The EPA now has a Most Wated list published on its website.  It is similar to the FBI’s list of some of the most violent, dangerous criminals on the planet.  However, the EPA list is a little different.  They include only crimes against the environment such as smuggling freon, importing collector sports cars that do not meet US admissions standards and illegally removing asbestos!  I am just hoping that I do not see my name show up on that list since bothy my wife and I drive trucks and SUV’s, keep our hose cool in the summer and warm in winter and enjoy watching movies and television on our big screen, high definition television hooked up to our surround sound entertainment system while burning our plastic shopping bags in the fire pit next to our volatile chemical dumping hole in the back yard.

Apparently a serious threat to our environment.

Seriously?  We have a simple freon smuggler on the most wanted list?  If that is one of the worst environmental violators you could find to make the list then I think we have the environmental issue well in hand.  My dogs do more environmental damage than that if we accidentally feed them beans.  Let me tell you, that not only destroys the ozone but any appetite you might have had as well.

You would think that the EPA would have better things to do that chasing a family of bafoons who smuggled some Alfa Romeos into the United States.  Send the FBI after them for smuggling, but the EPA?  How much environmental damage could a few dozen luxury sports cars not built to US environmental standards really cause?  Enough to make a Most Wanted list and have a task force formed to track you down?  Well, I guess so.

Finally, the one that really concerns me is the man they have charged with discharge of pollutants into the waters of the United States.  Yeah, you see, there was this time that I was swimming in the Brazos River and …  Well, I admit it, I just did not want to get out.  So there, even I am guilty of this one.   Actually, my two sons have taken this up as a sport in the creek that runs behind my parents house.  My four year old claims to be playing fireman, but he does not understand that he is really destroying the planet and risks the ire of the EPA.  He just has so much fun doing it that I have not been able to tell him what a horrible person he is and how he needs to stop hating his planet.

Oh, they also have a news release website associated with the site that looks like it is on a WordPress account.  Check them out and see what you think.  Me personally, I think they have bigger fish to fry than some of the jokers they allowed to make this list. It seems like their focus is on more enforcement and not prevention where it needs to be.

I have not had the chance to comment on McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate this past week. Let me first state that I think it was the perfect choice for him to make and balances his more liberal tendencies with the strong conservative values that his base was longing for.

A brief surface examination of Palin will show a woman committed to conservative values with a history of fighting corruption in government, even when it’s found within her own party. She served as a mayor of a small town in Alaska before being appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission where she discovered corruption among the officials serving on the commission. She resigned in protest and filed complaints against fellow Republicans, exposing their corruption and resulting in the resignation of both men and a record fine being paid by one of them. Palin then turned on the Governor who refused to address the corruption and defeated him in the next election by a significant margin. Her record on reduced government spending speaks for itself. During her short stay at the reigns as the Alaskan executive she has cut more than 300 government programs, reduced taxes and viciously routed out corruption in Alaska’s government.

Palin holds true to the concept of limited government, even rejecting federal money for construction projects that her state was perfectly capable of accomplishing on its own. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and an avid sportsman, including hunting and fishing. She believes in the right of the American people to use the vast resources under our feet and not continue to be beholden to foreign interests to depend on our energy sources. While she supports conservation and alternative energy, she is not ignorant enough to believe that we should not drill our own energy.

Palin is a strong pro-life candidate, demonstrating it directly in her life through the choice to give birth to a known Downs Syndrome baby and now with the revelation that her 17 year old daughter is five months pregnant. She has shown that she would choose life and has instilled those values in her family even under the most dire of personal consequences. While many have made a big deal out of the teenage pregnancy in her family this past weekend, I frankly do not know what business it is of anyone that her teenage daughter made some poor choices. Can any of you with children say that they have never made a bad decision? What is important is how they deal with the choices that they make. Do the show responsibility and accept the consequences of their actions or do they make excuses and take the cowards way out? In the case of Bristol Palin, she chose correctly. She is having the child and will marry the father apparently with the love and support of both families. If anything, I think this strengthens Palin as a candidate. It shows that she is a normal American parent dealing with issues that any parent in America might face. It also shows that she sticks to her convictions even when it is personally or politically a difficult choice for her to do so.

I think it is appalling the way the left has begun attacking Palin right out of the gate. They have challenged her lack of experience and questioned whether or not we want someone with limited executive experience and no foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. For that argument I think they would do well to look in the mirror. I would rather have someone with limited experience in the number two seat, than have someone with even less experience heading the ticket. Those in glass houses…

They have also attacked her by questioning if we really want to have a beauty queen running our country, as if an attractive woman could not possess the intelligence or capability to hold the office. What hypocrites the left continually shows itself to be. I thought this was the party that championed equality and women’s rights, or does that just could for liberal women? The disgrace that they have shown in attacking her choice to accept the nomination while having a Downs Syndrome infant would not be acceptable if she was a man and it should not be acceptable now.

