produce more food? How many fish can we pull out of the sea before they are gone? How much fresh water is available?
Do we want any sort of wildlife out there besides rats and cockroaches?

A hell of a lot of people on this globe are in denial. We need a planetary revolution of reason and rationality prevailing over emotions.

Ahhh nice rant, I feel better . . . . .

I am willing to sacrifice money to ensure that our children are the best educated in the world.

I am willing to sacrifice convenience for the right to live in a democracy that doesn’t use torture.

I am willing to sacrifice my time to help the underserved get the care they need.

But I have no interest in sacrificing so Detroit can get its hands on yet more tax dollars to finance some beaurocrat’s pipe dream that will never happen.

If people want to use less gas, they should use less gas. This isn’t rocket surgury people, it’s common sense. Trade in the Nagravator for a Civic and stop whining. Better yet, walk.

Simple: don’t store it for thousands of years. Burn it instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

“The two forms of waste produced, a noble metal form and a ceramic form, contain no plutonium or other actinides. The radioactivity of the waste decays to levels similar to the original ore in about 200 years.”

Of course, this is all theory, since the US government shit-canned the project 15 years ago. But at least it is well-grounded theory, unlike the ethanol nonsense we are suffering under.

Nevertheless, I would agree the Manhattan Project is a reasonable model for an effort like this. Recall that very early on, the Manhattan Project management was faced with a design decision to pursue: gun, implosion, or catalytic? Their answer is apropos of today: do them all. Catalytic was quickly shown to be unfeasible and dropped. The gun design was simple, but inefficient. The implosion weapon was a technical challenge indeed on many fronts.

Build them all. Nuke, wind, solar, geo-thermal, wave, cow-farts, politician slave labor. Let them all compete on a fair, level, field.

The first to feel it are the biggest energy gluttons like airlines and GM et al who have attached their corporate wagon to gas guzzlers that are now obsolete. Recreational vehicle producers like Winnebago are in a similar predicament with no way out.

Even the gas guzzling military may have to curtail a war because of lack of resources to pay for the thousands of gallons it uses every day. If Iran is attacked the price of oil will sky rocket and it may become unavailable to some. The Iranians are not going to let anyone steal their oil without a fight and mission accomplished will end up being even messier than Iraq.

Individuals living a high energy lifestyle are paying the price. If they have the bucks and many do, they can put off the pain awhile. But in the future as oil production falls a small percentage each year and more people appear on the planet, the price will have to rise exponentially to kill demand.

At some point even the wealthy will feel the pain as fuel becomes difficult to get at any price. This is the Post Peak Oil future that concerns so many. There are no easy answers. Partial, temporary solutions like ethanol can help, but the long term outlook is dismal.

Electric cars will overload the grid. Fossil fuel electricity production will become ever more expensive along with oil. And wind generated electricity is no where near ready to take up the slack.

Sacrifice will be of the forced kind eventually.

The use of energy is directly proportional to how productive we are as a nation (think physics and how x amount of energy is needed to do y amount of work). That is a fact. Fortunately for us, because GDP is a number that represents the collective choices of everyday individuals to do what is in their best interest, the country with the most individual freedom to use energy, will be among the most productive AND the most efficient. This relationship can be measured using a metric called Energy Intensity (look it up) and the U.S. comes in fourth. That means only three other countries beat us when it comes to how much energy they expend to generate $1 of GDP. That’s pretty good considering our travel distances here in the U.S. are many times greater than those in every other western country.

Also, the fact that we have major cost of living differentials between urban and rural communities even just an hour away from each other is another MAJOR economic growth driver. This is one of those great mechanisms for lower income families to actually move into the middle class and vastly improve their standard of living. Talk of increasing gas taxes to put an end to this would be absurd.

A. It would take the cost of living differential mechanism out of play for many struggling families (often forcing them into higher cost/tax, lower quality of life living arrangements).

B. It would serously hamper the ability for people to “vote with their feet.” (that’s a freedom issue which I do not take lightly)

C. (Regarding energy and other behavior modification type taxes) When has Government ever created a socialized program that could spend tax payer dollars more efficiently than the individual in charge of their own pocketbook? Just ask yourselves what happened to all that tobacco lawsuit money that was supposed to go towards healthcare for the state recipients…..

In closing, I’m all for using less energy…if and only if it’s through the means of gaining further efficiencies. And, as proven time and time again, this can only be gained effectively through the free market where individuals are making decisions about their own money and energy useage. Once we put artificial price controls (i.e. excessive taxes, regulations and restrictions) on our energy, just for the sake of cutting back, we might as well flush our competetive production levels down the proverbial toilet, and hand the global economy over to China and India. Then we’ll really have to make sacrafices.

You know wars are good for the economy, right? You know that that money ’spent’ by the government is essentially one giant R&D budget circulated back through our economy. I can tell you right now the next administration is going to reap the rewards for the money this administration was lambasted for spending and take full credit for it.

For everyone else suggesting we tax the living crap out of people to force ‘change’ by the least efficient means possible government because you’ve analyzed everyone’s lifestyle as that of ‘excessive’ consumption: why don’t you cover for us with the money in your parent’s trust fund?

I see no reason for doom and gloom- the market is simply correcting itself and is doing so naturally without any government interference nor any need for government interference.