Have you accepted Al Gore as your personal savior? No? Me neither. It seems as if the masses almost NEED a boogeyman to be afraid of, and this one is a work of genius (which rules out Gore as an originator; that dumb bastard probably needs help tying his shoes).
Fact: The UN has always been about control. PEOPLE control. Why do you think socialists are so enamored with it? They would just love a world where everyone is crammed into urban areas festooned with small, shoddy apartments stretching as far as the eye can see. These, of course, would be "good enough for everybody," but those in power would somehow rate more luxurious digs. In this Utopian paradise, most everyone would ride "public transportation," since we couldn't have everybody just driving around as they pleased. But naturally. those who were more "important" (govt. functionaries and the like) would be "allowed" the use of a small, limited range electric (or maybe windup?) vehicle to perform their duties. Nobody would be allowed to travel outside these urban islands unless granted special permission, or on state business.
Sound farfetched? Most of the above has already been tried. In a place called the Soviet Union. I doubt if there's a social engineer alive who doesn't make pink weewee down their flabby thighs at the sight of the Moscow suburbs and the sardine can accommodations that seem to go to the horizon.
Fact: The UN needed a new boogeyman after communism "died" (yeah, tell that to the Cubans, or those poor bastards in Burma, or a billion and a half Chinese) and we cleaned up most of the pollution people were hollering about before. (And yeah, I'll admit that, when rivers can catch fire, or develop photographic film, a cleanup is in order.)
Back in the '90s, I came up with what turned out to be the most efficient catalytic convertor in the world, hands down. I tried to get funding, but the California Air Resources Board kept moving back the deadlines for implementation of their small engine requirements. (This is where the real money is: in '94, Briggs & Stratton alone made 7 million engines.) So we were always presented with a moving target, making it impossible to write a halfway tangible business plan.
And then, just about the time we'd found an "angel" to bankroll the thing, up comes CO2 as a THREAT TO THE ENTIRE PLANET! This, of course, was an all-pervasive monster that no catalytic converter could combat, since they work by converting HCs and CO into CO2.
Alcohol? It creates more "greenhouse gases" than petroleum does. Biodiesel? Fine, if you know a couple of drive in restaurant owners and don't mind cluttering up your garage with an apparratus that needs to be fed such niceties as Methanol and Lye in bulk quantities. (They say the exhaust "smells just like french fries" or "smells just like popcorn," but I've yet to see a PIANO analysis or Aldehyde speciation on it, and believe me, I've asked around.)
Solar? Yeah, PVs look pretty promising, don't they? Until you look at what goes into making them. Just the front-end costs alone are scary enough, what with various furnaces, high vacuum systems, superaccurate slicers, and it's a good idea to have a scanning electron microscope in-house. Then there are the precursors; ultrapure Silicon, ultrapure dopants, ultrapure EVERYTHING. (Checked the prices on sputtering targets lately?) And the electricity. You want to make single-crystal billets? Be ready to suck some serious juice. There are QC stations after just about every stage in the process. Some of the chemicals used are WAY toxic, so there's a lot of federal, state and local regs to contend with, and of course the attendant disposal fees. It takes people to run all this stuff, and some of it is pretty labor intensive. Plus these operations generally have a workforce thats topheavy in skilled and degreed personell. All of this and more before a single solar cell goes out the door. No, solar will never be cheap without a major breakthrough.
Geothermal? There's a laugher. The filtration equipment alone will eat you out of house and home, since it's highly specialized. It's quite a trick to remove all the caustic contaminants from the gas stream without an excessive pressure drop; too much Delta-P across the filter and you'll be lucky to spin a pinwheel, let alone a 70,000 horsepower turbine. Plus, the filtration isn't 100% effective, so it doesn't take long for the sulfates and other compounds to go to work on the turbomachinery. Blades, nozzles, bearings and shafts all become useless junk much faster than with other forms of steam generation. True, there are now turbines specifically designed to be refurbishable several times more than standard gear, but downtime is downtime, regardless. Just as, for someone in the aviation business, there's nothing quite so worthless as an aircraft sitting on the ground, for someone in the power business there's nothing so useless as a plant that's offline. And because there are so few geothermal plants in existance, there are no economies of scale to drive down the unit cost of their components.