Obama has been the only one on the main stage for the Democrats that has shown even a modicum of dignity in these matters, stating that the issue of her daughter’s pregnancy was irrelevant to the campaign and was not an issue at all. For that rare show of tolerance and class I will give him credit.

However, speculation and accusation are running rampant on the left and the mainstream media is going nuts over every minor issue regarding Palin. They have spent more time investigating her past in the last few days than they seem to have done investigating Obama’s questionable past in the last 19 months.

I smell fear in the air and rightly so. Palin is known as a fierce opponent. Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign once commented that “The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” most of whom she apparently found to be corrupt politicians.

The left should be scared and so should some on the right. This is exactly the type of politician Washington needs, someone who will not hesitate to clean house where corruption is found.

Be afraid, you elected officials who have abandoned your charge. Be very afraid.

I am not even sure if I can write about the Democratic Nation Convention this year, but I will endeavor to do so. I have listened to multiple interviews of attendees and I am continually shocked and dismayed at the simple lack of knowledge and understanding possessed by so many in the Democrat Party.

One example was when our local conservative talker, Mark Davis from WBAP News/Talk 820 interviewed Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters. The ignorance and hypocrisy of this man was astonishing. Davis began the interview by stating that he was all for conservation at the same time as we expanded drilling and began using our own resources. Karpinski retorted back that increased exploration and extraction was a ‘hoax’ and that it would do nothing to decrease the price of fuel. He tooled on about how our only hope was alternative energies and increased conservation proving what an idiot he was.

Even a middle school economics student should be able to understand the law of supply and demand. If you have a product that is in high demand and short supply, the price will rise. If you increase the supply of the same product and demand stays constant, especially if it decreases through conservation measures, the price will fall.

Since crude oil is traded as a futures commodity, an announcement that future supplies of oil will be made available will have an immediate effect on our market system. Even the announcement by President Bush that he was ending the Executive restrictions on exploration and extraction caused an immediate down trend in the price of crude. Speculation over public opinion supporting future drilling and continued speculation about decreased domestic demand has continued this trend. If you watch the markets you will realize that their reactions are not purely based on actual events, but on speculations of how those events will impact their particular commodity. When Ahmadinejad started rattling sabers in Iran or when Chavez nationalized his petroleum industry, the market immediately reacted sent the price of crude higher even though there was absolutely no change in the actual supply or demand of the commodity. This process works in reverse as well. Any even that promises to increase the supply of oil to the market, reports of drastically reduced consumption or surpluses, send the speculative price of crude down. If my ten year old son can understand this concept, how is it that most Democrats cannot? Or is it it something more sinister? Is it that they simply refuse to do so because it does not support their agenda?

Karpinski continued to state that the federal government should force auto makers to start producing more hybrid vehicles, absolutely ignoring the horrible amount of environmental damage caused by the very production of these vehicles. He also stated that the government should have been involved as early as ten years ago. He insisted that the government should have been forcing American car manufactures to produce hybrid cars years ago, despite the fact that there was absolutely no market for them back then. His argument was that if the government had forced them to start make the vehicles ten years ago, then there would be millions on the roads by now saving millions of gallons of gas.

This is not necessarily the case. If the government had stepped in ten years ago, in 1998 and forced American manufacturers to begin producing extremely expensive hybrid vehicles that they had only a very marginal market for, what would have happened is that American auto manufactures would be bankrupt and out of business. Another very simple economic law is that if you produce a product that there is a demand for, you can sell that product and make a profit. This means you stay in business and grow. If you produce a product, especially a costly one, that there is no demand for, you will not be able to sell that product and will lose money. This means you board up the doors and go home or you decide to manufacture a product for which there is a demand. Right now, there is a huge demand for hybrid or extremely fuel efficient gasoline vehicles. Ten years ago there was not. There are actually waiting lists from most manufacturers for these vehicles and they are selling as soon as they hit the lot if you do not have to wait. Suddenly, every manufacture out there is coming out with a hybrid or efficient gasoline model in their existing lines or creating entire new lines based on these technologies.

It is simple. When there is demand for a product, companies will produce it. If there is no demand for a product, they will not. The federal government has absolutely no business whatsoever telling any company what products it can produce and what it cannot so long as the business is of a legal nature.

I have checked out the website for this League of Conservation Voters. Let me quote you some of the sickening swill they are selling.

Today, at the opening of the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party adopted a new platform. League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski issued the following statement:

“The Democratic Party Platform wisely embraces the energy plan put forward by Senator Obama, the strongest, most comprehensive plan ever put forward by a Presidential nominee. Obama’s plan recognizes the enormous potential of renewable energy to end our addiction to oil, strengthen our national security, fight global warming, and create millions of jobs across America. On this platform, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will build the clean energy future that America deserves.”

What?! The strongest, most comprehensive plan ever put forward by a Presidental nomineee. My God, Paris Hilton had a stronger, more comprehensive plan than Obama did! I am not sure I can stomach much more of this adult bovine excrement.

I wonder if Gene Karpinski knows how damaging to the environment hybrid vehicles are to manufacture.

I wonder if he knows how much water and fossil fuel are used and how much carbon dioxide is released in the manufacturing of once single gallon of ethanol.

I wonder if he even cares as long as he can promote his self-proclaimed messiah and his agrenda.

What has happened with Barack Obama lately? The man seems to be coming apart at the seams and his campaign is losing steam much faster that even many Democrats are comfortable with.

Just a few days ago he made announced his brilliant plan to bring us out of this energy crisis by claiming that if we just inflated our tires and tuned up our cars, we could gain more oil in savings than we could hope to gain by extracting our own natural resources. While I think that proper tire inflation and a well tuned vehicle is a smart idea and will provide a better fuel economy for your vehicle, pretending that it could anyway near compensate for the amount of oil we could extract from domestic resources is insane. Not to mention that if you over inflate your tires you actually reduce the stopping efficiency of the tires, risking more accidents or more serious injuries due to the reduced stopping power.

If that moronic statement was not bad enough, he went on to start one of his own campaign rallies and forgot to say The Pledge of Allegiance. This was apparently too much for even the lovesick Democrats at the rally as they began to heckle him for forgetting. Instead of profusely apologizing for forgetting the Pledge, he acted as if it was a bother to him, telling the audience that he would do the Pledge if they wanted him to then claiming that he thought he had already said it. When he did manage to pledge his allegiance to the very nation that he hopes to lead, it completely lacked any emotion or conviction at all. He repeated the words in an absolutely dead-pan tone which seems to reflect perfectly on his passion for the ideals of this great nation.

Now, he reacts like a spoiled child to the attacks that John McCain has made on his ridiculous tire inflation energy policy and the ingenious ad campaign labeling him as nothing more than a celebrity such as Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton answered the John McCain ad with a surprisingly poignant response that actually seemed to contain an fully formed and coherent thought. Other than her self absorbed notions of her importance and ‘hotness’ which I completely disagree with, she actually made an adult suggestion that we use a hybrid energy plan comprised of McCain’s desire to drill off shore and Obama’s desire to invest in alternative energies. The Hilton Energy Plan? We should drill off-shore with tight environmental restrictions, use tax incentives to encourage automobile manufactures to create more fuel efficient vehicles and continue to support investment in new forms of energy. John McCain responded to the statement made by Ms. Hilton by saying, “It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain’s ‘all of the above’ approach to America’s energy crisis – including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan.”

What was Obama’s response? Well, it sounded like a child running home to mamma and complaining about everyone making fun of him.

“You know the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars and a new electricity grid and somebody said, ‘well, what can I do? what can individuals do?’” Obama recalled.

“So I told them something simple,” Obama said. “I said, ‘You know what? You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we’d get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, or wherever he was going to drill.’”

…”So now the Republicans are going around – this is the kind of thing they do. I don’t understand it! They’re going around, they’re sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is ‘Barack Obama’s energy plan.’

“Now two points: one, they know they’re lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they’re making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

“You know, they think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework. Because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.”

Uhm, no. Not every expert says that Barack and certainly not every expert says that your little automotive care tips could ever produce anywhere near the amounts we could get form increased domestic exploration and extraction. So what does he do when someone with a modicum of intelligence (or even someone without one such as Hilton) challenges his idiotic ideas? He complains that they are making fun of him. What the hell is this ass hat going to do when an opposing world leader decides to publicly ridicule him? Will he run home and cry to Speaker Pelosi? This is definitely not a man worthy of leading this nation.

Well, there are fifty-one moronic Senators who voted today. Fortunately, fifty one is not enough for cloture. The Senate needs sixty votes to secure cloture and prevent a filibuster of a bill from stalling the bill on the floor. The bill to apply a windfall profit tax against the oil companies failed to reach the magic number and will die on the Senate floor.

These idiots decided that we were apparently not paying enough at the pump and that the Federal government was not making enough money on the high gas prices, so they proposed taxing the oil companies on the oil companies MORE than they already do. Ahh, yes. That must be some of the basic socioeconomics that we have hear so much about from the left, because on the planet that I come from, trying to strong arm more money out of an already inflated situation sounds like price gouging to me and logically would only make the price of fuel go higher.

For any of you who foolishly think that the government can tax any large corporation in any industry as an effective means of punishment for having exceedingly good profits you are dead wrong and you need to take some basic classes in economics. You cannot tax a company; you can only ultimately tax the consumer. If you expect the oil companies to simply absorb punitive taxes and not pass the cost on to the consumer that you are insanely naïve. It may not happen immediately, but in one way shape of form it will occur just as it did when they tried the very same thing in the 1970’s.

When Carter implemented price controls and windfall taxes, it did not lower the cost of fuel. What it did was cause the gas companies to severely curtail their domestic output and focus on their foreign holdings that were free from the punitive measures of dimwitted jackasses who would not understand an economic incentive if it reached up and slapped them. This in turn drove prices higher domestically and lead to fuel shortages. Our domestic production fell sharply while our reliance on imports, not subject to the taxes rose, setting up the very situation that we are in today.