Nuclear? 30 Years ago I'd have said "NO WAY," and I've still got some reservations about Fission. But things have improved considerably in terms of reliability and safety. The French generate over half of their electricity with nukes. (On the other hand, their nuclear engineers are trained almost from birth to build and work the things, and they could be a little more selective about who they provide this technology to.) Spent fuel and other waste is still a problem, but we've already got ten godzillion tons of the stuff, so let's finish digging out Yucca Mountain and stick it all there. We're already going to have to moniter it 'Till Arnold Ziffel gets his instrument rating, so more isn't going to make much of a difference unless we build rockets big & reliable enough to send it to the sun. That would keep a lot of people employed.
What we really will need to do, though, is to have a massive input into Fusion research. Something like the Manhattan Project squared (cubed?), and don't let up until it's a done deal. Scientists and engineers are such pussies these days! I'm grateful to have been trained and schooled by old timers who didn't screw around, and I find it reflected in my work. When a problem presents itself, I don't whine about it or nibble at it, I HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT!!! Not to brag on myself (there's enough self-aggrandizement already), but we definitely need more of that kind of thinking. The High Temperature Ignition Facility in Livermore (it was supposed to be in Sacramento, but luddites screwed that up) is a peanut compared to what I've got in mind. Not for research into high energy physics, except as it would apply to a concentrated effort at power generation, PERIOD. Set a ten year deadline, like JFK did with the moon shot, and offer a $10 billion bonus for any team that can bring it in in five years. That's a fairly substantial incentive.
The Goreites seem to believe that just by emphasizing a sense of urgency, and outlawing petroleum, they can make all of the methods above suddenly just jump in & take over. Anybody who'd believe that has to be insane, incredibly naive or just plain stupid. But that's what the forces behind the Kyoto Accord and the rest of this hoax are counting on. The UN elites have decided it's not "fair" that we are doing so well, and never mind that we worked for it.
This is yet another dichotomy inherent in the class warfare they're always peddling. Make the downtrodden jealous of the better off, and the prosperous ridden with guilt. But that's just the first half. Instead of elevating the living standards of the poor, they drag everyone down to a common level of mediocrity. We wouldn't even have the ability to run off to the hills, much less revolt. After a couple of generations of mere, tepid existance, we'd be nothing more than an easily controlled flock of two legged sheep. Sort of a cross between Huxley and Orwell, with a little Kafka thrown in for those who might have the temerity to want to rise above the common condition.
And what better way to start than to limit our ability to heat our homes, feed our families or move about. That's a lot of birds with one stone. And by refusing to drill in ANWR or offshore, they've already got a head start on it. This is doubled by the fact that, as we speak, the Chinese and the Cubans are drilling in the Gulf Of Mexico just outside our territorial boundaries and "Going Horizontal" into our oil fields.
All of the above is with the full complicity of the "Mainstream Media," so don't expect to hear a sudden revelation from them anytime soon. And Obama invoked the above-mentioned guilt trip just the other day, going on about how we can't expect the world to like us when we drive SUVs and keep our thermostats at 72 degrees, as if they'd just love us if we did without. They've been beating us over the head with this "what-will-the-neighbors-think" mentality for the last two decades or so, and in certain circles it takes hold.
And me? I drive a full-sized, V-8 powered, four wheel drive pickup that gets ten miles to the gallon, period. When I'm cold or hot I adjust the thermostat for comfort, at the expense of a couple extra bucks. I'm not a glutton, but on occasions when I feel like eating big, I'll slop down a #4 plate at Kicko's Mexican Restaurant, or beat up on a jumbo double pepperoni with double garlic (delivered, of course).
Guilt? What for? I generated my wealth by providing something of value for the people who write my checks. And neither Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton or the UN had a Goddamned thing to do with it. And I intend to keep it that way.
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