It should be the Federal government being punished for the energy crisis that is looming in days ahead. For thirty years we have strangled our domestic production capacity and moved more and more to reliance on foreign sources. We have prevented extraction and exploration and have not continued to develop the infrastructure needed to maintain a competitive edge in the energy market. We have failed to develop alternative energy technologies that we have had since the 1950’s and have failed to implement those we have effectively.

Compressed natural gas is a clean burning, widely available and efficient fuel source that we could be using in transportation. However, almost a full two-thirds of our annually recovered natural gas goes to industrial and commercial electrical generation. This is an absolutely wasteful process, when you consider that nuclear energy could completely replace natural gas consumption for power leaving it available as a much cleaner transportation fuel. Nuclear power could also severely reduce our reliance on coal fired plants, some of the dirtiest power generating plants in operation. We have operated thousands of naval vessels on nuclear power since the 1960s and have never had a major nuclear incident at sea. We can build clean, safe, extremely efficient nuclear power plants and reduce our consumption of hydrocarbons significantly, but our Federal government has allowed special interest groups to block the construction of nuclear facilities since the 1970’s.

Instead of punishing companies for being profitable while providing a commodity that is in high demand, we should be punishing the government for preventing companies from developing and deploying technologies that would provide us with energy. We have no comprehensive energy plan in this nation. We cannot drill or explore like we need to. We cannot build new facilities to increase our refining efficiency, until just last week (a new modern oil refinery is finally beginning construction in South Dakota). We cannot build wind farms because people bitch about property value and migratory birds. We are being forced to use more and more Ethanol, an inefficient and costly fuel source that releases as much is not more carbon than petroleum, because of ignorant legislation that our Congress passed.

How does your government propose to solve these problems? Well, they are going to tax the hell out of us. During hearings conducted over the past few weeks they have even threatened to take control of the petroleum industry. Can you say socialism folks? That’s right, lets nationalize the problem so it becomes more inefficient and corrupt and tax the hell out of everyone in the process while we pass stupid legislation that prevents us from addressing the real problems and causes starvation and soaring food prices. Brilliant!

You know it has been over a week since I wrote anything on this site or really visited many of my normal haunts. I have sat down multiple times to address the issue of the day, but have not managed to actually post anything at all. Amongst all the bits and pieces of half written articles there has been many a good idea over the past few days. So I am going to post a quick synopsis of some of the more interesting topics I was going to write about, but never got the time to finish.

The Missile Shot Heard Round the World:

I was pleased to see that the United State successfully shot down a failing satellite with and SM-3 Anti-ballistic Missile System. The spectacular direct impact hit was caught on camera and showed the missile impact turning the satellite into a rapidly expanding cloud of debris and gas. It appears that Russia and China were particularly displeased to see the accuracy at which American ingenuity can eliminate objects in low earth orbit, which means we can easily intercept ballistic missile trajectories. It also appears that some on the left are so desperate for attention that they have already formulated conspiracy theories ranging from extreme to ludicrous. Some claim that this Administration ordered the satellite shot down because they were using it to spy on American citizens, while others are claiming that it was just a stunt to anger Russia and China with our obvious aggression. Finally some are even claiming that it never happened at all and once again we have been duped by special effects and subterfuge. I am amazed at the level of moonbattery.

We Must Fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, Whenever They Get There:

In other news, it appears that Obama has forgotten certain details in his campaign and is making statements showing what an idiot he can be. When asked by a reporter what would happen if we leave Iraq too soon and al-Qaeda re-emerges and declares victory over the United States, he commented that if al-Qaeda emerges in Iraq then we will have to deal with that, apparently forgetting, until he was reminded by Republican front runner John McCain that al-Qaeda is in Iraq going by the obviously clandestine name of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Obama was quick to point out that the reason they are in Iraq is because we were there first. While a sometimes disputed, yet possibly valid point, it fails to address the fact that it makes no sense to say that if they are there we must deal with them there, and then want to pull our troops out of Iraq while they are in the process of dealing with them there… Uhm, what?

Punishing Success the Obama Way:

Also, Obama has decided he will put an end to CEO’s of huge companies making in ten minutes what it takes a fry cook at McDonalds to make in an entire year. It apparently makes no difference that the CEOs may have spent years gaining the knowledge and experience to put themselves in charge of making multi-million dollar decisions for entire companies that affect the lives and fortunes of tens of thousands of people. He apparently does not care that these CEO’s are delivering immense profit to their companies and investors by providing goods an services that millions may use and stimulating the economy by providing goods, services and jobs while maintain profitability and growing their industries. What if these CEO’s started these multi-million or billion dollar companies from their garages twenty-five years ago and have spent all their adult lives growing and expanding the capabilities of their creation? While a fry cook has to make sure that he removes the fries from the grease when the buzzer sounds so that the fries are not overcooked. What right does Barack Obama have to determine who is worth of great wealth of reward over anyone else? What give Barack Obama the right to say that he will stop CEO’s from making in ten minutes what a basic laborer makes in a year? It is not of the government’s business to limit the success of anyone because someone else is less successful. That, my friends, is socialism and it counter to everything that this nation stands for. I an not rich by any means, but I am more successful than a basic laborer and my wife is more successful than I am if you base things solely on income. Where will this end? Will we be penalized because we have taken advantage of education, experience and perseverance to provide a better life for our family? What if I were to invent something that everyone wanted and by next year I can make in a day what it takes me a year to make now? Am I then to have it all taken from me by a man who thinks he has a right to limit my success? No, I think not.

Remember, this is coming from a man who lives in a $1.6 million mansion. Hmmm.

Global Cooling:

It is official now. According to all the official monitoring stations and much anecdotal evidence, this past year has been one of the coolest on record in many years. Record snowfalls have been recorded in areas world wide and temperature averaged have been some of the coolest in more than fifty years. North America has seen more snow this year than any year within the last fifty. China has recorded its coldest temperatures in over one hundred years and Baghdad has received its first snow in all recorded history. According to an article by DailyTech this past year has wiped out over a century of warming trends with cold weather across the entire planet. It now appears that record snow falls are drastically increasing the polar ice packs thickness and reversing some of lost mass that the last few warmer years have caused. Is this a fluke or is this a trend? Should we fear the coming Ice Age now or should we realize that our climate is way too complicated for us to understand and predict even a small percentage of its behavior? As it stands right now, the planet has warmed less than 0.10 C in the last hundred years, not much of a warming trend to me.

My point with all of this is that predications by global warming alarmist were for the hottest year on record in 2007. Even with environmental consciousness at elevated levels the planet’s carbon emissions increased by about 12% last year, thanks in a great deal to countries like China and India’s booming economic growth. This would have given weight to the predictions for increased manmade warming, however we have been faced with cold snaps, ice storms, record snow falls and the lowest recorded averaged for anywhere between a half and a full century in many places. We know so little about how our environment actually works, jumping to conclusions and predictions and closing the discussion about anything involving our climate is ridiculous. We simply do not understand.

Today I will discuss a well known form of alternative power generation that has been around for many years and is actively producing a decent amount of alternative energy: hydroelectric.

Hydroelectric:

Hydroelectric power generation harnesses the power inherent in the water flowing across the earth to generate what most people consider to be clean power. The application of this technology typically involves creating water reservoirs behind massive concrete and steel damns, the water then flows through the damn, turning enormous turbines and generating electrical currents. There are many benefits to this form of technology, but there are also many serious concerns about the environmental affects it has. Currently, about 17% of the world’s total energy consumption comes from hydroelectric sources.

As for the benefits, once the damn in place it can provide massive electrical generation capacity and is fairly easy to maintain. Most damns are designed with multiple electrical turbines and can shut down one at a time for maintenance and repair while the others are kept on-line. The damn itself produces little in the form of waste, but that is not where the chief environmental concerns come from. The cost of hydroelectric power generation is negligible during the operational phase of the dam; however that is often overshadowed by the extreme construction cost associated with these projects.

One of the chief environmental concerns of hydroelectric energy is the initial construction of the damns required to produce the power. These damns are construction and engineering marvels that attempt to control forces capable of carving wonder such as the Grand Canyon. Years of environmental studies have concludes that hydroelectric damn can have serious detrimental effect on the surrounding aquatic ecosystems. On August 20th, 2007, removal of the Marmot Dam near Portland, OR was completed with the removal of the Little Sandy Dam to be completed later this year. These dams were removed after environmental studies showed a dramatic decline in the salmon populations due to the disruptive effects the damns had on the salmon traveling back up river to spawn. Also, aquatic life passing downstream are faced with a quick demise upon entering the turbines of most hydroelectric dams. Other concerns include the destruction of the landmass upstream during the creating of the reservoir, the erosion of downstream river basins due to the speed and low sediment content of water leaving the dams and the massive population relocation required for their construction.

One final concern that most people miss is the net amount of greenhouse gasses generated by some hydroelectric projects. While the operation of the dam itself does not release these gasses, the net affect it has on the environment has been shown to increase the levels present in the atmosphere around the dams. Studies indicate that in areas where there was no deforestation before the construction of the dam, the reservoirs released high levels of carbon dioxide and methane due the decomposition of biomass in the reservoirs. Further mitigating this effect was the absence of vegetation to process carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the area surrounding the dam. The World Commission on Dams has stated that large reservoirs where the power generation is less than 100 MW per square meter of reservoir surface area are detrimental to the environment as a whole. If the dams generate than this amount, the World Commission of Dams has stated that traditional hydrocarbon fuel sources are the preferred choice.

The last concern with these projects is structural failure. While this is exceedingly rare, this potential represents one every bit as haunting as the Chernobyl disaster illustrated for nuclear energy. In 1975, near Henan, China, the Banqaio Dam suffered a catastrophic structural failure due to rain levels exceeding 24-in per day. This chain of events started when a smaller upstream damn, Shimantan Dam, failed and released millions of tons of water in a roaring surge that hit the already overflowing Banqaio Dam. Even though Banqaio was designed to survive a 1,000 year flood, its center mass was obliterated by the billions of tons of water it was trying to hold back. The collapse of this dam killed 26,000 people in the immediate flooding and an estimate of 150,000 more died in the ensuing epidemic. The failure cause a chain reaction of events that ended up destroying 62 smaller dams and almost six million buildings when a ten mile wide wave cresting at 23ft swept through the lower plains. Over 11 million people lost there homes and were displaced due to the disaster. When evaluated against the deaths and destruction from Chernobyl, the Russian disaster pales in comparison.

While this technology can eventually provide cheap, clean energy, it is by far not a perfect solution. Due to its massive construction costs, detrimental environmental effects and potential damage to the ecosystems surrounding the reservoirs, the question still remains as to the viability of hydroelectric power generation.

Tomorrow, I will cover another common form of energy production that is expanding rapidly in the current market: wind.

I will now get back to my discussion of alternative energy sources. I have already discussed our current fuel source, ethanol, hybrid vehicles and solar. Today I will move to what may be the single most promising alternative fuel that we have available, or at least somewhat available, therein lies the problem.

Hydrogen:

Aside from the possibility of controlled matter / anti-matter reactions or sustainable cold fusion, the idea of hydrogen as our primary fuel source has been one of the greatest dreams in our scientific community for years. Science fiction commonly uses this substance in the dreams of men brought to life by pen, paper and film as the future fuel source of our space faring descendants.

Hydrogen is a dream fuel because technically it can burn completely cleanly with nothing but pure water as a byproduct. It is almost the perfect choice for fuel to power our ever increasing amounts of vehicles and machinery, since the amount of hydrogen on this planet is vast. Hydrogen is found in all of the common burnable fuel sources we have currently. In fact, it is what we actually burn out of the hydrocarbons we use as fuel not. The problem is that even though hydrogen is commonly found in massive quantities on this planet it occurs nowhere naturally on its own. Everywhere you find hydrogen naturally it is bound to other molecular compounds.

We have known of the combustible properties of hydrogen since 1766 when Henry Cavendish discovered that the gas released from a metal-acid reaction would burn and produce water as a byproduct. What we have not been able to achieve is a method of extracting hydrogen from its natural sources that requires less energy to extract than can be recovered as burnable fuel.

There are many methods of extracting hydrogen from its natural sources:

Chemical Reactions: Hydrogen can be produced by certain chemical reactions such as acidic reactions with metal like zinc. The problem is that this process typically consumes the acid and the metal, producing much less recoverable energy from the hydrogen than the process used to create it consumes.

Electrolysis: Hydrogen can be produced by introducing a low voltage current through water. This process releases oxygen gas at the anode and hydrogen gas at the cathode which can then be collected for storage or burned immediately. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this process is no better that 80~90% in even the most efficient applications. This means that the reaction returns only 80 to 90% as much burnable energy as is used to create the gasses. There are many alternative methods of electrolysis being developed including: alkaline electrolyses, steam electrolysers, gasification of biomass, thermal decomposition of water and photoelectrolysis.

Extraction from Hydrocarbons: There are many avenues of extracting hydrogen from common hydrocarbons such as: gasification of coal, steam reforming of natural gas, autothermal reforming of natural gas and oil, thermal dissociation and carbon black & hydrogen (CB&H). All of these methods suffer from the same general short comings. They all rely on hydrocarbon based fuels which we are attempting to phase out and they all consume massive amounts of energy in their production process. These basic two shortcomings prevent these from being attractive alternatives for extracting hydrogen.

Currently, all of these processes consume more energy than they can hope to return as a burnable hydrogen resource. Hopefully, as the pace of hydrogen research continues to increase, scientific breakthroughs will allow us an efficient means of extracting hydrogen from water and biomass that will return significantly more energy that the extraction process requires. Some estimates have deemed us as close as ten years from this feat, while others project us as far out as fifty years.

One viable possibility would be the infusion of solar technology into the hydrogen production process. Since most of the methods for extraction currently involve massive amounts of heat or electrical energy, solar power could provide the means to reduce the energy cost of hydrogen extraction to the point where it becomes a viable fuel source.

I truly believe that hydrogen is the fuel source of the future due to its efficiency and the fact that it produces clean pure water as a byproduct. Maybe someday we will see solar powered fuel stations that dispense clean burning hydrogen, extract the water byproduct from you vehicle and start the process all over again with the power of the sun, but we are years from that at best.

In today’s article I will cover only one form of alternative energy, one that has great potential that we have failed to harness in the fifty years since its first practical application.

Solar:

This is probably one of the most promising yet most disappointing forms of alternative energy that we have available to us. In essence all energy that we have comes either directly or indirectly from solar energy. It is the only reason that life is possible on this planet. Without the sun, this would be an unremarkable chunk of rock hurling aimlessly through space.

We have understood the potential for solar energy for many years. Even the Greeks knew to orient their buildings to face the sun and capture as much sunlight as possible to provide light and warmth. We powered our first satellite with photovoltaic solar cells in 1958 when we launched Vanguard 1. By 1978 we had miniaturized the photovoltaic cells enough to develop solar power handheld calculators. Then the energy crisis of the ‘70’s ended and solar research practically ceased along with the falling gas prices.

Since then, the development of solar resources has continued, but not nearly at the pace that it should have. There are multiple technologies available to collect and harvest the massive amounts of solar energy that this planet receives on a daily basis. This should be one the two main area in which we are actively and aggressively developing new technologies. By now this form of energy should have been common place, efficient and inexpensive. It is none of the above. Currently only 0.4% of all energy produced is produced by solar power.

Here is a list of solar applications currently available.

• Solar Lighting: Using solar light (during daytime) to replace electrical lighting, reducing the amount of energy consumed.
• Agricultural Planning: Using greenhouses to cultivate agriculture in climates where it is not possible otherwise, thus providing food for remote regions without shipping it in.
• Urban Heat Island Reduction: Designing and redesigning the cities to generate less thermal energy (plant trees, use light color paints, top asphalt with light colors, etc.). This can reduce air conditioning costs, heat, humidity and lower atmosphere pollution.
• Water Heating: Combining solar energy with efficient tankless gas heating can massively reduce energy cost associated with taking a nice hot bath.
• Heating, Ventilation and Cooling (HVAC): Solar energy can be used to heat buildings, power ventilation systems and even assist in cooling homes by providing power to air conditioning systems.
• Process Heating: There are many manufacturing processes where products have to be dried or baked. Incorporating solar energy into this process is not only efficient, but can significantly reduce manufacturing costs over time.
• Cooking: Mass production of food items can be supplemented with solar energy to offset some of the energy cost of cooking prepackaged foods. While not currently practical on a small scale this process could be easily deployed on a manufacturing scale and reduce both energy consumption and cost.
• Water Treatment: Desalination and sanitation processes for water consume massive amounts of energy. Using solar stills or solar pasteurization processes to produce clean water and recycle waste water is a simple, inexpensive and very efficient way to treat water. This technology has seen some major improvements and implementation over the past few years.
• Energy Generation: This is probably the largest category where solar energy’s potential lies. There are multiple methods of energy generation, such as: photovoltaic, concentrated solar heating, thermoelectric, photoelectrochemical (PEC), solar chemical and solar mechanical.

These are just a few examples of practical applications of solar technologies that could directly affect the cost and the consumption of energy. The problem with most of these is that they are not practical, affordable or available to the general consumer. These technologies are only practical in large scale engineering scenarios and are expensive to initially implement. The technologies associated with water heating and HVAC applications have only recently become available to homeowners and typically then only on new homes at a significant cost. It is not easy or inexpensive to try to retrofit a home with solar enhancements.

There are companies out there that are attempting to solve this. As one of my recent visitors pointed out in a comment he left, companies such as Nanosolar are leading the way in the attempt to make solar energy generation easy and affordable. They currently produce two main products:

Nanosolar Utility Panels: These panels are for large scale power generation operations and are capable of generating five to ten times more current then current photovoltaic technologies.

Nanosolar SolarPly: This is a light weight solar-electric foil that can be cut and shaped to any size. It is non fragile and does not even require soldering for electrical contact.

The goal of companies like Nanosolar is to bring this technology to your home so that you might benefit from inexpensive, clean, renewable energy. The problem is that they are currently sold out for the next twelve months and are struggling to increase their production. Therefore since their product has a very limited supply faced with an enormous demand, it is neither currently inexpensive nor available to the average consumer. In time this will hopefully change, but the point is it will take time, much of which we have already wasted. We could have been developing these technologies for over 50 years. We just chose not to do so.

Solar energy is one of the top two most feasible forms of alternative energy that I will discuss. It has enormous potential, but cannot completely be relied upon as our sole energy generating technology. We must still have a burnable fuel source of some kind. There will be times and areas where solar energy is not reliable or feasible. Other challenges are to develop efficient storage medium that can retain and release solar energy effectively, inexpensively and without producing massive amounts of pollution in their manufacturing process as the most common forms of rechargable batteries currently do. In this aspect solar energy suffers some of the same shortcomings as do the hybrid vehicles.

However, the potential to supplement our current energy generation infrastructure is literally exponential. We consume about 471 exajoules (EJ) each year as a planet. That is 471.e+18 joules, 0.471 zettajoules (ZJ) or 471 trillion megajoules (MG). The Earth receives approximately 3.85 yottajoules (YJ) per year. This is 3.85e+24 joules, 3,850 zettajoules (ZJ), or 3.85 quintillion megajoules (MG) for comparison. This equates to 8,174 times the amount of total worldwide energy consumption. This is a nearly limitless supply of energy just waiting to be harvested. What are we waiting for?

In today’s article covering alternative forms of energy I would like to cover two of the more popular options that have been emerging for some time now.

Ethanol (C2H5OH):

Ethanol is a flammable, colorless chemical compound typically produced from the fermentation of vegetables and grains. It is best known as the alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, but has many other uses such as solvents, sterilizing agents and fuel. There a benefits to Ethanol in that it is a renewable source of fuel and burns very cleanly releasing few waste gasses as pollutants. However, there are some serious drawbacks to relying on ethanol as a primary fuel source.

Ethanol is a much cleaner burning hydrocarbon than most forms of petroleum fuel including compressed natural gas. It can be produced from a wide variety of plant stocks including: corn, grain, potatoes and practically any kind of fruit or vegetable with a wide range of efficiency. Some plants produce Ethanol much more efficiently than others while some are virtually impossible to ferment into alcohol. Currently the most commonly used plants are corn, grain and sugar cane.

There are several problems with the widespread use of Ethanol.

One such issue that most people do not take into consideration is that the primary waste product of the fermentation process used to create Ethanol is carbon dioxide (CO2). When the yeast metabolizes the natural sugars during the fermentation process, they release CO2 as a by product. This is the very gas we are supposed to avoid releasing into the atmosphere by using alternative fuels.

Another problem with ethanol is the massive amount of food quantities that are required to produce usable Ethanol. Even the most alcohol resistant yeast can only survive in about a 15% alcohol mixture. To be usable as fuel, large amounts of food stocks have to be fermented at 15% efficiency and then the Ethanol has to be distilled out of the remaining liquid. This severely impacts the availability and cost of basic food categories such as corn, grain and sugar. This price impacts other food products that rely on these products as base ingredients. Already this year we have seen increased prices of corn, grain, beef, milk, bread and many other products that rely heavily on these Ethanol producing items as a base feedstock. Increased production of Ethanol based on these base food stocks, threatens to cause increased demand for these products and limited supplies. Corn and grain are staple food products and could seriously impact all areas of food, thus severely increasing prices and making some items unavailable.

The final consideration of Ethanol is its horrible efficiency as a fuel. It takes massive amounts of energy to plant, harvest and transport the materials required to produce Ethanol. The fermentation and distillation process adds to this energy cost considerably. Once we have a burnable fuels source, we find that when added to gasoline, even at an 85/15 mixture (85% gas, 15% Ethanol) it severely decreases the CAFÉ standards of the engine burning the Ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol uses certain waste products that it converts into complex sugars and then ferments those sugars. While this process is has the potential for reusing waste products for fuel, it does not address any of the other problems with Ethanol.

Therefore, the question still remains with Ethanol due to its manufacturing cost in energy and the release of massive amounts of CO2 in the process, the cost increases of its base products and the inneffency of the fuel itself, are we actually doing more harm than good by pushing for increased Ethanol production?

Hybrid Vehicles:

Fuel efficiency is paramount to reducing the amount of emissions that we release into the atmosphere. Along those lines, we have seen the rapid development of Hybrid vehicles over the last few years. These vehicles boast some of the best fuel efficiency on the road, but have dark secrets that no one wants to hear.

While the fuel efficiency of some Hybrid vehicles is impressive, most cannot achieve CAFÉ standards much over what small efficient gasoline only vehicles can produce. This efficiency comes at a sever cost, however. For a Hybrid vehicle to function there are essentially two engines that operate a symbiotic form of propulsion. Each vehicle contains an internal combustion engine and an electric one. As the gasoline portion of the engine operates, it charges large batteries which in turn operate the vehicle when not under gas power and assist the gasoline engine when needed.

To be efficient, these vehicles must be light weight and store large amounts of energy while charging on the gasoline engines. The light weight is achieved by using more plastic and exotic lightweight alloys in their construction. This makes the vehicles less safe and less able to protect their occupants from injury during a crash. All the additional plastic used to lighten the vehicles currently comes from petroleum sources and these exotic alloys use massive amounts of energy in their production. This not only increases the cost monetary of the vehicles but the energy and environmental costs as well.

The final dirty little secret about Hybrid vehicles is the massive amount of environmental damage caused during the manufacturing of the batteries they operate on. All Hybrid vehicles currently use nickel based batteries in their design. These batteries retain a memory and eventually must be replaced. They cause massive amounts of pollution to produce, must be replaced every three to five years, cannot be reconditioned or reused once they are replaced and cannot easily be disposed of. I recently wrote an article illustrating the massive amounts of pollution that the nickel mining and refining process causes and the overall environmental damage that hybrid vehicles cause. You may read the entire article here: The Hybrid Lie. In the study cited in this article, most Hybrid vehicles scored worse than 90% of gasoline powered vehicles on environmental damage due to the damage done in their manufacturing process, including my Ford F-150 and my wife’s Ford Expedition.

The only thing you can conclude from the data in the “Dust to Dust” study from the above article is that if you truly care for the environment, you will not purchase a hybrid vehicle.

Tomorrow I will cover two more variations of alternative energy. One which has great potential that we have unfortunately not developed to its full potential over the past three decades.